The Hindu | No censorship? The Hindu No serious thought seems to be given to the agonising rise in the cases of rape and molestation, which one believes is due to the absence of a separate Censor Board for television. With the rise in TV channels and serials, one comes across horrendous ... |
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No censorship? - The Hindu
Actor Johnny Depp introduces his film The Libertine at the Glastonbury Festival of Music and Performing Arts on Worthy Farm near the village of Pilton in Somerset, South West England, on Thursday.
AFP/Getty Images
A daily roundup of the biggest stories in right-wing media.
Voices in conservative media continued to criticize left-wing political rhetoric on Friday. The Federalists Mary Katherine Ham wrote that the events of the past week and the responses to them in the media and the Democratic Party showed that many on the Left and in elite institutions dont want to understand the other half of the country:
On Fox and Friends, Fox host Jeanine Pirro said that the Democratic Party had become a party of hate and destruction. I think its anti-American, she said. I really do. Im sorry. When you talk about, you know, killing the president, doing the stuff theyve been doing, its disgusting.
During the day, audio circulated of Nebraska Democratic Party official Phil Montag saying that he wished that Steve Scalise, who was seriously wounded in the June 14 congressional baseball shooting, was dead. This motherfucker, like his whole job is like to get people, convince Republicans to fucking to kick people off fucking health care, he said. I hate this motherfucker. Im fucking glad he got shot. Montag was fired on Thursday. [Nebraska Democratic Party chairwoman Jane] Kleeb deserves to be recommended for her clear stance against violence in political rhetoric, PJ Medias Tyler ONeil wrote. Both the Left and the Right should denounce it. In the Washington Examiner, Becket Adams criticized Kleeb for saying that rhetoric on both sides of the aisle needed to be toned down. After a politically-motivated assassination attempt carried out by an alleged left-wing fanatic, and after her own people have been caught celebrating and snickering over the near-massacre, Kleeb has the gall to pull the both sides card, he said. We're not sure what's going on in Nebraska, but it sounds like the states Democratic Party is in desperate need of a leadership overhaul.
Montags comments drew attention on Twitter.
So too did a joke Johnny Depp made Thursday night at the British music festival Glastonbury about assassinating Trump. Im not insinuating anythingby the way, this will be in the press and it will be horriblebut when was the last time an actor assassinated a president, he asked. I want to clarify, I am not an actor. I lie for a living. However, it has been a while, and maybe it is time. He later apologized.
The White House released a statement asking Depps colleagues to speak out against violent rhetoric. Those Hollywood elitists wont speak about it, of course, the Daily Wires Amanda Prestigiacomo wrote. Depp is a leftist and apparently advocating something with which they agree.
Multiple outlets applauded the news that former Attorney General Loretta Lynch is the subject of a new probe by the Senate Judiciary Committee over her involvement in the Clinton email investigation. RedStates Susan Wright called the move well overdue:
Other conservatives rejoiced on Twitter:
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Today in Conservative Media: The Left Is Still Out of Control - Slate Magazine (blog)
Photo: Mark Schiefelbein, Associated Press
Staffers of Sina Weibo promote the site at the Global Mobile Internet Conference in April in Beijing. Three Chinese Internet services have been ordered to stop streaming video.
Staffers of Sina Weibo promote the site at the Global Mobile Internet Conference in April in Beijing. Three Chinese Internet services have been ordered to stop streaming video.
China tightens online video controls
BEIJING Three popular Chinese Internet services have been ordered to stop streaming video after censors complained it contained improper comments on sensitive issues. The move prompted a sell-off in the U.S.-traded shares of Sina Corp. and its microblogging service, Sina Weibo.
Thursdays announcement adds to efforts by President Xi Jinpings government to tighten media control ahead of a Communist Party congress late this year. Xi is due to be appointed to a second five-year term as party leader.
Video streamed by users of Sina Weibo, AcFun and Phoenix New Medias Ifeng.com contained negative comments about unspecified sensitive issues, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio Film and Television said. It ordered them to stop the services.
Communist leaders promote Internet use for business and education but try to block access to material deemed subversive or obscene.
Beijing has been especially wary of social media since some sites were used by organizers of the Arab Spring protests that spread across the Middle East in 2010 and led to the downfall of the Egyptian and Tunisian governments.
Rules that took effect June 1 bar private or foreign companies from directly disseminating news or investing in online news services. Those that want to work with foreign partners must undergo a security review.
In January, the government announced a 14-month crackdown on cloud-hosting and content-delivery services. The technology ministry said it forbids use of virtual private networks and leased lines to circumvent government filters and access banned websites abroad.
On the Nasdaq Stock Market, Weibo shares fell 6.1 percent and shares of Sina fell 4.8 percent after Thursdays announcement. Both regained less than 1 percent Friday.
The company is communicating with the relevant government authorities to understand the scope of the notice. It intends to fully cooperate with the relevant authorities, Weibo said.
Sina Weibos main business is a microblogging service similar to Twitter. It is one of the worlds most popular social media services, with 313 million users as of December, according to the company.
Weibos stock market value surpassed Twitters early this year. It stood at $15.8 billion after Thursdays sell-off or more than double the $6.2 billion market value of its parent company compared with $13.2 billion for Twitter.
AcFun is a video-sharing site that is popular with young Chinese, and Ifeng broadcasts brief news and entertainment videos.
In a statement on its Weibo account, AcFun promised to carry out a comprehensive rectification of its website management to create a clear and bright online environment.
Joe McDonald is an Associated Press writer.
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China tightens online video controls - SFGate
According to the newly released Heritage Committee report on Canadian media, we are a nation smothered under the power of excess media concentration. The data available on this subject indicates that media concentration is increasing in Canada to the point where Canada has the highest vertical and horizontal media concentration in the world.
Wow. Thats terrible. Theres nothing worse in liberal economic circles than corporate concentration, unless the concentration is in the hands of government. Then its okay, even desirable. In this case, the committee is zeroing in on alleged concentration of private industry control over the telecommunications, broadcasting, social media, web browsers, wireless, desktop operating systems, newspapers, pay TV, etc.
The committee says it has the data to prove that Canada is under the heels of the most concentrated media structure in the world. If it has the data, then it must be fact, right? Unless, of course, the data is a little shaky as is often the case in the area of economics and law that covers anti-trust, monopolies, competition enforcement, market power, industrial structures, control and concentration and other bogeys of the alt-left.
So what is this data and how did the (Liberal majority) politicians on the Heritage Committee come up with its alarming conclusion? It gets complicated. Some math is involved, along with a lot of massaging and manipulation of media ownership and market share numbers.
The supplier of the data, it turns out, was Dwayne Winseck, director of the Canadian Media Concentration Research Project at Carleton Universitys School of Journalism and Communications. The institutes name sort of gives away its lack of objectivity and Winseck has been cranking out claims of media concentration for many years.
For the committee, Winseck employed a basic data head-spinner called the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index. It was developed by U.S. researchers more than 60 years ago and adopted by U.S. Justice Department anti-trust enforcers.
Heres the basic math exercise: To determine market concentration, begin with a list of all the firms in the business and their market shares. Lets say there are four firms supplying widgets: Firm One has 40 per cent of the market, Firm Two has 30 per cent, Firm Three 20 and Firm Four 10.
From this data, the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index of industry concentration (widely known as the HHI) calculates the square of each firms market share. Firm Ones data point then becomes 1,600, while the square of each of the others is 900, 400 and 100 respectively. The total, 3,000, is the HHI for the widget industry.
Under HHI theory, if the total of the squares of the market share in an industry exceeds 2,500, then it is already excessively concentrated, even oligopolistic.
Whether this makes any sense or not has been hard to discern from the economic literature. There are dozens of YouTube videos on how to calculate the Herfindahl index, but none that explains why it matters.
The foundational point appears to be the old perfect competition myth of corporate organization. If there are 10 firms in the market, then the market is perfectly competitive. Ten times 10, 10 times, equals a 1,000 HHI score, perfect competition. If theres only one firm with 100 per cent of the market, the HHI is 10,000, monopoly.
If this strikes you as the mathematical flapdoodle that it is, never mind, because it gets more complicated. A key to the Herfindahl index is determining the market thats being measured and squared. In Winsecks analysis, cited by the Heritage Committee, the definition of markets are narrowed down to the point where just about every nook and cranny of the media world is a self-contained concentrated market. When it comes to todays media industries, that approach makes no sense.
For example, Winseck runs an HHI on Social Network Sites and comes up with a score of 2,762, thereby creating the idea that Twitter, Facebook and a few other sites are standalone examples of highly concentrated media. Separate HHI calculations are done on broadcast television, mobile web browsers, pay and specialty TV channels, newspapers, mobile wireless, desktop operating systems, and many more. All but a few (magazines, radio) hit HHI scores of below 2,100 (moderately concentrated) while most top 2,500 and up to 8,300 (highly concentrated).
But breaking off each little segment and sub-segment of todays media industries makes no sense. Many of these isolated industries are part of vicious inter-industry and inter-market competition. Consumers are constantly shifting from one medium to another, one technology to another, from YouTube videos to magazine sites to print newspapers to radio to cable channels to Netflix to Twitter to wireless videos its an endless and giant smorgasbord of content and technology.
In a 2014 law review paper, California attorney Toby Roberts commented that Orris Herfindahl, creator of the index, warned that there are many factors that play into the complex business of industrial competition and that the index suffered the deficiency of considering only two indicia of industry behavior. Roberts added another point: The precision and sophistication of the HHI may cloak its limitations and create a false impression of scientific accuracy in the courts.
And, one might add, among researchers and politicians who are in the business of policy-based evidence making, one of the hallmarks of junk science.
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Junk Science Week: Little data on big media - Financial Post
"Yanez may have gotten away with justice on this planet. He will not get away with divine justice."
Valerie Castile: Yanez may have gotten away with justice on this planet. He will not get away with divine justice.
These were Valerie Castile's words to the public moments after Minnesota Officer Jeronimo Yanez was found not guilty in the fatal shooting of her son, Philando Castile.
Usually, moments after the death or lack of conviction of loved ones, the parents of the slain will say to the press something similar to Castile, in relation to religion and God.
Tracy Martin, dad of Trayvon Martin, told NBC News in an interview published in July 2013 before George Zimmerman was found not guilty for the second-degree murder charge in the death of his son that "we will still put our faith in God," if Zimmerman was acquitted.
"My answer to that would be God is in control. You know, we continue to put our faith in God. And God forbid, if acquittal is handed down, we still put our faith in God, you know, it's out of our hands. There's nothing we can do and we'll continue to pray," he said.
There's something so moving and sad about that sentiment. But why does it often make me angry?
Because this expression, to me, reveals a conditioning of black people, even from a young age, to trust in and give it over to God in the midst of all hardships. This is especially the case when faced with death or a wrongdoing at the hands of a cop, a person of authority or a white person.
My mom, a Southern woman, would always make biblical references whenever sadness or difficulties struck. Maybe I'm cynical to wonder what kind of God would do this to you or us because of the color of our skin? I'm aware that spirituality and religion serve so many purposes in one's life, and I would never diminish that significance. I can understand calling out to or praying to God for comfort or solace. However, I ask that we follow up those prayers with action.
During the late 1800s, and early nineteenth century, lots of black folks were converted to Christianity. With slaveholders quickly realizing that religion could be used to continue preaching the importance of obedience to their masters. However, religion - likely unbeknownst to many white people at the time -began to become abeacon of hope for slave preachers who would use the word of God to teach redemption, freedom and salvation.
"Slaves sang spirituals filled with lyrics about salvation and references to biblical figures like Moses, who led his people to freedom. On occasion, these songs functioned even more explicitly as expressions of resistance, encoding messages about secret gatherings or carrying directions for escape," according to PBS.
Religion continues to have an important role in the lives of many black people to this day, and it should. "Several studies and surveys reveal black Americans retain remarkably strong levels of religious beliefs and practices. And that spiritual core is having an impact on community life in areas from health to economic empowerment," HuffPost reported in 2015.
We all know the statistics of how black people are disadvantaged and discriminated against in every single aspect of life: black people arrested at a rate five times more than that of whites, blacks are more likely to be spoken to disrespectfully by the police, black people in the military are punished more, black students get punished more harshly, black women are least desired when it comes to dating, black women with natural hair in the workplace face more bias, people with black-sounding names are less likely to hear back from a job, and so much more.
It will take the support, courage and persistence from all Americans to change this systemic issue that's deeply engrained in the tapestry of this country. All my life, I have been told how this system wasn't made for us to succeed, and how I would have to work twice as hard to get half as much. But I still believe that change is attainable through action and being vocal.
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The Problem With Black People Asking God For Justice - ATTN: