Category: media

“Country music artists are hardly united in their support of the war in Iraq but you’d never know it from listening to the radio. While Toby Keith, Darryl Worley and Charlie Daniels have scored hits with patriotic, war-themed songs, others such as Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and Nanci Griffith released anti-war, or at least questioning, songs that went nowhere.” Part of the problem may be that most of the protest songs are being released by artists with a “classic country” or “alt-country” sound which doesn’t get a lot of play on today’s slick, corporate airwaves. But market researchers say that the most basic reason for the snub is that country programmers know that their listeners would flay them alive if they deviated from the flag-waving.

A former BBC chairman is complaining that the license fee which the government collects from every UK household with a television set in order to fund the public broadcaster is insufficient. But Gavyn Davies doubts that the BBC will dare ask for an increase when its charter comes up for renewal in 2006, for fear of running afoul of public sentiment regarding the license fee.

Clear Channel, the largest radio broadcaster in the U.S., has agreed to pay $1.75 million in fines over on-air comments by shock jock Howard Stern which the FCC has deemed “obscene.” The amount being shelled out is a record in the industry, and while the FCC is trumpeting the settlement as a “victory for the American public,” it is likely that Stern will use the occasion to take his bombastic campaign against President Bush and the conservative-controlled FCC up yet another notch. Clear Channel dropped Stern from all of its stations earlier this spring.

Americans make plenty of movies about politics. But there are few Canadian political movies. “There are many reasons why this is the case. To begin with, Canadians are less willing to make the imaginative leap necessary to enjoy a movie about domestic politics. Where our neighbours to the south are willing to envision, say, Harrison Ford as the commander-in-chief, someone like Kiefer Sutherland would not be accepted in the role of prime minister.”

There have been many attempts to try to cut funding for public broadcasting in the US. PBS is supposed to be neutral politically. But now some critics wonder if PBS is adopting more of a political slant…

The Los Angeles city council has decided to preserve all three of the buildings that once comprised the historic Hanna-Barbera animation studio, where such TV icons as the Flintstones, Barney Rubble, Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound and Scooby-Doo came to life. “It was at the studio that Bill Hanna and his partner Joe Barbera perfected ‘limited animation,’ which is far cheaper than the traditional kind. It also involves far less movement of the animated characters, however, and thus is criticized by some purists. Hanna and Barbera perfected the cheap technique in the late 1950s, a time when the major studios were closing their labor-intensive animation departments, and thus some have credited them with helping save the cartooning industry.”

“Music–not merely classical but also jazz, folk, blues, and bluegrass, once staples of public radio programming–is slowly being withdrawn from the public airwaves. The number of noncommercial stations identified as “classical” has been cut in half since 1993, while the number of noncommercial news-talk stations has tripled. From 1995 to 2002, the number of locally generated classical music hours on public radio declined roughly 10 percent, even as the number of public radio stations greatly increased; meanwhile, over the same period, the number of news-talk hours rose by more than 150 percent. As the tracking study researchers wrote in their report, with unseemly enthusiasm: ‘Local classical music just sits there, while NPR news-talk races ahead’.”

A comic book artist, a fan of the Harry Potter series, writes his own soundtrack to the first Harry Potter movie, replacing the original dialogue with his own. “As imagined by Brad Neely, the three main characters are child alcoholics with a penchant for cognac, the magical ballgame Quidditch takes on homoerotic overtones, and Harry is prone to delivering hyper-dramatic monologues.”

Online games are hugely popular around the world. Now China wants to monitor and censor what games its citizens play. “Ministry of Culture officials said all online and wireless games produced outside the country will now be subject to examination first before they can be legally distributed within the country. Foreign producers of online games already in distribution must submit those products to MOC examinations by Sept. 1, or face punishment.”