Category: media

“Once upon a time Sexist Lad ruled the radio. He was the ‘slob with a gob’, baiting his employers and flirting remorselessly with female guests before reducing them to tears.” In fact, Alpha Males might have been the official UK Broadcast Symbol of the 1990s. But as it turns out, that kind of caveman mystique wears thin fairly quickly, and the new generation of radio stars tend to be either women, or a noticably less aggressive breed of “regular guy.”

India has banned a documentary that looks at religious rioting betweeen Hindus and Muslims. “The film follows 2002 clashes in the western state of Gujarat, which left more than 1,000 people dead. A censor board said the documentary was ‘highly provocative and may trigger off unrest and communal violence’.”

The FCC is delicately stepping into the fray over two touchy issues: spam and “fair use” of copyrighted material. The regulatory agency issued a ruling banning some spam messages from wireless devices (phones, PDAs, and the like), but has left a large loophole through which spam can travel directly to individual phone numbers. “In another order, the FCC approved 13 different technologies that digital TV equipment makers can put into devices designed to work with new copy controls, known as the ‘broadcast flag,’ for digital broadcast signals.”

The long-running BBC game show “Mastermind” has been catching a great deal of flak lately for abandoning its traditional focus on intellectual topics for a lighter mix of pop culture and current events. In fact, one Conservative politician has even leaped into the fray, accusing the show of dumbing down in a blatant ratings grab, saying “It used to be about Jane Austen novels and Beethoven symphonies.”

“Out-of-work film technicians – those actors, prop men and other entertainment industry workers whose names unfurl on the screen as moviegoers scramble out of the theater – are rallying behind international trade rules to stem the flow of film and television production to Canada. With the Teamsters leading the fight, the Film and Television Action Committee… has sent 20 pages of comments to the new Unfair Trade Practices Task Force of the Commerce Department and demanded that the Bush administration take action against Canadian film subsidy programs, which have lured United States filmmakers north of the border and siphoned tens of thousands of jobs out of the country.”

Creators of the satirical web site JibJab have decided to go to court to fight for their right to keep running a popular parody of a Woody Guthrie song featuring cartoon images of President Bush and Senator John Kerry. The site had been threatened with a lawsuit by Ludlow Music, which owns the copyright on the Guthrie song, but JibJab decided to strike first, filing a lawsuit of its own in a U.S. District Court. The case could have far-reaching implications for artists’ rights in the digital age.

How scary is that new suspense movie that just came out? University researchers in the UK can tell you, right down to the tenth decimal place. The researchers claim to have invented a mathematical formula that can quantify such things: “[it] combines elements of suspense, realism and gore, plus shock value, to measure how scary a film is.” As it turns out, The Shining is the perfect formulaic scary movie, while Jaws exhibits the best use of non-gratuitous gore in a scary film.

“Anti-fraud investigators swooped on a number of markets and car boot sales in the UK last weekend, netting over half a million pounds worth of DVDs and CDs. Fifty-seven people were arrested for piracy. The joint investigation found people selling films such as Troy, Spider-Man 2 and Shrek 2.”

Nigerians love the movies. “The country is famous for its thriving and expanding home-video industry.” But until now, Lagos, the largest city, hasn’t had a songle movie theatre. “Now, however, that has all changed, thanks to the Silverbird Cinemas – an upmarket five-screen Cineplex in the heart of Victoria Island.”

The production process for the lucrative video game market is looking a lot more like the way Hollywood movies are made. “Hollywood definitely wants a piece of the $11 billion video game industry. Game producers say they can help get it by guiding a movie-based video game through production so that it hits stores the day the movie opens.”