Media News

Brit TV Stations Cheat Viewer Phone-ins

Elaine Meinel Supkis

The media systems are always seeking ways to make money off of gullible people. Starting with Big Brother 6 years ago, the business of luring foolish viewers to call into shows and then making money off of the phone charges, has grown like weeds. Now, in England, it is revealed that these shows were cheating people calling in, getting them to stay on line until $3 or more was charged or by having winners chosen early on but keeping the lines open for hours just to make more money. How sweet of them.

From the Independent:

This deception of viewers on such a vast scale represents one of the greatest crises in confidence in British television since commercial TV began more than half a century ago. The scandal has been steadily growing amid revelations that more and more television shows are implicated.

None of the major terrestrial broadcasters, including the BBC, has remained untainted. Last night's investigation by the BBC investigative programme Panorama contained the most damaging allegations yet, suggesting that millions of viewers of ITV's GMTV breakfast show had been duped into making premium-rate phone-calls for competitions they had no chance of winning because the winners had already been chosen.

The alleged swindle, which is denied by Opera Interactive Technology, is thought to have generated £45,000 a day (or £10m a year) in wasted calls and to have resulted from alleged malpractice that has been going on for four years. GMTV yesterday said it had terminated its contract with Opera Interactive Technology with immediate effect after its own inquiries had revealed "irregularities''"in the system.

Far from being unknowingly deceived by the Opera operatives, all the TV station owners and the programmers loved this foul system. Revenues for ads are declining because Britain doesn't have a very energetic economy. The article notes that some quiz shows would have really stupid questions that anyone could answer as a lure to get the maximum number of callers, for example.

Other shows used a sort of, actually very much like 'Brave New World' sort of entertainment whereby the watchers could press a red button to 'vote' what would happen next. It turns out this was a total scam. The show was pre-set and it didn't matter what the pigeons on the other side of the screen pecked at, the results were the same.

Indeed, all this is very much like living in a Skinner box only you don't get fed, it steals from you! Great going. This reminds me of our own economic system: as we lose money, we are told that we are getting richer and we are encouraged to 'vote' for things but these are not really tallied.

From the Washington Post:

Federal regulators, concerned about the effect of television violence on children, will recommend that Congress enact legislation to give the government unprecedented powers to curb violence in entertainment programming, according to government and TV industry sources.

The Federal Communications Commission has concluded that regulating TV violence is in the public interest, particularly during times when children are likely to be viewers -- typically between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., FCC sources say.

I guess that will kill all those Tom and Jerry or nearly every single Walt Disney cartoon ever made not to mention Popeye or Woody Woodpecker. Not to mention nearly any kiddie TV show. Defining 'violence' is difficult. In some cultures or life forms, just looking sharply at someone is considered violent. Some violence leads to imitation while some doesn't and censoring stuff is stupid since this is all about free choice. Many parents don't care if their kids watch violent stuff. Some don't care if they watch mass murderers in movies kill one person after another. Over the years, I noticed that lower-income families really like this stuff.

Teenagers love it and try telling a 12 year old, they can't see a violent movie all the 18 year olds are seeing! Instead of controlling access to guns, we will control all the content of all our media, practicing Soviet-style censorship, etc. Great.

We will still see one mass murderer after another. Today, in Houston yet again, another mass murderer went on the rampage and killed several people before being killed. In a very rich neighborhood. He used a gun, of course.

So, we will all have the capacity to kill many people but will not have the right to watch many movies or cartoons or read many books or play video games, or whatever? Right? And this is freedom.

Gun nuts like to pretend having guns will make us free. But our country isn't free at all, we have zillions of rules and regulations and they are growing by the hour and the more people use guns, the more our freedoms are restricted! So far from freeing us, these pieces of equipment are making us less and less free.

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NBC Enables Mass Murder

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Because America loves and needs mass murderers for entertainment, NBC scored a coup when the latest MM prepared a media package plus his script to them after killing two students. He then went on to fulfill the rest of his publicity event. NBC first piously said they handed over all this stuff to the FBI but then someone in the heirarchy, probably the owner of the station, said, 'Let's put on this kid's show!'

Right on the heels of all the politicians rushing to Virginia Tech to dip their greedy hands in the pool of blood there, they all piously ordered sane people to NOT talk about gun control because it would dishonor the dead and upset the mourners. Anyone who dared talk about preventing these crimes was ghoulish and nasty.

Well, talk about ghouls! NBC got this media package that was professionally put together since the young man was not a mere English major, he was studying how to write scripts. He then sat down and wrote not only a script but he made a movie and a media proposal which he thoughtfully mailed to NBC.

NBC first said they would hand this over to the FBI but less than three hours later, they featured his stuff on national TV. Before hardly any funerals for the many dead students could commence, the media feeding frenzy turned the killer into a sensation. He succeeded in his objectives.

I knew the sorrows and wailings of Americans over this latest mass murder were alligator tears except for maybe the families, because not one parent stepped forwards to yell about the need for gun control. Some parents of the Columbine massacre did do this and they tried as hard as possible to change the laws but they failed since both the Republicans and the Democrats fear the NRA and gun nuts of America.

But in this case, not only have no parents shaken off the lassitude of this event to denounce Virginia's insane gun laws or rather non-laws, no politician attending this mess have said we should do something.

The top TV show this last several years aside from Survivor and CSI and other inhuman shows has been 'American Idol' and it is supposed to cull bad singers and reward good singers. Everyone is talking about this kid who can't sing but who can entertain with his crazy antics. Polls of small children asking them what they want to be when they grow up and 'celebrity' or 'star' wins!

Far from being an aberration, the latest killer is a perfect product of our culture. His artistic venture worked. He is now up there with Jim Jones and Adolf Hitler. He carefully studied modern entertainment to see how he should pull off his stunt and he gave a good imitation of what he enjoyed watching.

And it worked. Hitler, like Cho, was a failed artist who succeeded when he became a mass murderer. He was born before modern media but he was one of the first to understand how it works and how to use it. And so right at the very beginning of movies and radio, a psychopath used them to create WWII and the Holocaust.

We are supposed to be thinking about the Holocaust this week. Of course, we are not supposed to think about the real lessons of that event or we would force that racist, religious bigot state, Israel, to stop their criminal actions recreating Nazi Germany and force them to clean up their act.

From the Nation:

The authors of the document called "The Democratic Constitution" maintain that the Arab citizens of Israel should be considered a "homeland minority" with national rights. The idea is to transform Israel into a bilingual and multicultural democracy for all its citizens, rather than a Jewish democracy, which they argue is an oxymoron. Such transformation would inevitably mean changing the laws of citizenship and immigration so that citizenship would no longer be granted automatically to any Jew wishing to immigrate but rather to anyone born within Israel's territory or whose parent or spouse is a citizen, or to people persecuted due to their political beliefs.

Not long after the documents' publication, Israel's second-largest newspaper, Ma'ariv, reported a meeting between the head of the security agency, Yuval Diskin, and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. During the meeting Diskin warned Olmert that the radicalization of Israel's Arab citizens constitutes a "strategic threat to the state's existence." Diskin added that "the proliferation of the visionary documents published by the different Arab elites in Israel is particularly worrisome, [since] the documents are united by their conception of Israel as a state for all its citizens and not a Jewish state." The head of the security services concluded that "the separatist and subversive patterns represented by the elites might engender a new direction and mobilize the masses."

This is the week we are supposed to be talking about Waco, the Columbine killings, Hitler's birthday, the Oklahoma City bombing, etc. But instead, we are entertaining ourselves watching this horrible kid's media package. The irony of this week's media frenzy over a mass murderer comes on the heels of last week's frenzy over a stupid loud mouth radio personality calling some university students ''ho's'.

All this is doing is teaching future mass murderers how to do it better. On top of all this bloody mess, we see clearly once again that the enemy is ourselves and our culture. No matter how many peasants we kill in many lands, none of them die to make us safer. This is because the real problem lies here at home and it due to our present culture. And our lust for blood is very strong.

Homeland Security is a neo-Nazi Soviet entity that doesn't make us one iota safer. It is set up to prevent POLITICAL actions, not make America safe for children. It is run by a citizen of Israel which is a violent state that hates equality and freedom and we are losing our freedoms even as we are allowed to carry guns.

For the act of carrying guns doesn't make us free in the end. Many Iraqis had guns under Saddam. They were trained to fight and they are showing us just how capable they are of fighting since they kill more people each month even as we pour in more soldiers. The land is terrorized, not free. We are terrorists and they are creating terrorists. And our own children, our own families are churning out a stream of terrorists here at home and we seem unable to do anything.

9/11 was a political event just as the OKC bombing. It was a declaration of war upon our imperial oppressions, specifically our support of Irsael AND Saudi Arabia. We dealt with it by attacking first Afghanistan's peasants and then Iraq who had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. And the results were inevitable.

And in the present case, it is obvious we have to talk about our own culture and do something but again, we will attack the wrong target and make things worse. So the only question is, who will be the next mass murderer? Will he use bombs, guns or both? And who will be his targets?

Obviously, innocent children. Our own Infantata continues.

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