BuzzMachine

A few years ago, I wrote a post (and more here, here, here, here, here, here, and http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2004_06_23.html#007358
) wishing somebody would create a digital place for my stuff, where I could put anything that I could get to from anywhere on anything.

Cablevision — of all companies — has made a step in that direction with its DVR in the cloud: a personal video recorder (that is, a TiVo) that lives not on your TV but at their headend. That means you can record a show and then watch it from any TV in the house.

This would not have been possible only a few years ago, just as networks distributing shows via iTunes wouldn’t have been possible, either. That’s because all parties thought they had entrenched rights, powers, and interests and those wouldn’t budge. But, of course, in the meantime, TV exploded.

Back then, I attended a Cable Labs meeting — the braintrust of all these local monopolies — and the elephant in the room was digital delivery of directly addressable content: that is, consumers getting what they wanted whenever, wherever, and however they wanted because they could point any device to any address. This, the room knew, would kill their control over the pipe and what flows through it. We, the people, would take over the pipe. It was inevitable. They just hoped to forestall that future for as many quarters as they could.

Similarly, I attended meetings with programmers who were dying to make their stuff directly available to viewers but they dared not because they had strangling deals with cable MSOs. They could not put their stuff online because of deals or fear of cable

But there was TiVo, beloved of every viewer who got it. And then there was the iPod, where people were getting other programming and so the big networks finally knew they had to put their programming there, too. And then came the Slingbox, which lets people view the TV they’ve paid for anywhere.

It’s all about control, our control. I’ll repeat Jarvis’ First Law of Media and Life: Give the people control and we will use it. Don’t give us control and you will lose us.

Cable fears losing us. And cable wants to compete with the TiVo and the Slingbox and the iPod to give us control of the media we want. That is a good thing.

Well, David Lee Roth is back on the air, but it’s not the David Lee Roth who was taken off the air a few days ago. He announced this morning all the things he’s not allowed to be — which was all the things he was. No music. His cohorts are gone. He has to talk about the news and sports. He has to change subjects every X minutes. They will hire him a Robin. They even hired extra security for the floor but I don’t know what they’ll do: keep his sister out? He got a four-page letter from his bosses detailing all these things or there will be “disciplinary action.” He even hints of insipid racism in the orders: “no more black guy, no more black music” is one of the orders, he says.

Even though I thought he was a disaster on the air, I sympathize with Roth — as Stern has. CBS is turning the post-Stern disaster on their air into Roth’s fault. But it’s not. It’s CBS’s fault for hiring him. For there was no way he was going to give them the radio they’re used to. What he came up with was unlistenable, but they should have known that before they put him in front of that mike.

So now he is miserable and he makes them look all the more idiotic.

Well, perhaps we can count on Justice Scalia’s vote to free bullshit.

The New York Times new lab is hiring a futurist. Laugh if you will. But when you think about it, maybe newspapers should have hired futurists, oh, 10 or two years ago. [See my disclosures]

Amos Oz says on Comment is Free that the rise of Hamas could be good news.

s there anything the new centre-left Israeli government can do for peace, as long as Hamas does not want any peace with Israel? It can “take the issue upstairs” - talk to the bully’s parents, as it were. In our case, the bully’s family is the Arab League, which in 2000 adopted a peace plan….

It is not unthinkable that a deal between the pragmatic Israeli and Arab governments can be reached - and then brought before the Palestinians for a referendum. … Instead of Israeli disengagement - bound to leave many issues open and bleeding - we can work with Egypt and Saudi Arabia for a lasting peace.

A sobering view of Tribune Company’s pickle.

We’ve all heard it: that staccato buzz coming over a telephone speaker, even when it’s off, and we look to play a game of, Who Has the Blackberry? The other day at a big event, I heard it over the loudspeakers. I wondered whether this was engineered in; it would be smart if irritating advertising for the ‘berry. But I see it’s called the GSM mosquito and new standards are supposed to eliminate it.

A commenter to my defense of bullshit on Huffington Post reminds us that when he ran for President in 1992, Sen. Tom Harkin was quoted by NBC’s Andrea Mitchell on TV news saying: “George Bush and his fat-cat Republican friends say they are building a Conservative Opportunity Society. I’ve got a one word reply: Bullshit.” That is certainly political speech. But today, it would be censored or fined: NBC, the network, every station airing it, Harkin himself, and Mitchell if she repeated it. Politicians should be free to call bullshit. So should reporters. So should we. And we should be free to hear it. But not under the rule of the FCC, we’re not.

And let’s not forget that Harry S Truman called MacArthur’s old-soldiers-never-die speech “nothing but a damn bunch of bullshit.” Fine his dead ass.

: I just edited the post to run as a story in The Guardian Monday. I think I’ll have some fun and see whether any U.S. papers has the balls to call bullshit on bullshit.

Thanks to a commenter in one of the many very active discussions about David Lee Roth, we learn that he’s out. Says DCRTV.com:

This just in: CBS Radio has removed the low-rated David Lee Roth (right) from his post-Howard Stern morning slot at the company’s stations in NYC, Philadelphia, Boston, and Pittsburgh. Just in time for the spring ratings sweep, which starts tomorrow. “JV And Elvis” now airs in NYC, at least. CBS recently flipped Philadelphia rocker WYSP, which carried Stern in morning drive, to “Free FM” all-talk with Roth in mornings. And it has plunged from 4th to 19th place in the ratings. We’ll get more info later today about how the Junkies are doing as Stern’s replacement at DC’s WJFK-FM and Baltimore’s WHFS when another round of Arbitrends gets released…..

Listening to Stern this morning, he recounted the ratings disasters that CBS has on its hand: three of the five lowest-rated stations in New York and each a former powerhouse, for example. Roth was a disaster from the first minute but Stern’s right: We can’t blame him for CBS’s woes. Those are CBS’s.

Dave was off the air this morning — reportedly suspended, was the rumor — and in just five minutes, I could tell that his replacements were better. They’re no Stern. But they’re not David Lee Roth, either.

: This from yesterday’s NY Post: “…Roth’s February Arbitron numbers were only half of what he averaged in January. According to Post radio reporter John Mainelli, Stern had 277,000 listeners at any given moment last December - while Roth had only 32,000 listeners last month.” There are plenty of blogs that are bigger.

: UPDATE: Here’s the NY Post story. CBS is saying he wasn’t suspended and is on his way back from Miami. Last I knew, you could fly that route in a few hours, not a few days. The Post says he was ordered to redo the show. He’s still off the air today (Thursday).

Pretty good summary of the blogging state in Iran, from the AP.

The FCC has outlawed the single most essential word in political discourse and protest: bullshit.

This is not only an absurd misinterpretation of our community standards and another perilous attack on our First Amendment, I also believe it is a violation of our civil rights worthy of court challenge. Get me to a lawyer, I think we now have the basis for a citizens’ suit.

In its latest batch of nannyisms, the FCC declared shit and all its variants, including bullshit, not merely indecent — which is where the case law stood after the Supreme Court washed the seven dirty words out of George Carlin’s mouth in 1978 — but also now profane. Since outmoded broadcast censorship legislation was passed in 1927 — giving the government this constitutionally dubious authority — the FCC had not once found any word to be profane until 2004, when it ruled against Bono’s joyful utterance of “fucking” at the Golden Globes. Now “shit” et al join this devil’s dictionary. And the FCC warns that they are not merely profane but “presumptively profane,” which means that except in “rare” and “unusual circumstances,” to speak these words on the air will guarantee you a penalty.

By declaring them profane, the FCC rules these words are “certain of those personally reviling epithets naturally tending to provoke violent resentment or denoting language so grossly offensive to members of the public who actually hear it as to amount to a nuisance.” Nuisance, in this case, does not mean a dog barking; it means that the community finds this utterance universally disturbing, utterly unacceptable, and even intolerable. The FCC commissioners say that they “reserve that distinction for the most offensive words in the English language.” As I pointed out in an earlier post, even the FCC recognizes the uncomfortable and quite politically incorrect irony that they will not similarly ban racial and religious epithets because they may constitute political speech. Thus, in the offensive view of the FCC, the S-word and F-word are now worse than the N-word and K-word.

But bullshit is political speech. It is our single most precious means of expressing displeasure with the political and the powerful.

Without the word bullshit, we are left with far less satisfactory means of debate. Now don’t feed me the mothers’ bromide about curse words indicating a limited vocabulary. Bullshit is the most expressive word we have in this context. In his delightful treatise On Bullshit, Harry G. Frankfurt finds the most equivalent word to be humbug and he acknowledges, “It is more polite, as well as less intense, to say ‘Humbug!’ than to say ‘Bullshit!’ ” Humbug’s synonyms, which he lists, are similarly unsatisfying: “balderdash, claptrap, hokum, drivel, buncombe, impostuer, and quackery.”

So now imagine a protestor at a televised rally against the war railing that “this war is humbug!” Doesn’t cut it. If, instead, she said that “Bush’s war is bullshit” and that were broadcast across the country, every station that carried it and the speaker herself could be fined per utterance, even into bankruptcy. If, fearing this, she censored herself, that is evidence of the chill the FCC has imposed on free political speech. If, because of that chill, a station decided to time-delay the news — a journalistically and constitutionally offensive but pragmatic necessity of the age — it could dump her words: “Bush’s war is ‘bleep.’ ” But unquestionably, that detracts from the power of her statement and that is done only because the FCC threatens fines, presumptively, for the use of the word.

Thus, the FCC chills and censors political speech and warns that it will penalize and fine Americans for political speech. And that, I believe, is a violation of our civil rights and a violation of our First Amendment protections. Gotcha.

: When I attended one of the many confabs on news in the blog age — this one in an august hall at Harvard under the auspices of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism — various leading lights of the news profession were pondering the question: Why does the nation trust Jon Stewart more than us? After considerable consideration, the group agreed that it could be summed up thusly: “He calls bullshit.”

Indeed, calling bullshit should be the highest calling of journalism.

But consider the experience of the premier show of journalism on journalism, NPR’s On the Media, when it tried to report on the FCC and its bullshit. (Hear the MP3 here.) I listened to the show’s cohost and chief wag, Bob Garfield, on the podcast version — which doesn’t sully our airwaves, merely my iPod — and so I heard him say to FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein:

Garfield: Now, I want to talk to you about the word bullshit. Now this is commonly used to convey skepticism, but the commission found it to be explicitly excretory and therefore indecent, whereas dickhead as an insult is ok. But where I come from, bullshit is pretty much kidstuff and dickhead is pretty darned insulting. All of which is to finally ask how you go about finding standards on this stuff. It seems to be so arbitrary.

Adelstein: Well, are you going to edit that out?

Garfield: It depends. Are you on duty?

Speaking next to NYPD Blue creator Steven Bochco, Garfield says, “You and I may agree that the ruling that bullshit is indecent is bullshit…”

I emailed Garfield and asked him whether WNYC, his host station, and NPR would have the balls to let him say bullshit. No, he said, it was bleeped from broadcast for fear of fines to the show’s 207 affiliate stations.

Next, I emailed Dean Cappello, WNYC’s senior vice president of programming, to find out why this decision was made. He said:

With respect to the issue in general, it feels as though we are involved in some Restoration comedy. As public radio journalists, we’re all about context. We’ve aired controversial material and rough language as part of a stream of programming that is probing and thoughtful. We hate being gratuitous. It’s just unsatisfying. And that has really been our standard… to illuminate and not just to shock.

But I don’t doubt that across the country producers are censoring themselves because they’ve heard something about something and assume certain things are forbidden. It’s been my experience that the further down the chain you go the more you uncover producers and reporters holding back.

In other words, Garfield, OTM, and WNYC thought “bullshit” was quite appropriate for my iPodded ears and not for my radio. The difference? The FCC. Government censorship. The chill. I asked Cappello then whether the recent fines had a direct impact on this. He replied:

…I think there is an absolute chill in the air. It may even be felt most keenly in cultural programs and documentaries where expression is at the core.

I would say we have the first case we need to demonstrate the chill on political speech and the the exercise of free speech in the press. Gotcha again.

: And that leads us to another issue with the FCC’s ruling: a subtle racism.

Step away from that keyboard until I explain. I am not saying that black people say “bullshit” more but that the FCC has ruled that “bullshit” and other allegedly indecent words are, in very rare cases — namely Saving Private Ryan and Schinder’s List — OK coming from the mouths of white people. But when black blues musicians say “bullshit,” the FCC rules them profane. That cultural apartheid is the net result of its new fine against the Martin Scorcese documentary on PBS, The Blues: Godfathers and Sons. Indeed, FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein dissented in this part of the ruling, saying that “the course language is part of the culture of the invidivual being portrayed.”

In this, the FCC props itself up as not just our national nanny but our official national cultural critic. They decide what is appropriate and what is not. They decide what has redeeming social and artistic value and what does not. So in their view, films about white people in war — by Steven Spielberg, it so happens — are appropriate forums for bullshit. But films about black musicians are not of sufficient cultural value to allow it.

Now add to that the fact that “bullshit” is now ruled to be profane and offensive but “nigger” is not.

This slope couldn’t get slipperier. Gotcha again.

: Pulling back from the political absurd to the culturally sublime, it is also utterly ridiculous that the FCC contends it is enforcing community standards when it says that the nation as a whole finds bullshit to be among of the most offensive words in the language. Show me the man or woman — or, yes, child on a playground — who has not said “bullshit.” Show me one, and you will have found me a liar. Go to Google and you will find 30 million uses of bullshit. Bullshit is part of our language, part of our culture, part of our politics, part of our democracy. Those are not our community standards the FCC is enforcing. They are enforcing the fetish of the so-called Parents Television Council and their ilk. By stretching to make shit not merely indecent but now profane and by stretching again to include the s-word variants in that ruling — thus specifically encompassing bullshit — the FCC far overextended not only its dubious authority but also common sense. Gotcha again.

So let’s say the FCC reconsiders its foolish ways and decides that bullshit is, indeed, political speech and thus protected beyond even its reach. This, too, illustrates the absurdity of all this. What happens when that protestor yells the next time that Bush’s war is the byproduct of a rat or a monkey or an owl? Does the FCC has to decide which animals’ shit is protected? That is the level of absurdity we have reached here.

At the Foursquare conference recently, I questioned FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, saying that in the room we were hearing CEOs of major worldwide corporations calling on the FCC to pay attention to the urgent business of preparing our telecommunications infrastructure to protect us in case of disaster or attack and also the vital necessity to catch up to Korea and even France in broadband to protect our industry and our future. Yet, I complained, he was wasting his time instead, on farts.

And bullshit.

: I am no lawyer and don’t play one on TV, but I believe that the FCC has now violated my civil right to speak truth to power any time I am on TV or radio. They went too far when they banned not just shit but bullshit and banned it presumptively. Even Commissioner Adelstein acknowleges on On the Media that if the FCC “oversteps in these cases and the court knocks us down… it would actually take a Constitutional amendment, amending the First Amendment, to get the FCC authority back.” That sounds like an opportunity to me.

So I believe there is cause for action against the FCC. I would like to see the newsmakers who want to call bullshit, and the journalists who ought to call bullshit, and the broadcasters who think that stopping them out of fear is bullshit gang up to take on the FCC and the archaic and unconstitutional law that makes them think they can and do what they have done.

It is time to stand up in defense of bullshit.

Heard an absurd interview with Karen Hughes, our undersecretary of public diplomacy (reach: flack-in-chief), on NPR this morning, in which she said our country just isn’t friendly enough to visitors. She sounded amazed to find that we send U.S. citizens to one line and everyone else to another line at the airport. By the standard, even France is mean. She quoted an exchange student who said he thought he was forced to take his shoes off because he was African and black — even though, of course, everyone around him was doing likewise. I wonder what he was studying; it better have nothing to do with the power of observation. And her solution? She met with our head of Homeland Security to create a pilot program to make arriving at the airport friendlier. They’re going to put up banners (and what should they say? take your shoes off, please?) and show videos of what it’s like to live in America (even as Congress passes new legislation to make that tougher). What should they show: Friends? The aggressive cluelessness is shocking.