The Chompsky Weekly #71
In which mourning has broken on Normal Island.
Hello.
It’s weeks like this when I truly lament the disappearance of the #BonkersBritain segment of the Noel Edmonds vehicle, Noel HQ.
Coverage of the Queen’s death has led to a blanket of fealty clickbait, consigning all other news to the depths of the pixels below your phone’s charging port.
If you thought Maitlis’ summary of government influence over the BBC was bad, Buckingham Palace have secured an industry-wide blackout on advertising. This takes place at great expense to the media, according to the Guardian:
“The death of the Queen and coverage of her funeral will top the ranks of the most-watched broadcasts in British television history, while newspaper publishers have seen an unprecedented boost in sales as mourners seek commemorative copies. And yet the biggest national event in decades will not provide a commercial bonanza for media firms.”
And it’s not just TV. Across all of British commerce, advertisement of products has been put on hold.
It’s Monday 19th Sept, 2022
Media News
The European Union has revealed plans for new media freedom laws, and for the provision on “stable” funding for public interest media. The body claims it wants to combat state spying, political pressure on news outlets, and the placement of political adverts to protect independence across member states amid “mounting concern” about political influence on outlets across the continent. “No public media should be turned into a propaganda channel,” said the European Commission’s Vice President. (AP)
Ex-BBC local DJ Alex Belfield has been sentenced to 5 years and 26 weeks imprisonment for serious stalking and harassment offences. He targeted other broadcasters including Jeremy Vine, who described an “avalanche of hate” for a period of years. (Sky News)
Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia's few remaining independent news outlets, has been stripped of its last media licence. Editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov was a recent winner of Nobel Peace honours. He accused the Russian Supreme Court of “murder” and of depriving its 27 million readers of information. (Reuters)
Twitter's shareholders have voted to go ahead with Elon Musk’s $44bn (£38bn) buyout proposal. (BBC)
A small Dutch town has taken Twitter to court, demanding the platform delete messages relating to a conspiracy theory about it having been home to a Satanic paedophile ring. The original conspiracists are in jail on other online harassment charges and had previously been ordered to remove the content, but rumours still abound, leading to visits by conspiracists. (The Guardian)
Union members of the New York Times and NBC News have refused to go into the office, in defiance of their employers’ plans. (WSJ)
YouTube has claimed that a “small experiment” consisting of expanded “ad pods”—ad breaks of up to ten unskippable ads—has now “concluded.” (9to5 Google)
Disney have released employee pay data based on race and gender for the first time. It shows just a fraction of a percent of difference between the pay rates of men and women, and between White people and people of colour when “base pay is adjusted for roles, experience and location”. (Bloomberg)
Campaigns + Content
Climate Tipping Points Warning Buried
Exactly half an hour after the death of the Queen was announced, The Guardian published an alarming report on a new scientific paper, showing we are now reaching the climate tipping points scientists have long warned us about.
Read and share: World on brink of five ‘disastrous’ climate tipping points, study finds
And another piece that isn’t getting enough attention: Governments urged to act after oil giants accused of misleading public
The brutal economics of celebrity culture is turning children into marketing mannequins by Van Badham
“Four-year-olds aren’t being clad in “mini-me” Olivier Rousteing outfits to get mud on them. They’re to get the eyeballs of media.
What’s being engineered by the brutal economics of current celebrity culture aren’t clans of Barrymores or Fondas sharing a traditional craft. It’s the aristocratisation of cultural power that often concentrates opportunities not around talent, but brand inheritance.”
Everybody Wants a Raise at the New York Times by Shawn McCreesh
“Right now, sign-ups are being passed to Guild members for “strike school,” in which staffers would learn how to build up to a strike and get skeptical colleagues onboard.”
Apropos of nothing, what a great time to revisit Propaganda (2012) the NZ-made, mind-and-genre-bending ‘documentary’/‘mockumentary’/‘propumentary’:
That’s all folks, see you next week.
Love.Eliz