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UK Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has reached a preliminary decision about the proposed Newcorp buyout of BSkyB I mentioned a few weeks ago. Click here for the full skinny. His verdict? He’s going to refer to it Ofcom, the British regulator (huzzah!). Oh, but wait. He would, if he wasn’t going to take the middle ground and give Newscorp time to make amends first. We’ll see. Click here for the Beeb’s coverage, and here for the full government statement. A brief synopsis of the media consolidation pros and cons here.
From President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address, 50 years ago last week:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
A fitting match with my comic on the US/UK military base currently occupying Diego Garcia, first conceived off only a few years before Eisenhower’s term of office came to an end. Click here to read the full comic.
Former British PM Tony Blair took the stand yesterday to offer an addendum to the comments from his previous appearance at the Iraq inquiry, explaining that:
“At the conclusion of the last hearing, you asked me whether I had any regrets. I took that as a question about the decision to go to war, and I answered that I took responsibility. That was taken as my meaning that I had no regrets about the loss of life and that was never my meaning or my intention. I wanted to make it clear that, of course, I regret deeply and profoundly the loss of life, whether from our own Armed Forces, those of other nations, the civilians who helped people in Iraq or the Iraqis themselves.”
Yet another signup to the “let history be the judge” camp it seems – not least the part of history that saw him planning regime change with Dubya back in 2001 (see 1:13 in the video). But it wasn’t the heckling that best summed up the public’s reaction to Tone, fresh from his book tour – it was the fact that he arrived at the inquiry 2 hours early to avoid the crowds of protestors who set up outside the premises. Watch Sky’s coverage of his testimony here.
Borderland, the comic I did with Fulbright Fellow Olga Trusova last year, just got a great review from The Comics Journal, together with a review of the latest issue of World War 3 Illustrated, which is carrying an extract from What a Whopper – talk about a double whammy:
Borderland is easily the most focused and best-looking work of his career…The stories are all different (and horrifying) enough so as not to start to drone; rather they succeed in grabbing the reader’s attention and raising awareness.
Above is a continued sequence from Hardhats, my graphic novel in progress, set in May 1970 at the height of anti-Vietnam sentiment. Hit “previous” to read from the start of this little interlude. It being Martin Luther King day here in the US, celebrate it wherever you are in the world by listening to one of his speeches on Vietnam here: “the press generally won’t tell you these things, but God told me to tell you this morning…” RIP MLK.
I’m now only a page or two from finishing the first third of my graphic novel, Hardhats – which you can read more about here. The above panels are part of a flashback sequence as two of the main characters talk on their way to an anti Vietnam protest at the Federall Hall in downtown Manhattan. I’ll post some follow-up panels over the next few days. Please leave your comments! You can also checkout my latest sketchbook doodles and watercolours here.
Remember to scroll down – news and updates are just a scroll away, under the fold.
Sketchbook page from last night's Zittrain lecture
In the first of many blogging experiments, and to minimize the amount of time I spend at my computer this semester – not to mention to hone my cartooning skills – I’m going to post pages from my sketchbook from some of the lectures I attend this semester. Last night’s was part of the Liberation Technology series and featured Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain discussing the ethical pitfalls and perils of crowdsourced jobs – especially ones that seem innocuous at first but actually have nefarious goals. Such as what if the Iranian government (whose involvement would obviously be kept hidden) attempted to identify protestors at a rally by building an entertaining face-matching game, or companies luring “turkers” (from Amazon’s now notorious “mechanical turk” site) to provide bogus product reviews for points or minimal (3-5 cents) return.
We are all complicit when the promise of fake online points prompts gamers to overlook their ethical responsibility to society – check out this so-sinister-it’s-laughable true story of an anti-Health Reform Organization bribing facebook game players with points to send an email to their member of congress decrying the evils of Health Care reform. In a beautiful instance of technology spawning some great metaphorical neologisms, this process is called astroturfing – because it’s fake grass roots campaigning.
Find out more about Zittrain’s book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it, here.
Sketches of Condi during our Q&A
The Winter term kicked off this week, and already it feels like I’ve been back ages. In true Stanfordian fashion, yesterday’s highlights included: an introduction to multimedia reporting (hello Final Cut Express), catching up with the globe-trotting antics of the rest of the Knights, planning a group ski trip to Tahoe, reading Jeremy Scahill‘s scathing expose of Blackwater and the role of private security firms in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then sitting down with ex-National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to discuss her take on them. While thinking about how all this fits into my project, and working out which courses to shop. Just your average day back at school really.
Geri Migielicz’s class on Multimedia Storytelling is the definite course highlight of my year, as I’ve been wanting to tinker with video, audio and animation to complement my comics work for a while now. Naturally, a lot of the same compositional/framing devices for comics apply to (and are directly borrowed from) film, so that helps. I’ve been addicted to storytelling shows like this American Life and The Moth podcasts for years (ever since depending on them at White River for accompaniment during the hours spent inking at my drawing board in fact), so it was great to see Jessica Abel and Ira Glass’s Radio: An Illustrated Guide in the syllabus. In fact, just this afternoon a bunch of us are getting together to learn how to make a podcast, courtesy of KBOO Portland Radio Director Jenka Sondenberg – so be sure to come back next week to listen to that. Some of the examples we checked out were the NYTimes Year in Pictures and the media-rich 5 Years Later from USA Today, focusing on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I snapped up my copy of Final Cut Express from the bookstore that afternoon, and have just installed it, though I hear it’s a beast on a par with Photoshop in the menubar/features stakes. We’ll see.
The chat with Condi Rice was another year-long highlight, though the mood in the lounge was a lot lighter than expected when I walked in – probably a strategic decision on Jim and Dawn’s part to mix up the holiday catch-up festivities with an indisputably controversial speaker. Predictably, Condi came across as furiously intelligent, quoting in-depth resolution numbers and bilateral treaties in many of her answers (though arguably few of us could confirm or deny their veracity), and the possessor of a honed rhetoric that was nimbler and more acrobatic than the psuedo-kung-fu hand gestures that accompanied them.
After an extended hiatus home and away from email and the interweb, I’m now back and straight into classes at Stanford. Not that the holiday hiatus was totally work-free – see above for a cartoon published this month in Jewish Renaissance magazine – it illustrates an anecdote from the article it accompanies, so don’t fret if you don’t get it. The idea is that in uniform, all the army soliders’ religious differences/stereotypes become obscured. So hurrah for uniformity! Not often you hear that on this website. Content aside, it was a nice prod for me to turn my hand to watercolour washes over the festive period, as I grabbed the odd minute or two to sketch out scenes from London, Yorkshire and Paris (the holy trinity of European cultcha) to hone my life drawing skills. I’ll post new art every day.
What better way to start 2010 than by casting off the shackles of last year – famous for that US Supreme Court ruling giving corporations unprecedented power in electoral funding – and giving Rupert Murdoch the keys to the Kingdom? The United Kingdom, that is – or at least any semblance of a diverse media. After an expose published in December destroyed Vince Cable’s cabinet credibility, it now falls to Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who has already publicly stated his support for the wannabe Ozymandias of Oz, to decide on whether Murdoch’s proposed £8bn buyout of BSkyB by his News Corporation should be subjected to a Competition Commission inquiry. Why could this be a bad idea? Aside from the obvious media hegemony argument (for the record, I’m no all-hands-t0-the-wheel liberal either), there’s the undisputed history of Fox Managerial influence over its editorial offerings. Click here to read about the memos from Fox News Washington Managing Editor Bill Sammon that told journalists to play down climate change stories, and use the term ” government option” instead of “public option” in their coverage of the health care debate. Surprisingly, the Guardian has come out with some arguments for why the takeover is a good thing, which you can read here.
For more info on Murdoch’s media empire, click here.
More from the follow-up on last week’s post revealing the real reason behind the UK government’s support for a marine preserve on Diego Garica – namely to use the leverage of the environmental lobby in the UK against the less powerful Chagos Support group, who are fighting to return the expelled islanders to their homeland.
Another legal revelation here (though not as scandalous and therefore far more likely to stay in the headlines) is that tweeting is now possible in court, as ruled by the Lord Justice Judge of the High Court (quite the title):
“The use of an unobtrusive, hand-held, virtually silent piece of modern equipment for the purposes of simultaneous reporting of proceedings to the outside world as they unfold in court is unlikely to interfere with the proper administration of justice.”
As opposed to a camera…
Radio silence of late has been due to our snowy return to the UK, where naturally all transport has ground to a halt in the wake of a few inches of snow. As the itinerant comics journalist, I’ve been using the time to chronicle the wonder of the big smoke in my sketchbook – above is the commercial black hole of Mordor, aka Oxford St, in all its festive glory. Some washes to come later on this week, along with a long post on Honduras and Canadian Mining Companies in Central America. It doesn’t get more festive than that.
