Multi-Directional Censorship (photo courtesy of)

The Wall Street Journal's intrepid and very good Amy Schatz has a piece today updating us on the progress of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'s National Broadband Plan. 

With all that we have thus far seen, things look quite grim from a free speech, free market perspective.  The groundwork for government information totalitarianism - favored by people like Hugo Chavez-loving FCC "Diversity Czar" Mark Lloyd and Marxist "media reform"-outfit Free Press founder Robert McChesney - is being laid in the Plan being crafted by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.

As we first reported, the Center for American Progress (at which Lloyd was then a Senior Fellow) and McChesney's Free Press co-authored the deeply flawed, anti-conservative and Christian talk radio "report" entitled The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio.

But their shared disdain for free speech and the free market extend way beyond just this.   These "media reformers" seek to eradicate most or all private ownership of all information delivery - be it by radio, television or the internet - thereby leaving the federal government as sole purveyor. 

Twitter has announced that it will end a list service that blatantly favored Democratic politicians by attracting viewers to their profiles while excluding GOP officials from the service.

The list service provided new Twitter users with lists of prominent message-posters they might like to follow. Watchdog groups discovered late last month that Democratic officials were prominently listed by the service, and gaining large swaths of followers as a result, while many prominent GOP politicians were excluded.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who has since withdrawn his bid for Governor, was one suggested user, and had roughly 1.2 million followers when the Associated Press reported the story on October 27. His opponent in the race for the Democratic nomination also appeared on the lists, and garnered 960,000 followers.

But none of the GOP's gubernatorial contenders appeared on the lists, and all three had fewer than 5,000 followers.

Want more evidence print media is giving way to digital formats? According to CNBC "Squawk on the Street" Nov. 3, Internet behemoth Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) could have its sights set on The New York Times (NYSE:NYT).

Brian Shactman, a general assignment reporter for CNBC noted an article in the Nov. 2 Wall Street Journal that indicated a lot of big companies are hoarding cash and short term investments and it pointed out the information technology sector had nearly $280 billion to invest.

"There's so much talk today about M and A," Shactman said of mergers and acquisitions. "Well let's look it forward - some names out there that could be in the offing, some things to think about. Remember The Wall Street Journal said yesterday tech has about $280 billion to work with. Remember Google said they wanted to make about one acquisition a month. They have the cash - they got to speed up."

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Friday, Andrew Breitbart, founder of such center-right online powerhouses as Big Government and Big Hollywood, blasted what he dubs the "Democrat-media complex." He spoke of his most recent exposes on the administration's political malfeasance and the mainstream media's refusal to cover those scandals.

Breitbart rocketed into the national spotlight with his work with James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, the young conservatives responsible for the ground-breaking ACORN sting operations that led to congressional votes to de-fund the community organizing group.

"I had a 20-year-old and a 25-year-old and my integrity on the line if we were going to launch this," Mr. Breitbart says. "It was so obvious that the mainstream media, given this information, would not cover it and would, in effect, attempt to cover it up." So he devised an intricate strategy of rolling out the videos one at a time, anticipating Acorn's defenses and rebutting each in turn with the next video...

The Washington Post's new employee guidelines for the use of online social networks such as Twitter and Facebook have sparked a debate over the proper role of new media for journalists, and the objectivity of major media outlets generally.

The Post's new guidelines, handed down from on high by Senior Editor Milton Coleman, disregard the potential of new media to engage readers in a conversation about the paper's reporting. Rather, the new social media policy attempts to buttress the Post's supposed objectivity, at the expense of journalistic transparency.

The Post's rules forbid employees from "writing, tweeting or posting anything—including photographs or video—that could be perceived as reflecting political, racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism that could be used to tarnish our journalistic credibility" and prohibit "the discussion of internal newsroom issues such as sourcing, reporting of stories, decisions to publish or not to publish, personnel matters and untoward personal or professional matters involving our colleagues."

The New York Times announced today that it would appoint an editor to monitor 'opinion media'. In an attempt to respond to criticism that it has been too slow to pick up on stories first reported by conservative blogs and talk show hosts, the Times acknowledged poor coverage, but denied a political agenda.

The self-proclaimed 'paper of record' was extremely slow in picking up on two recent stories. The first, the 'trutherism' of former White House Green Jobs Czar Van Jones, was initially reported by Pajamas Media, and later by Glenn Beck on his Fox News talk show. The Times did not cover the story until after Jones had resigned.

Later, the Times neglected to report on the undercover sting operation that exposed ACORN for offering assistance in a bogus child prostitution ring. The Times reported on Congress's votes to de-fund ACORN, but neglected to mention the sting operation that inspired the votes.

CNBC "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer credits lack of government regulation with a recent market jump in technology stocks. The tech-heavy NASDAQ composite (NASDAQ) shot upward 3 percent, from July 8 through July 23, even defying other market indexes that had down days in the same time period.

Cramer theorized on his July 23 show that the tech sector during that time period, despite the setback on July 24 in the wake of news that Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) reported lower than expected earnings - because of government.

"So, now let me explain a pattern that I've discerned that could be incredibly important - important for you to take profits on if President Obama regains his clout and starts pushing hard with the rest of his agenda," Cramer said. "Everyone today wrote him off because of health care. I got to tell you, you can't write this guy off. He's too darn popular."

The Upside Down Ratings World of NABOB

On April 9 we wrote of an asinine assertion made about the new Arbitron radio ratings system by soon to be transferred Democratic Federal Communications Committee (FCC) Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein.  Well now President Barack Obama has put the imprimatur of his FCC and Administration on Adelstein's addled notion.

Since the inception of tracking those who listen to Guglielmo Marconi's marvelous invention, Arbitron had relied on a personal pen-and-paper diary system and the journal-keepers' honor and memory as to what they had listened and for how long they had done so.  The potential for misremembering and book-cooking was simply staggering.

So Arbitron came up with a pager-esque device called the Portable People Meter (PPM).  This gadget automatically tracks to where the radio dial is tuned, thereby virtually eliminating human error and the ability to cheat.  

Obviously, this is far more accurate way to establish who is listening to whom, right?  If you do find this to be a self-evident truth, you are not a master of the obvious, you are - according to the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters (NABOB) - a racist bigot.

How so?  Because the ratings under the new regime revealed that the numbers for hip-hop, urban and other racial minority stations had long been incorrectly inflated (and conversely the listenership of talk radio had long been underreported).

And this, you see, is not the better results of technological advancement, this is racism.

It seems that the Washington Post will soon be welcoming ultra-liberal hack blogger Ezra Klein to their online operations. Klein has often been the subject of stories by NewsBusters. This is what the Politico reported on the Post's acquisition of Klein (h/t OTB):

The American Prospect's Ezra Klein, one of the top bloggers on politics and policy, is heading to the Washington Post.

Rumors about Klein's upcoming move spread on Wednesday night during a reception thrown by The Nation magazine in honor of D.C. bureau chief Chris Hayes.

A Post spokesperson confirmed to POLITICO this morning that Klein was hired as a blogger at washingtonpost.com and is expected to start in about a month.

The move continues a regrettable trend started with their hiring of Greg Sargent, who formerly worked for the far left Talking Points Memo, to run a blog at one of the Post's websites. The addition of Sargent, an accomplished hack in his own right, was covered by Tim Graham here at NewsBusters. Tim quickly identified it as yet another example of the revolving door between liberal organizations and the mainstream media:

The New York Observer has noticed an interesting new trend at The New York Times. Its something that we have rarely, if ever, seen from The Times in it's long history. In fact, we are used to seeing a defiant and rather confident Times:

There was a time when The New York Times never had to say anything back. If the newspaper caught hell for a story in the popular media, editors at the paper could rely on the time-tested formulation: "The story speaks for itself." When critics carped about the newspapers' editorial vision, business plan, or financial position, it was once enough for Arthur Sulzberger or Janet Robinson to just sort of roll their eyes and move along. At the end of the day, The New York Times was still The New York Times.

No longer. Now, as The Observer chronicled, every criticism leveled at The Times is met with an immediate, if not insecure, defense. The trend seems to have started with the debacle surrounding the famous McCain/Lobbyist article in which The Times incompetently insinuated that Senator McCain had an affair. However, the defensiveness has continued at a more frequent pace since then:

As the downward spiral of old media continues at an ever faster pace many have begun to wonder what's next. Well, PBS's MediaShift blog has been mulling it over in a series of posts. Their thoughts on the current and future state of news are quite insightful and certainly warrant dissection and discussion.

Stephen Strauss starts off by noting the recent downfall of many main stream newspapers, as reported on NB by yours truly, and the resulting end of the "tyranny of reporters". Strauss celebrates the downfall of old media because of increased flow of information it has caused:

In the old print/radio/television world there wasn't much else you could do. Space and time was limited and so many things had to be left out, ignored or radically reconfigured. In ways that I don't think we truly appreciated, the media -- or rather the limitations of the media -- was the message.

One of the most magisterial things the Internet is doing is undermining the previous writer/editor dictatorship. Suddenly, what used to be effectively a one-sided conversation in which the writer did all the talking has been turned into an agora in which a piece is dissected and often reconstructed by the readers -- and if we ever get there, listeners and viewers, too.

In yet another example of flag spamming and poor corporate over sight Facebook decided this week to remove an ad from the conservative group Americans for Prosperity. The group was advertising a petition on their site nostimulus.com which lets people voice their opposition to the near $800 billion stimulus going through congress right now.

After originally screening and approving the ad CNS News, a sister site of NewsBusters and the Media Research Center, reports that Facebook claimed to have received some complaints from users. They then proceeded to put a disapproval notice on it and then yank it from the site all together and notified Americans for Prosperity of their reasoning:

Once the NoStimulus.com Web site started getting a large volume of visitors, Kerpen told CNSNews.com, “they put a disapproval notice on it and they pulled the ad."

On Friday's CNN Newsroom, anchor Rick Sanchez dazzled viewers with his profound grasp of economics.  His guest was CNN chief business correspondent Ali Velshi, whose most recent achievement was being called "incompetent" by Rush Limbaugh:

SANCHEZ: You know, it's funny, but, as I hear him (President Barack Obama).talk, I'm just thinking, tax cuts are spending, right? I mean, they really are, because you have got to get it from somewhere.

VELSHI: Right. If you think about it, is -- your own budget, right? If you have less money coming in, you have to have less money going out.

The issue is that -- the argument is that, tax cuts, while it brings less money into the government, which means it lowers the amount of money the government has, which makes it the equivalent of spending, it stimulates the economy, because it lets -- people will use that money in another way.

The way tax cuts could be considered spending, a contention with which Velshi agreed, is if one believes that all income belongs not to the individual earning it, but rather to the government.  It's then government's option to determine how much people are permitted to keep and if they're using it "appropriately."

Sanchez's reasoning reminds me of President Bill Clinton, who said of the budget surplus: "We could give it back to you and hope you spend it right." But "if you don't spend it right," bad things would happen to Social Security and other programs.

Say, how 'bout the news of President Obama lifting the ban on embryonic stem cell research imposed by his predecessor?

What, you haven't heard? With good reason. Former president Bush did not impose this, making it all but impossible for Obama to reverse it.

None of which prevented radio host Ed Schultz from repeatedly claiming on Friday that Obama, all of three days after taking office, had lifted a "ban" on embryonic stem cell research. 

Lost on Schultz was what Bush actually did -- prohibited federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, which did not affect privately funded research -- and what Obama has yet to do -- reverse Bush's ban.

Still, it made for provocative fodder to Schultz, all the better to feed the meme of Obama bringing transformative change that includes paraplegics soon shedding their wheelchairs.

Schultz's interest was piqued by news of the FDA approving an application for Geron Corporation to inject embryonic stem cells into patients with injured spinal cords.

Here's how Schultz described it --

Some wag dubbed the Prius the "Pious," for the smug self-righteousness of its greener-than-thou owners.  CNBC ran a segment this morning highlighting an even pricier form of conspicuous green consumption: the installation of geothermal wells in Manhattan as an alternative form of HVAC.

Narrating a segment that would have had Veblen nodding in approval, CNBC's Bertha Coombs observed "for many, it represents bragging rights in the pursuit of green luxury."  That segued to a clip of New York magazine's Jesse Oxfeld explicitly making the conspicuous consumption point.

View video here.

A Barack Obama supporter in Ohio with deep roots in Democratic politics -- and a 2001 sex-related felony conviction to his name -- is behind two new confrontational videos that bait ignorant people into calling Barack Obama a terrorist.

The first video was released Wednesday and has gone viral. It currently has more than 1.1 million views on YouTube. Part II went online a day later and is well on its way to viral status, with more than 145,000 views.

The John McCain and Sarah Palin supporters in the videos are characterized as “The McCain-Palin Mob.” The videos selectively feature voters who, upon being asked antagonistic questions, make some outrageous statements about Obama.

One of the hottest Internet videos during the mortgage and banking crisis has been a YouTube clip titled "Burning Down the House," which outlines the untold story of how liberal Democrats pressured banks and lenders to throw standards out the window and give money to people who couldn't pay it back.

Try watching it now, however, and you won't be able to, thanks to the growing problem of "flag spam," the practice of abusing online filter systems to squelch political speech with which one disagrees.

We've all seen spammers at work in our e-mail inboxes. Experts estimate that 90 percent of all e-mail messages nowadays are spam, or unsolicited commercial e-mail.

Luckily for most of us, the majority of it gets filtered out. That's caused the more sophisticated spammers to change course and target a more vulnerable part of the Internet - the hugely popular Web sites like YouTube, Digg and the blogosphere, where anyone can join the discussion by posting videos, essays, reviews and other content.

When interviewed by Eyeblast.tv last month, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that YouTube, the video-sharing site owned by his company, is "pretty serious" about removing the "strange" videos that keep popping up on the site, especially videos "that can be used to incite bad outcomes." Apparently videos designed to incite Catholics don't fall into that category.

A YouTube user who goes by the moniker "fsmdude" has posted more than 30 videos under the title "Eucharist Desecration." Each video features an attack on a symbol that Catholics consider sacred -- by blow gun, nail gun, boiling, sword and cigarette in a few recent episodes.

The creator of the videos isn't subtle about his intent. He was angered by reports of a college student allegedly receiving e-mail threats from "fanatical Catholics" after the student snatched a wafer at mass, so "fsmdude" decided to repeatedly profane the Eucharist on camera for all to see.

Advertising Age magazine reports today that CBS News has gotten "[A] Rude Lesson in Citizen Journalism" with its iPhone application. It turns out the "Eyemobile for iPhone" has become a handy vehicle for amateur pornographers to spam the site:

A visit to CBSeyemobile.com turns up a few photos that walk the line of not-safe-for-work, a jarring juxtaposition with CBS's storied news brand.

What's more, Google is advertising on the clips via AdMob.

The feds are zeroing in on David Kernell, the suspected hacker of GOP veep nominee's Yahoo email account:

The FBI searched the residence of the son of a Democratic state lawmaker in Tennessee over the weekend looking for evidence linking the young man to the hacking of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's personal e-mail account, two law enforcement officials told The Associated Press on Monday.

David Kernell, 20, has not returned repeated phone calls or e-mails from the AP since last week. He is the son of state Rep. Mike Kernell, a Memphis Democrat and chairman of Tennessee's House Government Operations Committee. The father declined last week to discuss the possibility his son might be involved in the case.