After having skipped out of Apple’s iTunes Store, NBC seems to be flailing about a bit. They signed on to sell their shows on Amazon.com’s video sales service, and now have announced another “free” download service that is ad- and DRM-laden.

The Amazon.com Unbox service seems to be the most reasonable; it allows for more flexible pricing, which the networks of course desire. However, it is also restricted; it requires Microsoft’s “PlaysForSure” DRM software–something also desired by NBC and other content providers–which pretty drastically limits viewing abilities. You can’t play the video unless you’re running Windows or opt for the TiVo option. The video cannot be played on iPods or even Zunes.

The “NBC Direct” route is set up to be a disaster. Not only is it so heavily restricted that you can only play it on NBC’s proprietary software and can’t use it on anything but a Windows PC, but it carries ads which cannot be skipped. Sure, it’s free, but so long as you’re allowing ads into it, why be so stupid as to watch it on NBC’s player where you can’t skip them? Why not just tape or TiVo the show? The “NBC Direct” idea is completely nonsensical.

Part of the reason NBC left Apple was over pricing. Apple claims NBC wanted to charge as high as $5, and other reports suggest that Apple wanted to lower the price on all TV shows to $1. Probably the NBC suggestion of $5, if it happened, was less a serious proposal and more an idea thrown out there. And I can certainly see content providers wanting to set their own prices.

The thing is, Steve Jobs is no idiot, and NBC would be well-advised to listen to him. Sure, he gets money from iPod sales, demands large profit margins for his own products, and does not lose money if the margin on TV shows sold on the iTS is slashed. I will give you all of those.

Nevertheless, Jobs is one of the best marketers around, and he stands to profit by selling more and more and more of NBC’s content. And more often than most people in the business, Jobs has been right. Case in point: music sales on the iTS. It’s wildly successful. But remember how the music labels had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into allowing for $1 song sales and no tiered pricing? Well, the iTS has been a rousing success, having sold more than 3 billion tracks in 4 years–over half of which sales occurred in the last one year–capturing 88% of the music download market, becoming one of the biggest outlets for music sales.

Like I said, Jobs is not an idiot. And selling TV shows for $1 apiece is similarly very astute. A lot of people have downloaded TV shows at the $2 price, but that can be sustained for only so long and at only so high a rate. Most people will begin to realize that at the end of a season of shows, they have only the shows to own, and they have shelled out between $40 to $48, depending on how many episodes there are in a season. In the meantime, the networks release the DVD set very soon after the TV broadcast ends, and one can own the whole season at higher quality, with all kinds of extras an add-ons, for less money. Payment for one is not transferable to another–you can’t apply the $46 you paid for season 1 of Heroes to the $40 price of the DVD box set. And if you want to watch the show in your iPod or other handheld player, you are limited to downloading via BitTorrent or another service, though you might have to process the file to squeeze it into a format the player can handle.

Yes, that fits nicely with the network paradigm of making viewers pay multiple times for the same content. But enough viewers are not stupid enough to make this a big seller. Jobs has the right idea: price the bare-bones, lower-quality version for lower, and people might go for the double-purchase a lot more easily. After all, $23 doesn’t seem quite so bad a price to pay for having immediate, portable, commercial-free access to a whole season of shows while you’re waiting for the feature-rich, expanded DVD box set to be released. A lot more people would go for that, and NBC would make a lot more money. In the meantime, a lot more people are instead turning to BitTorrent.

Here’s an even more radical idea: make the downloaded versions into the equivalent of a boxed DVD set. Offer the extra versions as extra downloads included in the price of a season pass. You can raise the price because you are essentially selling the DVD box set plus the ability to get it delivered a lot earlier, as the episodes air. Instead of $40 for the box set, sell the season pass equivalent for $50. That would represent a lower profit margin, but I bet increased sales would make up for it–and you would cut out the crowd who only buy one or the other but not both.

But here’s the biggest idea: drop the frakking DRM. Jobs was dead right earlier this year when he said that DRM was stupid. It is. It does not stop piracy one bit–in fact, it encourages piracy. Why? Because if you pay for the video, you have all these restrictions and roadblocks and limitations; if you download it for free, there is absolutely no restriction on what you can do with the file. DRM does not even slow pirates down, and it punishes paying customers. Why NBC and other content providers fail to see this glaringly obvious point is beyond me. Remove the DRM, and sales will rise, piracy will suffer. What is with these idiots at the studios?

In the meantime, if you aren’t in the BitTorrent crowd, expect to pay higher prices multiple times, and face higher obstacles to viewing where and when and how you like.

I just thought I might mention this, purely out of a sense of the weirdness of it. A new movie trailer on Apple’s trailer site, called “Dynamite Warrior.” First, this bit appears in the description of the trailer:

A supernatural, action packed movie with high-grade special effects and the kind of raw action scenes the world is coming to expect from Thailand.

Um, okay… I didn’t really expect that much out of Thai movies, but… Justin, any comments?

However, the description get weirder:

…the killer is in fact a warlock of immense power, a nearly invincible mystical man who is trying to control the whole village. His one weakness? He can be harmed only by weapons that have been treated with the menstrual blood of a young virgin.

It’s at that point that I essentially said, “okay, I’m outta here.” Those wacky Thais. You’d think they’d give older virgins a chance.

Seriously, though, if the trailer is any indication, there don’t seem to be any “high grade” special effects, or even any special effects that I can make out. Just a bunch of choreographed martial arts moves based on ridiculous extremes, with flying objects on wires. Not nearly as impressive as most of the stuff that’s out there. Which makes this just weird, not even cool-special-effects-weird.

Here is Fox News’ “apology” for “mistakenly” running the “wrong footage” yesterday, showing John Conyers instead of Bill Jefferson.

Several things to note here. First, the statement is so brief and, as Conyers himself put it, lackluster, that it in itself is almost an insult for that reason. If you blinked, you could have missed this statement. In fact, fully half of the statement simply recaps the story about a Democrat being indicted. The “apology” part takes all of five seconds.

Second, such an apology requires a special note to any person who is shown and labeled as corrupt and up on charges, but who is actually innocent. Not mentioning Conyers by name or apologizing directly to him was a grievous insult in itself, as if to say that no one specific was wronged.

Third, such an apology usually focuses on what was wrong about the error, and at least tries to dispel the belief that there was any intention behind it. Fox’s statement barely covered this, as one could infer from the word “mistakenly” that they did not intend to show what they did. But a proper apology would at least touch on the easily-inferred racial undertones and stated that such were not intended and no on should take offense. Not that such a statement would be believed, but at least it would be proper.

Fourth, the briefest possible “explanation,” that the footage was shown “mistakenly,” is hardly an explanation. Normal errors of this type are when footage of an upcoming story is queued up ready to go, and someone in the control room accidentally pushes the wrong button and the video is shown out of sequence with the commentary. However, this “error” was of a completely different order. The Conyers footage was not for any pending story. Instead, the Conyers footage had to be retrieved from archives where it by practice is carefully labeled and notated, and then reviewed and edited manually to select the appropriate small clip to be aired. Which means that either the clip was badly mislabeled and nobody in the review process caught the error (nor in the broadcast itself since it took a full day to note it) or it was not an error at all. And since, from Fox’s history and its well-known bias, it is easy to believe that it was an intentional jab at Democrats and blacks, a more detailed explanation and disclaimer was at the very least appropriate.

Of course, the reason for the lack of a real apology here is pretty clear: Fox would have to admit to… well, to being Fox News. They would have to apologize directly to a Democrat, which would probably cause half the Fox News executive staff to suffer brain hemorrhages. They would have to publicly recognize that something they did was racially offensive, which would dredge up all sorts of equivalent behavior on their part. Or they would at least have had to touch peripherally on the matter that they were either intentionally racist and biased, or that they simply can’t tell black people apart. You can bet that on another network, someone–perhaps even the newscaster–would have quickly recognized that it wasn’t Jefferson, if not because Conyers is so well-known and recognizable, then because Jefferson would not have been anywhere near Alberto Gonzales. But, yet again, we have to remember: this is Fox News we’re talking about.

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Update:Fox apparently–and quite surprisingly–realized that their first apology was completely unacceptable, and does it again–this time a lot more properly. They still don’t touch on the color issue, but they do make a big deal of the fact that they put Conyers in Jefferson’s place.

As a side note, YouTube has just made it a lot easier to embed their videos when viewed on a non-YouTube site. They added some Javascript goodies that allow for choosing related videos in a very Mac-Dock-like fashion, and at the end, an easy-to-use copy-the-url-or-embedded-code feature. Very nice. In the past, I had to click the “share” button, then change the URL from “share” to “watch,” and then grab the embedded code from there. This is much easier.

Truth be told, I’m not a fan of Al Sharpton, and never really was since I fist heard of him in relation to the Tawana Brawley case. Some liberals and some libertarians seem to like him, say that he’s good at bringing up topics that should be brought up, and/or see him as a constructive spoiler in political campaigns and debates. I don’t see that myself. I don’t dislike the guy that much, but I’m certainly no follower, and have little reason to defend the guy.

And if I thought that Sharpton really had said something to the effect that Romney or Mormons in general did not “really believe in God,” I would be alongside the people condemning him for the remark. I certainly do not feel that Christians are always respectful of people with differing beliefs, and would have little trouble believing that one mainstream Christian said that about a Mormon. In fact, I think Romney’s biggest obstacle in this election will be the fact that the majority of Republican voters tend to be strongly non-Mormon Christians.

If Sharpton had a history of bigoted statements, towards Mormons or any other religious group, I would also be suspicious of what he said recently.

The thing is, I don’t think the claim holds up that Sharpton was talking about Mormons.

Sharpton said: “…and as for the one Mormon running for office, those who really believe in God will defeat him anyways, so don’t worry about that; that’s a temporary situation.”

Out of context, it certainly sounds like Sharpton was saying that Romney and/or Mormons don’t believe in God. However, context is everything. Sharpton was debating an atheist, and it is absolutely believable that Sharpton was telling Hitchens–the atheist–that people who really believe in God as opposed to atheists would defeat Romney. Not people who believe in God as opposed to Mormons.

Now, especially out of context, the statement could be taken either way; the thing is, in the context of a debate with an atheist, it makes far more sense that Sharpton was talking about atheists being the ones who don’t really believe in God–else one would have to believe that Sharpton has suddenly turned into a massive anti-Mormon bigot with no history to suggest that.

The thing is, most stories I am seeing so far in the media don’t even mention that he was debating an atheist. Take this one, an ABC affiliate. Yes, it’s in Mormon country, but even then, to exclude the entire context of debate with an atheist is equivalent to outright lying. And of course, conservative blogs, Fox News, and the Romney campaign have started running with the story and are busily establishing their version of events. Lou Dobbs had Hitchens on, but again, showed only the clipped statement–even muted the audio of the previous statement in showing the clip–and then had his debate opponent comment on it, which he did as a means of expressing disdain for religious groups.

Like Gore’s statement about “taking the initiative in creating the Internet,” or Bill Clinton’s “I didn’t inhale” statement, there are two ways to read it–the way that makes perfect sense in context, and the way that makes the speaker sound like an utter buffoon. This is the same situation: taking the statement in the context of a debate with an atheist, Sharpton was almost certainly not dissing Mormons. But if you want to make it sound sensational, it is very easy to spin the statement the other way.

But I have noticed another problem: nobody is providing the context of the whole dialog between Sharpton and Hitchens. I have looked solidly on Google, both in news and on web sites, and not a single one of them show (a) the statement that Sharpton was responding to–incredibly vital in order to understand the nature of his reply–nor did they (b) even include all of Sharpton’s statement. They cut in with Sharpton saying “…and as the one Mormon…” and many of the quotes dishonestly cut out the “and,” leave no ellipses to show that it was a continuation of a prior utterance, improperly capitalize the start of the second clause of his statement, and do not show what came before.

This is incredibly dishonest, and inexcusable that news outlets–supposedly objective–should cut it like that. For all I know, the words before that statement were exculpatory, or even more damning. But leaving them out–and in many cases, acting like they didn’t exist–makes it impossible to understand fully. It certainly makes it seem even more like Sharpton was indeed saying something else, but that including the prior utterance would lessen the sensational impact of the story. All that I can say is that within the context of debating an atheist, what has been quoted so far makes perfect sense–albeit awkward wording–in the way Sharpton is still insisting that he meant it.

Like I said, I have no great love for Sharpton, and if the full story indeed shows he was making a bigoted statement against Mormons, I’ll be right up there condemning him. But with the facts that are out now, that does not seem to be the case, and with the full context still being held back, that’s the only honest way of reading it.

I am also somewhat disappointed that, at least so far, the major liberal blogs are completely ignoring the matter. Perhaps they are waiting for a full transcript, perhaps they just don’t want to touch it. But it seems to me that what has been shown so far is enough to make the point I myself have made.

If anyone can point me to a transcript of the debate with the full Sharpton quote and the statements preceding it, I would appreciate the heads-up.

Well, I got an unusual chance yesterday–to see a movie here in Japan at about the same time it starts showing in the U.S.–in fact, the public sneak previews started even earlier here, but I wanted to go see the film with Sachi. We were able to get good seats because I had visited the theater the day before and got seat assignments–something which only Toho and Warner/Mycal theaters let you do in Japan without extra charge, I think. Strangely, although you can buy your tickets online from those places, they won’t let you get a specific seat–they only allow you to choose a general section of the theater.

In any case, the movie. Super-short summary: not great, but a fair action flick. Slightly longer review: in order to watch this movie, make sure you have set your critical faculties aside and are in full disbelief-suspension mode–even for a fantasy-villain super-hero movie. That goes not just for the mode of how villains are created, but also for personal interactions between the characters. It’s kind of like an incredibly well-budgeted special-effects extravaganza written by someone who couldn’t figure out how to get from A to C so they kind of fudged on B all the time. You start at scene A, which is good, and you arrive at the payoff scene C, which is better; but scene B leaves you shaking your head.

Another problem with the film is villain overload. There are three villains in the movie–or four, depending on how you count them. Hell, even five, in a sense. They do wrap things up fairly (though not perfectly) neatly at the end, but at times you get a bit tired of yet another villain arriving to molest Spidey. It also seems to be an increasing trend: in the first Spiderman, there was one villain; in the second, two. God knows what they have planned for a potential fourth film.

Another quality this film picked up from the second film in the series is the drag-them-down-to-bring-them-up technique of storytelling, except this time they applied it to both Peter Parker and MJ. As the film starts, MJ has a starring role in a broadway musical, and Peter is madly in love with her, getting ready to propose. So, you know things are going to disintegrate. And, of course, that at some point, MJ will be grabbed by the villains and Peter/Spidey will have to rescue her. Don’t worry, I am not giving anything away here, just like I would not be giving anything away to say that in Die Hard 4, there will be highly improbable car chases, stunts, and explosions. It’s established formula by now.

Once you get past all of that, there is some good movie there. As usual for the Spiderman series, the human element of the story is pretty strongly emphasized–the relationships between characters, and the principles of morality involved. But let’s face it: when you go to see a film like Spiderman 3, you go for the action and special effects. And there’s a fairly good amount of that in this film. The nature of the villains and their modes of transport assure it. The flying scenes between Spiderman and Harry or Venom tend to fly by so fast, with so much happening, that it’s almost impossible to take in what’s going on; they seemed to crank the speed of these up to the maximum, testing the limits. The Sandman effects were fairly impressive, and are probably where a fair amount of the $250 million budget went to–but in the end, you have to wonder if it was really necessary to spend that much to get this film.

If you’re into Spiderman or just enjoy super-hero action films, this’ll be worth watching. If not, then not so much; it might be good light fare, but you might want to wait for the film to reach a lower-priced venue to see it.

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As I have noted before, American movies often premier late in Japan; Spiderman 3 is an exception. Here’s a list of upcoming movies and when they open. A few open within a few weeks of the US release, but more open more than a month later, with a few coming many months late:

Shrek the Third: USA, May 18; Japan, June 30
Pirates of the Caribbean 3: USA, May 19; Japan, May 25
Ocean’s 13: USA, June 8; Japan, August 11
Surf’s Up: USA, June 8; Japan, January 12, 2008
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer: USA, June 15; Japan, September 29
Live Free or Die Hard: USA, June 27; Japan, August 4
Ratatouille: USA, June 29; Japan, July 28
Transformers: USA, July 4; Japan, August 4
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: USA, July 13; Japan, July 21

As for films that were already released in the US, 300 comes out in Japan on June 9; Zodiac on June 16; and The Prestige (opened last October in the US), June 9.

The Simpsons Movie, set for a July 27 release in the U.S., doesn’t even have a release date for Japan. Neither does Rush Hour 3–which is rather odd, considering how popular Jackie Chan is here.

I still enjoy watching Bill Maher’s “Real Time,” but there is one aspect to it that makes it painful to watch sometimes: Maher’s lack of preparation. Let’s face it, he gets his kudos for being irreverent, not studied on the issues. And because he doesn’t seem to prepare much beyond his own immediate talking points, his conservative guests tend to get away with outrageous statements. And sometimes it’s not even the preparation which seems thin, but Maher’s apparent inability or unwillingness to challenge commonsense contradictions.

For example, on a recent show, one conservative guest discussed the Second Amendment as if it was a fact that it conferred an individual right, in the face of about a century of Supreme Court rulings to the contrary; Maher agreed with the statement instead of challenging it. Yes, Maher is Libertarian, but was arguing for gun controls, and even if he weren’t, at the very least one would want the facts of a case observed.

At another point, a right-wing guest got away with saying we should stay in Iraq because when we pulled out of Vietnam, there was massive bloodshed; Maher did not supply the obvious counter-analogy, which was that Vietnam also was not a war we would have won by staying in. Like Iraq, Vietnam would have just dragged on and festered for however many more years we stayed there, and the same bloodshed would have happened when we eventually left anyway. But Maher let this guy’s rather outrageous analogy just slip by.

A third issue that Maher let slide was “partial birth abortion,” where he was very poorly prepared or just poorly informed, and let the supremely politicized distortions about what “partial birth abortion” is and how it is applied to the issue fly right by–he even said that he had respect for them on the issue of abortion, as if he accepted this extreme wedge issue as representative of the issue as a whole.

Sometimes there will be a liberal guest on the show who will set the record straight instead, but the third guest who would otherwise have balanced the two heavy conservatives was a Democratic governor from a red state–in other words, a conservative Democrat who had something to lose by taking the liberal position on any of the issues mentioned. So he didn’t really act as a counter to them at all.

The thing is, the other guests shouldn’t have to do this. Maher brought up all the issues I listed above, and so he should have at least had a staff flunky do some basic research and give him some crib notes. But almost every time, Maher seems to come to the moderator’s table with little more than what he skimmed from the newspaper. For a person leading what is essentially a debate, Maher does not seem to prepare at all for that debate, and that can be frustrating sometimes. I very much enjoy the show, even when I disagree with Maher and/or his guests, but to have such complete fiction spouted and not challenged when even a half-assed attempt at preparation would have sufficed to stem that sort of thing….

It’s the kind of show where I can get worked up about a thing, and even pause the playback to debate the point as if I were there. Which is not good, really–there’s no point in me doing so, but it helps relieve the frustration. A pity, it’s otherwise a good show, but this flaw often makes me think twice about watching.

This was really a no-brainer from the start, and why Nevada Democrats ever agreed to a Fox News-sponsored debate in the first place is beyond comprehension. After all, can you imagine Republicans agreeing to put McCain, Giuliani and Romney in a debate hosted by Air America and featuring Al Franken, Randy Rhodes, and Jesse Jackson? Even if Ann Coulter were thrown in as a token conservative? Somehow I don’t think so.

Fox attempted to sidetrack the boycott by offering to “co-host” with an Air America affiliate, but it was soon made clear that they would still control the debate, with a panel of Fox personalities joined by a single Air America questioner. The format would be clear: Fox would make their best attempt to focus the “debate” on smears of the candidates, try to pit them against each other with accusations and dirt, and then wind up the farce by having a post-debate show talking about how stupid and lame all the candidates were. Yeah, Democrats should be happy to participate in that, and boycotting it was a real blow to “balanced” reporting, proving that a Democrat should not be elected because they’re all “afraid of journalists,” “only appear on those networks and venues that give them favorable coverage,” as Ailes put it. Which, of course, describes the Bush administration to a tee.

But when Nevada Democrats somehow agreed to such a bargain, they were immediately castigated by the bloggers and others as having made a huge blunder–and because it would look bad if they suddenly retreated under such criticism, they had to wait for some other excuse to back out of the debate. And Fox News being what it is, they didn’t have to wait long before they got their excuse. It came in the form of Roger Ailes, president of Fox News, making jokes which compared Barrack Obama and Osama bin Laden.

Ailes’ remarks are particularly interesting because he had just scolded Democrats for the rumored boycott of the debates, saying among other things, “We’re headed into covering a tough political season, and all of us will be called upon to do our best and be fair.”

And then just hours later, he said, “It is true that Barack Obama is on the move. I don’t know if it’s true that President Bush called Musharraf and said, ‘Why can’t we catch this guy?’”

Not that this was the first such biased comment by Ailes or the most outrageous. And yet, somehow he sees this as being “fair.”

I’d hate to see what his idea of “biased” is.

The Simpsons isn’t out of good stuff yet. This week’s was another of their musical episodes, which I usually don’t enjoy–but it had one of the best one-liners I’ve ever heard on a TV show.

For those who don’t like the spoilers, it’s below the fold.
Read more…

For a long time, WKRP in Cincinnati was a notable exception to all the TV shows being put on DVD. You kind of had to wonder why that was, seeing as how so much money could be made off of it. The answer: the RIAA. Original episodes of KRP had popular music in them, often inseparably from the dialog as Johnny or Venus would introduce a song. The problem came when the music labels started asking exorbitant piles of money to approve their rebroadcast–and so they had the owners of WKRP by the cajones. No music, no show. Many of the original episodes were shown in syndication, with non-licensed music dubbed in place of the big hits.

Well, apparently they worked something out, because the first season of WKRP (click-through to Amazon) is finally coming out on DVD on April 24th. It will have 22 episodes, some extra features (commentaries on two episodes with Hugh Wilson, Loni Anderson, Frank Bonner, & Tim Reid, plus three featurettes), and will cost $26. From what’s been reported, the studio wasn’t able to work out everything with the music labels, and so there will be music substitutions that fit the episodes. But no problem there–the little 5-second snippets we heard in the original episodes are not what made the show really good, anyway.

About nine months ago, I got contacted by a professor at a college in Texas who was putting together an anthology of readings for college writing classes, asking if he could publish one of my blog posts in his book. Duly flattered and all big-headed about it, I agreed, on the condition that I get a desk copy in return for my magnanimity.

The post, by the way, is Arguing on the Internet, from December 2005. You can read it here, for free! How about that!

Well, it seems like half the bargain has played out. Last I heard from the permissions coordinator in August, the book had been sent to the publisher a bit later than expected, and the July publication date had been set back a little. After that, I just forgot about the whole thing until tonight, when a re-sorting of my inbox brought one of the old emails into view. I started to write a letter back to them asking what had become of the whole thing, when I thought of doing a search on the web, and bingo–got an instant hit.

The book, as it turns out, was published last September. Guess they were a bit too busy to remember to send me my desk copy (of course, I have just now sent them a gentle reminder of the agreement).

In one sense, this is kind of cool. When I started this blog, I certainly did not expect anything I wrote here to wind up in a college textbook. And, as the author pointed out when he was asking for my permission to print, I am in the very same chapter (Chapter One!) as George Orwell, George Lakoff, and Deborah Tannen. I am the closing act, in fact! Wow! And I’m sure that I deserve to be in such company, and that the author was not just trying to stroke my ego!

In a slightly more realistic light, I’m still a dweeb with a blog who wrote a post that a community college professor in Houston figured he’d fill out a new anthology with.

But, still, George Orwell!

Buy it via this link (you know you want to!) and I get a cut. (Through my Amazon Associates account, not any deal with the publisher.) But for some strange reason, the US Amazon store does not list the table of contents (and therefore not my own name! Bastards!). The Canadian Amazon store does, however. Yet another way to Google me.

I’m sure the book and movie deals will start pouring through the door after this. Any day now.

One story in the press this week is about the supposed discovery of the tombs of Jesus, Mary Magdalena, and their conjectured son Judah. Behind it are the “Exodus Code” producers Simcha Jacobovici and James Cameron.

From what I understand, the tombs will be opened on live TV, whereupon ghostly apparitions will fly out, and James Cameron’s face will melt while Jacobovici’s head will explode.

Seriously, what the hell is with Cameron? He used to make awesome films. I guess he got all the money he needed after Titanic, and can do whatever the hell he wants now. I can understand why he went on a decade-long kick on deep-sea submersibles and just made documentaries about Titanic and related subjects–the guy probably just loved doing it and figured he’d focus on that.

But now Cameron seems to be behind a new string of Christian-themed movies-of-the-month, becoming a new huckster for cheap religion-masquerading-as-science crapola. A new hobby I can understand, but a Bible fetish and spurious claims of having proven the Red Sea parting or finding Jesus’ tomb… that’s straying well into wacko territory.

What happened, did a cult get their hands on him or something?

Steve Job’s polemic on DRM drew many responses, but they’re essentially all the same: full of hot air and horse manure. As a representative sample, here’s the one from Fred Amoroso, CEO & President of Macrovision, a company that specializes in the production of DRM schemes:

DRM is broader than just music –
While your thoughts are seemingly directed solely to the music industry, the fact is that DRM also has a broad impact across many different forms of content and across many media devices. Therefore, the discussion should not be limited to just music.

He’s right. DRM should be removed from all media, not just music. DVD region encoding, for example, is in place for no other reason than to defeat the open marketplace and gouge customers in each region for as much as they can be shaken down for. And Jobs’ argument applies equally well to all DRM: it can be and regularly is broken, and so DRM, in every form, does nothing but hobble honest, paying customers so that the companies applying the DRM can cheat them. The entire argument that DRM has anything at all to do with piracy is bunk–it is clearly and simply about controlling media after a customer has bought it so that the paying customer must pay the highest price possible, and pay that price again and again for the same media.

DRM increases not decreases consumer value –
I believe that most piracy occurs because the technology available today has not yet been widely deployed to make DRM-protected legitimate content as easily accessible and convenient as unprotected illegitimate content is to consumers. The solution is to accelerate the deployment of convenient DRM-protected distribution channels—not to abandon them.

This is just one of the many places in this argument where Macrovision’s bias as a DRM-producing company shows through. The point Jobs made, the point which is absolutely and glaringly true and real, is that DRM will never work. So long as there is a clear picture and clear sound output at one end, pirates will always find a way around whatever DRM scheme is thrown at them. Macrovision just wants to get the perpetual contracts to make yet another DRM scheme when each successive one is defeated.

Without a reasonable, consistent and transparent DRM we will only delay consumers in receiving premium content in the home, in the way they want it.

There’s a bald-faced lie if there ever was one. The way customers want it is without DRM. What Amoroso is saying here is supposedly that DRM can allow a customer to choose between delivery systems and viewing devices. What he really means is that without DRM, a customer would actually be able to view media without restrictions–i.e., you buy it, you own it–and that’s the last thing Macrovision or the media producers want. They want to charge the customer for the same media again and again and again, as many times as they can. Pay once for viewing over cable, again for renting, again for buying to watch on TV, again for buying to watch on your iPod, and so forth and so on.

Abandoning DRM now will unnecessarily doom all consumers to a “one size fits all” situation that will increase costs for many of them.

Yeah, customers would really hate owning something outright after paying for it, without restrictions about how how and where and how often they can play it. That would suck. What Amoroso is probably talking about, however, is the idea that without DRM, one high price would have to be paid instead of many small prices. Which, of course, is BS. It all tracks back to the idea that somehow media can’t be made available without DRM–that if even one version is free and clear, it will ruin all other sales. But since most media is sold without DRM, and all DRM is breakable, and yet the media producers are still making many, many billions in a lucrative business, that’s clearly bull.

Besides which, it does not mean that DRM must be universally applied. Want to DRM a rental movie which is only intended to play 2 or 3 times? Fine. If I rent it, then I don’t own it, so DRM away; I don’t expect rental material to be permanent, or else I would wonder why NetFlix wanted their DVD back. You think that DRM is necessary for the subscription music services, where people pay for access and not ownership? Again, fine–if ownership stays in your hands, you may DRM till the cows come home. But if I pay to own the media, then keep your grubby little DRM paws off of it, thank you very much. I just paid your highest price, the “one size fits all,” and now it’s mine.

In fact, Amoroso’s statement itself suggests that the highest price to be paid deserves no DRM. The “one price fits all” he mentioned must be the highest possible price, and that price is for outright ownership–and Amoroso said plainly that such a price would be tied to “abandoning DRM.” Thanks, Fred! You just made Steve Jobs’ case for him.

DRM will increase electronic distribution–

… Quite simply, if the owners of high-value video entertainment are asked to enter, or stay in a digital world that is free of DRM, without protection for their content, then there will be no reason for them to enter, or to stay if they’ve already entered. The risk will be too great.

You mean like every single movie and TV show now made, which are all transferred eagerly to DVDs which have either no DRM, or DRM that is so easy to break that there is no practical difference? What horse crap. All music and all video is already in a DRM-free world, in that every single piece of media can be separated from DRM easily and effortlessly by pirates, which is supposed to be the whole purpose of DRM, right? And yet all these media producers just can’t wait to release their material because of the immense profits waiting for them despite the “devastating” effect of piracy (which, of course, is little or no effect at all).

In short, adding DRM will not increase the release of media at all, for the simple reason that all media which can be released, is being released already. You can’t increase the amount being released when everything is being released. And with DVD sales now exceeding box office revenues, the suggestion that movie studios would pull out of the DVD market if DRM were not available is so ludicrous as to be laughable.

DRM needs to be interoperable and open –

No need to go over this–the paragraph is simply a swipe at Steve Jobs, daring him to license FairPlay, with the insinuation that he’s the one ruining things by running a monopoly.

The rest of the statement is more PR gobbledygook, essentially saying that a reliable and pirate-proof DRM can be achieved (wrong), and the good people at Macrovision are just the people to do it. Blah blah blah.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: DRM has no relation to piracy, zero. It’s about shaking down paying customers for more. It’s like the guy who ties a string around a quarter so that after the vending machine accepts it, he can yank it back out; the content producers want to use DRM as the string around the media they “sell” to you, so that after you pay them for it, they can still yank it back and keep charging you for it.

Here’s a video clip from Fox’s new show, The 1/2 Hour News Hour. Intended to be the right wing’s answer to The Daily Show, you can see that they ripped off the studio design, camera moves, music style, and even the feel of the graphics directly from the Comedy Central show. Unfortunately, they couldn’t rip off a good sense of humor or a talented host.

The clip is almost painful to watch. The best gag they have is the name of a magazine for Barack Obama: “BO.” That’s about as good as it gets. But the bad jokes are not what’s painful–it’s the laugh track. During the in-studio news desk bits, the laughter comes from a live audience, but it is clearly forced, and sounds angry; for example, when Obama is stuck with a barb, the laughter seems to come mostly from three or four conspicuously loud men in the audience, one of whom shouts, “Yeah!!”

But during the video piece, the laughter is clearly canned. Aside from being very different in quality than the live-audience laughter a few moments before, each burst of laughter sounds nearly identical, and artificially timed. There is also too much effort to shove each joke in your face: in the piece, the “BO” magazine has five gag headlines; if The Daily Show makes such a mock-up, they might mention one or two and then comment on how people taping the show will be able to view the rest. On The 1/2 Hour News Hour, they painfully zoom in on every last one to make sure you don’t miss their cleverness, with the canned laughter punctuating each one, turning neatly to applause at the end.

The anchors themselves look like SNL “Weekend Update” rejects, reading their cue-card-driven conversation with less skill than an Academy Awards show presenter. The Daily Show became popular because Jon Stewart has real talent; this show is based rather on sheer political will in the absence of comic talent. And Stewart is not only clever, he also clearly enjoys himself and is open about the gags; the Fox hosts are rigid and posing, taking themselves as seriously as Colbert ironically pretends to. They lack the ability to project that we’re all having a good time, and come across more like amateurs reading cue cards with jokes they don’t quite get themselves.

As so many are pointing out, this show is not really a comedy show, it is a right-wing political attack show disguised as comedy. The Daily Show combs the news for anything that’s funny, and runs with that. They’ll go after anything stupid, a key strategy. If the Democrats can bolster their control of Congress and elect a president in 2008, you know that The Daily Show will shift focus onto them, simply because they’ll be in the news doing the most stupid stuff–and their liberal-leaning audience will still love the show. This new Fox show simply throws vicious barbs at Democrats; were the Republicans to take over Congress again and get a Republican in the White House in 2008, the show would just scrape deeper and deeper into the crap barrel for something angry to throw at what little there was to say about Democrats. They’re not going after anything stupid, they’re going after anything liberal. If Jon Stewart took the same strategy in the other direction, he’d fall flat and people would stop watching.

The question now is, will the show were to last for more than a few months. It’ll certainly gain the hardcore crowd that loves Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, but it will never gain the much broader audience that Stewart and Colbert enjoy. If it stays on the air for more than just the short time it’ll take for people to figure out it sucks, it’ll be because Murdoch and Fox are subsidizing it in the hope that one day it’ll catch on–like Bill Gates is doing with the Zune.

But just in case you want to see more really bad comedy, here you go.

One meme that has repeatedly emerged in news reporting is the idea of “giving both sides” of a story. If you are willing to presume that any story has two sides (as opposed to one or more than two), then that sounds quite objective and balanced, of course–until you come across a story where one “side” is not only an outright lie, but a demonstrably outright lie. And in the recent age of media manipulation by the right wing, such stories are more numerous than one can count.

However, one such case has surfaced in the past few days, one which is so egregious in its nature that it bears commenting on, even though the source (Fox News) is one that you would naturally expect to bear such falsified witness.

Sean Hannity, of Fox News’ Hannity’s America, has decided to air at least one of the deleted scenes from ABC’s now-infamous right-wing fantasy screed The Path to 9/11.

The scene to be shown is most likely going to be the one where a CIA sharpshooter literally has Osama bin Laden in his sights and requires a “go” order from the White House–and National Security Advisor Sandy Berger is represented as chickening out and denying the team the ability to take the shot. Thus, the Clinton White House was directly responsible for 9/11 and the War on Terror™.

This “event” was completely fabricated, is totally false. It never happened. Former CIA chief George Tenet himself said that the mission referred to never got close to Osama bin Laden; the mission had been scrubbed by Tenet himself a few weeks before it was scheduled because it was considered to have a very low probability of success. Berger was informed of the decision, that being the sum total of his involvement. The 9/11 report did say that “working-level CIA officers were disappointed.”

Therefore, the Path to 9/11 scene should have played much differently: a CIA planner wants to go on the mission, but the head of the CIA gets briefed and concludes that it probably won’t work, so “he alone” decides to “‘turn off’ the operation.” The CIA planner is unhappy. End of scene. Now, that wouldn’t be nearly as dramatic, so the Path to 9/11 writer decides to punch the scene up. Instead of simply planning a mission that has a low probability of success, the mission is on the field and has a 100% chance of immediate success; instead of the CIA chief canceling the mission because it probably wouldn’t work, a senior Clinton White House staffer scrubs the mission in a chicken-hearted panic. Yes, that’ll certainly punch up the drama!

Later, the movie’s writer, Cyrus Nowrasteh, admitted to “improvising” the scene. “Improvising,” in this case, meaning that it was rewritten in a way that made it a virtually complete fabrication, indicting real people of having made catastrophically stupid miscalculations that were complete and utter fiction.

In short, it was a lie.

Enter Fox News. (Or, as Olbermann more accurately calls it, “Fox Noise.”) John Finley, producer of Hannity’s America, believes that the story has merit as “news”; according to a Fox News attorney, despite Fox not having the required permission from ABC to air the scene, “officials there believed that the newsworthiness of the material put it under the fair-use exception to the copyright statute.”

But what really merits attention is a statement by Finley:

We here at Fox — and myself personally — feel the American people deserve both sides.

And that, in a nutshell, pretty much describes the attitude taken by Fox News and a sizable chunk of the whole news media, in how it handles the “both sides” philosophy: even though one side consists of an utter, patent lie, the public deserves to hear that lie presented as if it were a viable, honest “alternate view.” Instead of just telling the public the facts and the facts alone, tell them the facts and a big, juicy lie–and then, “let them decide.”

Welcome to the 21st-century news media.

When Bill Kristol appeared on The Daily Show a few weeks back, Stewart nailed him in a way that seems to have been overlooked, pointing out Kristol’s common wingnut double-standard in regarding Bush:

Kristol: Bush has been right about taking the war to them, not letting them come to us, he was right about the fact that with aggressive tactics…

Stewart: So he was, waitwaitwait, I heard a phrase that I hadn’t heard, waitwaitwait. He was right about…

Kristol: …the fact that with aggressive tactics on our part we wouldn’t be attacked, for the last five years, which is something he deserves some credit for, I think.

Stewart: I disagree.

Kristol: Really?

Stewart: Yeah. I mean, 1993 …

Kristol: We all thought we would be attacked again…

Stewart: 1993, they bombed the World Trade Center, and they didn’t bomb again until, what, 2001. That’s what, eight years? So, Clinton needs more credit than Bush, it would seem.

Kristol: Well, they attacked us, unfortunately, they attacked in Africa in 1998…

Stewart: If we’re gonna add in attacks in Africa, we gotta go Spain, we gotta go England, and then we gotta say, they actually have attacked us, quite frequently, since…

Kristol: Yeah, and you know, we’re in a global war.

I noticed this when it got played last week on the International Edition of The Daily Show, and just got around to looking it up now. You can find a video clip of the of the interview, as always, on C&L here; the part I transcribed above starts at about a quarter of the way into the video.

What surprises me is that when you look at the commentary on the interview, nobody notes that Kristol’s argument was completely hypocritical, and that Stewart completely nailed him for it–or that Kristol just shrugged it off, instead of thoughtfully reflecting, “Hey, you’re right on that one.”… because for right-wingers, there’s nothing wrong with that kind of “logic.” It’s the standard double-standard for Clinton and Bush that right-wingers love; in this case, Bush gets all the credit for no major attacks, but Clinton doesn’t because there were overseas embassy attacks in his 8-year stretch of quiet, ignoring all the overseas attacks during Bush’s term.

The thing is, how can someone of Kristol’s media stature, one of the top-tier conservative intellectuals, get away with such openly sloppy “reasoning”? Unless, of course, everyone simply shrugs it off as Kristol did, and considers it ‘par for the course’?

Wow. Very rarely does the media go for actually defending a Democratic candidate rather than joining en masse to repeat the smear. Usually the media just gloms on to a lie like this and then goes silent when the truth is made clear.

This time it is a rumor that Barack Obama attended an Islamic Madrassa school, like those in Pakistan, which teach hardcore Islamic hatred of Christianity and the West. The rumor was released by a right-wing site (owned by the Washington Times), which in a double-whammy claimed that the rumor came directly from Hillary Clinton, despite naming no names and producing no documents to back that up. Fox News immediately jumped all over the story, gleefully broadcasting what amounted to a huge smear on both front-running Democratic candidates, and the deepest right-wing elements of the media and blogosphere began their swarm.

As for the Hillary part of the smear, Insight.com is standing by its story, saying that they had direct contact with “researchers connected to Senator Clinton” who said that:

“Ms. Clinton regards Mr. Obama as her most formidable opponent and the biggest obstacle to the Democratic Party’s 2008 presidential nomination. They said Ms. Clinton has been angered by Mr. Obama’s efforts to tap her supporters for donations.”

When you consider this, it comes across as the biggest load of crap ever heard. One of the things about Clinton is that she is a savvy political operator, and her campaign doesn’t make completely idiotic newbie mistakes. So for her own researchers to go to a right-wing organization, and to say, “hey, tell everyone that Hillary hates Obama and wants to trash him!” is so stupidly and transparently a lie as to be laughable.

This is where organizations like CNN usually chime in with the popular smear, ignoring little details like the one I just mentioned and foregoing things like investigating the truth first. In a turnabout from their usual routine, however, CNN is now savaging the rumor, calling it, accurately for once, a right-wing smear. Wolf Blitzer is even making a big deal about it, saying that “CNN did what any responsible news organization should do,” which is investigate the claim. Yeah, as if that’s what they have always done. Instead, this time, they actually went to Indonesia, discovered that the school was not a madrassa but instead a normal school where Christianity was taught side-by-side with Islam (but only once a week for both), and that there’s nothing subversive or dangerous about anything there–nor was there ever. But CNN didn’t stop there, they also went to lengths to show where the smear was coming from; Blitzer repeatedly mentioned Fox and “right-wing” news organizations and blogs as being responsible for spreading the story, and pointed out the connection between the conservative Washington Times and the web site that began the rumor.

Well, better late than never.

Here is a sampling of the headlines from major news services reporting on Hillary Clinton’s announcement to join the 2008 presidential race:

MSNBC: Clinton voices confidence in her 2008 prospects
CBS: Hillary Clinton Awaits “Great Contest”
ABC: Clinton Confident in Her 2008 Prospects
CNN: Hillary Clinton launches White House bid: ‘I’m in’
BBC: Hillary Clinton Joins 2008 Race
NYTimes: Clinton’s Success in Presidential Race Is No Sure Thing
LA Times: Clinton joins 2008 race for president
Boston Globe: Clinton gives her answer to voters: I’m in

And then, the lead Fox News story highlighted on Google News:

Fox News: Fear and Loathing on Sen. Clinton’s Trail

The story, actually, is written by someone at RealClear Politics, a right-wing site, and focuses on how Obama will sink a Clinton candidacy, and uses expressions like “discombobulated near-panic” and “liberal candidate” (as opposed to “Democratic candidate”).

Nice to see they are so vociferously fighting to maintain their fair and balanced perspective. While they don’t seem to be pitching that line too much any more, they still print the slogan, “We report; You decide.” Which, in line with its obvious falseness, brings to mind the fact that if they weren’t slanting their news so egregiously, they wouldn’t have to emphasize the idea that they weren’t trying to plant preconceived notions in readers’ minds. Kind of like a used car dealer calling himself “Honest Joe’s.”

This from CNN, via Media Matters; CNN correspondent Elaine Quijano spoke on the naming of Bush’s new policy:

Democrats are seeking to cast a surge as an escalation of the unpopular Iraq war.

That from within a piece that is otherwise balanced–but this characterization near the beginning of the piece shows either bias or incredibly poor reporting. A reporter should be as unbiased as possible, casting the events reported on in as neutral and objective a light as possible.

With this story, both the words “escalation” and “surge” are political buzzwords; in both cases, politicians are “casting” the proposed policy in a way that sounds favorable to their agenda. But Quijano states the issue in such a way that makes Bush’s buzzword sound like the accepted neutral term, while it is the Democrats who are playing politics with language–when in fact, Bush was the first to inject politics into the wording.

An objective reporter would have said this:

Both Republicans and Democrats are seeking to cast the president’s new approach to the unpopular Iraq war in ways that suit their interests. President Bush and some Republicans are calling the troop increase a “surge”; Democrats responded by calling it an “escalation.”

The thing is, wording like Quijano’s very much colors people’s perception of who is right and who is wrong, who is serious, and who is playing politics. Since most of the piece is balanced and the bias is subtle enough to slide under most people’s radar, it has an even stronger ability to sway opinions than an editorial piece, which many people automatically discount for bias.

Quijano’s example of media bias, however, is the kind of thing that goes on all the time. If it were simply a matter of chance, it would favor liberal and conservative interests equally. The thing is, it seems to be quite lopsided in favor of conservative interests–though who knows, maye that’s my own bias speaking. But whatever the direction of the tilt, all of us should be alert to and aware of such subtle bias, and be ready to discount for that bias in straight reporting as well as in editorial speech–a boundary, by the way, which is becoming increasingly blurred in today’s “news” media.

Oops. The RIAA may have made a little tactical error. They did not account for the possibility that some people would not knuckle under to their “legal” extortion and actually fight back in court. But that’s what some people are doing, and it is beginning to expose some of the recording industry’s trade secrets.

In UMG v. Lindor, the defendants are challenging the RIAA’s supposition that when someone pirates a single piece of music on the Internet, the music labels lose $750 and should be compensated accordingly. The legal representatives of Marie Lindor make the counter-argument that “in a proper case, a court may extend its current due process jurisprudence prohibiting grossly excessive punitive jury awards to prohibit the award of statutory damages mandated under the Copyright Act if they are grossly in excess of the actual damages suffered.” Seeing as how the RIAA’s bottom-level figure of $750 per song is roughly 1000 times the actual maximum loss a music label would suffer in such a case, they argue that $2.80 to $7.00 per song (4 to 10 times the real value, supposing that the defendant would have purchased the song in the first place) is slightly more reasonable. Such punitive damages are far more in line with reality.

However, the big fish that the defendants are after is information on what pricing structure the labels use–how much they make per song, and more revealingly, how they collude to fix prices in the marketplace:

The pricing data really may not be all that secret. Late in 2005, former New York Attorney General (and current Governor) Eliot Spitzer launched an investigation into price fixing by the record labels, alleging collusion between the major labels in their dealings with the online music industry. Gabriel believes that making the pricing information public would “implicate [sic] very real antitrust concerns” as the labels are not supposed to share contract information with one another. …

[Defense counsel Ray] Beckerman argues in a letter to the judge that the only reason the labels want to keep this information confidential is to “serve their strategic objectives for other cases,” which he says does not rise to the legal threshold necessary for a protective order. The proposed order would force the labels to turn over contracts with their 12 largest customers. Most details—such as the identities of the parties—would be kept confidential, but pricing information and volume would not.

That’s how to hurt the industry back–show that if they want to extort money from grandfathers and 12-year-old honor students, they risk having their illegal market strategies exposed. The Inquirer puts it a bit more clearly:

This would reveal to the world if any price shenanigans were going on between the RIAA members and could cause them more problems with regulators than it would like.

Already investigations into industry pricing have revealed a Byzantine system of backscratching between record labels and distributors and the last thing the RIAA wants is to have details of this information made public.

If Lindor wins then the most the RIAA would ever be able to charge a pirate in the US will be between $2.80 and $7.00 per song. However the RIAA might also find itself up in front of a Senate inquiry.

Ah, it would be such sweet justice if the RIAA’s reign of courtroom terror would end up with them being stuck with punitive damages so reasonable that it would not be worth their while to sue anyone, while at the same time having their own corruption exposed in such a way to get them into real trouble.

I know, it probably won’t happen. But in a just world, it would.

Apparently, Darlene and Nancy over at the Associated Press don’t cross-check their stories. Both writers took the same AP-AOL poll from mid-December and wrote a story based on it. Here’s Nancy’s article:

AP poll: Americans optimistic for 2007

By NANCY BENAC, Associated Press Writer
Sat Dec 30, 7:22 PM ET

WASHINGTON - The news from Iraq and other national headlines may be grim, but in Greenville, N.C., John Given has a new baby and his first home, and life is good. [Continued]

The next day, Darlene wrote this:

Poll: Americans see gloom, doom in 2007

By DARLENE SUPERVILLE, Associated Press Writer
Sun Dec 31, 6:11 PM ET

WASHINGTON - Another terrorist attack, a warmer planet, death and destruction from a natural disaster. These are among Americans’ grim predictions for the United States in 2007. [Continued]

Who knows, maybe it was a contrasting-piece set. But neither article references the other. Whatever the case, it most certainly highlights the opinions I’ve recently written saying that you have to be careful of the press as its members often contradict each other in impossible ways. Of course, I did not expect the same news agency to contradict itself quite so starkly.

Or maybe this is all one of the glass-half-empty, glass-half-full deals.

Of note: the poll claims that 25% “anticipate the second coming of Jesus Christ,” and only slightly fewer believe we’ll meet E.T. I have to figure that most of those two groups overlap. About half as many people foresee Congress passing a minimum wage hike. So, maybe the entire thing is April Fool’s, come four months early. But then again, I am in the optimist’s group.

Hat tip to FARK.