(With appologies to J. Peterman.)
I’m a marketing guy. But before I was a marketing guy, I was a newspaper guy. Started early. I was about 13 when I threw my first paper route. Back in the days when there was still an afternoon paper, and you could watch anything you wanted on TV as long as it was on CBS, NBC, or ABC. Grew up reading the paper. Eventually did a lot of writing, a good bit of which ended up in a paper or two. Still read the paper every day. By the hardest. Get most of my news from (drum roll, please) the Internet. Not the full-goose-Bozo, commie-pinko-junkie, don’t-let-the-facts-get-in-the-way-of-a-good-rant sites. No sir. The usual: MSN, FoxNews, CNN, Bloomberg, et cetera. Newspapers now deliver “yesterday’s news, today.” Aside from local stories, there’s nothing in there I didn’t read the night – or day – before. Sad, really. Doesn’t have to be that way.
I don’t watch a lot of movies any more. I used to. There was a time that I’d go see 10 or 12 movies in a month, if I could. It would be easy to explain away my change in habit…I’m married, I’ve got a young daughter, my wife doesn’t like theatres (she doesn’t like the volume cranked up), theatre audiences are rude, tickets are too expensive, and on and on. But None of that explains why I don’t rent a lot of movies. No, I don’t have HBO, Skinemax, or Stars at home. In fact, I’ve got the equivalent of “expanded basic” on my satelite dish. Nope, the reason is the way movie studios choose to burn their DVDs. Strange, you say? Read on… 
Do you have a favorite magazine? TV show? Online site? Forget, for a moment, political speech media – news shows, political blogs, partisan sites, and such. Let’s just talk about “Mainstream Media (MSM)” I’m talking about special-interest magazines, network television, Top-40 radio, et cetera. Have you noticed lately that they seem to be getting more and more politically opinionated? I have. Everything from Law & Order to Wired magazine seems to have veered from “entertainment” to “screed” in an alarmingly short period of time. And another thing – I’ve noticed that the vast majority of these media outlets espouse a doctrine that is far to the left of the political spectrum.
I don’t want to get off on a rant here (with apologies to Dennis Miller), but I feel compelled to say a few words about SPAM. I’m not talking about the all-purpose food from the fine folks at Hormel, nor am I making a Monty Python reference. No, gentle reader, I’m talking about unsolicited email, and nefarious bastards that are behind the practice. Unlike the Feds “we don’t know how to define spam, but we’ll know it when we see it,” I can define it. It is the moral equivalent of 4th class advertising. Unsolicited, unwanted, and unnecessary. Ever wonder why you get so many unsolicited ads in your (snail) mail box? Because they are A) cheap to send, and B) work.
In January 2006, The “King of All Media” (a.k.a. Howard Stern) moves his blue humor act from terrestrial radio to Sirius satellite radio.
Most things work in cycles, like the swinging of a pendulm. Hemlines go up and hemlines go down. Pants legs go from flares to straight and back again. The country swings towards liberalism and back to conservative values. Some cycles take longer than many people observe in their lifetimes. To understand those cycles, we must study history. For instance, did you know that there have been several periods in American history where the two sides were as polarized (if not MORE polarized) as they are today? There are periods in our past where politics were even more nasty than what we see today – with more dirty tricks than Watergate, with more scandals than the Clinton era, and with more bile than a Howard Dean speech. 