Mediaboss Marketing

Heavy distortions and suppressions of information regarding current Ukrainian events are appearing in US media.

You might wonder how so many different news sources could all completely avoid mentioning that the US government is consciously supporting two radical far-right parties, Svoboda and Right Sector, which are in control of key positions in the coup-installed new 'government' of the Ukraine. You might also wonder why almost all the US mass media news sources could conceal with vague phrases like ''the sequence of events is not clear' and similar techniques the role of these extremist organization in murdering dozens of unarmed civilians in the past few days in southeastern Ukraine.

The explanation is surprisingly simple: There aren't numerous US mass media news sources at all; there are just five. Five giant corporations control 90 percent of US mass media. And direct links connect all five of these media conglomerates to the political establishment and the economic and political power-elites of the United States.

These five conglomerates are Time Warner, Disney, Murdochs' News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS). Their control spans most of the newspapers, magazines, books, radio and TV stations, movie studios, and much of the web news content of the United States. These conglomerates are in large measure responsible for inculcating the social, political, economic, and moral values of both adults and children in the United States.

It was not always like this. Immediately after World War II three out of four US newspapers were independently owned. But the media-control numbers have been shrinking ever since then due to mergers, acquisitions, and other processes. By 1983, 50 corporations controlled 90 percent of US media. But today just five giant conglomerates control 90 percent of what most Americans read, watch, and listen to.

It is notable and should be emphasized that all the five major media conglomerates are corporate members of the Council on Foreign relations. This organization is a US think-tank whose members have been instrumental in formulating US government policies resulting in sanctions, destabilization efforts, and outright military attacks on nations which have never attacked the US.

The Council's members activities helped to promote the Iraq war, the bombings of Serbia and Libya, and the recent overthrow of the elected government of the Ukraine. The promotion of these policies by the media conglomerates which belong to the Council has been key to preparing the American public to accept these policies.

The media conglomerates fellow members of the Council on Foreign relations include a large number of large corporations, powerful CEO's, and present and former government officials. One prominent member is former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose doctrine calling for US control of the Eurasian landmass, which includes Russia and China, is one of the guiding elements in US foreign policy.

It should also be noted that the conglomerates themselves are giant corporations. They are among the largest companies in the world. They contribute to both of Americas big parties, the Republicans and Democrats, while supporting their policies. US media companies have also received from the Reagan, Clinton, and Bush administrations progressively greater media deregulation, which permitted ever greater media ownership concentration, culminating for the first time in allowing all the media in a community or city to be owned by one company.

Pages would be needed to list the thousands of information outlets now controlled by the five conglomerates. A few examples will have to suffice. News Corp owns Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, Barrons weekly, the London times, far Eastern Economic review, the New York Post, and hundreds of other large and small city and community newspapers, magazines, and internet properties.

Time-warner owns Time Magazine, Fortune Magazine, People Magazine, Sports Illustrated, CNN news group, Turner networks and movies, Warner brothers films, DC Comics, Times online systems, and much more.

And Disney is not just about Mickey Mouse Cartoons these days, as it owns ABC Television, magazine publishing business, Disney Films, Lucas Films, and a huge number of other media and entertainment enterprises.

Now let us perform a thought experiment to see how far the conglomerates can go to support government foreign policies. Imagine that US policy-makers decide a few years from now that the current US-supported and unelected Ukrainian 'government' no longer serves their interests.

They might then announce that this government is 'undemocratic', 'is a human rights violator' or that it is a 'failed state' and that 'there must be 'regime change' to 'protect the Ukrainian people.'

Following suit, the media conglomerates would then 'sound the alarm.' They would 'discover' the reality which has existed all along that fascist or extreme-right forces are part of the coup-imposed Ukrainian 'government, that there is a history of anti-Semitism, murders of ethnic-minorities, and conclude that the US government is right and a humanitarian intervention to remove the government is required.

Is this scenario an impossible one? Not at all. It is precisely how the repressive and brutal government of Saddam Hussein, to cite just one example, was dealt with. For many years he was praised by US officials as a stalwart ally and sent billions of dollars worth of military aid and the media conglomerates went along for the ride.

Then, in the twinkling of an eye he was converted by the US government and by the media into a tyrant, a ruthless killer, a possessor of weapons of mass destruction aimed at the US; and a man whose country must be invaded.

Or consider Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan. For years the US government supported them with weapons and training and portrayed them as 'freedom fighters' against their secular 'socialist government' and the 'Russian occupation'. The media for the most part went along with this narrative.

But then, after 9/11, in the twinkling of an eye, the fundamentalists became (in the eyes of the government and the conglomerates) 'medievalists,''oppressors of women,' and harborers of 'terrorism' who must be eliminated via a US invasion.

Recently, the US government, unable after ten years of military occupation to eliminate the Taliban resistance, has again changed course, and is seeking negotiations with the Taliban to include them in the Afghani government. And again the five conglomerates have also changed course to follow the government.

The best advice for anyone seeking to understand current events is to look at the history and realities behind them, and to look at media not controlled by the five conglomerates. Media including print, television, and internet is available in multiple languages including English from Russia, China, India, Pakistan, South Africa, the Middle East, Brazil, and other countries. You can easily find this media by internet search. No doubt all media contains bias; but at least your mind will not be shaped solely by the US narrative.

Eric Sommer for RT

View post:
How five American companies control what you think

a service layer in IEEE 802 network standards

In IEEE 802 LAN/MAN standards, the medium access control (MAC) sublayer (also known as the media access control sublayer) and the logical link control (LLC) sublayer together make up the data link layer. Within that data link layer, the LLC provides flow control and multiplexing for the logical link (i.e. EtherType, 802.1Q VLAN tag etc), while the MAC provides flow control and multiplexing for the transmission medium.

These two sublayers together correspond to layer 2 of the OSI model. For compatibility reasons, LLC is optional for implementations of IEEE 802.3 (the frames are then "raw"), but compulsory for implementations of all other IEEE 802 standards. Within the hierarchy of the OSI model and IEEE 802 standards, the MAC block provides a control abstraction of the physical layer such that the complexities of physical link control are invisible to the LLC and upper layers of the network stack. Thus any LLC block (and higher layers) may be used with any MAC. In turn, the medium access control block is formally connected to the PHY via a media-independent interface. Although the MAC block is today typically integrated with the PHY within the same device package, historically any MAC could be used with any PHY, independent of the transmission medium.

When sending data to another device on the network, the MAC block encapsulates higher-level frames into frames appropriate for the transmission medium (i.e. the MAC adds a syncword preamble and also padding if necessary), adds a frame check sequence to identify transmission errors, and then forwards the data to the physical layer as soon as the appropriate channel access method permits it. Controlling when data is sent and when to wait is necessary to avoid congestion and collisions, especially for topologies with a collision domain (bus, ring, mesh, point-to-multipoint topologies). Additionally, the MAC is also responsible for compensating for congestion and collisions by initiating retransmission if a jam signal is detected, and/or negotiating a slower transmission rate if necessary. When receiving data from the physical layer, the MAC block ensures data integrity by verifying the sender's frame check sequences, and strips off the sender's preamble and padding before passing the data up to the higher layers.

According to IEEE Std 802-2001 section 6.2.3 "MAC sublayer", the primary functions performed by the MAC layer are:[1]

In the case of Ethernet, according to 802.3-2002 section 4.1.4, the functions required of a MAC are:[2]

The local network addresses used in IEEE 802 networks and FDDI networks are called media access control addresses; they are based on the addressing scheme that was used in early Ethernet implementations. A MAC address is intended as a unique serial number. MAC addresses are typically assigned to network interface hardware at the time of manufacture. The most significant part of the address identifies the manufacturer, who assigns the remainder of the address, thus provide a potentially unique address. This makes it possible for frames to be delivered on a network link that interconnects hosts by some combination of repeaters, hubs, bridges and switches, but not by network layer routers. Thus, for example, when an IP packet reaches its destination (sub)network, the destination IP address (a layer 3 or network layer concept) is resolved with the Address Resolution Protocol for IPv4, or by Neighbor Discovery Protocol (IPv6) into the MAC address (a layer 2 concept) of the destination host.

Examples of physical networks are Ethernet networks and Wi-Fi networks, both of which are IEEE 802 networks and use IEEE 802 48-bit MAC addresses.

A MAC layer is not required in full-duplex point-to-point communication, but address fields are included in some point-to-point protocols for compatibility reasons.

The channel access control mechanisms provided by the MAC layer are also known as a multiple access protocol. This makes it possible for several stations connected to the same physical medium to share it. Examples of shared physical media are bus networks, ring networks, hub networks, wireless networks and half-duplex point-to-point links. The multiple access protocol may detect or avoid data packet collisions if a packet mode contention based channel access method is used, or reserve resources to establish a logical channel if a circuit-switched or channelization-based channel access method is used. The channel access control mechanism relies on a physical layer multiplex scheme.

The most widespread multiple access protocol is the contention based CSMA/CD protocol used in Ethernet networks. This mechanism is only utilized within a network collision domain, for example an Ethernet bus network or a hub-based star topology network. An Ethernet network may be divided into several collision domains, interconnected by bridges and switches.

A multiple access protocol is not required in a switched full-duplex network, such as today's switched Ethernet networks, but is often available in the equipment for compatibility reasons.

Use of directional antennas and millimeter-wave communication in a wireless personal area network increases the probability of concurrent scheduling of noninterfering transmissions in a localized area, which results in an immense increase in network throughput. However, the optimum scheduling of concurrent transmission is an NP-hard problem.[3]

Cellular networks, such as GSM, UMTS or LTE networks, also use a MAC layer. The MAC protocol in cellular networks is designed to maximize the utilization of the expensive licensed spectrum. [4]The air interface of a cellular network is at layers 1 and 2 of the OSI model; at layer 2, it is divided into multiple protocol layers.In UMTS and LTE, those protocols are the Packet Data Convergence Protocol (PDCP), the Radio Link Control (RLC) protocol, and the MAC protocol.The base station has the absolute control over the air interface and schedules the downlink access as well as the uplink access of all devices. The MAC protocol is specified by 3GPP in TS 25.321[5] for UMTS, TS 36.321[6] for LTE and TS 38.321[7] for 5G New Radio (NR).

Follow this link:
Medium access control - Wikipedia

Courtesy of The Other 98%, with over 33,000 likes and 13,000 shares. This is a popular meme repeated over the last several years. Depending on the meme, its six corporations, or sometimes only five that supposedly control 90% of our media content. This is claim is generally used to create a feeling of paranoia, which gets exploited politically for calls to further regulate media companies. However, when this claim is analyzed, its dubious at best.

Where Does This Stat Come From?

Its quoted all over the place, sometimes even in respected outlets, but its origins are difficult to track down. The most popular claim is this: In 1983, 90% of US media was controlled by fifty companies; today, 90% is controlled by just six companies.

This is even quoted verbatim on the Wikipedia page about media cross-ownership, but the source for this quote, cited on the bottom of the page, is troublesome. It brings us to a Business Insider blog post, which is not an original source, or even reliable. In fact, the source used in the blog post isa meme!

This is a portion of the meme that Wikipedia and Business Insider used as a source!

Yes, a meme that went viral in 2011 put out by a blog called Frugal Dad. The blog seems well-intentioned, but hardly a reliable source. It does list some websites on the bottom of the meme, but none of them seem particularly reliable or relevant to this statistic. In other words, most of the web uses Frugal Dad as the source for this statistic!

After much searching, it seems the original source for this claim comes from the book, The Media Monopoly (later revised to The New Media Monopoly in 2004) by Ben Bagdikian. He was a fairly respected journalist, although clearly left-wing and biased against large corporations. The book is similarly slanted, and while he has credible sources for some claims in it, there is no source or footnote given for his claim that the Big Five control the media, or 90% of it (see for yourself). The original source seems to be the opinion of Mr. Bagdikian! An informed opinion, perhaps, but not one based on a scholarly study of how and who Americans get their news from, or other objective means. Furthermore, its more than 10 years old, and a lot has changed.

Its under this dubious source that we are warranted to continue our investigation of this meme.

The Big Six Claim

Bagdikian called it the Big Five in his 2004 book, claiming Time Warner, Disney, News Corporation, Viacom and Bertelsmann (from Germany) controlled our media. This has morphed into the Big Six, as time and ownership has changed. These are the companies supposedly controlling almost everything in the US media.

These six companies clearly own a lot of media, but is it really 90%? And what happened to Bertelsmann? They still exist, but apparently disappeared from influence in a few years? For the purpose of this analysis, well focus on news media, as thats what most would consider important (who cares who owns Marvel or the Weather Channel?).

Other Major Outlets

Heres just a partial list of influential news sources not owned by these six corporations.

This doesnt include the other large foreign news agencies like BBC, Al Jazeera, etc. or many smaller US outlets like Newsweek, Politico, The Atlantic, The New Yorker and countless others. When looking at this partial list of media sources, it not only seems dubious that 90% is controlled by the Big Six, but downright laughable. In fact, it seems plausible the Big Six might control less than half of media content. Considering this statistic is not reliably sourced (or sourced at all), it should not be considered credible.

Comparisons to Other Industries

Even if there were only six companies controlling 90%, would this be a problem? Lets look at some other industries.

Clearly, we can have vibrant, competitive markets delivering great products where a few players control the majority of it. Often, big companies can do things better, or mergers can make things more efficient. In the case of news media, it takes a significant amount of resources to create an infrastructure that can investigate and report on all the news. Given this, it wouldnt be surprising that it would become dominated by a small number of companies, but even so this seems not to be the case, as the news media has many more competitors than most other industries.

This isnt to say that there arent problems, biases, agendas or group-think going on in the media. There likely are, but its doubtful that its due to the Big Six or deregulation. For example, it might have more to do with outlets being lazy and not vetting sources correctly, leaving it to the Meme Policeman to do for free!

In fact, access to different views and unique styles of reporting are more prevalent than ever. There are blogs, news sites, social media pages and videos from every perspective imaginable available on the internet. It used to be almost impossible for these voices to get into the media, as they would need to own either a newspaper, magazine or TV/Radio station. Ironically, viewers were much more limited in the past, when so many tuned into Walter Cronkite on the CBS evening news. Now, its possible for anyone to have a voice, or to report the news with a blog or Youtube channel. Whether or not its listened to, or trusted, is a decision rightly made by the market.

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders

As for the supposed lack of coverage for Bernie, its doubtful anyone who follows the news hasnt heard plenty about him. Go to any major media source, and youll find coverage of his campagin. While The Other 98% might lament about the nonstop coverage of Donald Trump, one needs to go no further than their own Facebook page (which has over 2 million followers) to see this obsessive coverage in action. If this is happening even from a non-profit liberal opinion site, the intense coverage probably has other origins than a corporate conspiracy.

Original post:
Do 6 Corporations Control 90% of the Media- The Meme Policeman

The folks over at the Media Research Center, which tracks left-wing media bias, had some fun with the latest episode of "Good Morning America," in which the GMA team did their best to do some "damage control" over the "softball" interview of actor/singer Jussie Smollett by anchor Robin Roberts over the alleged "hate crime" attack against him an incident attack law enforcement sources say evidence increasingly suggests may have been orchestrated by the actor himself. GMA's spin comes as multiple high-profile media personalities, including CNN's Brian Stelter, are attempting to defend the media's handling of the case.

After refusing to qualify the January 29 "hate crime" attack against Smollett as "alleged" last week, Roberts was finally willing to apply the journalistically responsible descriptor Monday morning after "a new twist" in the case, as she put it euphemistically.

"A new twist in the Jussie Smollett case," Roberts said Monday, MRC reports. "The actor firing back this morning as the story of his alleged attack faces questions." Roberts then revealed the bombshell that dropped Saturday from multiple oultets, including CBS News: "Police in Chicago say they're working to corroborate allegations that Smollett paid two men to stage the assault," said the anchor.

"When I sat down with Jussie, it was Tuesday night in Chicago," she explained, her tone a bit defensive (video below). "At the time to give his first account, publicly give his first account, of what he said happened. And we have to remember, at that time, on Tuesday, police officers were saying that his account was consistent. It was credible. And that he was being cooperative. Now this was all before the interview aired on Thursday and then we found out about the brothers."

She went on to acknowledge that sometimes police say one thing publicly and another behind the scenes.

In her interview and follow-up reporting last week, Roberts repeatedly refused to qualify his claims, as MRC pointed out last week: "If the attackers are never found, how will you be able to heal?" she asked him. "It's been two weeks since that night left actor Jussie Smollett bruised but not broken," she said, again failing to qualify the language. "That's the first time he's given a detailed account, an account that Chicago police have saids that been consistent," she stressed after her interview. "He hasn't changed his story and they also said it's credible. The police have said that and also that he's been very cooperative."

As MRC points out, her fellow media personalities were ready to come to her defense Monday, ABC legal analyst Dan Abrams praising her for her what he portrayed as a fair and balanced interview. "[E]ven in the interview you did, you were talking about the skeptics. You were talking about the people who questioned his account," he said, failing to note the dismissive attitude about those "skeptics" promoted by the network and other mainstream outlets. "So, it's not new this idea that there are questions about what happened. What's new is that the police now seem to be making it clear that they believe the brothers and have, at the very least, serious questions about Jussie."

The panel went on to discuss the potential negative impact on real victims of hate crimes if this whole thing turns out to be a hoax, but notably failed to mention the smear of Trump supporters involved in the initial narrative promoted largely unquestioningly by the media.

Video below via MRC:

Another Smollett coverage damage control effort by a big name media personality has been pointed out by Grabien Media Editor Tom Elliott and Mediate writer Julia Rosas (h/t Twitchy): While CNN's Brian Stelter has admitted that "perhaps the questioning was not tough enough on Good Morning America," he insists that this is ultimately not about the media.

"Perhaps the questioning was not tough enough on Good Morning America, but ultimately this is not about the media or politicians or activists, or any of the other people that might have been fooled," Stelter said after the bombshell reports on the "new twist" in the case Saturday. "It's about Jussie."

"There was a rush to judgment, I think it was mostly in the celebrity press and among activists and among Twitter people," Stelter asserted. "I think it was a really careful reporting by news organizations. But it all gets lumped in together at the end of the day."

WATCH:

Related: Smollett Updates: Latest Developments In Case Look Increasingly Bad For Actor

Read this article:
WATCH: Media Does Damage Control Over Its Smollett ...

The Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP) is a signaling and call control communications protocol used in voice over IP (VoIP) telecommunication systems. It implements the media gateway control protocol architecture for controlling media gateways on Internet Protocol (IP) networks connected to the public switched telephone network (PSTN).[1] The protocol is a successor to the Simple Gateway Control Protocol (SGCP), which was developed by Bellcore and Cisco, and the Internet Protocol Device Control (IPDC).[2]

The methodology of MGCP reflects the structure of the PSTN with the power of the network residing in a call control center softswitch which is analogous to the central office in the telephone network. The endpoints are low-intelligence devices, mostly executing control commands from a call agent or media gateway controller in the softswitch and providing result indications in response. The protocol represents a decomposition of other VoIP models, such as H.323 and the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), in which the endpoint devices of a call have higher levels of signaling intelligence.

MGCP is a text-based protocol consisting of commands and responses. It uses the Session Description Protocol (SDP) for specifying and negotiating the media streams to be transmitted in a call session and the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) for framing the media streams.

The media gateway control protocol architecture and its methodologies and programming interfaces are described in RFC 2805.[1]

MGCP is a master-slave protocol in which media gateways (MGs) are controlled by a call control agent or softswitch. This controller is called a media gateway controller (MGC) or call agent (CA). With the network protocol it can control each specific port on a media gateway. This facilitates centralized gateway administration and provides scalable IP telephony solutions. The distributed system is composed of at least one call agent and one or usually, multiple media gateways, which performs the conversion of media signals between circuit-switched and packet-switched networks, and at least one signaling gateway (SG) when connected to the PSTN.

MGCP presents a call control architecture with limited intelligence at the edge (endpoints, media gateways) and intelligence at the core controllers. The MGCP model assumes that call agents synchronize with each other to send coherent commands and responses to the gateways under their control.

The call agent uses MGCP to request event notifications, reports, status, and configuration data from the media gateway, as well as to specify connection parameters and activation of signals toward the PSTN telephony interface.

A softswitch is typically used in conjunction with signaling gateways, for access to Signalling System No. 7 (SS7) functionality, for example. The call agent does not use MGCP to control a signaling gateway; rather, SIGTRAN protocols are used to backhaul signaling between a signaling gateway and the call agents.

Typically, a media gateway may be configured with a list of call agents from which it may accept control commands.

In principle, event notifications may be sent to different call agents for each endpoint on the gateway, according to the instructions received from the call agents by setting the NotifiedEntity parameter. In practice, however, it is usually desirable that all endpoints of a gateway are controlled by the same call agent; other call agents are available to provide redundancy in the event that the primary call agent fails, or loses contact with the media gateway. In the event of such a failure it is the backup call agent's responsibility to reconfigure the media gateway so that it reports to the backup call agent. The gateway may be audited to determine the controlling call agent, a query that may be used to resolve any conflicts.

In case of multiple call agents, MGCP assumes that they maintain knowledge of device state among themselves. Such failover features take into account both planned and unplanned outages.

MGCP recognizes three essential elements of communication, the media gateway controller (call agent), the media gateway endpoint, and connections between these entities. A media gateway may host multiple endpoints and each endpoint should be able to engage in multiple connections. Multiple connections on the endpoints support calling features such as call waiting and three-way calling.

MGCP is a text-based protocol using a command and response model. Commands and responses are encoded in messages that are structured and formatted with the whitespace characters space, horizontal tab, carriage return, linefeed, colon, and full stop. Messages are transmitted using the User Datagram Protocol (UDP). Media gateways use the port number 2427, and call agents use 2727 by default.

The message sequence of command (or request) and its response is known as a transaction, which is identified by the numerical Transaction Identifier exchanged in each transaction. The protocol specification defines nine standard commands that are distinguished by a four-letter command verb: AUEP, AUCX, CRCX, DLCX, EPCF, MDCX, NTFY, RQNT, and RSIP. Responses begin with a three-digit numerical response code that identifies the outcome or result of the transaction.

Two verbs are used by a call agent to query the state of an endpoint and its associated connections.

Three verbs are used by a call agent to manage the connection to a media gateway endpoint.

One verb is used by a call agent to request notification of events occurring at the endpoint, and to apply signals to the connected PSTN network link, or to a connected telephony endpoint, e.g., a telephone.

One verb is used by an endpoint to indicate to the call agent that it has detected an event for which the call agent had previously requested notification with the RQNT command:

One verb is used by a call agent to modify coding characteristics expected by the line side of the endpoint:

One verb is used by an endpoint to indicate to the call agent that it is in the process of restarting:

Another implementation of the media gateway control protocol architecture is the H.248/Megaco protocol, a collaboration of the Internet Engineering Task Force (RFC 3525) and the International Telecommunication Union (Recommendation H.248.1). Both protocols follow the guidelines of the overlying media gateway control protocol architecture, as described in RFC 2805. However, the protocols are incompatible due to differences in protocol syntax and underlying connection model.

Read the original post:
Media Gateway Control Protocol - Wikipedia