In the summer of 2012, News Corporation announced that it was planning to split the company in two. One company would be devoted to publishing, the other to film and television. Watch this space for updates.
Among my Seven Truths They Don’t Want You To Know About the Media is Truth #2 -There are no mainstream media (MSM). Of course we have big and small media; however, we use all kinds of media and our old legacy media hold no special status.
And everyone in the news media knew that this story would be breaking at 10 a.m. on Thursday, June 28th. The decision coming down was definitely not a surprise.
And yet…
Both CNN and Fox News initially got the story wrong. As the brilliant satirical news commentator Stephen Colbert put it to the networks, “You suck at news!”
In their effort to be the first to report it, both cable news networks initially reported that the court had overturned the individual mandate requirement that everyone purchase health insurance or pay a fine/tax because the court rejected the argument that this was justified by the commerce clause of the constitution. Except that that that Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion went on to say that the mandate could be justified under congress’s authority to levy taxes.
Niche, speciality news sites can often do a better job of reporting narrowly focused news as can big legacy news organizations.
In our modern media world, there’s no such thing as mainstream media. We have lots and lots of media choices, big and small, that are all capable of being influential in different ways.
And Fox News and CNN are really not all that different. Both are apparently more concerned with being first and drawing an audience than with getting a story right.
Eight years ago, singer Janet Jackson exposed her breast for 9/16ths of a second. As a result, broadcast network CBS was fined more than half a million dollars and a near-decade long battle over what could or could not be broadcast on network television was launched.
Today, The Hill reports that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the lower court ruling that threw out the fine on the basis that the punishment for showing “indecent content” was “arbitrary and capricious.”
According to Chief Justice John Roberts the case does not give a clear path to indecent content on broadcast channels today because broadcasters now know that such content is not allowed.
Although it was a unanimous 8-0 ruling (Justice Sonia Sotomayor did not vote because she had been involved with the case at a lower level), the judgment tells us very little about the court’s true feelings.
All the court did was rule that the FCC can’t throw big fines at broadcasters without warning them in advance. The court did not rule based on First Amendment issues, nor did it indicate that it was likely to tell the FCC to lighten up on regulation. This is the second time the court has heard the case. The first time the court ruled 5-4 in favor of the FCC on procedural grounds.
Video from The New Yorker featuring video from C-SPAN and George Carlin. Lots of bad language and limited nudity. (Yeah, that says C-SPAN to ya, doesn’t it!)
If you read this blog at all, (or even go on the Internet at all) you have to be familiar with the “Hitler Finds Out About…” meme. People take the excellent German film Downfall in which Hitler gets angry and frustrated, and they add their own creative subtitles to it.
The Real Downfall Clip
Clearly the creators of these sometimes hilarious videos are making use of copyright materials. But are they legally within their rights? (NOTE: As you go through this post, please note that most of the Hitler Finds Out About videos have NSFW language in the subtitles.)
In an interview with New York Magazine, Downfall director Oliver Herschbiegel said that the parodies are a compliment to his work. But the film’s distributor, Constantin Film, issued a takedown order last week for the videos for violating copyright.
According to the Ars Technica blog, Constantin Film did not obtain a takedown order under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; instead, the studio used YouTube’s Content ID filter that lets copyright holders directly blog content using digital audio and video fingerprints. In short, Constantin can automatically block many of the videos without any intervention by the courts or YouTube.
But, you say, aren’t these videos protected as parody? Yes, in fact, they most likely are. And according to the social media blog Mashable, the people who have created the parody videos can click on a check box that says the creator of the parody is disputing the takedown. That forces Constantin to go through the formal process of actually following the procedures outlined in the DMCA.
Perhaps the best explanations of the whole case are outlined in …. what else …. Hitler Finds Out About videos.
and
To me, the most interesting question is not how Constantin Film has fought this battle, but rather why? As I said before, the director doesn’t object and the publicity of the videos would not seem to be hurting the value of the movie. It appears to me that the biggest issue surrounding the meme is that it trivializes who Hitler was and what the Nazis did. (There is reportedly a version of it subtitled in Hebrew about the lack of parking in Tel Aviv.)
Of course, offensiveness is not a legal reason to ban parody.
You may have noticed that sooner or later, every Internet discussion that turns ugly (and what of them don’t?). And once they turn ugly, it seems that before long one of the people arguing will compare the other person to the Nazis.
NOTE: This is a re-post of the 2009 blog entry. All of the videos linked to here contain disturbing, violent imagery.The news out of Iran about the violent suppression of people protesting the results of the recent Iranian election has been chilling.
No where has this been more dramatic than with the news about the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan, a 26-year-old woman who was studying philosophy and vocal music. Though accurate details about Agha-Soltan are scarce, the New York Times reports that was engaged, valued freedom, and was shot while stopping to get some fresh air after driving home from a singing lesson.
When she got out of the car, she was shot by a sniper. Her death was captured on cell phone video. The person who captured the video then e-mailed it to a friend, who then forwarded it to the Voice of America, the British newspaper The Guardian,and several friends. One of those friends, who lives in the Netherlands, posted the video to Facebook. From there, it moved on to a report Sunday night on CNN.
A second person at the scene captured a shorter bit of video as well:
All of this allowed the person who shot the video to bypass the official Iranian censorship effortsto block Internet, cell phone, and text message traffic, and some have charged that Western technology companies have assisted with this censorship – though the companies deny it.
Citizen video has been used in a wide range of ways.Here is a collection of images and videos set to the music of U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday:
As I’ve written about many times in the past, I’m not a big believer in the idea of the press having some kind of overarching uniform liberal or conservative bias. I do think, that as Herbert Ganshas written, that the American press does hold a set of shared values, both liberal and conservative, the resonate with Americans. These values laid out by Gans include: ethnocentrism, altruistic democracy, responsible capitalism, small-town pastoralism, individualism, moderatism, social order, and leadership. We can see these values playing out, especially that of individualism, with the story of Neda Agha-Soltan from Iran.
