Left Out of the Digital Switchover

February 17, 2009. That's really not that far off when you stop and think about it.

That's the date of the nation's impending digital switchover from the analog television broadcast signal. Put simply, if you don't have a digital-ready television, or cable box capable of receiving the digital signal, by next February 17th, you will no longer have access to television broadcasts. Period.

Because the activities of the FCC are often layered in term-laden, technical complexity, many people don't realize that the 700MHz frequency spectrum on which television signals have been broadcast for years, was auctioned off by the government for $19.6 billion earlier this year; a consortium of large carriers and hi-tech companies bought it. It will be used in part to handle the massive increase in mobile bandwidth needs.

I blogged about the digital switch here on culturegeist back on July 10th.

I certainly see numerous television commercials and informational Websites sponsored by the cable companies to advertise government-backed coupons that offset consumer's purchases of the now-necessary digital converter boxes. The animated figure (pictured above) is part of the United Kingdom's ad campaign for their switchover.

What I don't see is a whole lot of mainstream media examination of this fractionally small, but none the less important omission from the digital switchover. It's not going to come as a shocker but the numbers of people who will be without television access are poor and I'd guess slanted towards the more rural areas of the country. They'll come from all races and nationalities.

For me the potential cultural concern is that Hispanics and African-Americans will be left out of the television equation in disproportionate numbers.

What's that going to mean to people? Can sociologists gauge the impact of people in the US with little or no access to TV?

Some might argue they'll be better off but Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Mr. Rodgers Neighborhood - these public television programs were very important to me as a Gen X kid raised in the burbs in the 70's and 80's. Should you have to pay each month to see TV?

Our desire and need to consume larger amounts of data and media content how, when and where we want and over multiple devices is one of the major drivers of the digital switchover.

But for all the 'enlightened' ways in which we consume media, don't we collectively have some degree of moral obligation to ensure that the information and educational gaps that underline the wealth disparities in the US not divide free access to local news and entertainment along the lines of the ability to purchase new technology and pay high monthly cable fees?

Don't the people of all races and backgrounds living on the fringes of the US economic spectrum deserve to plug in their old rabbit ear black and white and be able to watch something?

After February 17, 2009 not so much.

Tamron Hall's Distortion of Obama's Patriotism: Live on MSNBC!

Is it me, or does it seem as if prominent African-Americans are just all over Obama's case this week? Or is the media just making it seem that way?

Weeks after the incident occurred the Reverend Al Sharpton boldly steps forth and rises to the defense of Jesse Jackson after the latter's vulgar off-air remarks about Obama - in some kind of strange effort to make them both seem more relevant to the current political dialog than they actually are.

Unfortunately both bizarre media missteps only had the effect of making them both seem slightly less relevant and much more desperate.

MSNBC Anchor Tamron Hall (pictured above) is catching heat for a glaring journalistic blunder according to an article posted on the Media Matters for America Website on Monday, July 28th.

MediaMatters.org reports that during a Monday July 28, 2008 broadcast MSNBC Live anchor used a story about a John McCain political sound bite to distort the fact that Barack Obama had visited wounded troops while in Iraq. She repeats the false accusation from the McCain camp without any reference to the actual facts of the case.

The number of her specific commentary points totally conflicting with established facts are so numerous you really have to read the Media Matters piece (click the link above) yourself to appreciate one example of the evaporation of the most basic journalistic principles.

She and MSNBC 's crack research team were apparently totally unaware that Obama HAD in fact visited wounded US troops in the Green Zone along with other Congressional representatives during his trip to Iraq, has visited wounded troops at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington on multiple occasions and also made personal phone calls to wounded soldiers at the huge US military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany where most seriously wounded soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan are flown.

Rumors abound that McCain quietly used Pentagon connections to prevent the Obama camp from flying to Landstuhl - a trip that had been planned for weeks.

Hall actually contradicts a statement MSNBC's OWN chief foreign correspondent Andrea Mitchell made on July 25th that Obama DID visit troops in Iraq!

Check out this video of Hall answering questions at length from Hardball's Chris Matthews, she manages to simultaneously earnestly cement her authority on the story by recounting her experience as a member of the same Chicago Church Obama attended, headed of course by Reverend Wright - and also slam Obama on the Reverend Wright issue.

After a rather long-winded answer the camera pulls back and Andrea Mitchell is one of the Hardball panelists; the video is worth the look on Andrea's face.

I certainly am not suggesting that Hall or any other African-American for that matter doesn't have every right to express their opinion of Obama; but not at the expense of the truth. I mean come on, that doesn't even qualify as analysis.

Call me crazy but he's proved himself a capable and worthy political opponent and a savvy politician; he's kept it above the belt, if you're going to criticize the man at least get your facts straight.

"Crabs in a bucket." My Grandmom might've said. "Crabs in a bucket."

Italian Vogue's 1st All Black Issue Defies Mainstream Fashion Media Assumptions

My last blog about the fashion industry and race here on culturegeist was on June 24, 2008 after the media was swirling with reports about Naomi Campbell's latest meltdown in Heathrow Airport over her baggage not being put aboard her flight. I wondered how such behavior impacts other younger black models in the industry.

I HAD to comment on reports about Italian Vogue's recent all black issue, that's right! You heard it correctly! Oh, in case you're wondering that's 17 year-old British modeling sensation Jourdan Dunn, pictured left, gracing THE cover of the moment.

It was photographer Annie Leibovitz's April, 2008 Vogue cover that prompted me to start blogging about fashion and race in the first place - her cover photo of Cleveland Cavaliers guard Lebron James dribbling a basketball and cradling model Giselle Bundchen was so flagrantly filled with negative racial overtones I began to seriously wonder about little Annie's childhood.

A MAINSTREAM FASHION magazine filled with with nothing but black models? But how can that be? Fashionistas and media pundits have been mumbling on about how fashion magazines with black models on the cover "just don't sell" for years.

As a writer my career interests have expanded beyond just the publishing industry but I still read my trusty Ed2010 - that's where I saw the citation of Mediabistro's Vogue mention earlier at work, I was too busy to fire off a blog.

The coolest part is that it reportedly sold out on the news stands everywhere; you can't get your hands on a copy. In this era of flat print magazine ad sales, Vogue had to do a reprint!

Of the possible backlash, Italian Vogue editrix Franca Sozzani said:

"Maybe in our country it's not the best idea, but I don't care. I think if they don't like it it's not my problem it's their problem." You go Franca!

Perhaps the editors at Italian Vogue decided to show that Annie Leibovitz's cover doesn't accurately define the totality of Vogue's editorial and ad content. Perhaps there are those who dislike the assumptions about black models perpetuated by the fashion industry and their advertisers.

Maybe it's like a football game where a ref doesn't catch someone holding you on one play, but he gives you a make up for it later in the game without saying anything.

Well partial make up anyway, none of the ads in the issue featured models of color - but I guess it's a start. And that can be a very important step.

Oy Vey! Facebook's Targeted Ads Missing the Mark

I enjoy reading David Berkowitz's blog, he posted a pretty insightful and funny observation about Facebook serving him up contextual ads based on his ethnicity even though he doesn't say he's Jewish on his Facebook page.

Check out the picture of the ad, with the not so subtle "Hew Jew" greeting across the top, they sent to his Facebook page - it was posted Wednesday July 16, 2008 on his blog: InsideTheMarketers Studio

He also blogged about it on the Online Spin site the next day - the Online Spin blog might have a contact-info wall before you can read it but - you can get the gist on his blog and I think it's funnier. His observation about Facebook having some kind of secret Jewdar was hysterical.

What is Jewdar? More to the purposes of this article check out Heeb Magazine's more media-centric use of the term for yourself - see what Jewdar is all about. Both the site and the term are getting more and more media mention, potential permanent part of our sub-culture?

Could be, it's pretty sharp. I occasionally check out the dialog that goes down on sites like TheYeshivaWorld.com and Jewdar has a much more interesting contemporary Jewish perspective.

It goes without saying that advertisers and marketers struggle with executing ideas that connect with and engage specific audiences. Behavioral online advertising will inevitably stumble on the same cracks.

During the week of July 7th Berkowitz also blogged about how female Facebook users are being annoyed by targeted ads making assumptions about their weight, relationship status and their product marketing choices. Funny when they THINK they know you.

It's like a technological version of the same process people use to peg total strangers and tuck them into the little drawers divided on lines of culture, sex, race or religion.

New Yorker Magazine Cover Panders to Racist Media Portrayal of Senator Obama

I was pretty shocked when I logged on to the MediaTakout.com Website this morning and glimpsed the July 21, 2008 cover of The New Yorker Magazine featuring Senator Barack Obama and his wife depicted respectively as a Muslim cleric in Islamic-scholar dress and an AK-47-wielding terrorist-radical with an Angela Davis Afro.

Oh and there's a burning flag and a picture of Osama Bin Laden in the background too in artist Barry Blitt's appropriately titled, "The Politics of Fear."

Haven't seen it? Click the link above. Of course I immediately sent off an e-mail letter to the editor to the New Yorker to which I received this somewhat generic automatic reply:

"About this week’s issue: Our cover, “The Politics of Fear,” combines a number of fantastical images about the Obamas and shows them for the obvious distortions they are. The burning flag, the nationalist-radical and Islamic outfits, the fist-bump, the portrait on the wall— all of them echo one attack or another. Satire is part of what we do, and it is meant to bring things out into the open, to hold up a mirror to prejudice, the hateful, and the absurd. And that's the spirit of this cover. In this same issue you will also see that there are two very serious articles on Barack Obama inside—Hendrik Hertzberg's Comment, (http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/07/21/080721taco_talk_hertzberg) and Ryan Lizza's 15,000-word reporting piece on the candidate's political education and rise in Chicago (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/21/080721fa_fact_lizza)."

Well if satire is what they do, then it was certainly executed with poor editorial judgment, lack of cultural sensitivity and from my take; really bad taste.

Even if their intent WAS to lampoon the distorted right-wing depictions of Senator Obama and his wife, was that cover the only artistic interpretation they could come up with? An image that essentially reinforces all of these media mischaracterizations; many of which are generated by Fox News and the GOP's "Karl Rove school of political slander."

This mind-blowing editorial blunder is already generating waves of controversy in print, across the Web and on both television and radio. Sadly, their journalistic intent (and the hard work of writers Hendrick Hertzberg and Ryan Lizza is almost completely overshadowed by the cover of the magazine.

As a media professional who works with companies who publish magazines, I can only say this mess reflects that unfortunate fact that there is an appalling lack of diversity within the US magazine publishing industry, on the junior staff levels, in mid-management and most importantly on the mastheads.

Complex magazine editor Rich Antonoiello's video interview from the Folio: Website on diversity within the magazine industry is timely; just click the link on the upper right hand page to view it.

Don't get mad, get productive and stay positive! E-mail the New Yorker with your comments at:
themail@newyorker.com

Analog Television Demise Signals No Reception for Millions of Poor Consumers

Both cable and network television have their hands full trying to remain on the radar of the millions of consumers who now gravitate to the Web for news, communication, information, shopping, travel-planning, entertainment and increasingly content that was once the exclusive domain of television.

On February 17, 2009 the entire television broadcast industry is going fully digital. It's hard to miss the commercials warning of the impending switch. Cable companies around the country have committed $1 billion to educating consumers about the switch, and offering information about how to apply for government subsidized coupons from the Department of Commerce (wouldn't want anyone missing all that commercial advertising...) to offset the purchase price of a new digital converter.

But what exactly does this "switch" mean?

For one it means the tried and true analog signal that broadcasts over the 700 megahertz band, the same one that's brought us countless hours of television programming for decades, will simply no longer work; if you don't have cable that is.

The Digital Television Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005 makes it law with the stamp of the United States Congress. In a page ripped right out of the "Large Cable Company Wish List", Congress has made the purchase of new digital televisions and digital cable boxes mandatory if you want to watch TV.

In a secret bidding process that most Americans don't even really know about, the FCC auctioned off the 700 megahertz band for an eye-opening $19.6 billion in early 2008.

700 MHz penetrates walls and large telecommunications companies like AT&T and Verizon will now use a portion of it to handle the massive bandwidth needs of consumers using mobile phones, PDA's, Blackberry's, iPhones and laptop computers to download and share content over the Internet. The government will also turn some space over to emergency channels for firemen and police.

One thing that concerns me is that there are millions of low-income people in America who currently still use the old "rabbit-ears" or rooftop TV receptors to watch television. A disproportionate number of those people are Hispanic and African-Americans. Some can't afford a new digital-ready television, some just can't afford the high monthly fees to get cable.
Some just have no desire to get cable. Regardless, by February 10, 2008 they won't be able to watch TV.

There's something inherently unfair about that to me and it comes with a lot of ethical questions; and some environmental ones too. Senior editor Kenneth Hein explored some of these questions in the June 30, 2008 issue of Brandweek.

The digital transition has an array of permutations, more content, more bandwidth, more devices interconnected to the Internet - but it also means millions of Americans living on the fringes of the economy being totally cut off from television broadcast content, including news and public television, because they simply cannot afford the connection.

That's a lot of people left out of the digital equation.

Jesse Helms Dead at 86 - Business as Usual for the GOP

As Americans celebrate their independence a variety of mainstream media sources are marking the passing of former Republican Senator Jesse Helms (pictured at left) after the conservative North Carolina politician passed away in the early hours in a rest home in Raleigh.

Many Americans also mark the close of a direct political link to segregation, institutionalized racism and the marginalization of people based on skin color, religion and sexual preference.

The mainstream media went pretty easy on him. For my weekend television news fix I watch Lester Holt on NBC News. Since Bernard Shaw retired from CNN, Lester's become the most preiminent African-American anchor on network television. Lester noted Helm's conservative record, but out of respect shied away from excessive editorial comment.

But some media sources that lean more left gave Helms' passing scant notice given his right-wing politics and stances against art, communists, Martin Luther King, Jr. and homosexuals - the Mother Jones Website, for instance didn't seem to pay his death much mind; they didn't make a fuss but they didn't celebrate or anything.

Anyway, Helms was raised in the segregated South and his views were molded in a way of life that was built around an archaic antebellum perspective of the United States in which blacks and whites did not associate, work or attend church or school together.

Sure he had blacks on his staff, where he found people of color to work for him is beyond me, but make no mistake, Helms opposed segregation at every turn. He was a staunch conservative who believed in an American landscape divided along racial lines

Sadly this element is NOT gone from the GOP, in fact the Southern Poverty Law Center Website reports that Alabama State Senator Charles Bishop, a conservative Republican representative from Jasper, AL was the keynote at the 2008 Council of Conservative Citizen's conference.

The CCC is a racist, pro-segregationist organization born of the notorious White Citizen's Councils that sprang up around the South in response to the expansion of civil rights efforts across the South in the 1940's, 50's and 60's.

No one can argue that Jesse Helms didn't have a major impact on the modern conservative movement, but the sad truth is that his legacy of racism still exists today both within the Republican Party and across the Southern United States.

Jesse was like the uncle no one likes to talk about and our collective culturegeist will be the better without the presence of this advocate of hate and extremism. Men like Jesse Helms are remnants of a dark past that cannot be a part of an evolving America that seeks to take it's place amongst diverse, prosperous nations that support freedom and merge with the larger global community.

Beating of Black Teen in Marshfield, Mass. Belies Boston's Dark Side

Boston, one of the nation's oldest cities, has always been such a weird place to me. It's the place where Crispus Attucks, an African-American, became the first American to be killed by English troops of the Twenty-Ninth Regiment during the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770.

But it's also a city that was a major center of the US slave trade and home to a large Irish-American population; many, not all, of whom haven't exactly been welcome to the idea of coexisting with black people in the highly segregated neighborhoods that surround Boston, like the infamous Irish Catholic South Boston neighborhood commonly known as "Southie"

I had a paraplegic classmate from Southie while I was in college at Penn State. She told me it was an extremely dangerous place for any African-American and she didn't know any black Boston residents who would even think about being in the neighborhood at night; she was Irish Catholic.

The photo shown above frightened me when I first saw it years ago as a child, and it still gives me chills today as an adult. In it, a white Southie resident uses a flag pole with an American flag attached to it to stab an African-American man while his hands are held behind his back during a 1970's eruption of violence by Southie residents opposed to school integration and forced busing.

As an African-American intellectual who tries to understand, through objective analysis, some of the complex mitigating factors that make some geographical areas more prone to racism than others. Boston just confuses me. Well parts of Boston anyway.

On June 17th the Boston Globe's John Ellement wrote about 7 people charged in Marshfield, MA with the vicious beating of 17 year-old Tizaya Robinson, a black teenager brutally beaten even after he was unconscious by a group of up to 12 men and women while they yelled racial slurs at him. He was also stabbed repeatedly with 3-inch thick, 18-inch long wooden stick; which was covered in blood and found at the scene.

Just reading about it horrifies and sickens me. What's terrifying is the blind hate that festers in the hearts of people motivated to brutally attack a teenager they don't even know because his skin color is different than their own. Incidents like this are not an indicator of a great nation; but a symptom of a nation eating itself from within. A nation being ravaged by the cultural cancer known as racism.

We're fighting a war in Iraq and in the mountains of Afghanistan? The greater enemy is right here at home, hiding inside the hearts and minds of people blinded by their own hate.