This is some of what’s caught my attention in the past hours:
- Denver Journalists Say Media Revenue Squeeze Affecting Freedom of Information | Yahoo! News – In the past, the government knew that the media would take legal action every time information was restricted, Maass said. But now the government has gotten "pretty canny in knowing" that with financial pressures "there's less fight in the media to battle for information."
- Everything About Politicians Is Fair Game | WSJ.com – "Inevitably the mainstream media, suffering from the corporate pressures of diminishing profits, will yield to new media and its populism. The two-newspaper city, once a staple of every metropolis, is already as rare as a grammatically correct sentence from George Bush.
So with apologies to John Edwards, Sarah Palin and untold other Democrats and Republicans, the tabloid media gladly accepts its role of covering the scandals, relying on the American public to decide if that information is relevant to job performance."
- Can Google Be a Serious Player in TV Advertising? | Nate Elliott – "Google's dominance of online advertising is based primarily on their ability to target relevant advertising to consumers. But it'd be incredibly difficult for Google (or anyone else) to ever target TV ads nearly as well as online ads…"
- What Makes People Vote Republican | edge.org – "America lacks the long history, small size, ethnic homogeneity, and soccer mania that holds many other nations together, so our flag, our founding fathers, our military, and our common language take on a moral importance that many liberals find hard to fathom.
Unity is not the great need of the hour, it is the eternal struggle of our immigrant nation. The three Durkheimian foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity are powerful tools in that struggle. Until Democrats understand this point, they will be vulnerable to the seductive but false belief that Americans vote for Republicans primarily because they have been duped into doing so."
- ITV Bid May Loom as Mediaset, Saban, RTL Eye Stake | Bloomberg – Endemol NV, the Dutch producer of “Big Brother'' controlled by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's Mediaset SpA, declared its interest in July. U.S. billionaire Haim Saban, creator of TV's “Power Rangers,'' and RTL Group, which owns the U.K.'s Channel 5, would consider bidding for ITV, people familiar with their plans said.
- Spinspotter Attacks Media Bias, One Phrase at a Time – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com – SpinSpotter has started out with very few phrases in its database of spin…
- Murdoch: I Won’t Put the ‘Times’ Out of Business | Jeff Bercovici – "It's a libel to say that I use my newspapers to support my other business interests. The fact is, I haven't got any other business interests."