Archive for July, 2007

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Bob Marley&;s Ghost: So SueMe

July 17, 2007

Was the music for Bob Marley&;s brilliant Buffalo Soldier plagiarized?  Was it lifted from The Banana Splits?!  Watch yourself and be the judge.  You can hear more at Soundalikes or read about the late George Harrison lifting &;My Sweet Lord&; from &;He&;s So Fine&; here. The hack creators of &;The Banana Splits&; could try suing Marley&;s ghost estate.  But they&;d create a public relations disaster&;talk about alchemy turning lead into gold.

Posted in Bob-Marley, George-Harrison, Music, public-relations-disaster | 2 Comments &;

FearFactor

July 17, 2007

No, not the long-lived NBC TV show with a high &;yuck&; factor (listen here for Fear Factor host Joe Rogan&;s trippy DMT hallucogenic experience.) Unfortunately this fear factor provides neither a TV- or drug-based escape. It&;s the administration&;s new and scary report, The Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland report, which surprisingly enough notes that al Qaeda still want to kill us.  You can read it here, if you don&;t find it too depressing/bloodpressure raising.  But as ABC&;s Richard Clarke says, &;Given that there was no al Qaeda in Iraq until we invaded there, it&;s hard not to draw the conclusion that going to Iraq has created a further threat to the United States.&;  There&;s also no mention in the report of that Bin Ladin guy&;the one we haven&;t found yet after 7,000 U.S. deaths in the war on terror.

Posted in fear-factor, Joe-Rogan, war-on-terror | Leave a Comment &;

Paris Hilton: Dumb Blonde or Smart Like aFox?

July 16, 2007

Jeannette Walls of MSNBC claims Paris Hilton told Larry King she votes in the U.S.  presidential election &;every year.&;  Of course this wasn&;t in the taped interview, but off-camera, according to Walls&; &;source.&; But like fellow &;dumb blonde&; Jessica Simpson of buffalo wings fame, (she got a national commercial out of the infamous &;I don&;t eat buffalo&; comment), Paris is laughing all the way to the bank.  The media eats this stuff up.

Posted in buffalo-wings, dumb-blondes, Jeannette-Walls, Jessica-Simpson, Larry-King, MSNBC, Paris-Hilton, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment &;

Nixon inDisneyland

July 12, 2007

As a media trainer, a key tenet we teach is to never repeat a negative, even when denying it.  President Nixon at the time of Watergate said &;I am not a crook.&;  Convincing, no?  Now Nixon&;s presidential library, located in Orange County, the land of Disney fantasy, has decided to join the reality-based community.  The cover-up that was Watergate will no longer be continued in the museum, although you&;ll still be able to hold your wedding or barmitzvah in the Library&;s reproduction of the White House East Room.  Money quote: &;Visitors learned that Watergate, which provoked a constitutional crisis and became an enduring byword for abuses of executive power, was really a &;coup&; engineered by Nixon enemies. The exhibit accused Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — without evidence — of &;offering bribes&; to further their famous coverage. &;Most conspicuous was a heavily edited, innocent-seeming version of the &;smoking gun&; tape of June 23, 1972, the resignation-clinching piece of evidence in which Nixon and his top aide are heard conspiring to thwart the FBI probe of Watergate. &;This was history as Nixon wanted it remembered, a monument to his decades-long campaign to refurbish his name. Nixon himself approved the exhibit before the library&;s 1990 opening. &;Everybody who visited it, who knew the first thing about history, thought it was a joke,&; one Nixon scholar, David Greenberg, said of the Watergate gallery. &;You didn&;t know whether to laugh or cry.&; Now that &;exhibit&; is gone, tossed literally in the dustbin (dumpster) of history.  Somewhere a blue-haired Orange County matron is shedding a tear, but fear not: Digital photos were taken of each exhibit, so Nixon&;s version of history will survive for digital display.

Posted in Disney, Disneyland, Media Training, Richard-Nixon | Leave a Comment &;

Fear-Mongering Advertising At ItsWorst

July 11, 2007

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new scare advertising champion.  Use your credit card now to book a parking spot at the airport, or you too may be the victim of a glaring TSA lady terrorist.



Posted in Advertising, war-on-terror | Leave a Comment &;

Way Ahead of the Facts: Quote of theDay

July 9, 2007

&;Way ahead of the facts&; said White House spokesman Tony Snow, on if there&;s any internal White House debate on a U.S. troop pullback in Iraq. It&;s similar to the expression &;future truth&;, coined by an old boss of mine.  No matter that the users he wanted me to write about were as figmentary as John Nash&;s roommate in A Beautiful Mind.  Say something often enough, he&;d insist, and it will become truth. But &;way ahead of the facts&; is also a non-denial denial, an acknowledgement that something not true now will eventually become so.  It&;s a a classic of crisis communications from a White House in crisis&;or am I way ahead of the facts?

Posted in Iraq-war, Tony-Snow, White-House | Leave a Comment &;

LA Times Finally Catches Up toMMQB

July 8, 2007

On June 15, we published an item on the Motion Picture Academy of America (MPAA) leaving its long-time digs in Encino and moving to the Sherman Oaks Galleria.  On Saturday July 7, the LA Times finally caught up, &;reporting&; the move in a page two business section story. I developed the MPAA story myself the old-fashioned journalistic way, moving around the city with my eyes open.  Seeing “For Rent” signs in the courtyard of the MPAA offices, I contacted a spokesperson (who told me I was the first reporter to call), confirmed the move and published the item. The Times taking 22 days to run big news on one of Hollywood&;s most important organizations is inexcusable. I don&;t hate the mainstream media, or the Times. In fact, I recently won another award writing for the LA Times&; now-slashed magazine, West. But it&;s frustrated to see&;and try to work in&;what the Times&; own Tim Rutten calls &;the generalized collapse of confidence by newspapers engendered by print journalism&;s passage through an economically wrenching transformation.&;

Posted in 60-minutes, business-journalism, Journalism, Los-Angeles-Times, MPAA | Leave a Comment &;

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