Chicago -
By Thom Dunn/Boing Boing
Early this year, electronics company Vizio filed an IPO, and their newly-released third quarter earnings reveal an interesting business success: they made more than twice as much profit from their “Platform Plus” service, which includes advertising and data farming, than they did from actual TVs.
As The Verge explains:
Posted on November 20, 2021
By Julie Hollar/FAIR
As U.S. troops finally made their exit from Afghanistan after 20 years of occupation, the Sunday shows – which have always aimed to set Washington agendas – were filled with guests who had direct ties to the military-industrial complex.
FAIR analyzed three weeks of ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation, CNN’s State of the Union, Fox News Sunday and NBC’s Meet the Press during the Afghanistan withdrawal. We recorded 36 featured guest appearances and 33 roundtable participant appearances. Those who appeared on more than one show were counted every time they appeared; there were 24 unique featured guests and 32 unique panelists.
Of the 24 unique featured guests, only two were not from the U.S.: Roya Rahmani, the former ambassador to the U.S. from Afghanistan, and Yasmeen Hassan, the Pakistani director of the NGO Equality Now. The two were interviewed jointly in one CNN segment – the only segment in the study to center on the situation of Afghan women.
Posted on October 23, 2021
By Mark Frauenfelder/Boing Boing
One America News (OAN) is a television news channel that embraces the QAnon cult, spreads Mike Lindell’s discredited conspiracy theories, and believes Trump won the 2020 election.
In court filings, OAN CEO Robert Herring Sr. said AT&T paid OAN about $57 million over five years. But AT&T doesn’t really want to talk about it.
Posted on October 7, 2021
By Abby Zimet/Common Dreams
We assume you’re all psyched for this week’s Mayberry Days, the annual festival celebrating the wildly popular, tepidly reviewed, deeply disingenuous Eisenhower-era TV show about small-town life during America’s “simpler times,” when “neighbors were neighbors” as long as they were white and nobody locked their doors.
For those of you less ancient than the rest of us, Mayberry was the mythical home of The Andy Griffith Show, which ran from 1960 to1968 but evidently still lingers in the wistful minds of those who best enjoy “being around their own people,” who tend not to include black, poor, gay, trans, Jewish, Muslim or any other garden-variety “others.”
The genial Griffith played the genial sheriff Andy Taylor, a widower who lived with his genial Aunt Bee and was raising his genial son Opie in a genial small town in North Carolina modeled on Griffith’s real hometown of Mt. Airy.
With no crime in those halcyon days, the sheriff refused to wear a gun, so he and the other townspeople – goofy deputy Barney Fife, goofier mechanic Gomer Pyle, etc. – spent most of their time dealing with issues like bullies, speeders, pickles and inept barbers while basking in “the general good, old-fashioned welcoming spirit,” even as the Vietnam War, civil rights violence and nuclear tensions swirled around them in the real but pointedly distant world.
Posted on September 21, 2021
By Spencer Snyder/FAIR
On July 12, a photo of Rachel Maddow was posted to the “Community” tab of MSNBC’s YouTube account. The accompanying text read:
To mark MSNBC’s 25th anniversary, MSNBC Daily will feature 25 days of forward-looking essays on important issues from MSNBC anchors, hosts and correspondents. Today, Rachel Maddow writes about the future of election integrity.
Unlike Democracy Now!, which also just celebrated 25 years, or Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, which just reached 35 years, MSNBC isn’t commemorating with any looks back to its founding, or to its history as an outlet for journalism.
This choice might be because for much of their history, MSNBC wasn’t branded as the liberal answer to Fox News. It was instead the ratings-seeking, superfluous product of two mega-corporations endeavoring to expand their respective news businesses. To do a full retrospective of the network, one would have to include its record of platforming conservatives, silencing antiwar voices and being early adopters of round-the-clock scandal coverage.
Posted on September 2, 2021
By Mystery Science Theater 3000
Alternaversal, the production company responsible for the “100 percent Fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes TV series Mystery Science Theater 3000 on Netflix, has announced its nationwide tour of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) LIVE: Time Bubble Tour, with the first 24 of an expected 80 nationwide dates, taking the tour through spring 2022. The long-running series (34 years old next Thanksgiving!) has also garnered the Peabody Award for Broadcast Excellence and multiple Emmy award nominations.
The “Time Bubble Tour,” supervised by series creator Joel Hodgson, will launch in October of 2021 in York, PA, and feature the beloved returning cast of the 2019 “Great Cheesy Movie Circus Tour,” Emily Marsh, Conor McGiffin, Nate Begle and Yvonne Freese, along with the world’s only movie-riffing robots, Tom Servo, Crow and GPC. The show features the film Making Contact and will include all the tour signatures: hilarious riffing, wisecracking robots, and silly sketches. The show will be directed by Tim Ryder, an alumni of the Second City Mainstage cast and writer and performer from the MST3K TV series.
Posted on August 5, 2021
By Tim Willette
10. Go Fight City Hall . . . to the Death
9. Whatever Happened to Morris Perlmutter?
8. Slow Boat to Madness: Part 2
7. Dear Mummy
6. The Law Is a Fool
5. Sword of Honor, Blade of Death
Posted on July 13, 2021
By Jeff Cohen via Common Dreams
If you get your foreign policy news today from CNN or MSNBC or NPR or similar outlets, then you’re bombarded hour after hour with the idea that the United States has the absolute right to impose sanctions on country after country overseas if they violate human rights or are not democratic.
To give just one example: On Sunday, CNN anchor Dana Bash grilled Biden National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan on why the White House is not imposing yet more sanctions on Russia (and China) and why Team Biden was “giving in to Russia” on the gas pipeline to Western Europe. Sullivan was emphatic in insisting that sanctions had been imposed and more were on the way – boasting that Biden had grabbed even more presidential power to sanction Russia through an executive order.
Posted on June 22, 2021
By It Takes A Village Family Of Schools
Village Leadership Academy (VLA), Chicago’s very own premier K-8 independent social justice school, is excited to announce the BET television debut of Change the Name, a short documentary highlighting their students’ work to change the name of Stephen Douglas Park in Chicago’s North Lawndale community to Anna and Frederick Douglass Park.
The “Change the Name” campaign, which began more than four years ago as one project of the VLA social justice GrassRoots Campaign curriculum, garnered much attention as VLA students refused to back down from the Chicago Park District’s silent dismissal of their proposals to change the name of the park, which celebrated a slave-owning family in a historically Black neighborhood.
Posted on June 16, 2021
By Julie Hollar/FAIR
To mark the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police officer Derek Chauvin, the New York Times put together a special opinion section reflecting on what has changed and where the country is now on race and police violence. One piece described and analyzed the rise and fall of support for the Black Lives Matter movement: “Did George Floyd’s death catalyze support for Black Lives Matter? If so, for how long and for whom?”
Looking at data from online polling firm Civiqs, the authors concluded that “Republicans and white people have actually become less supportive of Black Lives Matter than they were before the death of George Floyd.” Indeed, after a gradual increase in support for BLM among both whites and Republicans following the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, and then a more marked rise that began around the release of the video of the vigilante murder of Ahmaud Arbery in May 2020, support plummeted from early June through late September.
Posted on June 10, 2021
