I happened by this blog about advertising at about.com and obviously this author is not happy about the new Enormous Omelete Sandwich at Burger King.

BK’s newly launched Enormous Omelet Sandwich will pack on 730 calories and 47 grams of fat. And despite a stomach turn for nutritionists who say eating the sandwich is putting you one step closer to a heart attack, BK says it’s all about choices.

Burger King execs say the sandwich will appeal to “the guy who is a Whopper-head.” Experts in the industry say those “Whopper-heads” are young males 16 to 24 who don’t care about nutrition. Research shows young males tend to eat at fast food restaurants 20 times a month.

Excuse me? But who made you the nutrition police? It is about choice, because I chose to eat that thing just the other day! And without bread, too. Great for the Atkins diet. :-p

I guess this is the idea of the freedom of the media thing, and also the idea that people can disagree with anything in the media as well.

Have video games ever forced legislation? Increasing awareness back in the mid-90s by parents because of overly-violent games like Mortal Kombat was one of the direct causes of a video game rating system. Now, we may have another case in Illinois thanks to Gov. Rod Blagojevich (Dem.) The game in question is the recently-released crime drama game by Midway, NARC.

Blagojevich called for the state Senate to pass his Safe Games legislation, which the Illinois House approved on a 91-19 vote last week. Passage of the measure would make Illinois the first state to ban sales or rental of such games to people younger than 18, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

“Narc” players take the role of one of two police officers and one of the options allows the game characters to use illegal drugs to change the game performance. It is rated “M” for mature.

The game is being distributed by Chicago-based Midway, which told the newspaper the game is aimed at adults and “it’s up to the parents” to control what their children play.

I find two things interesting about this. If this law is passed, are minors still going to be able to get their hands on it anyway, much like alcohol and cigarettes? Parents do have to put their foot down to keep this out of the house.

And Midway has a history of creating controversy with video games, like the aforementioned Mortal Kombat, and even an arcade game released in December 1988, also called NARC. Your basic violent shoot-’em-up, I’d say. Can’t beat the second level without losing all of my lives, though. :-p

In December of 2004, Electronic Arts, probably the biggest sports game maker in the video game business, signed a deal with the National Football League to exclusively make video games with NFL players under the EA Sports franchise. This seems like a very, very good thing, because I can say with personal experience that the EA Madden series of football games are the best football games out there.

But this $200 million deal might have consequences:

When the EA/NFL/NFL Players deal expires, no company will have renders of the league’s 1,400 players, which would cost millions – and could discourage bidding.

“I’m surprise that the naïveté of the NFL and its players,” said (Michael) Pachter (an analyst. “By giving a five-year license and giving EA an exclusive, they’re going to eliminate all of the competition. So in five years, the license fee is going to be whatever EA decides it wants to pay.”

Will this happen? Only time will tell. In the meantime, enjoy the football games! If you play them, that is

Heck yes.

On the cover of TIME Magazine, April 25, 2005, right-wing diva Ann Coulter is pictured sitting in a chair but there seems to be something weird going on with her legs and feet.

Drudge says:

The photographer, Platon, appears to have used a wide “Fisheye” lense for the cover snap, stretching Coulter’s legs and feet — while shrinking the rest of her body.

Deliberately making her look weird? I’d say yes. Including that picture of Clinton, I think they wanted him to look weird there too.

During Friday’s CBS Evening News, Bob Schiffer was speaking of a report that Alan Greenspan now predicts a tax increase in order to cut the deficit. And he seemed to be advocating it.

Schieffer brought up how Greenspan “said he now expects that in order to bring the deficit into line the government may have to raise taxes.” In his Face the Nation commentary on Sunday, Schieffer fretted about how in the rush of weekday news, as opposed to slow news weekends, “important developments are all but ignored,” such as one revelation “buried in the back pages of the Washington Post, a story in which Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said the runaway federal deficit was getting so bad, he expected taxes would have to be raised to bring it into line.” The Post had “buried” the story, “Greenspan Says He Expects Tax Increases,” by running it across the top of Friday’s “Business” section.

Now why would he want to mention raising taxes like that? The only people I know that want their taxes raised are people who government, and people that believe their taxed money is helping the poor.

And CBS News isn’t biased anymore because Dan Rather is gone from the Evening News? Whatever.

If you recall, back on May 1, 2003, after the American forces had captured Baghdad and ousted Saddam Hussein, President Bush gave a speech on the aircraft carrier U. S. S. Abraham Lincoln and part of the speech was the display of a banner that declared “Mission Accomplished.” The media hasn’t let that go.

On February 28, NBC mocked that declaration again.

Peter Alexander asserted that it was “the single deadliest attack since President Bush declared ‘mission accomplished’ in Iraq.”

Alexander’s February 28 story also covered the capture of Saddam’s half brother who is suspected of financing the insurgency. Alexander concluded his report from Baghdad:
“If the arrest of Saddam’s half brother was a blow to the insurgency, it’s hard to tell by the death toll in Hillah. Even though police say they have arrested several people linked to the Hillah bombing, tonight it remains the single deadliest attack since President Bush declared ‘mission accomplished’ in Iraq. Peter Alexander, NBC News, Baghdad.”

I’ve always said the “mission” was “accomplished”. I believe the mission at the time was to oust Saddam Hussein and that was done. Boom. Mission accomplished. But literal libs have to be so, well, literal; for the mission to be accomplished, every single i must be dotted and every single t must be crossed.

Is this guy going to quit sometime soon? This act is getting as old and dusty as the Democrat political playbook.

On Thursday’s Letterman show, according to the Media Research Center,

Dan Rather predicted that “given a little more time, perhaps we could have” authenticated the memos, [and] downgraded the potential impact of his story.

This point is old too, but I’ll say it again: if this story wasn’t so important, Dan, why did you run it months before the election?

Dalzell referred to the free trade in ideas, also known as the marketplace of ideas. How does Internet journalism, especially blogs, fit into this marketplace? How does the marketplace metaphor alter our understanding of what journalism is, and of who journalists are? How do recent blogswarms over Dan Rather, Jeff Gannon and Eason Jordan fit the metaphor? Does the chaos and cacophony of Internet sppech strengthen or weaken that marketplace? To what extent should that speech be controlled?

* * * * * * * *

Internet journalism is a horse of a different color ever since it began to show itself on the scene in the late 1990’s. Since then, it has placed its large footprint into the marketplace of ideas. Because anyone can express their ideas on the Internet, a wide range of ideas have gotten exposure that they may not normally have gotten in newspapers or television coverage. According to Dalzell,

It is fair, then, to conclude that the benefits of the Internet to private speakers arose out of the
serendipitous development of its underlying technology. As more networks joined the
“network of networks” that is the Internet, private speakers have begun to take advantage of
the medium. This should not be surprising, since participation in the medium requires only
that networks (and the individual users associated with them) agree to use the common data
transfer protocols and other medium-specific technology. Participation does not require, and
has never required, approval of a user’s or network’s content.

Next, the marketplace metaphor alters our understanding of what journalism is and what journalists are because of the simple fact that the situation can be directly transformed into the concept of a marketplace.
The consumer, or buyer, goes to the marketplace of ideas and decides what kind of information he wants to read, or buy. The “shops” of the marketplace are the channels that a person is able to get information from and the sellers of the wares of information are the journalists. This may overly simplify the real-world concept, but it still does the job.

The recent blogswarm over Dan Rather’s infamous report on the forged National Guard documents, which incidently, has a weblog named after it, is a good example of the metaphor. The “stand”, Rathergate.com is selling “wares”, ideas like this from a post by Rathergate.com blog user bobkohnon 2/16/05:

Rathergate, as this domain name suggests, has always been about the cover-up.

That Mary Mapes, Dan Rather and company were motivated by politics in the development of the now infamous segment on Bush’s national guard service is pretty much accepted by nearly all but the panel engaged to investigate the scandal. But the panel failed to answer some of the most basic questions: Were the documents fraudulent? Who prepared them? Who drove the coverup?

With Josh Howard threatening a lawsuit to clear his name, it now appears that the panel may also have screwed up the analysis of just what went on among CBS’s top execs during the coverup period. If Mr. Howard files suit, it will be the lawyers turn to uncover the coverup.

Ironically, CBS, though the defendent, will be the main beneficiary of such a suit: only by answering the unanswered will CBS finally get this sad affair behind them.

And a final irony: this is one lawsuit that the tort-reformers on the political right will welcome.

And the “buyers” of these wares are the consumers of the information, the people that visit the website. And this setup has attracted many readers and consumers.

This all proves the concept of Internet journalism has made it’s mark on the world. Soon, it might even render newspapers and magazines, the previous similar channels of communicating ideas, irrelevant because of their similar makeup and nature. And because the Internet allows for a more expanded realm of diverse ideas, this idea may become a reality.

The main sources for information in this answer are located here, and here.

The libel accusation, something all reporters and writers want to avoid like the plague, may be with former baseball player Jose Canseco’s new book. At ESPN.com, Darren Rovell reports on the problems the assertions in Canseco’s book might cause. Star players named in the book include Canseco’s former teammates Mark McGwire, Juan Gonzalez, Ivan Rodriguez, and current star players like Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa.

Particular paragraphs of interest from the article:

Whether any of these players will seek libel suits against Canseco remains to be seen. Though some may view their failure to sue Canseco as an admission of guilt, the libel test is hard one. In order to win a libel case, a public figure like a professional athlete would have to prove that a certain statement or story was untrue, that the lie hurt his reputation and that Canseco knew it was wrong when he wrote it.

According to Tom Rhodes, an Atlanta-based attorney who specializes in libel cases, two-thirds of all media libel cases are dismissed before they are tried in court. If a trial takes place, Rhodes said, juries rule in favor of the plaintiff two-thirds of the time, though most of those verdicts are reversed on appeal.

“Before any one of these athletes sues for libel, they should realize that they are going to be part of a continuing story that will last for a long time,” Rhodes said. “If they don’t sue, the story is more likely to disappear.”

This is a legitimate issue and the players have every right ot assert it. Personally, I think that Jose Canseco is just using these accusations to make money because he knows that most baseball fans are very concerned about this issue and are eager to find out about who is doing it and who isn’t, even if it was coming from an ego-centric source like Jose Canseco.

On February 12, the AP put out a story that describes new Navy Reservist Johnnie Chennault and his large family of a wife and 11 children. Overall, the article seems to imply that the war in Iraq is depriving the Chennault family of their main source of income and have a harder life, although they do concede that Chennault’s employer, Sears, will “make up the difference in pay while he’s in Iraq, an assignment Chennault thinks will last seven or eight months.” The glaring sentence of this assertion might come in the words of Chennault’s boss, Chris Nokes.

“I wish he wasn’t going. I just hope he comes home safe.”

That is a natural statement of support, but it can also confirm the implied message when looked at from the perspective of anti-war feelings.

Days before the big game, old wounds are reopened by our good friends at TIME.com. They just have to point out for the umpteenth time that Donovan McNabb is black. And they have to drag Mr. Limbaugh through the mud once more.

Rush Limbaugh thrust an unwitting McNabb into a firestorm in 2003 with his idiotic statement about black quarterbacks being overrated. Among veteran quarterbacks, McNabb has the highest winning percentage.

Jokes aside, McNabb clearly knows the score going into this year’s Super Bowl. Only one other black quarterback, Doug Williams of the 1987 Washington Redskins, has won the big game. “It’s not overblown,” McNabb says of his place in history. “But I won’t make it into a big issue.” So his teammates will.

Hold on. Idiotic statement? Gee, wonder where is this author is coming from? And honestly, does it matter that McNabb is black? He’s just a quarterback. Not a black quarterback . And Rush’s statement that the author is criticizing is absolutely ratified by this article!

From a transcript here.

Limbaugh: … for instance, black coaches and black quarterbacks doing well. I think there is a little hope invested in McNabb and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he really didn’t deserve …

This was back 0n September 28, 2003, when the Eagles were coming off a bye week after having lost two games 17-0 and 31-10. I doubt McNabb looked good then.

Their latest report is here. I’m not the least bit surprised about any of it. The thing covered in the report that disgusts me the most is that Good Morning America report on the murder of Megan Holden, in which it infers that the accused killer was affected by the war after he returned from Iraq. This kind of reporting won’t tone down until early 2009, I’m certain of that.

During the confirmation hearings the past couple of days, now-confirmed National Security Advisor Dr. Condoleezza Rice described six nations as “outposts of tyranny”.

Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice yesterday branded six countries, including Iran and North Korea, as “outposts of tyranny,” coining a term reminiscent of President Bush’s “axis of evil” three years ago.
Miss Rice, during her confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, vowed to use diplomacy to address “the threats to our common security” and to “spread freedom and democracy throughout the globe.”
“That is the mission that President Bush has set for America in the world, and it’s the great mission of American diplomacy today,” she said.
“To be sure, in our world, there remain outposts of tyranny, and America stands with oppressed people on every continent,” she said, naming Cuba, Burma (Myanmar, North Korea, Iran, Belarus and Zimbabwe.

A list of the reasons that these nations have been named can be found here.

I respect Dr. Rice a great deal and believe that she will continue to serve her country as best she can under President Bush. And her naming of these particular nations has told me one thing: I may pay attention to the news a lot, but I don’t pay enough attention, because I had no clue about what was going on in the countries other than Iran, Cuba and North Korea. Maybe we all can learn a little lesson from that.