MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann delivered an emotional special commentary on August 17 about the mislabeled “Ground Zero Mosque” in which he was on the right side of issue, wrong to inject too much emotion into his comments, and delusional – thinking he was Edward R. Murrow.

See for yourself:

Keith Olbermann\’s Special Commentary

Olbermann ends his intelligently crafted, emotional diatribe with Edward R. Murrow’s legendary sign-off, “Good night and good luck.”  Was this a reverential attempt to evoke the memory of Murrow or a delusion that he had transmogrified into Murrow?

Having a sense of Olberman’s gigantic self-absorption, I suspect the latter, which creates an equally gigantic dilemma.  I want to despise Olbermann for being so egotistical as to compare himself to the rational journalistic icon and crusader Murrow, but I also want to love him for his brilliantly crafted and argued commentary in which he correctly debunks the simplistic, stupid, polarizing, intolerant, repressive wing-nut label and position on the Lower East Side community center.

As a New Yorker, it’s so offensive to have wing-nuts from Alaska and Georgia trying to tell us who can worship where in our city.  Their position is so blatantly anti-Obama, anti-religious freedom, anti-American partisan and political as to be ridiculous.  But of course, calling wing-nuts’ positions ridiculous is an oxymoron.

Olbermann’s commentary would have been more effective and persuasive if it had been delivered in Murrow’s calm, rational, authoritative style.  When you watched Murrow, you didn’t know he was angry by the tone of his delivery but by the force and logic of his argument.

On the other hand, Olberman’s most obvious and visible message is rage – raw emotion that becomes the message and which means, unintentionally, that he is playing the O’Reilly, Beck, Hannity, wing-nut game.  Therefore, when a viewer looks at Olbermann’s commentary, the first reaction is to the anger, to the emotion (after all, it’s TV) and not to the rational argument.

And that’s the problem with TV, the medium and, thus, the emotion is the message.  The wing-nuts have mastered the medium with their simplistic, stupid, polarizing, intolerant, repressive messages, and when Olbermann plays their emotional, angry game, the logic of his words is lost.

Too bad, because he’s absolutely right on the issue.

J. Craig Venters’s seriously overreached when he claimed last week that his lab was the first to create synthetic life. Television has been creating synthetic life on a massive scale for decades and video games have been doing it for years.

What could possibly be more synthetic than family life in “The Honeymooners,” “I Love Lucy,” “Father Knows Best,” “Ozzie and Harriet,” or “Leave It To Beaver,” or “The Waltons?” That’s easy – the longest running sitcom in television history is also the most synthetic (it does even use live actors, it’s animated) and the most injurious to the image of fatherhood – “The Simpsons.”

Because television has always been in the advertising-delivery business and interested only peripherally in its effect on culture and society, it pitches the appeal of the majority of its entertainment content to the largest segment of mass consumers, lower- and middle-income women 18-49.

Is it no wonder that the heroes of this entertainment eye candy are savvy, long-suffering, loving, and sometimes funny women who show up their clueless, often childish, self-centered husbands? And as the years go by, it seems like the men get dumber and more helpless until we finally get to the ultimate stupid loser, Homer Simpson.

Network television entertainment programming doesn’t attempt to mirror or even define real life; it tries to embody in a video format the dreams of its primary target audience in order to sell this audience soap. Dreams are not reality, they are a synthetic, fuzzy, exaggerated replays of real-life problems in which our minds attempt a subconscious workout of our daily challenges.

And are television reality programs not synthetic? “Survivor,” “Bridezilla,” and their clones are as synthetic as the sitcoms mentioned above. The ultimate of being synthetic, or, more appropriately, of lying (the two words are have essentially the same meaning at their core) is television claiming that their programs are “reality” programs – it is the same newspeak (words the opposite of truth, as in Orwell’s 1984) as Fox News constantly claiming it is “fair and balanced.”

So J. Craig Venters and his brilliant colleagues in his lab might have created synthetic life, which brings up a few ethical issues, but it isn’t even close to being as synthetic or unethical as most television entertainment programming.

Guest blogger Darryl Smith of the University of Western Florida responds intelligently to my satiric blog post about the FCC reviewing buggy-whip rules:

I think broadcast TV will be with us for a number of years. While there are always concerns that newer technologies will make heritage technologies obsolete, the heritage technologies seem to evolve to maintain their existence and relevance.
Dead tree newspapers are indeed a dying industry. Newspapers will evolve to take advantage of new technologies such as digital paper, e-readers, etc. The industry will remain the same with only a change in the method of distribution and frequency of content delivery.
Over the air TV will have a longer run to obsolescence. Given the current economy, a lot of people are reducing their discretionary spending on cable and satellite services. They are able to receive high definition programming over the air via antenna. Some that maintain subscription based services, still receive over the air signals for high definition programming simply because of quality issues. The over the air signal looks better due to the amount of compression used by cable and satellite systems.
Residents of areas prone to weather emergencies such as hurricanes will maintain antennas for reception of TV signals. During these periods, power is often restored long before cable service.
Over the air broadcast is essential for the safety and security of the country as well as to ensure that all Americans, no matter what their economic circumstances, have access to news, information and entertainment.
While not as prevalent, buggy whips are still needed and used for varied purposes.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced this week that it was going to look into its rules on media ownership, primarily how many radio and television stations and newspapers and cable systems one company can own in a market.

This announcement came five days after Google announced the introduction of Google TV, a platform that would allow people who had the latest generation of TV sets that connect directly to the internet to surf the web and use Facebook and Twitter as they watched video programming, including TV network programming.

TV sets that connect directly to the web will eventually disintermediate local TV and radio stations and cable systems, just like craigslist.com and the web has ruined the dead-tree newspaper business.

TV station signals that don’t travel through coaxial or fiber optic cables are received via rabbit ears and roof antennae, which are as up-to-date technologies as buggy whips, and are headed for the same scrap piles that are also filled with typewriters and dial telephones.

Passing regulations about how many radio and TV stations a legal entity can own is like passing regulations about how much leather can be used in making buggy whips or how many typewriters someone can own.

I guess the bureaucrats need to have something to do. If they can’t prevent oil spills, then maybe they can regulate buggy whips.

Yesterday I bought $20 worth of lottery tickets because, according to my rules about buying lottery tickets, the jackpots for Mega Millions and Power Ball were both over $20 million. I don’t buy tickets when the jackpots are under this arbitrary amount because it’s no fun to fantasize about a net take of under $5 million (if you take a lump-sum pay-out instead of a 26-year payout, you divide the stated jackpot by four to adjust for taxes and the estimated lump-sum discount to be on the safe side).
Of course I could use a couple of million dollars, but any amount under $5 million is not enough to really lust for; it doesn’t get my greed juice flowing. The current Power Ball jackpot is $142, so dreaming about $35.5 million gets my dopamine gushing – all my grandchildren will be able to go to Ivy League colleges and I can buy without feeling guilty that Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar watch I lust for.
I suspect that something similar happens in the media and, especially, with internet media startup companies. When people start working in media organizations, many of them are motivated by the idea of serving the public with news, information, and ways to connect, communicate, and build community.
That’s the way was it was when many media companies were privately owned by families or controlled by a founder, such as when the Bingham family owned the Louisville Courier Journal or when founder William S. Paley ran CBS.
A study in Journalism Quarterly showed that rates for advertising were lower in family-owned newspapers than in publicly owned companies such as Gannett. Family-owned newspapers were apparently more interested in serving the community than in maximizing profits, the goal of public companies.
Before Larry Tisch, a non-broadcaster and bottom-feeding investor bought controlling interest in CBS in 1986, the notion of the CBS News Division making a profit was anathema to Paley – news was a public service supported by the Entertainment Division. It wasn’t until CBS was bought by Tisch and, for that matter, until GE bought NBC also in 1986, that the news divisions were considered profit centers.
When they became profit centers, as necessitated by the culture of maximizing profit in publicly owned companies, the news divisions stopped providing balanced news and became entertainment.
Similarly, when profit pressure enters the picture, newspapers and magazines often tear down the walls between marketing and editorial in order to produce more popular, more saleable inventory.
Fast forward to 2003. Mark Zuckerberg was dumped by his girlfriend at Harvard and had a few brews. He was alone and brooding in his dorm room, so to do something to take his mind off his pain, he wrote on his blog, “Let the hacking begin,” and created a program that eventually became Facebook.
Mark got lucky and Facebook caught on; by 2006 it was the right platform at the right time. In that year legend has it that Zuckerberg turned down $750 million for Facebook, headquartered in Silicon Valley’s Palo Alto, because he felt it was worth $1 billion.
In 2008 Zuckerberg proudly announced in an annual meeting (referred to as f8) that Facebook’s mission was to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” (Click here to see him say it on You Tube).
This statement was around the time Mark hired a Google executive, Sheryl Sandberg, as chief operating officer. According to the New York Times:

Ms. Sandberg, currently vice president for global online sales and operations at Google, joined the search giant in 2001 and helped develop its immensely lucrative online advertising programs, AdWords and AdSense. She will join Facebook later this month to work closely with Mr. Zuckerberg, a co-founder of Facebook, the company said Tuesday.
“A big theme of this hire is that there are parts of our operations that, to use a pretty trite phrase, need to be taken to the next level,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in an interview. Ms. Sandberg will help Facebook expand overseas and develop an advertising network that will help justify its carbonated $15 billion valuation, set last year when Microsoft invested $240 million for 1.6 percent of the company. She will also oversee Facebook’s marketing, human resources and privacy departments — essentially guiding how Facebook presents itself and its intentions to the outside world.

Clearly Ms. Sandberg was hired to maximize revenue and profits.
When Facebook was worth $1 billion, Zuckerberg didn’t seem to feel he needed an experienced revenue and profit maximizing COO. The amount wasn’t enough to get his greed juices flowing; the mission was to connect people, not make him and his colleagues filthy rich.
But it seems that when Microsoft and Russian investment firm DST invested in Facebook and shot its valuation past $15 billion that Zuckerberg’s dopamine started gushing. And according to Silicon Alley Insider, Facebook is now worth between $22- 33 billion, so Mark must be fantasizing about joining the ranks of Slim, Gates, and Buffett.
Which might well explain Sheryl Sanberg’s entrance on the scene as COO, a job in which she will control Facebook’s “marketing, human resources and privacy departments.” It doesn’t look like a coincidence that soon after her oversight of both marketing (maximizing revenue) and privacy that Facebook’s problems with privacy issues began to accelerate.
Putting marketing and privacy under the oversight of a single executive is like tearing down the wall between the sales and editorial divisions in a newspaper or magazine – it undermines credibility and consumer trust.
More money for Facebook equals less privacy for its members. When Zuckerberg had a mission of connecting people, privacy was virtually sacrosanct, but when greed and Sandberg crept in, priorities, missions, and ethics became compromised.
Palo Alto, meet Wall Street – anything for a buck.

The New York Times featured a story in its Tuesday, May 11, Technology section titled “Missouri’s Newsy Changes Journalism on the iPad” that claims the “new startup Newsy.com has combined an innovative journalistic model, a low-cost Midwest business strategy and a beautiful touch-screen design to rocket to the Top 10 of News apps for the iPad in iTunes. Remember how the iPad was supposed to change journalism? Newsy could be an example of how it’s actually working…”
Quoting from The Times story, here’s how Newsy.com works:

Newsy doesn’t cover breaking news and it probably never will. Instead, the team waits until a topic is buzzing, then grabs video clips from multiple sources across the political perspective to combine into a short video segment. The resulting content is very clearly incorporating, with extensive attribution, the work of diverse news production teams from around the world. The breadth of editorial vision seems genuinely diverse, too. Clips from Fox News and Democracy Now! will both appear in the same stories at times.

The Newsy.com NY Times story appeared less than a week after Donald Graham, CEO, of the Washington Post Co. told employees of the Post-owned Newsweek magazine that the company was putting the venerable weekly news magazine up for sale.
And the day before the Newsy.com NY Times story, Time Magazine, in a grasping-at-straws maneuver, announced a new advertising guarantee.
Here’s what Advertising Age wrote about the Time offer:

One of the industry’s biggest publishers, Time Inc., and one of its biggest ad buyers, the Starcom MediaVest Group, are collaborating to develop promises that certain numbers of people will remember ads or take action on them. If a participating marketer’s campaign doesn’t achieve the promised result, Time Inc. will run free additional ads until it does.

The Time Inc. announcement reminded me that a revival of Neil Simon’s only musical, “Promises, Promises,” is now running on Broadway, or of the old advertising line, “promise her anything, but give her Arpege.” Time Inc. is desperately trying to promise results, engagement, more ads – anything – to put off the inevitable announcement that Time Warner is putting it up for sale.
Time magazine probably delayed that announcement a few years by going digital sooner than Newsweek did. It has a popular iPhone and iPad app. The well-established Time’s iPad app is currently ranked number six, two places higher than the unheralded startup Newsy.com’s app.
Time is trying, but its app is based on name recognition and soon the innovative Newsy.com that’s all video and that compares coverage of the same story from diverse news sources will stomp the single-sourced Time coverage.
Young people know Fox News and MSNBC are biased, that CNN is numbingly boring, and want to make their minds up themselves and on their mobile devices. Within five years more people will surf and watch video on the web on their mobile devices than on their computers.
While Newsy.com is fulfilling the mobile video news dreams of its consumers, Time is making promises to advertisers, not to its readers. That’s the reality of the new media (the consumer is in charge) and the self-imposed tragedy of the old media (the advertisers are in charge).
Is it any wonder Newsy.com is the future of mobile news?

On May 3, Media Daily News’s David Goetzl wrote: “No surprise here: the Tribune Co. has tapped an insider to take over its broadcasting division. Jerry Kersting replaces Ed Wilson, who departed last week.”
Why was it no surprise? Because Kersting is an old radio crony of controversial Tribune Co. CEO Randy Michaels, the former shock jock who clueless media mogul Sam Zell hired to run the Tribune Co., which, of course, is now in bankruptcy.
What does a beleaguered mainstream media company executive trying desperately to emerge from bankruptcy do? Innovate? Find new sources of revenue? Inspire the troops? No, he does what he’s always done, surround himself with cronies.
Cronies are loyal; no matter how many stupid mistakes you make, how many employees you harass, or how you completely demotivate associates with top-down, silly directives, such as Michael’s banning of 119 words in newscasts on Tribune-owned WGN-AM, cronies will tell you how brilliant, funny, and absolutely right you are.
And Kersting isn’t the only crony hired by CEO Michaels. In 2008 Broadcasting and Cable reported that:

Tribune made the announcement in an off-beat press release, headed, “Surely You Can’t Be Serious?,” and then went on to make light of the hire because Chase doesn’t have experience typically required of the head of an Internet division. In response to follow-up questions, a Tribune spokesman said the release was meant to demonstrate a “‘new’ Tribune and a new way of thinking about things.”
Chase joins Sean Compton, who was brought on last week as Tribune’s senior VP of programming, leaving his position as VP of programming at Clear Channel/Premiere Radio Networks.
Michaels also hired Lee Abrams away from XM Satellite Radio, where he was chief creative officer for the past 10 years. At Tribune, Abrams is chief innovation officer.

There may not be any correlation between cronyism and bankruptcy, but then again, there could be. But there does seem to be a correlation between Michael’s hiring decisions and the hiring practices and outmoded management practices and beliefs of many mainstream media executives.
It’s as though all they read is their own press releases slopped out by PR flacks and their own blogs. God forbid they keep up on the latest management and leadership trends and ideas — they’d call them fads. Their attitude is, “I know best because I’ve done it.”
Yes, they did do it – they did it in an era when you had to be a moron not to make a living in the newspaper or, especially, the broadcasting business, with its FCC licensed oligopoly in which all managers knew how to do was price and sell their inventory based on scarcity.
However, radio and TV station and broadcast group executives today are virtually unemployable (unless via cronyism) because they have no idea how to compete in the disruptive internet age in which inventory is not scarce, attention is.
Instead of reading their press releases, they should be reading Drive by Daniel Pink that aggregates the latest research on motivation, and that clearly indicates that you can’t motivate people with just money and that straight-commission compensation systems are the worst way to pay people.
Ex-broadcast executives looking for work should read The Game-Changer by A.G. Lafley and Ram Charan that reveals “how you can drive revenue and profit growth with innovation” (the book’s subtitle). Lafley, the former CEO of the world’s largest advertiser, details how to manage for innovations that lead to profit growth, and not how to do the same old things over and over again and expect different results.
They should read Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta that details how Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page not only invented a brilliant new way to search for information but also invented new management structures in the internet age in which engineers rule, not self-absorbed, all-about-me moguls.
Broadcast dinosaurs should read Predictably Irrational by Daniel Ariely that uses examples from behavioral economics research to show that the theory of economic man – a rational decision maker – is flawed. According to behavioral economics, people make decisions based on emotions (irrational) and try to rationalize them post hoc.
Broadcast executives (squadrons of whom are now seeking work) will probably never consider reading The Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong with the World’s Leading Media Companies by Columbia Business School professors Jonathan Knee, Bruce Greenwald, and Ava Seave because the book points out that “content is not king” and the current problems in the media business are caused largely by the egomaniacal moguls that head the big, old-fashioned media conglomerates (Iger of Disney is an exception).
And reading Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer that pulls together some radical ideas about advances in neuroscience, and rmakes the argument that science and art are about the same thing…fuggetaboutit.
But expecting intellectual curiosity and openness to workable ideas from me-first broadcast and former broadcast executives is probably too much to ask. They will probably continue to have silly ideas like the one Randy Michaels had of measuring the Tribune’s reporters’ productivity by column-inches of words. The management of the paper would assume that the more words a reporter writes, the more productive he or she is.
Ideas like this one are what you’d expect from an old-line mainstream media executive: predictably irrational.

The second segment on John King’s April 22, hour-long CNN news show was about the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day and showed “some of the devastation” to the earth’s environment. The handsome, graying King (no relation to the senile Larry) showed pictures taken from a satellite on his “Magic Wall,” a high-tech, oversized iPad, of deforestation in Brazil and glacier melt-downs in the Mt. Everest region of Nepal as clear evidence of global warming.
But then he blew it and brought up an image of a post card that touted an “Environmental Bounce Back” in Yellowstone Park. King showed a picture of burned-down trees after the fires of 1988 and a picture of a “thriving area now” in the park. King added that the bald eagle, which was once an endangered species, was also thriving, so, he said, “not all the news is bad.”
Then, in a in a cynical have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife statement, he intoned dismissively, “We’ll leave it up to you on whether Al Gore is right or he’s wrong, but an interesting perspective from up above” ( the satellite photos).
What John King reaffirmed was that news on television is all about interesting and arresting images, which tend to be uncomplicated pictures of what appears on the surface and not about any underlying, complicated truths or messy realities.
King’s “USA” show debuted in March after the immigrant-bashing, right-wing bloviator Lou Dobbs mercifully left CNN, but King, flashed his conservative credentials with the pejorative Gore remark and revealed, perhaps unintentionally, that CNN (owned by Time Warner) must have reserved the 7:00 p.m. time period for a wing-nut. King probably kept Dobb’s producers, who must be in harmony with Dobb’s ideology and climate change denial. And CNN’s strategy must be to reserve the time period for a right-wing tilt in a desperate attempt to appeal to Fox News’s right-wing audience.
But no one does wing-nut, tea party, birther, climate-change denier pandering better than Fox News, and an attempt to entice its audience to change channels is bound to fail – it’s an awful strategy.
If CNN wants to turn around its plummeting ratings, trying to pander to Fox News’s conservative audience or to MSNBC’s liberal viewers with high-tech gimmicks and flashy sets won’t work. CNN is caught in the middle between the polarizing opinions of Fox News and MSNBC, which is clearly a losing position, and there is nothing it or John King, or Anderson Cooper, or Wolf Blitzer, or, can you believe it, Larry King can do about it.
And certainly pandering to climate-change deniers won’t work, either.

This year’s Pulitzer Prizes for journalism not only rewarded good news, they were good news.
The best news was that the scandal sheet, the National Enquirer, neither won an award nor was a finalist for breaking the story of candidate John Edwards’s sordid affair and the birth of his out-of-wedlock love child.
Even though the National Enquirer got the facts right when it dug up the dirt on the horrendously hypocritical, adulterous presidential candidate Edwards and gave him the biggest black eye of the year, it would have given serious journalism a black eye if the Enquirer had won a Pulitzer Prize.
Giving an award to the Enquirer would have legitimized the tabloid, celebrity-bashing, UFO-sighting, sensationalistic press. It would have been like giving Jack the Ripper a medal for reducing the number of prostitutes on the streets of London.
Some other good news from the Pulitzer Prizes was that high-quality public interest journalism is still alive and well and not just published by the usual suspects – the Washington Post and The New York Times. The top award, the one for Public Service went to the Bristol, Virginia, Herald Courier, and the award for Breaking News went to The Seattle Times staff.
Also, the Pulitzer Prize Board for the first time admitted that the internet exists and that there were reporters doing good work who didn’t work for an organization that didn’t print news on dead trees. The prize for Editorial Cartooning went to Mark Fiore, a self syndicated cartoonist whose work appears on SFGate.com, and the prize for Investigative Reporting was shared by Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman of the Philadelphia Daily News and by Sheri Fink of ProPublica, in collaboration with The New York Times Magazine.
Howard Kurtz writes in the Washington Post:

This is a glimpse of an unexpected future: a battered newspaper business, an idealistic start-up with a deep-pocketed liberal backer, and dogged reporters who otherwise might be out of work. If the Times was piggybacking on ProPublica — which covered about half the $400,000 cost of the investigation — the paper has plenty of company.
“That’s what we’re here for,” says Paul Steiger, the former Wall Street Journal managing editor who founded ProPublica and makes its stories available to interested outlets. “The goal is not about getting credit. The goal is getting the story before the eyes of the people who can most benefit from it.”
Herbert Sandler, a 78-year-old former bank owner who is giving the venture roughly $10 million a year, says his motivation is simple: “I can’t stand the abuse of power. I can’t stand corruption. I can’t stand the powerful taking advantage of those with less power.”

It’s interesting, but not surprising, that the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal hasn’t won a Pulitzer Prize since Paul Steiger left as managing editor. Before Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal, it was a regular, multiple winner. Steiger resigned as the WSJ Managing Editor in May, 2007, after the Pulitzer Prize Board announced two WSJ prizes for work done under Steiger in 2006.
Since Murdoch hatchet man Robert Thompson took over as editor of the Wall Street Journal, the venerable business-oriented paper has increased its coverage of national and political news in an attempt to compete with the New York Times, which Murdoch has been trying to buy for years unsuccessfully. So, in typical Murdoch fashion, if he can’t ruin good journalism by buying a paper that practices it, he’ll try to ruin that paper financially in an angry fit of revenge.
Murdoch is slowly trying to turn the Wall Street Journal into an up-scale National Enquirer. He doesn’t care about public service or good journalism or Pulitzer Prizes. His prize is profit, power, and revenge. Too bad he’s taking a great paper like the Journal down the pandering path.
The 2010 Pulitzer Prizes were good news that not only reinforced the notion of what good journalism is, but it also, by what they left out, reminded us of what bad journalism is.

Guest blogger Bruce Braun weighs in on global warming:
“Global Warming and Climate Change have become our latest chic-set societal religion and money generating opportunity for politicians and entrepreneurial types. No doubt we need to take care of our environment, and protect our natural resources. How that is accomplished and by what means is what should be questioned.
Anyone remember how Acid Rain back in the 1960′s and 70′s was going to cause the destruction of the planet? Public awareness of acid rain in the U.S increased in the 1970s after the New York Times promulgated reports from the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire of the myriad deleterious environmental effects demonstrated to result from it. Every danger to our society becomes, in the end, a new way to impose taxes where none existed before. How many air pollution taxes emanated from those fears?
In our politically correct society, to even question AGW or Climate Change is no different than suggesting to a fundamentalist Christian that Jesus was not the son of God or that the Bible is not the word of God.
Try it sometime and watch how fast either of these types go red-faced and start sputtering at you with accusations of stupidity, ignorance, and intolerance. They begin acting like a mother bear protecting her cubs from some sort of threat.
In the 1980′s smoking and second hand smoke, the politicians told us were to be our societal demise. Getting rid of smoking and second hand smoke were going to reduce healthcare costs! Remember that lie? Billions went into that movement, politicians in the lead along with their partners in extortion, the trial lawyers. When I was a teenager, the cost of a pack of cigarettes was around $ .50. Today, that same pack of smokes runs around $5 to 7.00. On average, almost 50% of that cost goes towards taxes.
Higher gasoline and fuel oil taxes were supposed to go towards decreasing air pollution, mandating milage standards, and improving roads. My car may get better milage than in 1980 but I now offset that by sitting in traffic longer on roads that are in such poor condition as to wear out my tires more quickly. Thanks, Uncle Sam!
Once the politicians discovered that Global Warming and Climate Change could be a rallying point for generating votes and campaign contributions, the race was on.
Never being ones to miss a chance to corrupt something, the politicians and their useful idiots began funneling tax dollars into the scientific community for their own political ends. He who controls the gold, makes the rules. Should we be surprised that accusations of manipulated scientific data were soon to follow or that political influence would not happen?
Politicians and their power to control scientific research funding and grants, have become to the scientific community what the pro sports leagues are to young athletes. Throw millions at someone and the temptations will follow.
Next on the agenda for politicians is the obesity “epidemic” and yet another back-door way of additional taxation and product liability class-action suits.
You’d have thought our politicians would be students of history and the lessons of “The Noble Experiment”, that period from 1920-1933, during which the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol for consumption were banned nationally as mandated in the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Why police it when you can tax it? Wait! They did learn from history: Tax it!
For our elected officials, AGW and Climate Change are nothing more than an umbrella for 1000 more ways to tax an already over-taxed population. For the trial lawyers, it is their version of new business development. After all there are a lot more Fortune 500 companies that can be accused of sugaring up our children and destroying the ozone layer.
Our president apparently believes we are not taxed enough. Toward the end of a question and answer session at an advanced battery technology manufacturer, a woman named Doris stood to ask the president whether it was a “wise decision to add more taxes to us with the health care” package. “We are over-taxed as it is.” Obama responded with a 17 minute counterpoint. His discursive answer – more than 2,500 words long. In presidential speak, he told Doris she was in fact not over-taxed, ignorant and uninformed, as well as the rest of that audience who felt the same way Doris did.
Perhaps, but most of us, only have to look at our pay stubs, utility bills, phone bills, property taxes and purchase receipts to conclude otherwise.”

Guest blogger Marilyn Keenan responds to Jiri Nechleba:
“The debates of those with extreme views are getting so tiresome. And, as we all know, the extremists accomplish nothing except debate and deadlocked action.
When I hear either “Global Warming is going to kill us all soon unless we stop it now!” or “Global Warming is just a liberal plot perpetuated by environmental activists to do (….I’m not sure what)!”, I want to scream. I get why each of those extreme views upsets the opposite set. But both views are really beside the point, aren’t they?
I didn’t go to MIT (if that’s what makes you an expert on what really matters in life), but it seems pretty apparent to me that our air is less clean than it was 100,000 years ago—or 10,000 years ago—or when I was born. Our waters are more toxic than they used to be. Our ozone layer is less healthy than it once was. The amount of de-forestation on our planet, for whatever purposes, is not a good thing. Pumping increasing amounts of CO2 into our atmosphere cannot possibly be good for us or our forests or plant or animal life. Increased chemical run-off or dumping waste into our waters can’t be good either.
These, among others, are the points that matter. Whether or not the extreme intellectual elite agree on Global Warming (or AGW or whatever the new I-know-more-than-you-term is) is not even interesting to most of us. I think most of us can agree that these other things are what really need to be addressed in an intelligent, practical, useful manner. But while the extremists rule the debate, practical minds can’t even hope to solve real problems. The same goes for health care reform, financial reform, and every other major issue that affects all of us, but that gets co-opted by the extremes.
And I don’t even care if weathermen are dumb. Or if we even have weathermen. I’d be happy to read a scroll, listen to a voiceover, and see some diagrams if the weather information would just be accurate only 4 or 5 days out. And as for news “readers” and cable he-said-she-said “robots,” I’ve had more than enough of them. Let’s throw them all out—-along with all the extremists on both ends of the spectrum.
Let’s just fix real problems for real people in ways that really work. These intellectual and extremist debates are getting us nowhere.”
Guest blogger Chris Warner also responds to Jiri Nechleba:
“I knew your calling a group of people dumb was going to incite a response.
I am impressed with the apparent credibility of your respondent. His #1 statement that “The world has had significantly larger climate swings in the last 5,000, 10,000, and 100,000 years that we have seen recently” must consider that those changes were not of our making, while the current concern focuses on human contribution to atmospheric gases such as CO2, SO2 and NO2 that far exceed their normal ranges for at least the last 650,000 years. Changes in the climate on earth are inevitable. What is disturbing is continued denial of the fact that we are causing a change without taking responsibility for short sighted actions with long term negative effects.
I am not an MIT scientist, but have read and listened to more than a few experts that mostly say there has never before been any war, crisis, pandemic, etc. that remotely compares in complexity to the all-inclusive climate crisis. Human growth and development is accelerating as thousands of species of flora and fauna are going extinct. There is only one sky for our whole world to share. A big difference is that with exponential scientific growth, we now know better. I don’t understand how anyone, much less an educated person could deny the evidence that our all consuming 20th century fossil fuel driven lifestyle is unsustainable.
He must have an interest in maintaining business as usual. Making money requires making tough decisions, which requires denial. Who were the losers for him to win? In sustainable models, we all win.”

Guest blogger Jiri Nechleba takes the Media Curmudgeon to task with the following intelligent rebuttal to my post, “Survey Shows Many TV Weathercasters Are Dumb:”
You may be right that meteorologists are dumb. Along those same lines, let’s also call TV anchors dumb as well. The Brits have a better phrase for them – readers. In fact, weather people are TV personalities that present the news, and from a programming perspective they are usually selected to “entertain.” There are, in fact, real meteorologists who are pretty good with science – they may not be your TV variety.
But, let’s posit them stupid. Are you inferring that, because they are stupid, they must by necessity be wrong? In fact, the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) question is, at its root, a simple binary question. Are human beings causing global warming or not? And a derivative question is, IF we are, is it significant and what are the consequences if it is.
Now, those that believe in AGW are presenting the conclusion as FACT. In reality, it is a theory that is supported by some data and analysis. Frankly, I’ve seen little MSM coverage of the quality of the data and analysis. I, personally, have dug around to look at how the analysis has been done, what data has been used and how that data has been massaged.
I don’t think that most people who hold an opinion on this have done any detailed research. In fact, the “reality” of this is more a function of societal forces than fact — think Foucault’s concepts of the social construction of reality.
Now, you can write me off as some denier but I do think I have some creds in this debate. I went to MIT to be an astrophysicist and the only way to do that was to get two Bachelor’s degrees. So, I got one in Physics (Course 8 in MIT lingo) and got another one in Earth & Planetary Sciences (Course 12). The latter degree required interesting classes like “Earth and Planetary Chemistry” where we actually built models of the chemistry and climate of various planets (including earth). They were simple models but, at their core, they were meant to understand things like what gases exist in an atmosphere, what pressures/temperatures would exist given a certain input of energy, what did that look like at different altitudes.
While I went into business, I am very familiar with a lot of the concepts and approaches that go into climate modeling. Moreover, in my professional (business) career, I have been intimately involved in modeling lots of complex problems and used many statistical methods to do so. In fact, I am considered by many to be talented in understanding how to build good quantitative models. I’ve built investment models, marketing models, and supply chain models that have been very successful. Moreover, many of the problems I have worked on were in noisy systems (those with high variability to signal – not unlike climate).
With that preamble, I can tell you the following:
1) The world has had significantly larger climate swings in the last 5,000, 10,000, and 100,000 years that we have seen recently.
2) The data used for climate modeling is an amalgam of different proxies that have had significant adjustments made by those analyzing them.
3) Those adjustments are as least as big as the effects the models say are occurring.
4) There are significant changes in the sample data points over time and, from what I can tell, the samples have significant bias over time (read Briffa tree ring data).
5) Very few, if any, of the papers that support AGW share authorship with pure math statisticians.
The above (save #5 maybe) are science based issues. I could list a whole bunch of issues that are more political in nature – conflicts of interest, funding, etc.
So, from my perspective, I do not see any definitive proof that AGW exists. I will also submit that making fun of stupid people who don’t believe in it is no form of proof as well.

I, like many curmudgeony bloggers, often find fault with the New York Times, from its management, to its online pricing strategy, to the inaccuracies of some of its writers (yes, you Alessandra Stanley). However, The Times does have the best newspaper website in world and still has, overall, the best content and writers/thinkers of any newspaper in America.
And The Times website just got even better with TimesCast. http://nytimes.com/timescast
Here’s how The Times describes it:

The program, called TimesCast, lasting a few minutes, will appear on the nytimes.com home page at 1 p.m. each day; after 2 p.m., it will move to a less prominent position on the site. (It can always be found at nytimes.com/timescast.) It features interviews with editors and reporters who are covering the major stories, and scenes from meetings among the paper’s top editors discussing events that might go on the front page.
“It’s not just straight, breaking news, it’s talking about the way The New York Times is looking at the story – our analysis, our particular take on the story,” said Ann Derry, the paper’s editorial director for video and television. “We already produce a lot of video to go along with stories, but we felt the need to have a regular video news overview on the home page.”

The first three Times Casts opened with the noon page one meeting in which the editors and reporters discuss the stories that will appear on the front page of The Times. It’s fascinating. It’s what is called “news as process.”
I first heard this term of art in the 1980s when WOR-TV in New York (now WWOR-TV, Channel 9) opened its 11:00 p.m. newscast with a meeting of its newsroom managers, producers, and anchor Roland Smith. I asked my friend Willis Duff at that time the managing partner, I believe, of television news consultancy AR&D about the newscast and he said that several stations around the country were using this news-as-process approach because research had shown that people were fascinated with how the news sausage was made.
Of course I don’t know if The Times is familiar with the research, but it has done it right in starting with the page one meeting. The segment is well edited and shows a heterogeneous group of editors intelligent discussing why a news story belongs on the front page. Associate managing editor Jim Roberts runs the meeting and asks smart, informed questions as the editors pitch their stories.
The graphics are excellent because there are banners that show what the three or four main stories are and banners that fade in out that tell who the editors and reporters are. The editors and reporters have faces, they can walk and talk and ask and answer smart questions.
Some, like Executive Editor Bill Keller and editor Jim Roberts are attractive enough to be anchors on a New York TV station or on a major network – but obviously much too smart to stoop to that. They really know what they are talking about and communicate concisely and intelligently about the stories that are being covered; they are not merely news readers or hollow personalities.
Then the editors and reporters that are involved in the three top stories talk about these stories and give some insights, and they are good teases for the more in-depth and complete stories on the site. Smart promotion as well as great information.
The Monday TimesCast ran 6:21, the 23rd it was 6:50, and the 24th it was 6:30, which is cool because it doesn’t have a set time to fill and isn’t interrupted by commercials like a TV newscast is.
The time for the big-three network evening newscasts is set in granite at a half hour and can’t deviate for a second regardless if there is worthwhile news to fill the time. That half hour contains 22 minutes of news and eight minutes of commercials. Of the 22 minutes some (more and more) are “human-interest” stories or celebrity crap, and there is typically a silly kicker story that is supposed to leave you smiling.
So, typically, in a network newscast you don’t get as much brain food in 22 minutes as you get in an average of 6:30 in a TimesCast. Plus, you get the TimesCast at 1:00 p.m., so you know five and a half hours ahead of time what the networks will be featuring at 6:30 p.m., because they all follow the lead of The Times nine times out of ten anyway.
I’m putting a reminder in Outlook to ping me at 1:00 p.m. from now on so I can watch TimesCast, and if I miss a showing I can go to http://nytimes.com/timescast and watch the ones I miss or re-watch ones that are particularly interesting with an easy click of my mouse.
The Times has hit a run home with its TimeCast, and I’m here to cheer.