Permanent link to MTA daily media news

The most trusted name in news.
In a battle of breaking stories, CNN chooses Jenna Bush’s engagement to a Karl Rove intern over the Jose Padilla conviction.

Ralph Peters and Glenn Reynolds think you’re an idiot.
Putz links to the latest installment of “massive suicide bombings are a sign we’re winning” from the Fox News of newspapers . You remember how it goes: less violence means we’re winning. More violence means the terrorists are getting desperate…because we’re winning.

Backspin for War: The Convenience of Denial
The man who ran CNN’s news operation during the invasion of Iraq is now doing damage control in response to a new documentary’s evidence that he kowtowed to the Pentagon on behalf of the cable network. His current denial says a lot about how “liberal media” outlets remain deeply embedded in the mindsets of pro-military conformity.

Integrity
Bud Krogh, one of the “plumbers” in the Nixon White House who later went to prison, has released a fascinating memoir, Integrity: Good People, Bad Choices and Life Lessons from the White House. Krogh concludes that the Watergate crimes resulted from a complete breakdown of integrity… [He] has this warning for the Bush administration: “I’m very sorry to say this but I feel the Bush administration is headed for even more dire times [attributable] to serious breakdowns in integrity.”

The Financial News: Free Ads for Wall Street
I just heard BBC radio tell listeners that we should be expecting people to start buying on financial markets, given that everything is at rock bottom prices. How did BBC determine that stocks were at rock bottom prices? Did they do an analysis of price to earnings ratios and determine that stocks had never been so low, or at least not in recent years?  They clearly did not perform such an analysis because many, if not all, markets are far above their lows of the last decade.

GM Radio: Payola to …Talk Shows?
The tireless consumer advocate [Ralph Nader] discusses typically “brazen” auto manufacturers “pushing the envelope of advertising integration through talk radio program content.” Nader writes of how “Rush Limbaugh’s effusions to his dittoheads” stand out among the “words which flow from an emotional connection garnished with free use of vehicles”: Nader observes that “GM purportedly enlisted not only the expected suspects like Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Bill O’Reilly but also Bill Press and Ed Schultz, known for their liberal views.”

Nickelodeon to Limit Use of Characters on Junk Foods
Nickelodeon, the children’s television network, will prohibit use of its characters on junk food except on special occasions like Halloween.

Tony Snow Signals His Resignation, Plus ‘A Couple’ More ‘Coming Up In The Next Month’
In an interview with the conservative Hugh Hewitt show, Snow signaled that he will not stay until the end of the term. He also mentioned that there are “probably a couple” of other high-level resignations “coming up in the next month or so.”

Fact-checking the latest global warming denial campaign.
When NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies recently announced that it was revising its temperature data, right-wing bloggers leaped at the news to propel its global warming denial campaign. James Hansen — head of the NASA center — sets the record straight. He writes that the “corrected and uncorrected curves are indistinguishable,” adding that the “deceit” propagated by the right “has a clear purpose: to confuse the public about the status of knowledge of global climate change.”

Wolfowitz ‘Tried to Censor World Bank on Climate Change’
A Google News search reveals that, aside from passing mention in a Sacramento Bee editorial, the solitary major U.S. newspaper report on this story of “the now disgraced Paul Wolfowitz, personally interven[ing] to remove the words ‘climate change’ from the title of a [World B]ank progress report” came in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. The contrast in headlines is striking as well: while London’s Independent plainly states that Wolfowitz “tried to censor” the research, the L.A. Times ran their report under the determinedly passive “At World Bank, Climate Change Isn’t Part of the Equation.”

Dennis Kucinich: Desapparacido!
Frequent Extra! contributor [Dave] Lindorff declares that corporate reporters’ continued dismissal of the progressive candidate would “garner an ‘F’ in any decent journalism class”—even by the standards of poll-obsessed media.

CNN’s Malveaux failed to challenge DeLay’s assertion that Bush “held the line on spending”
[T]he Bush administration has run a deficit in every fiscal year of the Bush presidency. Additionally, Malveaux did not note Rove’s reported assertion that his “biggest error” of the 2006 election cycle was “not working soon enough to replace Republicans tainted by scandal,” or point out that DeLay himself remained in the House for several months following his indictment on money laundering and conspiracy charges.

After suggesting Vince Foster was murdered, Hannity praised caller who accused Clinton of multiple rapes
While discussing Sen. Hillary Clinton’s newest campaign ad, Sean Hannity agreed with a caller who argued that “Monica Lewinsky and all those other women that Bill Clinton raped were invisible to her.” Hannity replied, “I wish I’d thought of that.”

3 Reporters Sue H.P. in Spying Case
Three reporters for CNET Networks sued Hewlett-Packard on Wednesday, accusing the computer maker of violating thier privacy during its search for boardroom leaks.

Newspapers blast “Paris Hilton and Mel Gibson Protection Act”
California lawmakers are considering a bill that would make it a crime for law enforcement or court employees to profit by releasing confidential information gathered in criminal investigations or unauthorized photos of people in custody. Foes of the measure say it would whittle away press freedoms for the convenience of celebrities.

NYT Co. July ad sales down 3.5%; total revenue edges up
Internet ad revenue for the New York Times Co. papers climbed 19.3% in July while circulation revenue grew 4.0%. The company says TimesSelect currently has approximately 771,400 subscribers with 462,800 receiving TimesSelect as a benefit of their home-delivery subscriptions, 225,100 receiving it from online-only subscriptions and 83,500 receiving it free as college students and educators.

FM Power To The People: FCC To Offer Noncommercial Licenses
Starting October 12, local nonprofits and other organizations will be able to apply for their own full-power FM station, provided that there is space available in the spectrum.

AOL’s Truveo Launches New Video Destination Page For ‘All The Video On The Web’
Truveo’s offering of sources is enormous — from entertainment and news from broadcast channels, to vertical broadband video to a vast amount of user generated video.

EXCLUSIVE: Top 30 Web Sites for July Traffic
The New York Times again tops newspaper Web sites in terms of traffic for July, according to the latest data from Nielsen//Net Ratings. Compared to June, NYT.com unique audience rose to 14,149,000 from 12,535,000. In fact, all the papers that made the top five slots in July experienced growth in traffic.

Park: More Users Play Games Than Watch Videos on Web
When it comes to popular online entertainment, playing games squashes watching videos. At least according to a new report issued by researcher Parks Associates

UNTANGLING THE NETROOTS
[T]he bloggers ,,, serve as an “echo chamber”, making the internet a Democratic antidote to the Republican weapon of talk radio. Liberal bloggers consistently search for the worst Republican behavior and then harp on it endlessly, either causing the mainstream media (or in Kossack parlance, the MSM) to cover the scandal or at least increasing the number of voters who become aware of it through shear proliferation on the internet.

Internet is “the new Afghanistan”: NY police commissioner
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The Internet is the new battleground against Islamist extremism because it provides ideology that could radicalize Westerners who might then initiate home-grown attacks, New York police commissioner Raymond Kelly said on Wednesday.
Boy, is he behind the times.  American extremist groups have been using the internet for many years.  And before that, they used bulletin boards and list serves.

U.S. goes online to reach Muslim youth
RABAT, Morocco – The U.S. State Department chose a novel way to publicize baseball legend Cal Ripken Jr.’s appointment this week as its special sports envoy. It went on YouTube.

FBI, CIA employees editing Wikipedia entries.
“People using CIA and FBI computers have edited entries in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia on topics including the Iraq war and the Guantanamo prison, according to a new tracing program.” It was not known whether changes were made by an official representative of an agency or company, a CIA spokesman said, but it was certain the change was made by someone with access to the organization’s network.

KickApps Powers HBO’s Justin Tim[b]erlake Concert Network
HBO has launched a site powered by KickApps in order to promote the Labor Day Justin Timberlake concert special, titled after JT’s album, Futuresexlove. This has a bit of social network included in it, letting users submit their own videos for a contest to win the title of “Justin’s Biggest Fan.” Users can vote and comment on other clips submitted to the site, and view the exclusive behind-the-scenes videos from Justin himself.

Sprint Earmarks $5 Billion for WiMax Network
Sprint Nextel said it could spend as much as $5 billion on a new network based on the emerging high-speed wireless technology known as WiMax.

Now, the Clicking Is to Watch the Ads, Not Skip Them
Even while consumers seek to avoid advertising on TV and the Web, a growing number Web sites are presenting advertisements as entertainment.