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Liberal Voices Get New Home on Radio Dial
(Jacques Steinberg, New York Times, March 31, 2004)
"It needs to be entertaining, it needs to be compelling, it needs to be laugh-out-loud funny," said Jon Sinton, a veteran of radio who is a founder of Air America, a subsidiary of Progress Media. "It needs to foster water-cooler conversation. You need people to go to work and say, `Did you hear what Franken said yesterday?' " . . . "When people begin to say that," he added, "we will have arrived." . . . Beyond the satiric, sometimes sophomoric humor displayed during the dress rehearsal for "The Majority Report," which Mr. Seder shares with the comedian Janeane Garofalo, Air America plans to offer a mixture of issue-oriented interviews (with conservatives, as well as liberals), commentary, listener phone calls and news reports, delivered straight, at regular intervals. . . . Air America has bought programming time on stations with moderately strong signals, but previously low ratings: WLIB-AM in New York, WNTD-AM in Chicago, KBLA-AM in Los Angeles, KCAA-AM in Riverside and San Bernadino, Calif., and KPOJ-AM in Portland, Ore. A San Francisco station is expected to be announced in early April. . . . By contrast Rush Limbaugh, whom Air America has identified as a chief competitor, is heard on more than 600 stations, including WABC in New York. Sean Hannity, another conservative talk-show host, has a similar reach. . . . Air America, which has raised more than $20 million, has grand plans for buying stations, or at least all of the broadcast time on stations, in more than a dozen cities by year's end. Many are in Ohio, Florida and other states considered battlegrounds in the presidential election. But since the media ownership rules were eased in the mid-1990's, much of the broadcast spectrum is owned by a handful of companies. Few stations are for sale, and few station owners will give over all of their broadcast day to untested programming. . . . As a result the network's 17-hour weekday lineup has as much if not more in common with "Saturday Night Live" than with National Public Radio. For example, its midmorning show, which begins tomorrow at 9, will have as its hosts Lizz Winstead, a comedian and a creator of "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central, and Chuck D, the frontman for the rap group Public Enemy. . . . They will be followed at noon by Mr. Franken, the "Saturday Night Live" alumnus who has evolved into a satirist, and whose co-host is Katherine Lanpher from Minnesota Public Radio. Martin Kaplan, a communications professor at the University of Southern California, will be the host of a one-hour show about the news media in the early evening. . . . "It's not like we're here to say we're going to be as nasty as right-wingers," Ms. Garofalo said in an interview. "On the left, traditionally, you've got a nicer type of person. You've got a person who is more willing to engage in conversations that have context and nuance, who tend to have more educable minds."

Air America Radio is to be broadcast beginning at noon today on these stations:

WLIB-AM (1190), New York

WNTD-AM (950) , Chicago

KBLA-AM (1580) , Los Angeles

KCAA-AM (1050) , Riverside and San Bernadino, Calif.

KPOJ-AM (620) , Portland, Ore.

Channel 167 on XM Satellite Radio

posted by Lorenzo 10:20 AM

 

Censoring Soros and Friends
Paul Jacob, U.S. Term Limits Daily Radio Commentary #1067, Release Date: March 14, 2004

As an advocate of term limits, it's no accident that I've opposed nearly every campaign finance bill so far, and the recent McCain-Feingold bill in particular.
I'm for citizens' rights to speak, and for a free debate of ideas, which is one of the best checks on government power that a democracy has. McCain-Feingold suppresses those things. Like unlimited terms, McCain-Feingold seems designed to protect elitist and even tyrannical government. And now we have striking proof. The Republican National Committee has warned TV stations across the nation not to run MoveOn.org's anti-Bush campaign ads. The RNC claims the ads are illegally funded. The RNC doesn't want criticism. That's understandable. Who likes to be criticized? But that's not up to us. America's a free society, right? And criticism is everyone's right, even our opponents'. Of course the law is about funding. MoveOn says that it has received funding for these ads from 160,000 donors, legally, in amounts of about $50 a pop. The RNC knows, however, that billionaire George Soros has funded the organization, and plausibly objects to the ads on the grounds of "soft money." But that's just the legalities of a bad law. In a free country, even George Soros would have a right to promote his ideas. Republicans are threatening TV stations with an unjust and undemocratic federal law, hoping to squelch their opponents' speech. I liked it a lot better when Republicans were against this terrible law, including the president who signed it. This is Common Sense.22

posted by An Old Curmudgeon 12:00 PM

 

Bill in Congress Makes Sports Scores Private Property
(WiredNews. March 3, 2004)
Imagine doing a Google search for a phone number, weather report or sports score. The results page would be filled with links to various sources of information. But what if someone typed in keywords and no results came back? . . . That's the scenario critics are painting of a new bill wending its way through Congress that would let certain companies own facts, and exact a fee to access them. . . . Ostensibly, the Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act (HR3261) makes it a crime for anyone to copy and redistribute a substantial portion of data collected by commercial database companies and list publishers. But critics say the bill would give the companies ownership of facts -- stock quotes, historical health data, sports scores and voter lists. The bill would restrict the kinds of free exchange and shared resources that are essential to an informed citizenry, opponents say. . . . The House Judiciary Committee approved the bill and the commerce committee is expected to review it on Thursday. . . . Art Brodsky, spokesman for public advocacy group Public Knowledge, says the bill would let anyone drop a fact into a database or a collection of materials and claim monopoly rights to it. This would contradict the core principle of the Copyright Act, which states that mere information and ideas cannot be protected works. . . . Under the terms of the broadly written bill, a public-health website could be deemed in violation of the law for gathering a list of the latest health headlines and providing links to them on its home page. . . . Google would be in violation for trolling media databases and providing stories on its news page. . . . An encyclopedia site not only could own the historical facts contained in its online entries, but could do so long after the copyright on authorship of the written entries had expired. Unlike copyright, which expires 70 years after the death of a work's author, the Misappropriation Act doesn't designate an expiration date. . . . "The law of unintended consequences in this case has the potential to be huge," Brodsky said. . . . the bill's threshold for proving "commercial harm" is very low. . . . He cited the example of a financial planner who gathers information from several sources, like Securities and Exchange Commission filings, public documents and the Dun & Bradstreet business database. . . . "If he assimilated the information and put it into a report for his client, under this bill that activity would be illegal and would subject him to lawsuits from every company whose website he accessed," . . . Opponents of the bill include Yahoo, Google, the American Association of Libraries and a host of technology and financial-services companies such as Verizon, Bloomberg and Charles Schwab. . . . "All of the companies opposed to the bill produce some of the most massive databases in the world, yet they feel they already have adequate protections for them," Rubin said. "There really is no necessity whatsoever for this legislation."

[COMMENT: We'd all better contact our elected representatives in D.C. right away and stop this before they sneak it in with something else. This is a HORRIBLE Act.]

posted by Lorenzo 1:59 PM

 

Bush As A Girl :-)
You really owe it to yourself to take 60 seconds off and watch the Flash presentation via the link above. Although I've seen a couple of these pictures before, most of them were new to me. After watching it the first time, I clicked Replay an tried to imagine "What If?" this were real. It's a real trip. I highly recommend it.

posted by Lorenzo 4:59 PM