The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight Tuesday night.

Excellent! It's about time.. This has been rumored for awhile now.

Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site - New York Times

This is what happens when you hire idiots that get their on-air graphics from a Google Search without even looking at the results.

Click the image to see the full graphic that WAGT broadcast to all its viewers. You will clearly see text in the image that says "So good, you'll suck dick."

Livin’ in Cowtown by Corey Spring » NBC Affiliate Gets Goo All Over Their Faces

Colbert on O'Reilly:

O'Reilly on Colbert:

Colbert meets O'Reilly

terratogen wrote:
Examples of photo manipulation to create more dramatic news stories. It's odd that they didn't pick out things which didn't have to do with lebanon. This sort of thing is pretty much standard.

Decius wrote:
There is a degree to which the sort of manipulation performed by the media is mirrored by those who expose it, as most have an agenda. Little Green Footballs is a right wing blog. They have an interest in demonstrating a particular kind of media manipulation and only that kind. Noam Chomsky and groups like Ad Busters often demonstrate a different kind of media manipulation, and only that kind.

The media is a megaphone. Input goes in and is amplified. Its interest is in the dramatic, not the true. Its agents create drama where none exists. Those who are skilled at manipulating the media know how to point it toward favored drama. Those who are unskilled risk being the drama pointed at. The media's focus can bring wealth or recrimination, depending on how it comes. Mastering this is the key to mastering the broadcast society.

As we've matured, it has become clear to many of us that the media manipulates. As more information has become available the people are awakening. The political powers have managed this problem by injecting the fantasy that the media is only manipulated by the other guys, never by us. Widespread realization that the media is manipulated by everyone is the next step, but unfortunately few have an interest in such a development.

RE: Photo Fraud in Lebanon

Masked, plainclothes police carrying assault rifles staged a midnight raid on the country's oldest newspaper and its sister television station early Thursday, burning tens of thousands of newspapers in the most dramatic attack on the press in Kenya's history.

Boing Boing: Media shutdown in Kenya -- TV station, newspaper torched

The 38 million subscribers to MySpace, which News Corp bought for $629m (355m) last July, discovered that when they wrote to each other about rival video-swapping site YouTube, the words were automatically deleted, and attempts to download video images from YouTube led to blank screens.

However, MySpace managers promptly shut down the blog forum on which members had complained about the interference. An online notice said the problem was the result of "a simple misunderstanding".

The explanation did not, however, calm the bloggers. "There was an outcry by some members after MySpace's acquisition by News Corp. People were afraid they might start monitoring or censoring MySpace," Ellis Yu wrote to the Blog Herald. "At the time, their CEO said nothing like that would happen. Well, now it has. MySpace was built on an open community and now they're trying to censor us, putting business interests above its members!"

I'm pretty sure I'm on the record, somewhere, predicting News Corp would do just this kind of thing. MySpace is, and will continue to be, a journey in learning about the necessary dynamics of Social Networking sites, and not the final solution to the online community.

Mr Murdoch, 74, last week appointed 33-year-old Jeremy Philips to run News Corp's internet strategy and armed him with a $1bn fund to buy more sites.

Let me give my complete assurance that Industrial Memetics will never entertain a buyout offer from News Corp.

Myspace stumbles

It turns out that looking at the aggregation of billions of search queries people type into Google reveals something about our curiosity, our thirst for news, and perhaps even our desires. Considering all that has occurred in 2005, we thought it would be interesting to study just a few of the significant events, and names that make this a memorable year. (We’ll leave it to the historians to determine which ones are lasting and which ephemeral.) We hope you enjoy this selective view of our collective year.

Google's Zeitgeist reports are always interesting, but I also always feel like they could do more. Google is sitting on top of one of the most amazing collections of information mankind has ever assembled, and has all the metrics on people's usage of it. If all the various TV outlets ranging from CNN to VH1 can assemble "year in review" programs every year that go into the year's events in such depth, Google can do better than this.

Google Press Center: Zeitgeist

This is some beautiful stuff someone captured. Apparently someone at CNN trying to put together a map of the areas of France not currently in flames and bursting with rioters managed to really screw up using Google Maps.

Check it out, it's almost like a public school student's attempt at making their own map of a country they know nothing about.

The World According to CNN

] Maybe it won't be so bad being cut off from the
] blogosphere. I look around the Web these days and find
] that Newsweek's retracted atrocity story has sent
] everybody into cloud-cuckoo-land. Every faction up and
] down the political spectrum has used the magazine's
] blunder as a chance to open fire on its favorite targets,
] turning this into a fevered hunting season for the straw
] men.

AKA the Bird Seller's Lament.

The blogosphere is talking about newsweek's irrelevancy. I'm sure they'll take this column from Brooks as defensive main stream media blog bashing. Its not. There won't be any great controversy when people stop reading political blogs. The numbers will just quietly go down. The authors will be howling all the way...

The Lament of David Brooks

noteworthy wrote:
] "We're happy to see The New York Times acknowledging the
] importance of subscription-based revenue that we have
] long seen as a key element," said Todd Larsen of the Wall
] Street Journal.
]
] Will you subscribe? Or will you say goodbye to Tom Friedman?

Goodbye Tom Friedman. Your insights were useful while they lasted. In 6 months no one will be talking about the New York Times.

RE: NYTimes.com to Offer Subscription Service