Permanent link to MTA daily media news

Political ads likely to run up $100 million tab
Presidential candidates, the political parties and interest groups will spend at least twice as much as they did in 2003-04 on TV ads before nominees are chosen, campaign advertising experts say. A record $100 million or more will likely be paid to put campaign ads on the air by the time the Republican and Democratic races are effectively over, likely some time in February. And the allure of posting ads for free on YouTube and at campaign websites won’t replace broadcast TV because that “old media” is better suited for reaching voters, the experts say.

Bud.tv Gets Another Year to Prove Itself
Anheuser-Busch has announced that they will continue to fund their struggling online video site, Bud.tv, for at least another year. This news comes as a surprise to some as it is estimated that the site is only attracting approximately 50,000 unique visitors a month.  With the site already costing the company between $20 – $30 million, you have to admire their tenacity to stick by a site that is not providing a large return on investment.
Man!  What I could do with $20 to $30 million!  There would be a media revolution.

Huffington Post Raises Another $5 Million (by Stan Schroeder, Mashable)
The cool thing to do if you have a famous blog, it seems, is raising funding – and more funding. The Huffington Post, world’s 5th most popular blog according to Technorati, has raised another $5 million in its second round of funding. The investors are the same as in the first round: Softbank Capital, Greycroft Partners, CEO and co-founder Ken Lerer as well as Bob Pittman’s Pilot Group. This rounds it up at $10 million of funding total – not bad for, you know, a blog.
Give me $5 million, and I’d STILL mount a media revolution.

Huffington Post doesn’t have plans to pay its bloggers
“That’s not our financial model,” says co-founder Ken Lerer. “We offer them visibility, promotion and distribution with a great company.” He says the Huffington Post will be profitable next year, when its audience could double, thanks to interest in the 2008 election.
And I would PAY my CONTRIBUTORS, by damn.

Technology puts Myanmar protests in international eye
BANGKOK (AFP) – Myanmar’s swelling protests are in the global spotlight with the help of hi-tech gadgets in the era of YouTube — a stark contrast to the 1988 uprising in the pre-Internet age.

Media Coverage Helps Ahmadinejad, Harms US Public (by Danny Schechter)
How the Media is Selling Us Another War

Gen. Sean Hannity And Fox News Lay Out Their War Plan For Attacking ‘Ticking Bomb’ Iran
The Fox News network is now in full drumbeat mode, trying to promote a war against Iran. Last night, armchair General Sean Hannity did his part to beat the Iran war drums… The network also announced that this Saturday at 9 pm, it will air a “Fox News investigative piece” entitled Iran: Ticking Bomb. The show will be hosted by Dan Senor, the former spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority… Fox has also been parading one pro-Iran war voice after another.

FAIR Media Advisory: Disappearing Antiwar Protests
Hundreds of thousands of Americans around the country protested the Iraq War on the weekend of September 24-25, with the largest demonstration bringing between 100,000 and 300,000 to Washington, D.C. on Saturday. But if you relied on television for your news, you’d hardly know the protests happened at all.

Scoop for Spanish Daily: Transcript of Private 2003 Bush Talk Promising Iraq Invasion
NEW YORK El Pais, the highest-circulation daily in Spain, today published what it said was the transcript of a private talk between President George W. Bush and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar on February 22, 2003… Bush purportedly said he planned to invade Iraq inf March “if there was a United Nations Security Council resolution or not….We have to get rid of Saddam. We will be in Baghdad at the end of March.” He said the U.S. takeover would happen without widespread destruction. He observed that he was willing to play bad cop to British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s good cop.

Countdown: Rep. Harman Gives More Details On Bogus Terror Threat On Capitol
Keith Olbermann talks with Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) to get more details on the revelation that the Bush Administration used bogus intelligence in order to frighten lawmakers into voting for last August’s expanded FISA bill. Harman says that after much digging she found the classified intelligence document in question and the document clearly stated that the intelligence community did not deem the source to be reliable.
Click through to watch the video.

Clinton rips right wing for ‘feigned outrage’ over MoveOn ad.
In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, President Bill Clinton said there was something “completely disingenuous about the feigned outrage” from conservatives over the MoveOn ad. Clinton noted that many of the same conservatives who expressed outrage had likened Sen. Max Cleland (D-GA) to Osama bin Laden and had smeared Sen. John Kerry’s (D-MA) war record.
From a man who was attacked relentlessly by that same right wing.  Click through to watch the video.

Iraq War Spending: Context Please (by Dean Baker)
The Post…refuses to express its budget numbers in a way that would be meaningful to readers. The 2008 [Iraq war funding] request is equal to approximately 6.3 percent of projected spending for the year. It comes to $630 for every person in the country. By comparison, Congress proposed spending $7 billion a year more on the State Children’s Heath Insurance Program (SCHIP) than President Bush requested. This difference is approximately equal to what President Bush will spent on the war in Iraq in two weeks.

Media Matters for America headlines

On O’Reilly Factor, Bruce called Media Matters the “media Gestapo” and MoveOn.org “the political Gestapo”

CNN’s Roland Martin on O’Reilly comment: “[L]ast I checked, I didn’t hand over my brain to Rev. Sharpton”

Major newspapers, network news still silent on Romney-Blackwater connection

NY Times’ Seelye, public editor give conflicting reports on whether Times promised to run Giuliani ad on specific day

In LA Times op-ed, Krikorian cherry-picked “anecdotal evidence” on immigration crackdown

Reporting on $175K donation, LA Times did not mention that GOP is behind CA electoral-vote initiative

Media Matters’ Waldman: “[I]f Bill O’Reilly got caught robbing a bank he would say he was taken out of context”For Gay Press, ‘Good Old Days’ Are Here
Indeed, according to the Gay Press Report, advertising spending in publications, about half of them weekly newspapers targeting the so-called GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered) audience, increased 205% between 1996 and 2006.

Republicans gripe about Jackie Kucinich’s political reporting
At least one high-ranking Republican has refused to be interviewed by The Hill’s Jackie Kucinich — daughter of Dennis — because he questions her objectivity. Kucinich’s editor, Hugo Gurdon, says: “Her reporting is not influenced by her father being a presidential candidate and longtime politician, except perhaps that it means she grew up in the political world and understands it well.”
But if her name were Jackie Bush, she’d be touted by Republicans as a perfectly objective reporter, whether she was or not.

Murdoch era at the Wall Street Journal has already begun
The News Corp.-Dow Jones deal doesn’t close until November, but Michael Calderone finds signs that Rupert Murdoch’s already influencing the Wall Street Journal. “Several times over the past few months, he’s expressed his preference for shorter, newsier front-page stories. Sure enough, a 400-word piece on M.I.T’s miscalculation of S.A.T scores in the September 22-23 Weekend Journal didn’t jump past page one. That sure looks like a new direction.”
I actually agree with Murdoch on this one.  The Journal’s long stories tend to be lots of words that ultimately don’t tell you anything useful.

Air America gives free time to presidential candidates
Air America Radio has made Democratic candidates an offer they couldn’t refuse. The liberal network says all eight candidates have accepted an offer of 60 minutes each of free broadcast airtime during evening primetime, to use any way they want. The candidates will use their time during the first two weeks of October between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. ET during a new show called Clout! [hosted by Richard Greene]

NPR Rebuffs White House On Bush Talk
The White House reached out to National Public Radio over the weekend, offering analyst Juan Williams a presidential interview to mark yesterday’s 50th anniversary of school desegregation in Little Rock. But NPR turned down the interview, and Williams’s talk with Bush wound up in a very different media venue: Fox News.

Brought to You By…
The sorry state of commercial radio grows sorrier still as [Laura] Smitherman chronicles its slide into “a commercial-saturated world, akin to infomercials proliferating on television, and print advertising that pervades almost every public space… Radio is attractive to advertisers because it’s harder to differentiate the commercial from the regular programming and, therefore, listeners are less likely to turn the channel.”

Fox News Uses Maven to Expand Online Video Coverage
Fox News and Maven Networks are teaming up to bring the news channel more in to the digital age with far more video content. Maven will be supplying Fox News and the upcoming Fox Business Network, with all of their needed video support. Until now, Fox’s site has been fairly sparse with video implementation, but they are planning a major upgrade with an eye towards becoming more like an interactive television channel.

Microsoft touts new ‘media extenders’
NEW YORK – Microsoft Corp. and its hardware partners are trying to bridge the divide between home computers and TV sets this holiday season with the release of several “media extenders.”

Who Controls The News? On The Web, You Can
If you could create a newspaper based on what you like to read, would it look different from the front page of The Christian Science Monitor? Or The New York Times? Now, you can.

New Study Offers Surprising Numbers on Newspaper/Yahoo Deal
Little hard numbers have emerged on the revenue benefits of the big newspaper partnership with Yahoo. But now Deutsche Bank analysts have put pencil to paper, and estimate the Yahoo consortium could push newspapers into positive revenue territory a year earlier than originally forecasted, with online gains of 40%.

Amazon launches digital music store
SEATTLE – Amazon.com Inc. launched its much-anticipated digital music store Tuesday, a move analysts say represents the first hint of real competition for Apple Inc.’s market-leading iTunes.

Ring! Ring! Ring! In Japan, Novelists Find a New Medium
TOKYO — When Satomi Nakamura uses her cellphone, she has to be extra careful to take frequent breaks. That’s because she isn’t just chatting. The 22-year-old homemaker has recently finished writing a 200-page novel titled “To Love You Again” entirely on her tiny cellphone screen, using her right thumb to tap the keys and her pinkie to hold the phone steady. She got so carried away last month that she broke a blood vessel on her right little finger.

Verizon Rejects Abortion Rights Group’s Messages
Saying it had the right to block “controversial or unsavory” text messages, Verizon Wireless has rejected a request from Naral Pro-Choice America, the abortion rights group, to make Verizon’s mobile network available for a text-message program. The other leading wireless carriers have accepted the program, which allows people to sign up for text messages from Naral by sending a message to a five-digit number known as a short code.
And therein lies the danger of allowing carriers to make decisions on content.

Creationist vs. Atheist YouTube War Marks New Breed of Copyright Claim
YouTube yanked several videos last week that had been posted by the self-avowed atheist group Rational Response Squad. The videos criticized the Creation Science Evangelism ministry. YouTube removed the videos and at one point suspended Rational Response Squad’s account. The videos included content owned by Creation Science Evangelism. But Rational Response Squad argued in an open letter to YouTube that the content fell under fair use. The videos were eventually reposted, and Rational Response Squad’s account was reinstated. “The default, unfortunately, is that (sites like YouTube) take it down, and leave it to the user to issue a counter-notice,” said Corynne McSherry, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

NBC Universal Bans Junk-Food Ads From More Kids Shows
Restrictions Affect ION’s Qubo Programming on Local NBC Stations, Telemundo

Public Service Groups Follow the Audience
Partnership for a Drug-Free America is making a major commitment to online advertising while shifting spending away from traditional television outlets.

Teen Finds Her Flickr Image On Bus Stop Ad
It’s 10 o’Clock: Do you know where your face is? A Texas high school student discovered hers was plastered on bus stops and Internet ads for a mobile phone company half a world away, thanks to Flickr and a “creative” ad team. Now she’s suing.

ringtone lg free 320069 ringtone phone boyz cellfree absolutly ringtones nextel702 ringtonesringtone adding pc from2260 ringtones nokia30p ringtonestreo free 650 palm ringtone Map