How much entertainment versus news can be found in American mainstream television news shows? Read the full story

What are your thoughts on this one? Fox News aired a segment suggesting the federal government lower the minimum wage to help workers and the economy. I’m not too sure this is something that would be called for during the economic times we are currently in.

Credit f0r the video to RawStory.com

Glenn Beck’s gold-gate problem

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Hey, Tiger Woods: Why so dumb about tech?

When it comes to digital embarrassment, celebs are apparently just stupid

updated 7:59 a.m. CT, Thurs., Dec . 3, 2009

Not since Prince Charles of Wales told then-mistress Camilla Parker-Bowles of his desire to be her feminine hygiene product has an adulterous celebrity been so humiliated by a telephone communiqué. We’re talking about Tiger Woods here, and the voice mail message he left to an alleged mistress, released earlier this week by Us Weekly. In review:

“Hey, it’s, uh, it’s Tiger. I need you to do me a huge favor. Um, can you please, uh, take your name off your phone. My wife went through my phone. And, uh, may be calling you. If you can, please take your name off that and, um, and what do you call it just have it as a number on the voice mail, just have it as your telephone number. That’s it, OK. You gotta do this for me. Huge. Quickly. All right. Bye.”

Read the full story

by  Chloe Albanesius

News Corp. will likely pull all of its newspaper content from Google News once its switches from an ad-supported to a subscription-based model, according to Chairman Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch on Friday sat down with Sky News, of which News Corp. is a partial owner, to discuss the impact of the Internet on news, among other things.

The Australian media tycoon has been critical of the Google News aggregation model, as well as similar offerings from Microsoft and Ask.com, which he says is tantamount to stealing. When asked why he has not pulled News Corp.-owned material from Google News, Murdoch said that it will likely happen down the road.

“I think we will,” Murdoch said. “But that’s going to be when we start charging. We do it already with the Wall Street Journal.”

Google has argued that its news aggregator simply points users to content online and actually helps drive traffic to news sites. Murdoch was not impressed by Internet traffic and said he was more interested in finding loyal readers.

“What’s the point of having someone … who likes a headline they see in Google, come to us?” he asked. “The fact is, there’s not enough advertising in the world to go around to make all the Web sites profitable. We’d rather have fewer people coming to our Web site but paying.”

At this point, users can see the first paragraph of most articles in the Wall Street Journal, but to read the rest of the story online, they must sign up for a subscription. Murdoch was not sure that that is the approach he’ll take with all his publications.

“There’s a doctrine called fair use, which we believe could be challenged in the courts and barred altogether, but you know, it’s OK,” he said. “We’re getting a lot of advertising revenue, so we’ll take that slowly.”

In addition to the Journal, News Corp. owns Dow Jones, the New York Post, six newspapers in the U.K., including The Sunday Times and The Sun, and 25 publications in Australia. The company also owns Fox News and social networking site MySpace.

Murdoch brushed off the suggestion that people will not be able to afford subscriptions.

“Everyone can afford a newspaper; they’re the cheapest things in the world,” he said. “Think what you get out of it. It’s fabulous. And it’ll be even cheaper when you get it electronically.”

He was also not concerned about competing with publications that stick with the free, ad-supported model. “We’re better and if you look at most of [the competitors'] stuff, it’s stolen from the newspapers now and we’ll be suing them for copyright,” Murdoch said. “They’ll have to spend a lot more money on a lot more reporters to cover the world when they can’t steal from newspapers.”

http://www.pcmag.com/

White House Communications Director Anita Dunn declared a war with Fox News this week and this morning on This Week, Axelrod reinforced their stance saying “[FOX] is really not news.”

I asked him if he’s worried his strategy is fortifying his enemy?

“I’m not concerned, Mr. Murdoch has a talent for making money,” Axelrod said.

“The only argument that Anita was making is that they are not really a news organization, if you watch even its not even their commentators, but a lot of their news program. It’s really not news, it’s pushing a point of view and the bigger thing is that other news organizations like yours, ought not to treat them that way. And we’re not going to treat them that way, we’re going to appear on their shows and participate, but understanding that they represent a point of view.”

http://blogs.abcnews.com/

White House Urges Other Networks to Disregard Fox News

Senior Obama administration officials took to the airwaves Sunday to accuse Fox News of pushing a particular point of view and not being a real news network.

The White House is calling on other news organizations to isolate and alienate Fox News as it sends out top advisers to rail against the cable channel as a Republican Party mouthpiece.

Top political strategists question the decision by the Obama administration to escalate its offensive against Fox News. And as of Monday, the four other major television networks had not given any indication that they intend to sever their ties with Fox News.

But several top White House officials have taken aim at Fox News since communications director Anita Dunn branded Fox “opinion journalism masquerading as news” in an interview last Sunday.

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told CNN on Sunday that President Obama does not want “the CNNs and the others in the world [to] basically be led in following Fox.”

Obama senior adviser David Axelrod went further by calling on media outlets to join the administration in declaring that Fox is “not a news organization.”

“Other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way,” Axelrod counseled ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “We’re not going to treat them that way.”

Asked Monday about another Axelrod claim that Fox News is just trying to make money, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that while all media companies fall under that description, “I would say sometimes programming can be tilted toward accentuating those profits.”

But by urging other news outlets to side with the administration, Obama officials dramatically upped the ante in the war of words that began earlier this month with Dunn’s comments.

So far, none of the four other major networks has given any indication that they wish to disinvite Fox News from the White House pool — the rotation through which the networks share the costs and duties of White House coverage and the most significant interaction among the news channels.

The White House stopped providing guests to “Fox News Sunday” after host Chris Wallace fact-checked controversial assertions made by Tammy Duckworth, assistant secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, in August.

Dunn said fact-checking an administration official was “something I’ve never seen a Sunday show do.”

“She criticized ‘Fox News Sunday’ last week for fact-checking — fact-checking — an administration official,” Wallace said Sunday. “They didn’t say that our fact-checking was wrong. They just said that we had dared to fact-check.”

“Let’s fact-check Anita Dunn, because last Sunday she said that Fox ignores Republican scandals, and she specifically mentioned the scandal involving Nevada senator John Ensign,” Wallace added. “A number of Fox News shows have run stories about Senator Ensign. Anita Dunn’s facts were just plain wrong.”

Fox News senior vice president Michael Clemente said: “Surprisingly, the White House continues to declare war on a news organization instead of focusing on the critical issues that Americans are concerned about like jobs, health care and two wars. The door remains open and we welcome a discussion about the facts behind the issues.”

Observers on both sides of the political aisle questioned the White House’s decision to continue waging war on a news organization, saying the move carried significant political risks.

Democratic strategist Donna Brazile said on CNN: “I don’t always agree with the White House. And on this one here I would disagree.”

David Gergen, who has worked for Democratic and Republican presidents, said: “I totally agree with Donna Brazile.” Gergen added that White House officials have “gotten themselves into a fight they don’t necessarily want to be in. I don’t think it’s in their best interest.”

“The faster they can get this behind them, the more they can treat Fox like one other organization, the easier they can get back to governing, and then put some people out on Fox,” Gergen said on CNN. “I mean, for goodness sakes, you know, you engage in the debate.

“What Americans want is a robust competition of ideas, and they ought to be willing to go out there and mix it up with some strong conservatives on Fox, just as there are strong conservatives on CNN like Bill Bennett.”

Bennett expressed outrage that Dunn told an audience of high school students this year that Mao Zedong, the founder of communist China, was one of “my favorite political philosophers.”

“Having the spokesman do this, attack Fox, who says that Mao Zedong is one of the most influential figures in her life, was not…a small thing; it’s a big thing,” Bennett said on CNN. “When she stands up, in a speech to high school kids, says she’s deeply influenced by Mao Zedong, that — I mean, that is crazy.”

Fox News contributor Karl Rove, who was the top political strategist to former President George W. Bush, said: “This is an administration that’s getting very arrogant and slippery in its dealings with people. And if you dare to oppose them, they’re going to come hard at you and they’re going to cut your legs off.”

“This is a White House engaging in its own version of the media enemies list. And it’s unhelpful for the country and undignified for the president of the United States to so do,” Rove added. “That is over- the-top language. We heard that before from Richard Nixon.”

Media columnist David Carr of The New York Times warned that the White House war on Fox “may present a genuine problem for Mr. Obama, who took great pains during the campaign to depict himself as being above the fray of over-heated partisan squabbling.”

“While there is undoubtedly a visceral thrill in finally setting out after your antagonists, the history of administrations that have successfully taken on the media and won is shorter than this sentence,” Carr wrote over the weekend. “So far, the only winner in this latest dispute seems to be Fox News. Ratings are up 20 percent this year.”

He added: “The administration, by deploying official resources against a troublesome media organization, seems to have brought a knife to a gunfight.”

After Andrew Breitbart posted a video of an ACORN employee in San Bernardino, California, claiming that she had killed her ex-husband, Fox News’ Glenn Beck, Karl Rove, Greta Van Susteren, and Sean Hannity promoted it without fact-checking it or indicating that they had contacted ACORN for a response to the claim. In fact, ACORN stated that the employee made up the story because she recognized that the actors in the video “were clearly playing with” her so she “matched their false scenario with her own false scenarios,” and, indeed, the San Bernardino Police Department has said her claim is false. Read the full story

Andrew Breibart’s BigGovernment.com has got to be the strangest anomoly to hit Holllywood since Reagan was elected President.   A conservative website smack dab in the middle of the liberal capital of the world, Hollywood California, BigGovernment.com is becoming more than just a thorn in the side of the left.

The buzz all over the internet this morning is BigGovernment.com’s exlusive of the transcript from James O’Keefe’s investigation that uncovered the Baltimore ACORN chapter promoting fraud and perpetuating child prostitution.

The fact that this had to be exposed by an independent film maker and broke on an internet site is just one more example of the entrenched media’s kid glove approach to all things politically left.  The recent Van Jones fiasco but another.

It’s one thing to swoon for a candidate so much you use your power to sway a national election, tis totally another to completely shirk responsibility to investigate and report on ovbiously fraudelent organizations because it might hurt the image of the man you put in power.

From Dan Rather at the Aspen Institute to the the Marburger brothes in the L.A. Times the entrenched media is constant in it’s lamenting of, and crying for, the saving of “quality”, “investigative”, journalism and news.

They whine of the internet stealing their profits, leaving them withouth the financial resources to do the hard hitting investigative reporting required for a free republic.

Yet a 25 year old independent film maker has just exposed yet another fraud from that Obama favorite organization ACORN.

I wonder how O’Keefe’s budget compares to that of the L.A. or New York Times news budgets?

The lesson to be learned in this whole mess, is not whether a media outlet is right or left, old or new, but rather if it is willing to just report THE TRUTH.

After all the slobbering from the entrenched media over the President’s speech last night and CNN’s misleading poll (45% democrat to only 18% republicans polled) reporting, is there any doubt the only truth report is the administration’s version?

No doubt Breitbart and O’Keefe will be trashed by ACORN and their supporters, but somehow I don’t think they’ll mind.

http://www.examiner.com/

ACORN Officials Could Face Criminal Charges for Trying to Help ‘Pimp’ and ‘Prostitute’

Staffers for the community organizing group ACORN could face criminal charges after being caught on video encouraging a man and woman posing as a pimp and prostitute to commit federal tax fraud and offering to help them — for a fee — to establish a child brothel, legal experts say.

In a video made public Thursday, two visitors to an ACORN office in Baltimore told staffers they needed assistance securing housing where the woman, a 20-year-old who called herself “Kenya,” could continue to run her prostitution business.

An ACORN official told the couple how to falsify tax forms and seek illegal benefits for 13 “very young” girls from El Salvador that they said they wanted to import as prostitutes.

Though no tax forms were filed and the child prostitutes didn’t exist, the ACORN official engaged in “numerous acts of criminal facilitation,” said Judge Andrew Napolitano, FOX News senior judicial analyst.

“Criminal facilitation occurs whenever a person encourages, enables, entices, or explains to another how to commit crimes with the real purpose of helping that person to commit those crimes” — a violation the ACORN employee “committed in full,” he said.

Napolitano said the worker could also face charges for criminal conspiracy, though each charge would require a heavier burden to prove: a so-called “act of furtherance” — a concrete move that makes the conspiracy active.

Napolitano outlined eight crimes the ACORN worker could potentially have committed that could bring a total sentence of 24 years in prison, including criminal facilitation and conspiracy to:

• (a) commit prostitution

• (b) operate a prostitution ring

• (c) file false documents with taxing and other government authorities

• (d) file false documents with a bank [also known as bank fraud]

• (e) violate numerous immigration laws

• (f) transport children into the U.S. for immoral purposes

• (g) transport women into the U.S. for immoral purposes [also known as violating the Mann Act]

• (h) impair the welfare of minors.

But not all legal experts agreed that ACORN had committed a crime. Trial attorney Lee Armstong said that the employee had engaged in “repulsive … disgusting behavior,” but nothing illegal occurred because the entire scenario was a sham.

“For aiding and abetting tax evasion, for aiding and abetting child prostitution … you need the actual crime,” said Armstrong, an attorney for Jones Day in New York. “That’s what’s missing here.”

Armstrong said that the videotape appeared to show the ACORN official hatching a conspiracy, but no violation occurred because the 25-year-old filmmaker was only “pretending” to be a 25-year-old pimp.

“You need an actual agreement between two people to commit a crime. If one person is just faking it, you don’t have a meeting of the minds, you don’t have a conspiracy,” Armstrong told FOX News. “How do you clap with one hand?”

ACORN — the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now — calls itself a network of families “working together for social justice and stronger communities,” according to its Web site.

But the organization has been accused by conservatives and Republicans of committing fraud in voter registration drives around the country, and reaction to the videotape came swiftly after its release on Thursday.

“Taxpayers should be outraged that their money has gone to an organization that, in addition to facing charges of voter fraud and tax violations, is willing to facilitate prostitution,” said Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa.

“As this video confirms, ACORN continues to operate as a criminal enterprise.”

In a selection from the video, ACORN officials treated the “pimp’s” illegal schemes with nonchalance and offered to help further what they knew to be crimes.

“It’s illegal. So I am not hearing this, I am not hearing this,” said an ACORN staffer who identified herself as an accountant. “You talk too much. Don’t give up no information you’re not asked.”

Because the group receives millions of dollars in federal grants, Napolitano said, “ACORN agents and employees are required by law to adhere to high standards of lawful and ethical behavior; standards akin to those required by law of federal employees.”

ACORN suggested a plan of action for the purported pimp and prostitute, but did not fill out tax forms with any false information. But because the official sought a $50 fee for ACORN’s services, a conspiracy charge could still be considered, a defense attorney told FOX News.

“Conspiracy requires an agreement to do something unlawful and an act in furtherance,” said Mark Eiglarsh, a New York-based attorney. “There’s an agreement to assist in creating the brothel, in tax evasion, a number of other offenses.”

The act in furtherance, he suggested, could be the staffer’s seeking payment for the work. “I think that a prosecutor … would agree to go forward on a conspiracy count,” he said.

Whether or not prosecutors charge any ACORN officials in Baltimore, the filmmaker himself could be in hot water.

A Maryland state statute requires consent from all parties whenever a conversation is taped, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Violations of the law are punishable by a maximum of five years in jail and a fine up to $10,000.

But that statute does not apply to videotape recordings — only to phone calls or other electronic “communications,” Napolitano argued — meaning the filmmaker is likely in the clear.

http://www.foxnews.com/

This is good news for Ron Paul and his Campaign for Liberty. There have been threats by the Fed and others that auditing the Fed would have devastating consequences for the American, and world, economy. What exactly are they hiding?

Check out the videos from Ron Paul and others for some more information on this topic. Read the full story

Rupert Murdoch announced plans to charge for all online content of his newspaper and TV empire, in what is possibly the boldest move of any media mogul to boost revenue from online news. Since Murdoch’s News Corp empire spans the globe, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Fox News and basically anything ever published in Australia ever, this would send shock waves through a barren online media landscape that is gasping for revenue streams. But will it work? Read the full story

Interesting. Glenn Beck is one of those people who most either tend to hate or love, but this wouldn’t surprise me if proven to be true….

Glenn Beck says that cars.gov website will track your computer

On his Fox News show, host Glenn Beck warned that the government’s Cars.gov website allows for tracking of your computer activity. Part of the website says “This application provides access to the DoT CARS system. When logged on to the CARS system, your computer is considered a Federal computer system and is the property of the U.S. Government.” You can go on and read the rest of the fine print if you’d like, but you do so at your own risk. Read the full story