Some people are Democrats. Others identify themselves as Republicans. But a recent event in Arkansas proves that some people are just sick.

The campaign manager for Arkansas Democrat Ken Aden found his cat brutalized and murdered with the word “liberal” scrawled on its dead body. The dead animal was discovered by the five-year old son of Jacob Burris, who is managing Alden’s campaign against Republican Steve Womack for Arkansas’ third congressional district.

“The family pet, an adult, mixed-breed Siamese cat, had one side of its head bashed in to the point the cat’s eyeball was barely hanging from its socket,” according to a press release sent out by the Aden campaign. The perpetrators scrawled ‘liberal’ across the cat’s body.”

A Republican did not do this — it was a twisted human being who killed an innocent animal to make a point about local politics.

Anybody who would kill a living being for any political or religious message kills only for him or herself. There is no politic and no religion that condones murder as an acceptable outlet. Politics by themselves are pure; religion by itself is noble; it is the man—the monster—that makes them ignoble and diluted.

“Trying to send a message” is not a valid excuse for a crime. “Making an impact” falls short as well. The inability of this person to think or feel is the only explanation for the fact that anyone could do this.

There is no way that a normal human being could ever do anything of the sort.

Other articles will discuss the family’s statement, the disgust and horror that Aden and Burris feel. But you, the reader, should be feeling disgust and horror. Because, yes, countless others have committed and do commit and will commit countless more crimes, some more heinous than others, and many under the guise of politics and religion. It is up to the observer to remember that politics and religion as theories do not condone murder, do not condone collateral damage, do not condone malpractice or misinterpretation. It is the men and women behind the practice of these two major facets of life who determine how politics and religion play into everyday life. And corruption is not an integral part of either politics or religion—it is men and women who corrupt.

See also:

• Democratic Operative’s Cat Slaughtered, ‘Liberal’ Painted On Corpse, Huffington Post 1/23/2012
• “Liberal” Written on Political Campaign Manager’s Dead Cat, KTXL-TV Fox40 Sacramento

There was something refreshing in the political scene Wednesday when congressional sponsors ran away, as fast as they could, from two ill-considered bills that sought to stamp out Internet piracy by more or less stamping out the Internet.

Maybe it was the bipartisanship of the online smackdown’s target. Most Americans are fed up with the never-ending electioneering between Republicans and Democrats, who seem to launch the next campaign as soon as the polls close. Last year, the two parties and the two houses of Congress could not seem to get together on anything. But legislators of both persuasions were elbow-deep in the muck of somehow trying to apply U.S. copyright laws to web sites located everywhere except inside the United States. It was fun to watch them scurry together in search of cover.

Or maybe it was the public humiliation inflicted on the nation’s two most ham-handed defenders of intellectual property, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America. Most of us know the RIAA for its past practice of suing teenagers, their moms and grandmothers, and dorm-dwelling college students for illegally sharing and downloading music files. Earlier, the good folks at the MPAA were behind the film industry’s attempt nearly three decades ago to squelch video cassette recorders because they feared owners would retain copies of movies that were broadcast on television. Fortunately for the film industry, it lost the Betamax case, and a profitable market for pre-recorded videos developed as a result. These days the studios seem almost deft by comparison, with their public service announcements featuring union-scale crew members who urge viewers not to download videos illegally.

Music and movie companies are not wrong to want to protect their products from theft. They just have a remarkable talent for making themselves look nasty in the process.

I think the most satisfying aspect of this week’s developments is the way the online community rose up to fight back. The most visible blow came from Wikipedia, which blacked out its English-language site for 24 hours to protest the two bills. Some of Wikipedia’s contributing editors reportedly objected to the service, which strives for impartiality in its articles, injecting itself into a public policy debate. But as a financial contributor to Wikipedia, I had no complaints. Precisely because it is non-commercial and user-supported, Wikipedia has no vested interest in the tug of war over copyrighted content, and its point of view (and vast user base) added a powerful voice to the political debate.

Still, Wikipedia could not seem to help itself from being helpful, despite the blackout. It left its articles about the two bills, the Stop Internet Piracy Act and the Protect IP [Intellectual Property] Act, accessible during the outage. It even told users that they could circumvent the 24-hour blockade by disabling javascript on their browsers.

Elsewhere, Google covered the logo on its home page with a black patch. Visitors who clicked on the patch or on a separately labeled link were directed to an online petition opposing the legislation. Wired.com blacked out the headlines on its home page. Popular blogging site WordPress.com censored its “Freshly Pressed” highlights page. By at least one estimate, as many as 7,000 sites may have joined the protest. The protest attracted worldwide attention, as outlets like the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper rounded up some of the more interesting screen shots.

To its credit, the Obama administration got ahead of the curve when it announced last weekend that the president would not sign the legislation in its original form. The first drafts of the bills would have demanded that U.S.-based service providers corrupt the net’s domain name service, which is the system that translates a name such as Google.com into a sequence of numbers that point to a particular data server. This would be a technical nightmare and could open all sorts of new possibilities for the thieves, hackers and other genuine black hats who prowl the online world from the most lawless corners of the globe.

But even with last-minute changes, the legislation would have allowed the U.S. attorney general to create a blacklist of foreign sites that allegedly infringed U.S. intellectual property. There would have been limited court review and even more limited avenues for appeal. Search engines would have been required to withhold results from such sites; service providers would be required to prevent American web surfers from reaching them; and payment services such as Paypal would be barred from remitting funds to them. The easiest way for U.S. residents to see the entire Internet, once such legislation is passed, would be to check into a hotel in Canada.

Though the legislation did not explicitly target U.S. providers like Google, those organizations noted that it would impose major headaches, such as vetting every site that hosts a source document or, in some cases, it would force them to lie to users by stating that no relevant search results are available. Also, the American approach to censoring foreign sites would be an invitation for other democratic governments to impose their own restrictions. Britain would likely assert its Official Secrets Act and pre-trial crime reporting restrictions against Americans. France would want to impose its hate speech limits on documents that Google indexes and archives, and Germany’s anti-Nazi laws would get extraterritorial heft. Not to mention the field day that information-restrictive countries such as Singapore would have. The United States would go from being a global role model for free speech to the global standard-bearer for cross-border censorship.

Well before night fell on Washington, the legislation’s former backers were peeling away from it. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, called the Senate bill “not ready for prime time,” The New York Times reported. Hatch had been one of its original sponsors.

It is tempting to say that the legislation is dead, killed by a grassroots rebellion of Internet users, but I would not bet on that. Online piracy is not the vast scourge that the old-line media companies pretend that it is when they count each free download as a lost full-price sale, but neither is the theft of American-generated content a trivial matter. Right here at Palisades Hudson, we have had some of our online content lifted and even altered without permission, and in some cases without attribution. Since we are fussy about what we say and where we say it, we take such violations seriously. Our reputation is worth a lot to us.

So the big content publishers will be back. You can sense it in the churlish tweet that RIAA executive Jonathan Lamy posted in the midst of Wednesday’s protest: “After Wikipedia blackrout (sic), somewhere, a student today is doing original research and getting his/her facts straight. Perish the thought.”

As I said, even when they have a valid point, these folks make themselves look nasty. You can’t get far in show business without having some sort of talent.

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.

I recently pulled a Rip Van Winkle. I did not touch a computer keyboard or cell phone from 2007 until 2011. As a resident of a village in the region of the world depicted in Washington Irving’s immortal short story, I embrace my kindred spirit Van Winkle. Skipping five years of technology in the 21st century isn’t so different than Rip Van Winkle’s 18 year hiatus during the 1700’s. Each week, to create sketches and essays for a hyperlocal community news site, I’m required to immerse myself into the strange ways of this new era of connectivity. Ironically, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., where Irving first published his story of the Hudson Valley hermit, is helping me surf this time warp.

In the years before I unplugged, I was a profoundly busy and public person, engaged in both activism and art. Interactive media was my friend. I had served elected officials and civil rights organizations as a press secretary. In fact, it was with reckless self-confidence that I used a computer to launch my political career. As a press aide to the New York State Democratic Delegation to the 1988 Democratic Convention in Atlanta Georgia, I was asked to produce our daily news letter. I agreed to the assignment before I was shown that instead of a typewriter and Xerox machine, I would be using a computer, an instrument I had never touched.

After 20 hours of non-stop work, I completed my first draft. My work ethic was the immediate stuff of legend but if I had known what I was doing, I could have completed the project in four hours. The fact that I had the stamina for a marathon session of trial and error gave me what I suspect many early computer aficionados enjoyed; the mystique of mastering something that seems difficult but is actually simple if one took the time and sweat to figure it out.

My break with technology occurred with a slip, a splash and a moment of horror. While painting a condo with my ex-wife before putting it on the market, I leaned over a can of paint and watched my brand new Sprint Treo slip from my shirt pocket and disappear into the acrylic soup. The last sound it made was kerplunk, the sound a $700 Treo makes as it turns into a worthless blue brick. Although I quickly replaced it, I never got much use out of it. Several months later, I left New York, leaving behind my Hotmail address and my Sprint phone number.

Jump cut to 2011. The setting is Nyack, NY. The people and circumstances that can re-animate a moribund life converged and I found myself wanting to re-connect. I had the stiffness that racked Van Winkle’s body from years of disuse as he made his way down from the Kaatskill Mountains (sic), but it was my social not physical muscles that had atrophied. I still had my Treo, but I found it as useful as Van Winkle’s rusted musket.

To be connected to friends, family and work associates in 2011, you need to have a presence in the new town square: social media. When it comes to Facebook and Twitter I feel like a rube, unaware of the customs and morays. When Rip and I stepped out of the frame, we were both ruled by a George: his King George gave way to George Washington and when I got back on line, George Bush had been replaced by Barack Obama. In this one comparison, the transitions seem of equivalent historic significance.

Nyack Sketch Log, my weekly online column, has been a way for me to reacquaint myself with both the physical and virtual worlds. For me Nyack is an ancestral home. The landscape of the village that I sketch provides the same comfort for me that one receives from the contours of the face of a familiar old friend. For Rip Van Winkle, after an interval of suspicion and disbelief, the villagers embraced the returning eccentric. My experience has been identical. Like Van Winkle, I pine for the village that I knew as a child, when being social didn’t involve media. I had my first egg cream at Jerry’s soda shop on Main Street; I bought my first bike at De Jung’s on Broadway and my first book, the illustrated version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, was purchased at Pickwick Books.

Essayist Michael J Cummings says Washington Irving sees real change as “an amalgam of the old and new.” Hopefully, Nyack Sketch Log validates that theory. My Treo has been replaced by a T-Mobile Galaxy S II. I use this hi-tech gadget to transmit my old fashioned handmade low tech drawings. Hi-tech/ low-tech mash ups demonstrate, to my mind, generational harmony. My favorite example of the merger of modern and ancient is the digital radio with the hand cranked battery. Human progress can be threatened by a culture of stagnation or disposability. Truth be told, Irving’s tale was recycled from similar accounts of many cultures: something old, made new. The plot device of an avatar from the past in myth can be a useful literary device to transmit information of timeless value.

I was shamed into joining Facebook by a friend who thought my absence from the social media platform was evidence that I was over 50. Her remark, and her estimate of my age were way too close to the truth. In the 21^st century, to stay young and stay connected, you get to stay home, login in and post and tweet. I’ll leave it to you to decide if social media is also social progress.

My first tweet, using the Twitter hash tag #RipVanWinkle, will coincide with this post. My twitter handle is nyacksketchlog. My younger self was comfortable with this clumsy feeling that is overcoming me as I take my first strides into a new media landscape. People my age wish to avoid bumbling about in public.

Even more problematic for the twitterverse is my generation’s tendency to be long winded. I hope I can make my point in less than 140 charact

Artist Bill Batson, an activist and former NYC resident, draws sketches and writes essays each week curbside in Nyack, NY. Copyright 2011, Bill Batson.

The young people who started the Occupy Wall Street protest a few weeks ago are about to learn some important lessons about life in the grown-up world.

Lesson One: If you don’t have an objective, someone else will be glad to give you one. In this case the “someone else” means both labor unions, which have been fighting a losing battle to mobilize popular support, and the Democratic Party, which is searching for ways to feed public antagonism toward the financial industry without reducing the value of anybody’s 401(k).

Lesson Two: Protesting against something is useful if you want to prevent change. If you don’t want Wal-Mart coming to your town, you protest against Wal-Mart. But if you actually want change, you have to be for something. Until the union activists moved in, Occupy Wall Street was not for any particular thing that I could determine. It was just against Wall Street, whatever that means.

Lesson Three: You don’t drive a car from the outside. You need to have your hands on the controls. This, incidentally, requires you to learn how to drive. People marched for civil rights, which was good and important, but the civil rights movement ultimately progressed because Congress changed laws, lawyers brought lawsuits and judges made judgments. If you want to make an individual impact, rather than just be part of the crowd, you have to acquire skills that put you in the driver’s seat. Most protest gatherings, like the anti-austerity protests ongoing in Greece, simply vent public frustration without ultimately changing anything. Change requires an achievable goal and the know-how to achieve it.

There is both naiveté and cynicism surrounding the Occupy Wall Street protest. It reminds me in many ways of the protests by young French citizens in 2005 and 2006 against “précarité,” or precariousness, in their lives. A photo of a Paris march from that time shows a banner that reads, “No to précarité, for a real increase in buying power, no to dismantling the labor code,” as though the state could somehow guarantee jobs for life and rising productivity. There were similar sentiments here at the time, and many complaints about rising income inequality and a stagnant minimum wage (which was raised in 2007). Now, a lot of people look back on 2005 or 2006 as the good old days.

I suspect a more direct inspiration for the current protest was the tent city that sprouted this summer on one of Tel Aviv’s most fashionable boulevards. It was started by young Israelis who were upset at the high cost of housing in Israel, though it morphed into a broader demand for “social justice,” apparently defined as some combination of higher wages and lower prices.

Even in the current post-bubble era for U.S. real estate, young people in New York City have much to complain about when it comes to housing prices. They seldom make the connection between the absurdly tight rental market, which makes New York one of the few places where renters customarily pay commissions to brokers, and the price controls on rents that have been in effect (in varying forms) since the city declared a housing emergency in 1947.

Many of these young people are saddled with debt left over from college, and they are struggling in a stagnant economy and stalled job market. It is probably safe to say that many were Obama supporters in 2008 and that most will still favor him next year – if they are motivated enough to vote at all. And I suspect a lot have a history of “progressive” sympathies, such as advocating for living wage laws back on their college campuses. I apologize for the generalizations, but there is, as yet, no “Occupy Wall Street” platform that I can quote.

But outsiders will be happy to provide one soon enough. Unions have taken a drubbing in elections and state legislatures all over the country, and they are happy to make common cause with the protesters. Unlike unemployed twentysomethings, however, the unions know exactly what they want: card-check organizing rules, collective bargaining rights for public servants (who bargain against the politicians they help elect), pension and health benefits that don’t exist in the private sector, and higher taxes – which most of the Occupy Wall Street protesters will someday pay – to cover the bill.
Some friends told me last weekend that their 23-year-old son was among the marchers in lower Manhattan. I don’t know the young man, but he is unemployed and looking for work as a computer programmer. Knowing his parents and his educational background, I am certain he is very smart, and probably going to earn a good living for himself someday.

Which makes me wonder: If some of those Wall Street firms being protested set up a table and held a job fair across the street from the protests, would they draw a crowd? It’s an interesting mental image.

Such events always pose the risk that fringe elements, such as the clowns who rioted in Seattle during a 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization, will subvert the protest to their own agenda. Police overreaction, the granddaddy of which was at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, is also a risk, but one which – in a mild way – protesters would welcome for its publicity value, as in last week’s arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge.

The more likely outcome, though, is that these protests will simply be co-opted by the existing power structure of the political left. Democrats are eager to find someone to run against in 2012 as they struggle with their party’s own record on the economy. The bogeymen of choice have thus far been the Tea Party, the elusive “millionaires and billionaires” and, intermittently, Wall Street. The party that produced the economy that left these young people frightened and unemployed will tap them to protest their own fear and unemployment.

That’s the cynical part.

I have a warm spot in my heart for young people. It’s hard to make your way in an adult world where you gradually, but inevitably, learn that a lot of people will cheerfully lie to you or manipulate you to their own purposes. You find out that there are at least two sides to every story, that there are very few pure heroes or villains, and that problems are easy to identify but maddeningly complicated to solve. And you find out that despite all your parents may have done to make your life secure, the world is, indeed, filled with précarité, and that no amount of protest can make it go away.

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.

Photo Credit: CriticalLegalThinking.com

But this year’s graduation at Ithaca College in upstate New York wasn’t like that. The commencement remarks by college president Thomas R. Rochon used a classic movie scene from The Graduate about the life and times of a college graduate as a way to connect the students’ generation to their parents’.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus is credited with the observation, “The only constant is change.” Rochon used Dustin Hoffman’s fictional character Benjamin Braddock as a metaphor to remind today’s graduates and their baby boomer parents just how true Heraclitus’ words ring today. “Change has become the only constant we can rely upon,” said Rochon.

If Benjamin had been a real person, he would have received his bachelor’s degree in 1967 – the year the film was released. He would now be 65 or 66 years old, about to retire. Think what he would have witnessed between the day he graduated and his retirement this year.

When Benjamin graduated, the greatest threat to American security was a country called the Soviet Union. The largest corporation in the world was General Motors, the same General Motors that recently emerged from bankruptcy. When Benjamin graduated, no one had ever been to the moon.

And, unlike many of you, we know that Benjamin actually listened to the speeches at his commencement because he had no other options unless he brought with him either a transistor radio or a battery-powered record player.

Today, the odds are pretty good that Benjamin is retiring from a job that did not exist in 1967, or that existed but is now performed in an entirely different way using technologies that were not even dreamed of when his career began.

Of course, 45 years is a long time. But consider the pace of change in just the last four years – the span of time most of you have been at Ithaca College.

When you were freshmen, there had never been an African-American president of the United States and there was no reason to think there would be one any time soon. When you started at IC, there had not yet been a global financial meltdown triggered by misplaced confidence in financial instruments that few people understood.

Rochon then ratcheted the change theme up a notch. Because things have changed since Heraclitus’ time. Change is no longer a constant. The rate of change is accelerating.

The first iPhone came out just before you began your freshman year. Today, as you graduate, you can buy a fourth generation iPhone at your local electronics store. And the blogs are full of rumors about new capabilities that will be added to the iPhone 5, surely coming soon.

It’s a great metaphor and a good analysis…except for the one little fib that Ithaca’s college president told the graduates. “You have not yet reached the generational divide at which one develops a desire to just have technology sit still for a few years so we can get comfortable with our existing gadgets before trading them in for new ones,” said Rochon. “You might never cross that generational divide. You may be the ones for whom change is so omnipresent that the only thing that would make you uncomfortable would be to find out that there will not soon be another major advance in the way we stay connected with each other.”

President Rochon, shame on you for lying to your students. Instead of this innocent fib, you  should have told them about what Joni Mitchell, a real contemporary of the fictional Benjamin Braddock, had to say about change in her 1970 song, The Circle Game.

“Tell him, ‘take your time.’ It won’t be long now — till you drag your feet to slow the circles down.”

Dave Zornow is a media research consultant, web applications developer and hyperlocal publisher in Nyack, NY.

Sources:

• Ithaca College President Thomas R. Rochon, Commencement Remarks, 5/22/2011
• WikiQuote on Heraclitus
• JoniMitchell.com, The Circle Game
• Wikipedia, The Graduate

Once serious but lately comedic actor Leslie Nielsen died last weekend at age 84. Famous for his Airplane and Naked Gun appearances, he once tried to compete with the other Nielsen — according to this 1998 April Fool’s article.

Detective Frank Drebin, we’re going to miss you.

by Dave Zornow

April 1, 1998 — Actor Leslie Nielsen threw his hat into the cable ratings business with the purchase of the bankrupt “Psychic Friends Network.” Although cable analysts questioned the move (One unnamed source wondered, “How well can these psychics see the future if they couldn’t even predict their own bankruptcy? And if they are really psychic, why do they always have to ask my name when I call?”), the actor seemed determined to buy his way into a new business now that his acting career with O.J. is over.

Nielsen has decided to relaunch and reposition Psychic Friends in the audience measurement business. The new venture will now be known as “Nielsen Medium Research.”

Actor Nielsen plans a number of initiatives to make Nielsen Medium Research an industry leader. For example, to emphasize the importance of customer service at his new company, Nielsen Medium Research will include a coupon with each ratings pocketpiece good for ten free minutes with a telephone psychic to consult on upcoming buys, career moves and what to wear on your next date. (Offer void where prohibited.)

The new Nielsen also plans to give the other Nielsen more competition on the technology front. Hoping to capitalize on innovations in advanced digital video sampling, Nielsen’s Nielsen will introduce a new household meter which will measure, store and identify the concentration of purple in each video image. “Each program has its own digital pattern, just like any two random snowflakes in a blizzard or crackerjack kernels in a box. By measuring the Purple Percentage of each video image we can identify every program in a foolproof, digitally-efficient, state-of-the-art, low cost and competitive way,” Nielsen says. The new technology, which will be dubbed the Nielsen Purple Meter, will be available next quarter. Or the one after that, for sure.

Video engineers doubt the Nielsen Purple Meter will ever get out of the lab. Initial field test lab show the Purple Meter consistently overstating viewing to certain Oprah Winfrey movies (“The Color Purple”) and Woody Allen titles (“The Purple Rose of Cairo”).

Copyright 2003, Dave Zornow. Reposted from TNG Research

At Thanksgiving celebrations all across the nation, there was a new topic of conversation to complement the annual discussion of Aunt Minnie’s bean dip casserole and whom cousin Pat is now dating. At turkey time this year, people were talking less about stuffing and more about scanning. Or at least there were in the media: a Google News search turned up 7,744 stories about “airport scanning” in the last week.

Do scanners make us safer? Or is this a marketing effort to discourage terrorists and make us only feel safer? According to Steven Levitt, a University of Chicago economics professor one of the co-authors of the book Freakonomics, worrying about terrorist attacks “is one of the biggest wastes of time, ever.”

“Until the new body scanners were in place, the system was about stopping guns, because for a very long time, guns on planes were a real problem,” says Jared Blank, who writes about the travel industry at OnlineTravelReview.com. “They were being used for skyjackings. The security system created to stop that was actually very effective.” Blank says that 9/11 changed everything when terrorists realized that you could use something other than a gun to take down a plane.

TSA’s historical MO is to be reactive rather than proactive. “That’s how we ended up with bans on toothpaste and 3 year olds getting patted down.” Blank says the full-body scanners take care of half of the problem — uncovering what people are bringing on airplanes. “Great intelligence is what takes care of the other half of the problem,” he says.

In many respects, the TSA is its own worst enemy. Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Erik Uliasz writes about the embarrassment caused when pat downs exposed a young woman’s breasts or how a 61 year old bladder cancer survivor was accidentally covered in urine during a security check. How many people can honestly say that disposing of a two once bottle of shampoo left that feeling safer – and not just part of a vague poorly executed retail conspiracy?

Thanksgiving air travel this year requires even longer than usual wait times to pass through airport security. People are complaining. There’s even a right wing rant that says the public outcry is really a reaction to heavy handed liberal government interfering in every aspect of our lives. But neither the new procedures nor posturing by political pundits answers the question: are we really safer?

Maybe scanning isn’t really about security at all. Maybe it’s about CYA.

In a recent podcast, Levitt posits that game theory predicts that soccer penalty kicks should keep the goalie guessing. Which means that every once in a while you need to kick it right at the goal keeper on the theory that they will be moving to either their left or their right and won’t stop a straight-on penalty kick. But in practice, this doesn’t happen because no one wants to be the laughing stock of the sports press if this strategy backfires.

Which begs the question about the TSA: are they doing this for security purposes? Or to make sure they can say “no security stone was left unturned” in the event of a future incident?

If the TSA was purely motivated by passenger safety and efficiency, they might act differently. Instead of scanning everyone, it would make a lot more sense to use a stratified random sample of passengers. Which is just fancy talk for profiling. You randomly pick a sample of people to stop, scan and intensively question — Israeli style — but you oversample people who are more likely to fit the ever changing terrorist profile. And you do all of this out of public view – to give everyone left in line something to think about. The innocents will feel more secure. And the potential troublemakers will be put off guard.

Despite the fact that the average person “doesn’t know stat,” those who do aren’t complete ready to adopt sampling as a way to out terrorists. “If a bomber gets through a system that is based on sampling and blows up a plane, all hell will break loose,” says Gian Fulgoni, chairman of the Internet measurement company comScore. “I wouldn’t want to be one of the people involved in the design of the screening system if this were to happen.”

Where we go from here as a much to do with the media coverage as it does with any true concern about the safety of airport scanners. Levitt says the media get part of the blame. “People are predisposed to being frightened of things.” He says the media promotes fears because people love to read these stories. Blank agrees – but bluntly asserts that scanner fears are just media hype. “We live in an age where, because of social networks or whatever, everyone assumes that they are an expert,” he says. “They are not. And so as the TSA has rolled out body scanners, people have freaked out about the radiation issue.” Are scanners safe? Blank has no doubts: “There is no radiation issue.”

As someone who studies the travel industry, Blank is OK with TSA scanning. “If anything, TSA has been guilty of random egregious acts and of incredibly poor communication,” says Blank. “This whole thing will die down eventually. Until then, we have to listen to nonsense about people avoiding the scanners.”

What Is News And What Is Not: When Local Reporters Go GaGa for “Media Events”

by Dave Zornow

Nyack, Nov 19, 2010 — A religious hurricane forecast to hit Nyack, NY last weekend changed course at the last minute, allowing a high school production of The Laramie Project to take the stage with no worries about religious fundamentalists disrupting the play.

But to end the story there would be to miss “a teachable moment” about the averted storm – and why some forecasters predicted it.

The Laramie Project is a play about community reaction to the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student in Laramie, Wyoming. The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas has been picketing productions of the play throughout the country to spread its belief that every tragedy in the world is related to homosexuality.

For students of the media, religious fundamentalists — and students of all ages — here’s a study guide which looks at some of the myths and assumptions about the protest that didn’t happen.

1. As reported on their Website, The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas was hell-bent on coming to  this suburban NYC community to protest a high school production of The Laramie Project and spread their message of intolerance towards homosexuals, Roman Catholics, Islam, Jews, Methodists, Mormons, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Episcopalians other Baptists and Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly.

Actually, it was never entirely clear that they were coming at all. To wit:

• On October 21, the WBC announced they planned to picket at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY but never showed up.
• Last weekend, school administrators at Richard Montgomery High School in Bethesda, MD prepared for a Westboro Baptist Church rally that never occurred.
• On Nov 13, about 120 counter protesters at Cal State Fullerton were ready for a scheduled WBC rally that never materialized.
• On Nov 10, 2009, WBC members picketed at Baylor University. Four congregants demonstrated for 20 minutes and were mostly ignored by the students.

A local parents’ group that supports theater productions made a conscious decision not to counter protest and ignore WBC members if they appeared. It was only after local media owned by AOL and Gannett publicized their presence that it because widely known. The story was also subsequently picked up by WCBS-TV.

“No event or condition is inherently news,” says Scott Bonn, author and associate professor of sociology at Drew University. “It only becomes news because someone has the power and ability to say so and, generally, that person has both a political and profit-driven agenda, not the least of which is to entice an audience and sell advertising.”

Bonn, who previously worked at MTV as a sales and marketing executive, says news making is inherently amoral and it will cover and promote anything that serves its self-interest. “The news media often become passive co-conspirators in spreading public panics such as the bird flu and the threat from Iraq that was alleged by the G.W. Bush administration,” Bonn adds.

2. 21st Century mass media lets religious fundamentalists spread their message in ways never before possible.

Mass media has a long history of spreading religious intolerance. Father Charles Coughlin used radio in the 1930’s to reach millions of radio listeners with anti-Semitic message broadcasts. Although sophisticated in their use of media, sociologists say the Westboro Baptist Church has little in common with previous, more polished hate mongers. “Coughlin, in a totally different era, was successful and credentialed,” says Gerald Marwell, a professor of sociology at New York University.

By comparison, Marwell says Fred Phelps, the leader of the WBC is neither. “Coughlin had his own broadcasts and millions of followers.“ Marwell says that with the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, anti-semitism was a very important issue. Because the country is moving away from the positions advocated by the Westboro Baptist Church, Marwell adds that Phelps is a just a side-show, “Only the media pay him any attention. The best response to Phelps is laughter and dismissal.”

3. The Westboro Baptist Church is only doing this for the money.

Not true, says Baylor University’s Christopher Bader, an associate professor of sociology who has studied the Westboro Baptist Church extensively. “First, their motivations are primarily religious. They believe very strongly and unanimously in a God that is both “hands on” with the world and extremely judgmental of it,” he says. Although Bader describes the group as ambulance chasers, it’s because they are always looking for situations that will get the most attention. “It is not by accident that they engage in outrageous antics. They see themselves as God’s elect who must warn others.”

“The Phelps’ seem to be driven by a desire for attention. They will take negative attention over inattention,” says Deana Pollard-Sacks, a law professor at the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University. ”The public did not seem interested in the Phelps’ anti-gay rhetoric, so the Phelps’ resorted to extreme personal attacks against fallen soldiers and their surviving family members to garner media attention for themselves.” Pollard-Sacks says that the Westboro Baptist Church has been unable to attract public support for their anti-gay agenda. “The only reason they are getting any attention is because the media are giving it to them,” she says.

Bader says Westboro’s annual travel budget, estimated to be about $200,000, comes from multiple sources. He says that many church members hold regular jobs working as nurses, working in law offices and working as computer programmers and developers. “They also make significant money from winning lawsuits,” Bader notes. “Since they defend themselves, but can charge for their time, when they win a lawsuit in jurisdictions where the ‘loser’ has to pay legal expenses, they make a lot of money.”

4. Nothing good comes out of hate.

In this rare case, that isn’t quite true. Students involved in Nyack’s production of The Laramie Project say the publicity has sparked interest from peers who previously were not interested in either the arts or in talking about tolerance. According to one participant, kids are googling the play and the WBC and are forming their own opinions.

5. If it’s in the paper, it’s news.

The 20/20 hindsight of the run up to the Iraq War shows that reporting by a NY Times reporter tipped the scales for mass media in accepting the credibility of the Bush Administrations’ WMD myth. The public generally believes that news sources are motivated to report the news; but anyone who has ever worked in a news room knows that the definition of news is truly in the eye of the beholder. Journalists, more often than not, are motivated by the fear of “getting beat” on a story regardless of whether or not a story idea meets any vague criteria for being “news.”

Objectively speaking, is it news that six people in a bus with Kansas plates come to a town without any local support and hold up attention getting signs purely to attract the attention of the local press? Shouldn’t local reporters have some a built in “Media Manipulation” alarm for these kinds of incidents? Maybe — but more often than not — they don’t.

Sources:

• Church protest planned, church group fails to appear. The Spectator (Hamilton College) 10/21/2010
• Westboro Baptist Church is no-show at announced protest at Richard Montgomery High School. Montgomery (MD) Gazette, 11/13/2010
• Westboro counter-protest a success, The Daily Titan (Cal State Fulterton) 11/15/2010.
• Controversial church largely ignored, The Lariat (Baylor University) 11/17/2009.
• Wikipedia: Westboro Baptist Church, Father Charles Coughlin

Lost amid the fuzzy retelling and rewriting of recent history in George W. Bush’s new memoir, “Decision Points,” is the most salient fact: the Bush administration knowingly committed war crimes in Iraq. Let’s not forget that the Bush administration violated the Nuremberg Charter and the U.N. Charter when it launched an unprovoked invasion of Iraq in 2003. Also, the inhumane treatment of Iraqi prisoners, particularly at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, the water boarding of detainees, the killing of civilians, and the destruction of property during the occupation of Iraq violated the Geneva Conventions of 1949. The sacred documents violated by the Bush administration are international treaties that the U.S. co-authored after the atrocities of WWII.

However, rejecting such claims, the Bush administration has steadfastly maintained that the invasion was justified on the basis of the Bush doctrine of preemptive self-defense. However, the Bush doctrine went far beyond any reasonable interpretation of preemptive self-defense which would require that an actual attack was certain or imminent. The Bush doctrine was based on a much broader position that the U.S. was entitled to use force to eliminate any possible future threat to its national security, whether or not a threat was objective or imminent. According to the Bush doctrine, the invasion of Iraq constituted self-defense ostensibly because the Bush administration said so.

The Bush administration has always sought to preserve self-defense protection for invading Iraq under the U.N. Charter by falsely claiming that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that it was linked to al Qaeda and involved in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Of course we now know that none of those accusations were true. However, even if Iraq had possessed WMD as claimed, without an actual attack or an immediate threat to use them against the U.S., there would still have been no justification for invading Iraq under the U.N. Charter.

Watching G.W. Bush in his interviews the last few days it is painfully obvious that he lives in a delusional world in which he is capable of convincing himself of anything despite glaring evidence to the contrary. For example, he now claims that he was absolutely certain that Iraq had WMD before he launched the war in 2003. That is simply a lie. There is overwhelming evidence that Bush knew with virtual certainty that the information he used was flawed, including a 2006 Senate Intelligence Committee Report which concluded that the Bush administration knew the intelligence was bad but used it anyway. Moreover, Hans Blix, the former U.N. chief weapons inspector, had persistently said that there were no signs of WMD prior to the invasion and even CIA reports (now declassified) offered skepticism about the validity of the evidence of WMD. In particular, the CIA warned President Bush at least three times that U.S. intelligence services did not believe the claim that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium yellowcake for a nuclear bomb, yet Bush made that now infamous claim in his 2002 state of the union address.

It was refreshing to hear that G.W. Bush finally accepts the fact that Iraq did not possess WMD as he had claimed. However, when asked by Matt Lauer last week whether he would still have launched a war on Iraq if he knew then what he knows now, instead of answering the question, he stated that invading Iraq was still the right thing to do. His rationale is that he kept the U.S. safe from further terrorist attacks after 9/11 by invading Iraq. Apparently, in his delusional thinking, he protected the U.S. from the WMD that Iraq did not possess! Although his reasoning is self-serving and illogical, it no doubt allows him to sleep at night. Because if he did not live in his delusional world, he would have to accept the facts that he lied to the U.S. and the world about the Iraqi threat and that he committed war crimes when he launched an unprovoked and illegal invasion of a sovereign nation.

Scott Bonn, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. He is the author of a critically acclaimed book titled Mass Deception: Moral Panic and the U.S. War on Iraq from Rutgers University Press. He can be reached at sbonn@drew.edu.

“Here’s the top story we’re following at this hour: For the first time, there’s definitive proof that Fox News, the U.S. cable network that claims to be ‘fair and balanced,’ is neither fair nor balanced. Next up this hour: Experts say temperatures will drop when winter comes. And finally: Eating regularly is key to good health. Stay tuned for more details.”

OK, maybe these aren’t great revelations. But Fox News’ coverage of Comedy Central’s “Restore Sanity/Keep Fear Alive” rally on October 30 is worthy of a second look. The story posted on their Website stands in stark contrast to the pieces published by other media outlets, both liberal and conservative.

Disputing Fox News’ “fair and balanced” slogan is a “man bites dog” kinda story. However, it’s instructive to both lovers and haters of the leading cable news operation because the 1996 launch of Fox News in 1996 is one of the most significant events in cable new history, second only to Ted Turner’s 1980 creation of CNN. So an analysis of how a leading — albeit controversial — news network frames a story can tell us a lot about their journalism. And the people who watch the network.

Here are a few “leads” written by the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, the Washington Times, the Associated Press, Fox News and the Christian Science Monitor. See if you can tell which one fits the Fox News narrative.

Source #1: “Two of America’s best-known television comedians drew tens of thousands of people to a rally on Saturday that was part variety show, part Halloween celebration and part political rally to call for common sense before Tuesday’s congressional elections. Satirists Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, hosts of late-night cable TV shows, poked fun at politicians and media for stoking partisan fervor.”

Story #2: “They came from far and near, some wielding signs and hoping to attract a little attention, others just to watch the show. But what seemed to unite the tens of thousands who converged on the National Mall on a sunny Saturday in Washington for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear was a genuine desire to push back against the strong rightward tilt of the 2010 midterm campaign.”

Story #3: “In an election season characterized by loud divisions between the left and the right, Saturday’s crowded Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear marked an ironic uprising by those who want to turn down the volume. Three days before midterm elections, tens of thousands of people packed the National Mall to listen to Comedy Central satirists Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, looking for a laugh and a chance to display their disenchantment with what they say is the bitter tone of the nation’s political discourse.”

Story #4: Just three days before pivotal midterm elections, comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert threw a “sanity” rally in the shadow of the Capitol that organizers insisted wasn’t about politics. But there were political undertones to Saturday’s event as the two Comedy Central hosts entertained a huge throng stretched alongside the National Mall by poking fun at the nation’s diversity and its ill-tempered politics. Stewart is popular especially with Democrats and independents, a Pew Research Center poll found. Colbert of “The Colbert Report” poses as an ultraconservative, and the stage Saturday was stacked with entertainers associated with Democratic causes or Obama’s 2008 campaign.

Story #5: In the shadow of the Capitol and the election, comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert entertained a huge throng Saturday at a “sanity” rally poking fun at the nation’s ill-tempered politics, fear-mongers and doomsayers. “We live now in hard times,” Stewart said after all the shtick. “Not end times.”

OK, pens down. Which one did you pick? Maybe it was easy — or maybe it wasn’t.

The pro-business, right leaning WSJ, owned by the same News Corp company that owns the Fox News Channel, wrote “In an election season characterized by loud divisions between the left and the right…”

The Christian Science Monitor published “They came from far and near, some wielding signs and hoping to attract a little attention, others just to watch the show.”

If you chose “Just three days before pivotal midterm elections, comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert threw a “sanity” rally in the shadow of the Capitol that organizers insisted wasn’t about politics. But there were political undertones to Saturday’s event as the two Comedy Central hosts…” you found the Fox in the cable news hen house.

Strangely, the Washington Times, a conservative counterweight to the Washington Post, used the the AP story without sending a reporter to the rally (“In the shadow of the Capitol and the election, comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert entertained a huge throng…”)  Which makes you wonder: if their reporter couldn’t afford the $5 Metrocard to get to the Washington mall, things must be REALLY tough in the newspaper business…

Finally, Reuters wrote “Two of America’s best-known television comedians drew tens of thousands of people to a rally on Saturday that was part variety show…”

(One honorable mention that didn’t make this list: “whilst” surveying foreign news reports for their take on the event, I ran across the The Guardian blog of Richard Adams. His Jon Stewart rally ‘as it happens‘ entry provided an amusing play by play of the event as it unfolded from the vantage point of an outsider looking in. It was very funny with lots of wry Brit observations about American culture.)

What makes the Fox story unfair and unbalanced? Journalists are trained to report what is “new” when reporting the news. Glen Beck’s August rally was news because a conservative political pundit gathered thousands of his followers on the Washington Mall in the same location on the same day as Martin Luther King made his “I Have A Dream” speech. If you were there and didn’t that wasn’t your story, you must have had an another agenda. That *was* the story. The day was about GB and his ability to muster his masses to the Washington Mall. It was an unprecedented event because it had never been done before by a cable TV celebrity — until Saturday.

Using the same logic, Saturday’s story was about how between 60,000 and 250,000 people gathered on the mall (Stewart put the number at “millions” as a pre-emptive strike for those who would try to compare his rally to Beck’s) to see two TV celebrities in the company of Discovery’s The Mythbusters, The Roots, The OJays, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Sam Waterson, Tony Bennett, Jeff Tweedy, Kid Rock, Sheryl Crow, Ozzy Osborne and the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens. Among many others.

If there was a political message, it was relatively weak. Telling everyone to think for themselves and stop believing everything you read on Websites, see on cable news and hear on talk radio isn’t exactly a revolutionary manifesto. It may have been a little hard to write that sentence if you worked on the copy desk at Fox, CNN or MSNBC — the three networks that dominated the mocking clips shown by Jon Stewart — but you’d have to be an idiot to have missed that point. Or, perhaps had an agenda that reinterprets the concept of fair and balanced journalism.

In the second sentence of the Fox News story, the network reported that “there were political overtones…poking fun at the nation’s diversity and ill-tempered politics.” Actually, Stewart and Colbert weren’t poking fun at the nation’s diversity, but at the tendency of the news media to characterize events by who shows up. Fox seemed to deliberately miss the point that the Comedy Central kids were poking fun at news pundits who tune the facts to fit a particular news narrative targeted to their core audience. Writing “news” which rings of truthiness but doesn’t try to capture what happened isn’t news – that’s entertainment.

Google time line for the phrase "fair and balanced." It wasn't much of an issue until FOX News was launched and George W Bush became president.

Which is OK. The “fair and balanced” phenomenon in journalism is fairly new. Biased reporting in newspapers has a much richer history that predates the concept of fair and balanced journalism.

Fox News is to the 65+ audience what MTV is to 18-34’s: a consistent stream of content which tells people in a demo niche what they want to hear. Both networks have relatively small audiences which exert an oversized influence on the American culture. Both Fox News and MTV are extremely good at what they do: aggregating a high concentration of similar people to resell to advertisers. MTV gets heat because they don’t play music videos anymore; Fox gets heat before their definition of news isn’t what many regard to be fair and balanced. It’s a marketing disconnect which occurs when a cultural icon behaves differently than “we” think they should.

Fox News may not be “news” in the tradition of Walter Cronkite and Ed Murrow. But I bet that William Randolph Hearst would be impressed.

Stewart and Colbert are right when they suggest you shouldn’t believe everything you see on TV. As long as that healthy skepticism includes Comedy Central, we should all be ok.

Dave Zornow has worked as a media research consultant and applications developer at TNG Research for 20 years. He publishes MediaNewsAndViews and the hyperlocal Website NyackNewsAndViews.

See also:

• Fox News Freaks Out Over Stewart/Colbert Rally, PoliticusUSA
• Can Fox News be ‘fair and balanced’ if News Corp. gives to Republicans?, CSMonitor.com
• Rally For Sanity: They Also Want Their Country Back, Mediate.com