Great piece by Frank Rich on how US media conglomerates ensure that the US public lives in ignorance of everything except what they define as the agenda

Quote:

“But the media giants that wield such clout don’t always put it to such frivolous use. We are not just plugged into their matrix to be sold movies and other entertainment products. These companies can also plug the nation into news narratives as ubiquitous and lightweight as “The Matrix Reloaded,” but with more damaging side effects.

This is what has happened consistently during America’s struggle with Osama bin Laden. During the years when Al Qaeda’s terrorists were gearing up for 9/11, the media giants were in overdrive selling escapist fare like the Clinton scandals, Gary Condit’s sex life and shark attacks. They were all legitimate stories. But just as “The Matrix Reloaded,” playing on a record 8,517 screens, crowded most other movies out of the marketplace last weekend, so those entertaining melodramas drove any reports of threatening developments beyond our shores to the periphery of the mass-media news culture.

The media giants took the same tack in banding together to push the administration-dictated narrative of Saddam Hussein ? and with the same results. The networks’ various productions of “Countdown: Iraq,” though as ponderous as “The Matrix Reloaded,” were so effective that by the time we went to war, 51 percent of the country, according to a Knight-Ridder poll, believed that Iraqis were among the 9/11 hijackers. It took the bloody re-emergence of Qaeda terrorists in Riyadh two weeks ago to recover the repressed memory that none of the 9/11 terrorists were Iraqis and that most of them were Saudis. And whatever happened to Saddam’s arsenal, all those advanced nuclear weapons programs and biological poisons that George W. Bush kept citing as the justification for going to war? Well, sarin today, gone tomorrow. That laundry list of terrors, none of them yet found, vanished from the national consciousness as soon as the cable outlets of AOL Time Warner, Fox and NBC put their muscle behind The Laci Peterson Murder.”[More]

Is the music industry finally getting the Apple Music Store message?

Could it be that the music industry has finally got the message about online distribution? See this report that Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group are to sell their brain-dead online service, Pressplay, to Roxio. “The marketplace has changed,” Sony Music executive VP Robert Bowlin says. “We are in the content business. We don’t have to own the highway necessarily unless it is strategic to do so.”

Well, well… And isn’t it ironic that Roxio owns the Napster brand name?

WiFi users reduced to the status of ‘trailer trash’

Wired reports:

“In a move to generate extra cash and attract new patrons, a growing number of upscale RV parks are rolling out networks that allow users to connect throughout their facilities using Wi-Fi technology.

“A lot of parks are realizing that Wi-Fi is not only a luxury, it’s also a necessity,” said Randy Hendrickson, general manager of Destiny RV Resorts, which operates parks in Dallas, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Blythe, California. He said he believes offering Wi-Fi will help the parks draw a younger and more tech-oriented set of patrons.

“We have people who are actually working full time from their computer on the road,” he said. “And we need to offer a service that’s attractive to them.”

AOL Time Warner: the perpetual motion machine

Guess what? Steve Case — architect of the AOL Time Warner merger — is talking about undoing the marriage and spinning off AOL. Or so the NYT claims: “Stephen M. Case, mastermind of America Online’s record-breaking acquisition of Time Warner, has begun to talk favorably of undoing the deal by spinning off AOL, according to two senior company officials who have spoken with him”.

How to provide an RSS feed from your site

Useful guide from Wired.

A summary of Edward Tufte’s devastating critique of PowerPoint

Very good outline by Aaron Swartz. Done as a PowerPoint presentation, too — nice piece of self-referential irony. But it brought me up sharp with the thought: why are our schools teaching this bullshit to our children as a substitute for teaching them real ‘presentation’ skills?

Wireless broadband via barrage balloons. Eh?

A BBC report claims that a Yorkshire company is proposing to offer broadband via a set of balloons tethered 1.5km above the earth’s surface. And it would only require 18 balloons to cover the entire UK. And in case you think this is just hot air, you’re wrong. The balloons are filled with Helium.