Permanent link to MTA daily media news

Interview Recommendation: Souter Nearly Resigned After Bush v. Gore
According to Jeffrey Toobin’s new book on the Supreme Court, The Nine, Justice David Souter “nearly resigned in the wake of Bush v. Gore, so distraught was he over the decision that effectively ended the Florida recount and installed George W. Bush as president,” reports the Examiner. This should be a fascinating read.
To interview Jeffrey Toobin about The Nine, contact Todd Doughty, tdoughty-at-randomhouse.com.  Jeffrey is a great interview.  He was kind enough to discuss with me his book about the aftermath of the 2000 election, Too Close to Call, in 2001.

Going After Gore
Al Gore couldn’t believe his eyes: as the 2000 election heated up, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other top news outlets kept going after him, with misquotes (”I invented the Internet”), distortions (that he lied about being the inspiration for Love Story), and strangely off-the-mark needling, while pundits such as Maureen Dowd appeared to be charmed by his rival, George W. Bush. For the first time, Gore and his family talk about the effect of the press attacks on his campaign—and about his future plans—to the author, who finds that many in the media are re-assessing their 2000 coverage.
Long-time readers of MakeThemAccountable won’t find much that’s new here, and I really doubt that any of the Gore bashers in the media are re-assessing anything, but you may find this Vanity Fair article interesting.  It’s been a long time, but you may also enjoy reading David Podvin’s parody of a Ceci Connolly article supposedly about Tipper Gore’s decision whether or not to run for the Senate in 2002.  The parody was so true to type that Ms. Connolly called me and said people had been calling her, asking if she had really written it.  She demanded that I delete the article from my website, and even sicced a Washington Post Company attorney on me.  I didn’t delete the article, but I wish I’d had the presence of mind to ask Ms. Connolly if she had even thought about why people wondered if she had actually written it.  Oh, and be sure to note Connolly’s comment in the Vanity Fair article, “I never threatened Carter Eskew”.  She certainly was threatening to me.  Another good thing about this Vanity Fair article is that it credits Bob Somerby of The Daily Howler for the research he’s done to debunk the lies about Gore being a liar.  The mainstream media should always acknowledge the writers they borrow ideas and information from, even if we’re the freaky, wild-haired, lefty hippies on the internets.

Garry South: Rove’s dirty tricks
Regardless of whether he is ultimately judged a political genius or goat, someone of Rove’s ilk had no business whatsoever plying his trade in a high-ceilinged West Wing office on the taxpayers’ dime, running a federally funded continuation of Bush’s political campaigns and perverting public policymaking at the highest levels of government into cynical partisan maneuverings. Whoever the next president is, Democrat or Republican, people like Rove and me should be domiciled outside government, not embedded inside it.

Karl Rove, Still Behind the Curtain
President Bush’s behind-the-curtain adviser, Karl Rove, is expected to reprise that role for the prez in Texas, we hear. Now retired from the White House, Rove is planning to take charge of the Bush library and museum, including the design, fundraising, and planning for what insiders are calling a copy of the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
He’ll be busy trying to rewrite history, but he’s good at it.

Former Bush Official: White House Wanted To ‘Get Rid Of That Obnoxious FISA Court’
A new book by Jack Goldsmith — one of the “brightest stars in the conservative legal firmament,” good friend of John Yoo, visiting scholar at AEI, and former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — has published a book detailing the administration’s extraordinary efforts to expand its wiretapping program… “We’re one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court,” Goldsmith recalls Cheney chief of staff David Addington telling him in Feb. 2004, indicating that the White House always intended to do away with the FISA court.

ONLY DEMS:
[Indicted former Mitt Romney fundraiser Alan B.] Fabian was … missing-in-action when the Post published [a John Solomon] “news report” on the front page of Monday’s paper. The report listed four fund-raisers for major candidates who are said to have, or to present, “legal issues.” But all four men raised funds for Dems—and one of the four fund-raisers has no current “legal issues” at all. Meanwhile, Fabian—indicted just last month—was AWOL from the Post’s story… As always, the Washington Post is a joke, on page one—and as always, the liberal world is silent.

CNN’s Kyra Phillips On GAO Report: “Everybody Is Really Wanting To Hear From General Petraeus”
CNN’s Kyra Phillips [reported Tuesday] on the big GAO report finding that the Iraqi government has only met three of 18 benchmarks for measuring political progress. Phillips wonders whether this really carries any “weight,” and goes on to state as fact that “everybody” is “really wanting” to hear from Petraeus.
Click through to watch the video.

The Media’s Katrina Malpractice
National Review editor [Jonah Goldberg] makes some important points about how “two years later, the press is detailing everybody’s mistakes except its own.”… Unfortunately for Goldberg, a few of us also can’t forget his own particularly callous contribution to this “unmitigated media disaster”—in the form of supposedly “humorous” advice to survivors: “Hoard weapons, grow gills and learn to communicate with serpents,” “find the biggest guy you can and when he’s not expecting it beat him senseless,” and “protect any female who agrees to participate without question in your plans to repopulate the Earth with a race of gilled supermen.”

Countdown Special Comment: You have no remaining credibility about Iraq, sir
Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment tonight is without a doubt, one of his hardest hitting and most emotional to date. Keith absolutely lays waste to President Bush’s lies and rhetoric about the surge. He contrasts his callous disregard for the truth and the troops between his six hour photo op in Iraq and the interview with Draper released this weekend.
Click through to watch the video.

U.S. Farmers Move to Mexico: What Happened to the Land?
The NYT ran an article that reports on U.S. farmers who have begun to operate in Mexico because they can no longer get an adequate supply of immigrant workers. The article implies that this movement is good for Mexico but bad for the United States. It is not clear why this would be the case. If the farmers no longer operate their farms, then presumably the land will be used for other purposes that are more valuable than its use as farm land.
Maybe we should all move to Mexico.  Then all the Mexicans could move here.

HBO Buys Rights to Second Life Documentary
HBO has acquired the rights to a short film that was shot entirely within virtual world Second Life. Entitled “My Second Life: The video diaries of Molotov Alta,” the film is about a man who disappeared from his home in California, but sent video messages from Second Life… This acquisition highlights commercial interest in virtual worlds and online networks. It also emphasizes the fact that studios are looking to the Internet for more cost efficient ways in which to produce content for the niche and mass audiences.
Or maybe we should all move to a virtual world.  And wait for supernatural heroes to save us from disaster.

White House Website Scrubbed of FOIA Reference
Last month, the White House argued in federal court that its own Office of Administration was not subject to FOIA, even though the White House website said otherwise. The White House website has now been changed.

Wolff: Farewell to the news business; hello to Newser.com
After losing millions in the ’90s on an Internet venture, Michael Wolff is trying again with newser.com. “Every advance in technology has seen the invention of a new form of news,” he writes… “What if you could become the Amazon of news? The Google of news? This is a holy grail.”

The (Josh) Marshall Plan
Break news, connect the dots, stay small
And don’t hire any women.

FEC won’t regulate political blogging
WASHINGTON - DailyKos, an influential political Web site that serves as a virtual bulletin board for liberals, qualifies as a media entity exempt from federal campaign finance regulations, the Federal Election Commission said Tuesday.

Blogs about politics on radar of state elections officials
The rapid growth of political blogs and Web sites has attracted the attention of state elections officials, who are considering what, if any, new regulations should be imposed on the Internet.
Yeah?  Well, what about talk radio?  Regulate them first, then come talk to us.

NBC to Sell New TV Shows on Amazon Unbox
SEATTLE (AP) - NBC Universal said Tuesday it will sell episodes of its new fall television shows using Amazon’s Unbox digital download service, after the network failed to reach an agreement with Apple Inc. last week to offer the shows on iTunes.

Asterpix Puts Hyperlinks in Videos
With the official launch of Asterpix.com on September 6th, they are aiming to bring “hypervideo” to the masses for anyone to use… Hypervideo is a concept wherein you can make hyperlinks inside a video (see embedded clips below). Say there is a video of a war movie with a tank in it. You make the tank into a hyper object, and when the user clicks on it, they might be taken to a menu of other videos about that object.
Now we need text and keyword searches for video.

Facebook Profiles Will Appear in Google Results Next Month
If you thought the news feed was a threat to your privacy, be warned: Facebook is announcing Public Search Listings today, meaning profiles will be searchable through Facebook, and soon turn up on Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. As of tomorrow, search will be available through Facebook; users will then have one month to change their privacy settings before profiles get indexed by the major search engines. These results will include, at most, your name and profile picture.

Hakia’s semantic search: Do we need it?
I visited the Wall Street offices of Hakia.com last week. They’re a start-up focusing on semantic search. For some questions, the results are impressive. I just asked Hakia for the three most common elements in the universe. The answer comes back with the results, with no need to open a Web page. A similar Google search gets me close, but needs a click.

Online Ads Surpass Radio Ads in a Historical First
eMarketer reports that spending for online advertising has surpassed ad dollars spent on radio advertising for the first time in 2007, with online marketing reaching $21.7 billion while radio reached $20.4 billion. This would indicate the dominance of online marketing, and make some speculate that radio is a dying part of our culture. eMarketer says this isn’t true, and that online marketing isn’t growing at the expense of radio marketing.

Yahoo buys behavioral ad firm for $300 million
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc has struck a deal to buy BlueLithium, the fifth-largest U.S. online ad network, for $300 million in cash, in the latest move to consolidate the fast-growing behavioral ad targeting market.

In-game advertising company adopts TV ad model
AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - Double Fusion, a private company that connects advertisers and video game publishers, rolls out new technology on Tuesday to allow advertisers to mount last-minute ad campaigns in games the same way they use spot TV ads.

Breathless Pitches for Penny Stocks, Now in Newspapers
The promotion of penny stocks, for years a staple of Internet spam, has recently burst forth in splashy full-page ads in major daily newspapers.