This Week's Backside Of The Bell Curve Winner!

Champion Of Yellow Journalism

Rupert (Blog Hater) Murdoch

Don't cry, Rupie!
Just go away!

We ignore internet at our peril,
Murdoch warns editors

Chris Tryhorn, City correspondent

Murdoch: internet is 'emerging medium that is not my native language'

Rupert Murdoch has admitted he "didn't do as much as [he] should have" to confront the digital challenges faced by his newspaper business, which owns the Sun, Times and News of the World in the UK as well as titles in the US and Australia.

In a speech to American editors in Washington, Mr Murdoch issued a stark warning to the industry, arguing that the web was "a fast-developing reality we should grasp".

He said consumers wanted "control over the media, instead of being controlled by it", pointing to the proliferation of website diaries known as "blogs" and message boards.

He goes on to note that his newspapers are losing out to the net: The migration of readers online was also affecting advertising revenues, Mr Murdoch said. "The threat of losing print advertising dollars to online media is very real. In fact, it's already happening, particularly in classifieds." LINK

Hm.

The man who currently brings you The Simple Life, Stacked, American Idol, Nanny 911, The OC, and Cops-- along with his truly weird definition of a "News" Network-- now wants to grasp the the fast-developing reality of the web?

I'm sure King George III's men also wanted to grasp the fast-developing reality of the portable printing press in the 18th Century, too.

The passion of Revolutionary literature is found in pamphlets, the most popular form of political literature of the day. Over 2,000 pamphlets were published during the Revolution. The pamphlets thrilled patriots and threatened loyalists; they filled the role of drama, as they were often read aloud in public to excite audiences. American soldiers read them aloud in their camps; British Loyalists threw them into public bonfires.

Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense sold over 100,000 copies in the first three months of its publication. It is still rousing today. "The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind," Paine wrote, voicing the idea of American exceptionalism still strong in the United States -- that in some fundamental sense, since America is a democratic experiment and a country theoretically open to all immigrants, the fate of America foreshadows the fate of humanity at large. LINK

Ahem.

It was in this form -- as pamphlets -- that much of the most important and characteristics writing of the American Revolution appeared. For the Revolutionary generation, as for its predecessors back to the early sixteenth century, the pamphlet had peculiar virtues as a medium of communication. Then, as now, it was seen that the pamphlet allowed one to do things that were not possible in any other form.

The pamphlets include all sorts of writings -- treatises on political theory, essays on history, political arguments, sermons, correspondence, poems -- and they display all sorts of literary devices. But for all their variety they have in common one distinctive characteristic: they are, to an unusual degree, explanatory. They reveal not merely positions taken but the reasons why positions were taken.

One of the surprising aspects of the American writings is the extent to which they include the stylistic modes associated with the great age of English pamphleteering. Of satire...irony...parody...sarcasm.
Bernard Bailyn, 1967
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

***

The pamphlet is a one-man show. One has complete freedom of expression, including, if one chooses, the freedom to be scurrilous, abusive, and seditious; or, on the other hand, to be more detailed, serious and "high-brow" than is ever possible in a newspaper or in most kinds of periodicals.
George Orwell, 1948
British Pamphleteers
***

Bloggers, today's pamphleteers, could, I suppose, go completely underground if the Rupert Murdochs of this world force the issue.

As I type this blog entry, I know that my personal IP address can be found easily by today's internet-savvy Red Coats...

Which could, in a truly dystopic world, bring a Marat knock at my door.

I could, however, establish multiple false web identities and post from numerous public library branches and Internet cafés...

As if what I post on this blog could possibly threaten Rupert Murdoch's publishing empire!

What a crock!

Rupert is just another fascist Cry Baby!

Like his Republican political allies, He has more wealth and power than most can only dream of.

Yet he whines and cries when he imagines a threat to his ability to squeeze the last dime out of the masses.

How sad it must be to have everything...

And yet nothing.