Nice bit about the US media by Juan Cole

Juan Cole, a genius on all thing Iraq (as gory and unpleasant as it is to read, necessary if you want to have a window on the horrific reality of day-to-day happenings there) has a few well-stated paragraphs in his post today on the Media in this country:

Rupert Murdoch, who gives you Bill O'Reilly, Daniel Pipes, and other fantasists of the hard Right by his ownership of a vast media empire admitted at the Davos conference that his companies had "tried" to propagandize for Bush's Iraq War. He said that they were critical of the execution of the war, though. He doesn't watch or read his own media if he thinks that. It is never a discouraging word and 'what were the RNC talking points today?' over there in Foxland.

Murdoch's remarks are a good reason for which the news conglomerates should be broken up so that a wider range of views can be published. While Murdoch complains about competition from the internet, the fact is that far more people watch television than get their news from any blogger.

Murdoch's media have done more to cheapen American values and drive the country toward fascistic ways of thinking than anything since the McCarthy period in the 1950s. The airwaves belong to the public, and this man only licenses them. When will the public take them back and use them for purposes of which Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Franklin would have approved?

Changing the subject dramatically, slept most of the day away today, and pretty much got nothing done. I tried to ignore the computer and depressing news, but was unsuccessful. Now that I've got Tivo, most of the stuff I watch is like mind-candy, and so any thoughtful insight (other than Jon Stewart - our nation's court jester) comes via the blogs and online newspapers.

This next bit will only be of interest to you if you have a Mac. More in my saga to find the perfect killer app for my Mac:
I've noticed though, now that I have downloaded and started using VooDooPad on my mac, I have less desire to post to my blog and create anything major on the Web. I actually wanted it so that it would make it easier for me to post on my blog. But it is fulfilling my need to write about what I am reading and keep track of it all.
Early days now to see how I'll really integrate the software into my life, but so far it feels like the closest thing to the way I've always wanted and thought a Mac would work for me. I am under no illusions, everyone uses their computer in wildly different ways, so a killer application for me is not going to be that for everyone else. For me, not having a nice repository for all the things I have read - the documents, pdfs, recipes, websites, bloggy bits I want to keep, etc., has been irritating. Yes, you can save them into folders, but it is not easy to go back and find what you need, and get a sense of context of what you were reading and thinking at that time. Now, I can save the pdf of a document from the Web right into the day's journal on my pad, write about it, add images, video (though I haven't tried that yet, come to think of it) and if I had a drawing pad, could add artwork, etc, etc. All of which can be output in html or some sort of blog style output that I might be able to use here. However, my caveat from before remains the same - it will be interesting to see how the software performs when I need to find something weeks or years down the road.
I had been using Zotero, but it really seems to be targeted to an academic community, the scholars who have access to full-text article databases and need to organize their pdfs for later citation. It was a little clunky, you had to save pdfs in folders and point to them, which meant that each item had to have lots of bibliographic data entered by hand. (Which points out one of the reasons that the VooDooPad is so cool, you simply save the pdf to the page, and click on the link and the pdf opens from there.) It just wasn't proving to be what I needed, so I'll probably uninstall it soon.