Author: Digital Meme

Categories
Politics

Tony Bruman from Al Jazeera, begs the question: USA censorship on a big scale?

Al Jazeera is available in Canada now, thanks to a grassroots effort to make it so.

You don’t need to love the program, or even watch it, to feel that some form of wide scale, highly visible and excepted censorship is going on in the USA when a big legitimate news service is denied access to most cable services across the States. Are you OK with that?

Or do you want Al Jazeera to be a news option available to you on your cable programing? If it isn’t, why isn’t it? Is US media self-censoring/censored? Are we free to think for ourselves or is there a self-selected group that control what and how news reaches us?

The Huffingtong Post covers the question in this article: Al Jazeera English Blacked Out Across Most Of U.S. – which include these links to take action if you want to see Al Jazeera available to all Americans, not just Canadians, South Americans and some people in Washington D.C. (ironic, huh?), Vermont and Ohio:

  • http://www.iwantaje.net/
  • http://www.comcast.com/Corporate/Customers/contactus/ContactUs.html
  • http://www.timewarner.com/corp/contacts_support.html
  • http://www.directv.com/DTVAPP/content/contact_us

A good article by AlterNet: Will Al Jazeera English Revolutionize America’s TV News Landscape? – covers the same ground in more depth.

From the article:

According to the Pew Research Center’s annual State of the News Media report, coverage of international events by American media fell by about 40 percent in 2008. Thus has a bizarre situation arisen: at the most interconnected time in history, accurate and comprehensive news of the outside world is disappearing — and with it an informed public.

The news service is available online: Al Jazeera streaming live online

Categories
Asides

Marilyn Monroe had something to say

“I don’t mind being burdened with being glamorous and sexual. Beauty and femininity are ageless and can’t be contrived, and glamour, although the manufacturers won’t like this, cannot be manufactured. Not real glamour; it’s based on femininity.” by Marilyn Monroe

Categories
Asides Interesting People

Julian Assange

‘Unlike other organizations we always release the full source of material at the same time… the articles we do are based upon the full source of material so everything we do is like science, it is checkable, independently checkable, because the information which has informed our conclusions is there. Just like scientific papers, which is based on experimental data, must make the experimental data available to other scientists and to the public, if they want their papers to be published. It is our philosophy that raw source material must be made available so that conclusions can be checkable. And that is what we did with Der Spiegel.

But we are also an activist organization, the method is transparency, the goal is justice; part of the method is journalism. It is our end goal to achieve justice.’
by Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks

Categories
Design

From Cigarette vending machine to art vending machine

Progress. Take those awful dispensers of death and convert them to burpers of art. That is what Art*O*Mat does. They refurbish cigarette dispensers into art dispensers. Each machine gets an individualized makeover before it’s shipped off to various locations, from museum shops to small art boutiques. Cute idea.

Categories
Asides

Emile de Antonio

“I don’t think history is Kleenex, it is not a disposable item you put to your nose and chuck out. History has to be recaptured – history dies unless we recapture it.” by Emile de Antonio (director 1968 anti-Vietnam War documentary In The Year of the Pig)