Human and Dense Dancers

It's a weird feeling when a seemingly hokey, ridiculously popular song keeps going through your head. I usually have relatively little-known songs, or even songs only I know, go through my head. It's even weirder when a song goes through your head and it takes you a while to realize that the words reflect something going on in your life. 

Hilarious bit from Wikipedia re: confusion about the lyrics:

'There remains confusion and debate over the line "Are we human, or are we dancer?" [or "denser"] ... the lyrics were inspired by a disparaging comment made by Hunter S. Thompson, where he stated America was raising "a generation of dancers". ... [Killers frontman Brandon Richard] Flowers [said] "It's supposed to be a dance song, [the beat] goes with the chorus...If you can't put that together, you're an idiot".'

Right, like, dense. It all works. 

Calder-inspired logo for accuracy.org

A couple of months ago I had a great talk with several of my colleagues at the Institute for Public Accuracy -- Hollie, Layla and Ben -- about our new webpage and we decided part of what could be great about our webpage was the address, accuracy.org -- and that we should highlight that further. This got me doodling lots of things about accuracy.org. (One long-standing thing was spelling it out: double you double you double you dot a see sea you are a see why dot oh are gee -- I wondered if accuracy.org was the longest url where each letter is also a word. Pretty sure that's not the case, but I'll leave that to the gamers.) 

But I eventually came up with this:

Accuracy.org

Which is obviously Calder-inspired. Today I realized, along with millions of others, through google's temporary logo (which my intern Sam notes reacts to his moving laptop) that today is Calder's birthday. One thing that's not quite right about the google logo is that it depicts each piece of the mobile as appearing monochrome as they move, which is not how they appear in the real world. If really you look closely at a real-life Calder as it turns, because of the lighting, it changes color -- especially when it "flips" and you see the other side (indeed, "real-life" is part of what a Calder is about, mimicking life, "turning a leaf over"). That's part of what inspired my "a" -- seeing things "from both sides", "in a different light". Other obvious influences -- of motion, of pieces making up a whole -- are the Yin - Yang as well as Umberto Boccioni's "Unique Forms of Continuity in Space". Need to keep tinkering with the new logo it before we put it on our webpage, but have been using it on the twitter feed, @accuracy. 

Murdoch's Maneuvers, piece on FCC rolling over for Murdoch from 1994

This was a sidebar in my 1994 piece on "Felons on the Air: Does GE's Ownership of NBC Violate the Law?" for FAIR's magazine Extra!

Murdoch's Maneuvers

FCC regulatory decisions generally receive scant press coverage. The 1993 FCC waiver that allowed Rupert Murdoch to control a TV station (New York's WNYW) and a daily newspaper (the New York Post) in the same market was an exception.

But some media accounts were bewildered as to why Murdoch would want the money-losing Post. One obvious reason, which indicates why such cross-ownership is prohibited in the first place, is that the Post could promote Murdoch's Fox TV network.

This would hardly be a new thing for Murdoch. As James Ledbetter pointed out in the Village Voice (4/13/93): 

In 1989, Fox privately settled a $21million federal fraud suit charging it with, among other things, unlawfully padding its pockets by using Fox TV stations to advertise Fox films. Disregarding FCC reporting requirements, Fox didn't disclose that settlement when applying to renew the license of its Los Angeles station, KTTV.

The FCC review board said that omission, along with other Fox misconduct, "shows either carelessness or arrogance, depending on how the Fox compliance record is interpreted and we cannot sweep them aside lest we condone such conduct on the part of all FCC licensees." However, wrote Ledbetter, "Like good little deregulators, the board then promptly renewed KTTV's license, effectively sweeping the misconduct aside."

Just as troubling were some reports of how Murdoch obtained the cross-ownership waiver. In the mid-'80s, Murdoch had obtained a temporary waiver that allowed him to control the Boston Herald, Boston Fox affiliateWFXT, the New York Post and the New York Fox affiliate. However, he was forced to sell the Post and WFXT after Sen. Edward Kennedy (D.-Mass.) -- a frequent target in the Herald and other Murdoch outlets -- got a prohibition on waivers inserted into an appropriations bill in 1987.

Though a court overturned the 1987 prohibition, Kennedy could still have caused problems for Murdoch. Instead, he backed Murdoch's 1993 repurchase of the New York Post. Daily Variety (4/12/93) noted that shortly after Murdoch received Kennedy's backing, Fox put on hiatus a hard-hitting documentary on alleged ties between John F. Kennedy and the Mafia. "It appears from the timing of the decision to suspend production on the JFK/Mafia project that Murdoch doesn't want to do anything that might anger his longtime adversary, Sen. Edward Kennedy," Daily Variety reported.

Allan Sloan noted in New York Newsday (10/24/93) that on the same day that Murdoch's News Corp. re-acquired the New York Post (with Kennedy's backing), it announced an option to buy back WFXT, saying that it would give up the Kennedy-bashing Boston Herald. "Could that be the sound of two backs being scratched?" Sloan wondered.

In early 1994, Murdoch announced the sale of the Boston Herald--on favorable terms--to his close associate Patrick Purcell, who was to step down from several positions in Murdoch's operations (Boston Globe, 2/5/94).