Episode 26: Dear Jesse

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Sometimes you just have to move the schedule up a tick to take advantage of current events. In Episode 26: Dear Jesse, I've decided to turn twenty-plus minutes of Attack Ads! into an open letter to Canadaland creator and host Jesse Brown in an attempt to plead the Attack Ads! case for creating a zero-ads environment for those that feel the need to create one for themselves. It's perfect timing, given his crowd-funding drive and the decisions about the future of his podcast and all that.



A wonderful cartoon that accompanied
J. C. McQuiston's Radio News article in 1922.

The content with both Herbert Hoover's comments and J. C. McQuiston's article from 1922 came from Tim Wu's book The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (Random House, 2010, p. 74 for the Hoover quotes); I found Mr. McQuiston's article online. The later 1934 and 1935 quotes in connection with the Federal Communications Commission hearings also came from Mr. Wu's book, but can be found (in a poorly scanned OCR format, sadly) in a publication called "Education in Radio" from 1935.

Music over the '30s quotes comes from Jimmy Dorsey and his orchestra doing "That's A'Plenty". Ga'an soon thereafter does "Living Tribunal."

Episode 25: Shifting That Window

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I feel the need to explain myself. Well, to explain myself in greater detail. I've already revealed that I suffer an irrational hatred of commercials. That was revealed way back in the first episode. In this Episode 25: Shifting That Window, I dive a bit into what I believe is most responsible for making both commercials effective, and for what makes protest of them also effective: our human tendency to socially conform to the opinions of our peers. Further, I do feel a need to note why outrageous statements of opinion can be effective, even necessary, to discussion and debate.



The first psychological phenomenon I will address is the Asch conformity experiment results. A later refinement of Asch using the basic methodology but including an fMRI scanner for a real-time look into how the subjects' brains were working was underdone in 2005.



Next, I take most of the episode describing as entertainingly as possible a phenomenon named for its founder, the Overton Window, where opinions can be shifted with a concentration of focus of a type rarely, for me, discussed openly enough. It is from this Overton Window practice that I attempt to justify my strategic use of hyperbole and the occasional outrageous statement.

Music in this episode: Omyiga, "Confirm Friend Request"; and a few snippets, one from The Color and the Sound's "Graves"; the other a very brief "Ha Ha Ha Ha" from the Bee Gees. Closer today again from Mistle Thrush.

Episode 24: Sponsored Discontent

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Pick up the news, or tune in. Whichever. Zoom in to the content; don't just read or hear it, but really, really delve into the message. Does any element seem out of place? In Episode 24, Sponsored Discontent, I review what has become one of the only ways modern commercial newspapers (especially the newspapers, since the crash of classifieds as a near-monopolistic funding source) have been able to pay for their continued publication: sponsored or branded content. Essentially, an interested party "helps" newspapers with the content of their, well, "news," those scare quotes becoming more and more relevant.

I read a bit from two books. The first, Robert W. McChesney's and John Nichols' The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again (First Nation Books, 2010, p 13); the second, Robert McChesney's Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning The Internet Against Democracy (The New Press, 2013, p. 59).

I grabbed quite a bit of informative content from Episode 37 of Canadaland, where Jesse Brown interviews Matthew Ingram about the situation at one of Canada's most influential daily newspapers. What management is asking in contract negotiations might surprise!

We also hear from The Daily Show's Jason Jones in India with an equally surprising revelation about that country's newspaper system.

Music in this episode comes from Halloween doing "Making Evil" and Teleidofusion doing "Soft Illusion."