Episode 85: The Unfairwaves

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(This episode is part of the series The Powell Movement.)

It's bad enough that most radio is so chock filled with commercial interruptions that folks, like myself, find it unlistenable. Thanks to a late-80s rule change, however, one has to watch out for more than just paid crap between the featured show sneaking its influence into one's brain case via the hearing holes. That's the theme of today's Episode 85: The Unfairwaves.

In this episode, I read from: Mitchell Stephens' book Beyond News: The Future of Journalism; a Wikipedia article on the Fairness Doctrine; Eric Altermann's book What Liberal Media?: The Truth About Bias and the News; Robert McChesney and John Nichols' book Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America; McKay Coppins' book The Wilderness: Deep Inside the Republican Party's Combative, Contentious, Chaotic Quest to Take Back the White House; Politico articles "Who is Dave Brat?", "How Big Money failed Cantor", "Right-wing radio's win", and "The tea party radio network"; the Atlantic Magazine's article "Six Theories for Eric Cantor's Loss"; and the DailyKos article "Who is John Ga-er-David Brat".

Musically, I play three from Jahzarr; "Cavern," "Dip," and (quite appropriately) "Gloom." I open with KMFDM's "Attak" backing Henry Giroux, and close once again with Mistle Thrush.

I'm releasing this and all my episodes under a Creative Commons 4.0 attribution, share-alike, and non-commercial license.

Episode 84: Critical Mass Holes

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(This episode is part of the series The Powell Movement.)

Sometimes the conventional wisdom consists of nothing more than reasonable assumptions overlaid atop evidence that, without those assumptions, appears incongruous. Worse, because of those overlaid assumptions, we avoid looking more closely at those incongruities, at otherwise implied but obscured-by-assumption machinations lurking in the evidence.

That's what I do in this Episode 84: Critical Mass Holes. The assumed culprit hobbling the newspaper industry over the last 40 years has long been capitalism and the short-term profit incentive. I suggest otherwise. After all, short-term profits have long been an incentive; why have they only attacked newspaper productivity only recently?

For evidence, today I quoted three books: Robert McChesney and John Nichols' The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again (First Nation Books, 2010) Robert McChesney's Digital Disconnect (The New Press, 2013);" and Mitchell Stephen's Beyond News: The Future of Journalism (Columbia University Press, 2014).

Audio-wise, I sampled the voices of: David Simon, giving testimony before the Senate; Orson Welles in his role of the Citizen Charles Foster Kane, newspaper mogul; and Tony Randall playing Felix Unger from the television show "The Odd Couple." Since this is a Powell Movement episode, I also play the Memo Reading voice of D. L. Myers.

I kept the musical interludes to a minimum for this show, mostly because of the heat wave turning the Attack Ads studio into a toaster oven; but I had to open the show with the usual KMFDM samples from "Attak," today backed by Henry Giroux; and I'm close the show once again with Mistle Thrush's "It's All Like Today."

I'm releasing this and all my episodes under a Creative Commons 4.0 share-alike, attribution, and non-commercial license.