The CDA’s Section 230: How Facebook and other ISPs became Exempt from Third Party Content Liabilities

The rewrite of the communications law that emerged by early 1996 was driven by the appetite of the Bell legatees to position themselves as central providers of both content and conduit for the information age. – Patricia Aufderheide [1] Facebook and other Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are facing criticism for the legitimacy of the third […]

Anchoring Television News

“The news is privileged discourse, invested with a special relation to the Real.” – [1] The news anchor is a finely tuned instrument for television performance. Unlike print journalism where disembodied letters of information suggest an objective third person, the televisual anchor is intimate and direct. They lead the viewer through the news while “anchoring” […]

Russian Interference, Viral Sharing, and Friends Lying to Friends on Social Media in the 2016 Elections

As discussed previously, social media is now a central part of modern democracies and their election processes. This was touted in the Obama presidential election in 2008 but became even more evident in the 2016 U.S. election, notably for unexpected 304-232 electoral college victory by Donald Trump. The real estate magnate and reality show TV […]

Drone Journalism and Remote Sensing

After 9/11, I developed and often taught a course at New York University called Remote Sensing and Surveillance. It was designed to study the promises and perils of technologies such as aerial photography, closed circuit cameras, multiple orbit-earth satellites, and a number of IP-based web surveillance systems. The course combined a social science approach with […]

The Surveilling Eye of Global Financial News

Surveillance of the world is considered an important function of media systems and plays a unique role in the financial industry. Furthermore, it is important to place the analysis of financial news within the political context of a larger techno-structural environment of global financial trading that works to discipline countries, companies and people around the world. The implications of this global web have been amplified by the extraordinary volume and velocity of the system that sees tens of trillions of dollars of trades transacted every day.

Max Headroom’s Futuristic News Gathering

Max Headroom extrapolated some interesting trends in television journalism. Edison was what soon became called a “platypus” reporter, multitasking with a multiple forms of equipment, particularly a rather large camcorder. By the 1980s, TV journalism had switched from using film to electromagnetic video cameras. Film was difficult to transport and had to be developed before editing. Originally developed in the 1950s for television studios, portable video cameras with sufficient quality for electronic news gathering like the Betacam were available by the time Max Headroom was conceived.