By Jonathan Stempel/Reuters

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected former TV pitchman Kevin Trudeau’s bid to overturn his criminal contempt conviction and 10-year prison sentence for exaggerating the content of a weight loss book he marketed through infomercials.
Without comment, the Supreme Court let stand a Feb. 5 ruling by the federal appeals court in Chicago, which upheld Trudeau’s November 2013 conviction over his promotion of the 2007 book The Weight Loss Cure ‘They’ Don’t Want You To Know About.
Viewers were told they could “cure” obesity without dieting or exercise, but the book told readers to consume only 500 calories and walk one hour each day, take hormones, and undergo liver and colon cleanses and enema-like colonics.

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Posted on December 10, 2016

Is It? False Equivalency Ahead

Since when wasn’t news fake? At what point did people think we weren’t making it up from the start anyway?

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Posted on December 5, 2016

By Free Press

Free Press and the Free Press Action Fund today launched a campaign to set aside proceeds from the auction of public TV station licenses to strengthen local journalism and community-information projects.
At least 54 public television stations around the country are taking part of the ongoing FCC broadcast incentive auction, according to new Free Press research. Spectrum held by public TV stations alone is expected to bring in as much as $6 billion in the auction, with state governments, local school boards, university trustees and other station owners each likely raking in tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars for taking their stations off the air or moving down the dial to free up bandwidth to meet the growing demand mobile data.
“This auction of the public airwaves gives us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reverse the crisis in local news and reimagine how local communities can get the information they need,” said Craig Aaron, president and CEO of Free Press and the Free Press Action Fund.
“Instead of standing by as vital public outlets disappear, we should seize on this moment to reinvest in innovative community media projects and serious accountability journalism. If we act now, this could be the biggest boost for public-minded media since the creation of the public broadcasting system.”

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Posted on November 28, 2016

Executive Director Job Opening Up; How To Apply

Longtime CAN TV executive director Barbara Popovic has announced that she is retiring. Here she is on Ken Davis’s Chicago Newsroom discussing that, as well as “the role of access TV in the changing media landscape.”

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Posted on November 22, 2016

By Shawn Parry-Giles, Lauren Hunter, Morgan Hess and Prashanth Bhat/The Conversation

The general election ads from the 2016 presidential campaign represented a referendum on each candidate’s character. And in this ad race, there were no winners.
Both the Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump campaigns featured the takeaway message that their opponent is not fit to lead.
Even though Trump won the election, he will face significant obstacles in re-establishing the credibility he needs to lead a very divided electorate.
Fear and anger were the key emotions of TV ads from both campaigns and two Super PACS. Trump must now find a way to mitigate national anxieties in the wake of a polarizing election.

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Posted on November 17, 2016

By The Museum Of Classic Chicago Television

“There is no acceptable desegregation plan,” said Doris “Pixie” Galik of the Chicago Lawn Civic Association in 1979. “Stop dreaming the impossible dream of integration. It has become a nightmare for Chicago’s neighborhoods.”

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Posted on November 15, 2016

By Jonathan Pie, TV Reporter!

Trump, the pussy-grabbing, wall-building, climate change-denying, health care-abolishing, tax-dodging, shit-spewing demagogue. How shit do you have to be to lose to that?

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Posted on November 10, 2016

He’s A Corporation, She’s Owned By Corporations

Wealthy, corrupt businessman vs. wealthy, corrupt politician.

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Posted on November 7, 2016

By Jessica Huseman/ProPublica

TMZ posted an article Tuesday declaring voter fraud to be “a real concern.” (Yes, that TMZ.) Here’s how the story begins:

NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN and most blogs are trying to convince you there is virtually NO EVIDENCE of voter fraud, so Trump’s fears are bogus . . . but we drilled down and some officials who run the voting systems around the country are VERY worried about fraudulent voting.

But here’s the thing: Two of the three election officials the story cites told us TMZ attributes things to them they did not say, and that they have no concerns whatsoever about the possibility of voter fraud.

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Posted on October 29, 2016

By Scott Buckner

Eventually, 24-hour news-channel coverage of Donald Trump’s campaign of crash-and-burn turns into droning redundancy, so it was nice to find the History Channel in the middle of a Forged in Fire marathon all day Tuesday. I’ve lived a cable TV-deprived existence for a number of years, so it was refreshing to spend a few hours with a cable program not devoted to The Orange Man proclaiming every single thing under the sun “a total disaster.”
Given my total lack of aptitude for anything involving tools, I’m always interested in seeing how true craftsmen end up manufacturing awesome shit out of basically nothing. If I learned anything from the three-round, $10,000 winner-take-all elimination competition between four bladesmiths that is Forged, it was this: It might take a village to raise a child, but it takes a guy with an anvil to arm the village.

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Posted on October 26, 2016