Why don't we have public TV like this in U.S.?

Weeks before the Iraq invasion, Jeremy Paxman of BBC's "Newsnight" and skeptical British citizens literally cross-examined Prime Minister Tony Blair about evidence/reasons/legality behind the invasion -- an interview that became part of last year's official Iraq inquiry in Britain. (Here's another tough Paxman interview of Blair having nothing to do with Iraq.)

In our country, bullying from politicians + lack of insulated funding = embarrassing timidity at so-called "public television"...as evidenced by PBS surgically removing Tina Fey's swipes at Sarah Palin from a broadcast a year ago.

Country by country comparisons of spending on public broadcasting in this study (at page 31.)

MIT's Annual Biz Plan Competition now allows...

...1-minute YouTube videos to complement written and in-person pitches(H/t public radio's Marketplace)

Maya "twittering" behind...

...Obama's back.

And Kera seems to have scooped outlets like L.A. Times and Huffington Post on the Miley Cyrus video supporting Occupy Wall Street worldwide.

USA and Fast Internet

USA is behind other countries when it comes to broadband access (15th place) and Internet speed(23rd place).

There's a digital divide in our country whereby middle-class kids like my daughters grew up with Web-accessed computers in the home, while kids in rural areas and inner cities don't have computers or fast Internet.

In 2009, big Internet providers such as Verizon, Comcast, AT&T
DID NOT APPLY for any of the billions in stimulus grants for building out broadband infrastructure, according to the Wall St. Journal, because recipients of our tax money had to agree to respect Net Neutrality or Internet Non-discrimination.

In August 2010, Keith Olbermann did a segment about Net Neutrality on his now-defunct show on MSNBC. Olbermann exited MSNBC as it was being taken over by Net Neut-foe Comcast. (I was asked to appear on a talk-radio show on a big city station to analyze Oblermann's exit from MSNBC; when I suggested a link to the Comcast takeover and criticized Comcast's opposition to Net Neutrality, a producer asked me during a commercial break to stop the "Comcast-bashing" because "they're our biggest sponsor.")

ABC News is gathering photos...

...from various sources about Occupy Wall Street, and maintaining an ongoing slideshow, including photos from arrests today. H/t Julianne)

Blogger puts video distortions into MSM

Andrew Breitbart, a former Drudge Report staffer, runs BigGovernment.com. In July 2010, the Obama White House fired US Dept of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod soon after BigGovernment posted a 100-second video excerpt purporting to show that, during a speech to the NAACP, Sherrod had boasted about discriminating against a white farmer while she was a federal employee during the Obama administration. Actually -- and Breitbart corrected the error -- she was describing events in the 1980s when she was Georgia field director for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, a nonprofit that had grown out of the civil rights movement to help Black farmers.

MORE IMPORTANTLY, a fuller version of the speech showed that Sherrod told the story to illustrate how she had overcome her racial hostility toward whites and ultimately helped the white farmer save his farm.

Months earlier, other selectively-edited tapes distributed by BigGovernment.com (played repeatedly on Fox News and elsewhere) helped put the anti-poverty group ACORN out of business. Rachel Maddow dissects the distorted presentation that doomed ACORN. (Fox News had goaded others in media for not doing enough ACORN-smearing.)

It wasn't just Fox News that promoted BigGovernment.com's misleading ACORN story. The Public Editor of the paper of record, the New York Times, went to absurd lengths to defend his paper's coverage.

Beware Drudge "Exclusive"

Perhaps Matt Drudge should stick to aggregating content from elsewhere (with revved-up headlines) rather than "report" -- as demonstrated by this 1999 "world exclusive," which helped push the story into some mainstream outlets.

And as demonstrated by his 2007 "exclusive" in which he accused CNN reporter Michael Ware of "heckling" Republican senators during a news conference in Iraq and "laughing and mocking their comments." Drudge's evidence-free charge -- based on an anonymous "official" -- was picked up by rightwing blogs and the Washington Times.