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Here's an update to last night's report, "Peace Plan Brokered in Olbermann, O'Reilly Cable Flame War!"
According to the The Agonist, "Fox Wins"!
Well, Glenn Greenwald thinks so too, "GE's Silencing of Olbermann and MSNBC's Sleazy Use of Richard Wolffe" (via Memeorandum). But what he really hates is how the "corporate media" are controlling news content:
The New York Times this morning has a remarkable story, and incredibly, the article's author, Brian Stelter, doesn't even acknowledge, let alone examine, what makes the story so significant. In essence, the chairman of General Electric (which owns MSNBC), Jeffrey Immelt, and the chairman of News Corporation (which owns Fox News), Rupert Murdoch, were brought into a room at a "summit meeting" for CEOs in May, where Charlie Rose tried to engineer an end to the "feud" between MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Fox's Bill O'Reilly. According to the NYT, both CEOs agreed that the dispute was bad for the interests of the corporate parents, and thus agreed to order their news employees to cease attacking each other's news organizations and employees.
Most notably, the deal wasn't engineered because of a perception that it was hurting either Olbermann or O'Reilly's show, or even that it was hurting MSNBC. To the contrary, as Olbermann himself has acknowledged, his battles with O'Reilly have substantially boosted his ratings. The agreement of the corporate CEOs to cease criticizing each other was motivated by the belief that such criticism was hurting the unrelated corporate interests of GE and News Corp ...
This is hardly the first time evidence of corporate control over the content of NBC and MSNBC has surfaced ....
And now we have an example of GE's forcibly silencing the top-rated commentator on MSNBC - ordering him not to hold Fox News accountable any longer - because, in return, News Corp. has agreed to silence its own commentators from criticizing GE. The corporations that own our largest news organizations have extensive relationships with the federal government. Anyone (like Charlie Rose) who denies that those relationships influence how these news organizations "report" on the government - driven by the desire which corporate executives have to avoid alienating the government officials on whom their corporate interests depend, or avoid alienating potential customer bases for their products -- is completely delusional. GE's forcing Keith Olbermann to cease his criticism of Fox News and Bill O'Reilly is a clear and vivid example of how that works.
Giving Greenwald credit, he's been a vociferous critic of the Obama administration's anti-terrorism policies (see, "The Obama Justice System"). But it's hard not to think that his indictment of "corporate media control" might be a bit less strident had the focus of this story been on Rupert Murdoch capitulating to pressure from Keith Olbermann.
More at Memeorandum. And note how Joe Gandelman summarizes things, "in the end it seems as if Fox News O’Reilly 'won' in his ongoing feud with MSBNC’s Keith Olbermann."
Breaking!
This is serious news, plus it's another chance to blog about my party-school Ph.D. alma mater!
From the Los Angeles Times, "At UC Santa Barbara, Sex as a Matter of Course: Sociology Professors John and Janice Baldwin, Married for 41 years, Are Trusted Voices on Love and Lovemaking for Thousands of Students at the Beach-Side Campus":
How well should people know each other before they have sex?
In the biggest classroom at UC Santa Barbara, sociology professors John and Janice Baldwin are reeling off survey results showing that male and female students are almost equally willing to sleep with someone they love. But the hall erupts in knowing laughter as a gender gap emerges: Men, the long-married couple reports, remain eager for sex through descending categories of friendship and casual acquaintance. Women don't.
By the time Janice Baldwin gets to the statistic on sex between strangers, the din from the 600 students is so loud, they can hardly hear her announce that 37% of men would have sex with a person they had just met, compared with only 7% of women.
"So you can see, males are a little more likely to go to bed with somebody they don't know very well," Baldwin says dryly.
"Or at all," she adds, to guffaws.
By turns humorous and deadly serious, "Sociology of Human Sexuality" has been an institution at the beach-side campus for more than two decades. So have the Baldwins, unflappable sixtysomethings who are trusted voices on love and lovemaking for thousands of current and former UC Santa Barbara students.
Today's undergraduates have easy access to X-rated Internet sites, and many have watched television gurus dissect troubled marriages. But there are often gaps in their knowledge of biology and sexual behavior, the result of squeamish parents and less-than-candid high school health teachers.
The Baldwins step in with data about orgasm, birth control and infertility -- and, implicitly, with their own example of a 41-year marriage that seems to work well.
"We don't feel we are the sex king and queen of the world," Janice Baldwin, 63, said recently in the cramped office the couple share, their desks touching. "So this is not about us. It's about the students, and we are privileged to get to teach a class that can help them avoid the downsides of sex and increase the positives."
John Baldwin, 68, said he and his wife do not aim to be role models. "We are not trying to teach them to be like us," he said. "But we are going to be talking about relationships, and a lot of them want relationships. Even though there is a lot of casual sex, they want to find somebody special . . . So we are little hope signals."
Students say the class is fun, eye-opening and altogether useful. Clearly, many of them pay attention: Lectures on sexually transmitted infections can trigger a stampede to the campus health center.
This is a serious class, of course. And popular too - 600 students! Geez! And recall previously, "UCSB Makes Top-Ten in Latest Party-School List."It's hard out there for UCSB alum!Hey, maybe Smitty can get new series started with some of this stuff! Could be educational!
Between breaking scoops, I'm actually reading a number of books; next up is Michelle Malkin's Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies."
Well, add another to my list, thanks to my good friend Courtney at Great Satan's Girlfriend: Kimberly Kagan's, The Surge: A Military History.
Courtney, herself a young neocon-hottie, is getting some traction as an up-and-coming blogger-analyst. She's linked at Small Wars Journal, and the folks over there liked her eye-grabbing visuals: "... the post caught my eye more for the visual, rather than the written word - so sue me."
I wonder if that dude reads Robert Stacy McCain!
Plus, the Wall Street Journal had a piece on Kagan a few weeks back as well, "Turning the Tide of Battle: Why, After So Much Carnage and Pessimism, A New Strategy Worked in Iraq."
It must be something about those tenacious neocons!
More hot neoconservative commentary at GrEaT sAtAn'S gIrLfRiEnD.
