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 Creeping Chavezismo in the MSM in regard to President Obama. From Drudge:

On the night of June 24, the media and government become one, when ABC turns its programming over to President Obama and White House officials to push government run health care — a move that has ignited an ethical firestorm! Highlights on the agenda:

ABCNEWS anchor Charlie Gibson will deliver WORLD NEWS from the Blue Room of the White House.

The network plans a primetime special — ‘Prescription for America’ — originating from the East Room, exclude opposing voices on the debate.

Imagine if ABC news delivered a report on religion from the Vatican and excluded non-Catholics. What message would that send? This is an amazing level of sycophancy toward a president by a major media outlet, even a Democratic president.Let us hear no more whining about bias on FOX or talk radio, this stunt by ABC amounts to unpaid advertisng and a de facto government TV program. Why is this happening? Simple Obama-worship at ABC? Unlikely.

 John Podesta, is the lead strategist of the effort to coordinate the media with Liberal-Left  Democratic political needs, published his think tank’s strategy in regard to censoring talk radio.  We can only imagine what advice Podesta gives to Obama administration officials in private, but the report was a strong signal to all broadcasters to toe the political line or face increasingly onerous FCC regulation, escalating fees, fines and denial of licenses over the next four years.

Republicans and conservatives need to wake up that the Obama administration is not playing the traditional “issues” game beloved of partisan interest groups bent on fighting over microscopic technical changes in abortion laws or .5 % of the capital gains tax rate. They could care less about that minutia for now, seeing it as distracting crap; the aim of the Obama administration is creating long-term, strategic advantages for Democrats and progressive leftists by changing the rules of the game for the long haul. So the Obamaites are focusing on controlling the media discourse, turning the Census Bureau into a political tool of the Democratic Party, redrawing the congressional map and raising the barriers to entry to participate in the political process for independent or conservative demographic groups.

Either the GOP gets it together in the next two election cycles or it is finished for a generation.

UPDATE:

ABC refuses to accept paid advertising critical of Obama’s health plan

Hard to believe that this was an amateur production. For film making, this is akin to what the first great blogs were to publishing, a tipping point moment toward mass amateurization:

THE HUNT FOR GOLLUM – FULL Trailer 1 from Independent Online Cinema on Vimeo.

I watched the full 40 minute film a few days ago on my computer at The Hunt for Gollum website, it was impressive. Incidentally, the creators had permission from the Tolkien Estate to proceed as a non-profit venture and gave J.R.R. Tolkien’s vision, mostly culled from extant writings, notes and appendixes, a respectful treatment.

Hat tip to Scholars & Rogues.

The MSM has bumped up against the internet – and lost. 

Clay Shirky called it a while ago in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
but big media, if they wish to make the leap to to Web 2.0 life, have to leverage the one thing they do better than everyone else, original investigative reporting, that’s where they create value. Instead they are looking for government protection, subsidies or both.

Rupert Murdoch envisions a walled garden strategy but news has a brief shelf life. A high price on all content is a barrier to entry for older news items that just interest a few people. A flat rate drives down their market share for attention, their traffic and in turn, the market value of all the content they own. A sliding scale would be needed that rapidly discounts toward free as public attention on a news item waned.

Right now the media are like a brontosaurus that has just realized it waded into a tar pit.

Being a wingnut after an election victory that eventually causes acute moral retardation?  She sounded a whole lot like Mel Gibson’s father talking about “the Jews”.

Recently, discussing the media in the comment section here, Lexington Green had this to say:

Brilliant Shirkey piece.  He only leaves out one thing.  The dying incumbents are going to successfully seek money and protection from the government.  With a Democrat president and congress, their faithful allies, lickspittles, bootlickers, toadies, buttboys, catamites, lackeys also knows as “the media” will come to DC with palm extended, upright, demanding the payment that their partisan loyalty has earned.  They will get protection and money. 
.
They will not survive that much longer as a result.

In the same thread, democratic core remarked:

The Shirky piece raises fascinating issues.  The question of what the new economic model for journalism will be is interesting, and I appreciate the fact that this piece raises the question explicitly.  Contrary to Lexington’s comment, I doubt that there will be a government bailout, as the First Amendment issues would seem to make that unpalatable to both parties.  The non-profit approach is one logical evolution, where “newspapers”, i.e., centers of journalistic activites, get absorbed into non-profit institutions such as think tanks or universities to provide content to organs of information dissemination.  Another model might be the C-span model, where profitable internet organizations such as Google fund the entities we used to call “newspapers” in order to provide content for the web.  Most likely, you could have some combination of the two, as for example in the way that profit-making organizations subsidize research activities by non-profit institutions such as universities.

Now we have this. A remarkable turn-around time:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – With many U.S. newspapers struggling to survive, a Democratic senator on Tuesday introduced a bill to help them by allowing newspaper companies to restructure as nonprofits with a variety of tax breaks.

“This may not be the optimal choice for some major newspapers or corporate media chains but it should be an option for many newspapers that are struggling to stay afloat,” said Senator Benjamin Cardin.

A Cardin spokesman said the bill had yet to attract any co-sponsors, but had sparked plenty of interest within the media, which has seen plunging revenues and many journalist layoffs.

Cardin’s Newspaper Revitalization Act would allow newspapers to operate as nonprofits for educational purposes under the U.S. tax code, giving them a similar status to public broadcasting companies.

Under this arrangement, newspapers would still be free to report on all issues, including political campaigns. But they would be prohibited from making political endorsements.

Advertising and subscription revenue would be tax exempt, and contributions to support news coverage or operations could be tax deductible.

Because newspaper profits have been falling in recent years, “no substantial loss of federal revenue” was expected under the legislation, Cardin’s office said in a statement.

Cardin’s office said his bill was aimed at preserving local and community newspapers, not conglomerates which may also own radio and TV stations. His bill would also let a non-profit buy newspapers owned by a conglomerate.

“We are losing our newspaper industry,” Cardin said. “The economy has caused an immediate problem, but the business model for newspapers, based on circulation and advertising revenue, is broken, and that is a real tragedy for communities across the nation and for our democracy.