For years now newspapers have been closing down all over the world - and once again it has been a miserable year for publishers. It’s not only paper, but also TV and radio who find themselves under attack from the net.

Personally I love paper - but apart from my weekly edition of the ever great Economist - I don’t read any newspaper or magazine at all.

Overall mainstream media has lost the plot and has been to unwilling to confront the technological change and - MOST OF ALL - the contact to the reader. And there is still that thing called competence …

I knew many journalists in the early 90’s who sneered at so called "New Media" and it’s shiny new world. Today they are either unemployed or deeply into Internet publishing. But still most of them don’t like talking to "the reader" - their very audience. But if you don’t care about your readers - why should they care about you?

Make me smarter, not dumber!

Blogging brought back the "citizen journalist" - who stands on the same "height" as their readers and therefore love the exchange, no matter how bloody it is.

Many great publishing houses and broadcasters have started blogs on their own - trying desperately to build that very same relationship. But they usually fail. You can’t pit the passion of a 24/7 self-propelled blogger against a 9 to 5 work attitude of a normal employee.

But there is a final big mistake all these stations and newspapers make: the lack of depth, seriousness and competence. In the days before Google and Wikipedia it was very hard work for a normal person to research anything those newscasters and experts told us. Today it’s easy to find out if these "professionals" are competent.

Dunno where all that crap is coming from?!

Most mass media web sites are written poorly, offer no depth and real competence. They still just recycle what comes out of the big news agencies like AP or Reuters. Even my beloved BBC publishes only very short and not very deep news articles  - I dare not to mention CNN or MSNBC, which are a lot worse.

Most publishers are still under the illusion that if they offer infotainment and loads of celebrity crap people and advertisers will flock to them. That is why all stations and newspapers have so much trivial crap on their sites, pages and shows. And they is why they are all so exchangeable and don’t deserve any viewers loyalty.

Keep the paper - and give us competence!

Plus: since they all use the same news agencies all their content reads and looks the same. Reuters and AP also offer video and images - not just text anymore. That is why most smarter surfers "leech" the news directly from these providers - not from the recyclers like CNN or any newspaper.

But readers have to evolve as well. They have to be more willing to pay for good stuff and services. Only a few web sites so far have managed to get some money directly from their audience. And that’s a shame! Good journalism shouldn’t be funded by advertising, but by the readers.

But I am afraid in our "all for free" culture this won’t happen.

Bastian Schweinsteiger - called "Schweini" by his friends (which actually roughly translates into "Piggy") - is devasted …

Congratulations Spain - you really are Europe’s Football Champion. That title is well deserved - although I still think that the Dutch are an equally  breath taking team.

Germany - once again - didn’t make it to the top. They didn’t play very good and it’s more or less by chance they ended up in the finals.

And I glad it’s over. After a month of madness, endless street parties and over excited fellow countryman I am glad some form of silence and normality is back.

Actually it’s a stupid affair anyway: watching these youngster millionaires sweating it out on the field to make even more money. Almost all of these players are the cream of the top of their national leagues and earn shitloads of money.

So each Euro Championship is mostly about overpaid sport stars duking it out and RAISING their net worth in pro football.

I am actually happy that the Spaniards won the tournament, since it has already helped to heal some of the rift in a still divided country. Spain’s many proud regions usually despise each other and didn’t stand behind their national team in unity. This year was different. So sport and symbolism can have a huge transforming impact - even in so called "modern societies".

This is not about terrorist propaganda, this is not about free speech, this is not about radicalizing the public - it’s about the truth.

American politicians, American media and most parts of the so called American public simply "sanitize" reality to they don’t have to face the ugly truth: their own soldiers and mostly innocent people die in this stupid war on terror.

Don’t look away! This is your war. You decided to invade Afghanistan and Iraq - now stand up to it and face the blood.

This is the 21st century - you won’t be able to hide such videos and censor images - like the return of your own dead soldiers.

But America has learned from the Vietnam experience - and all side are making HUGE efforts to keep the TV screens clean. Because shocking images can make people change their minds - but cool 3D animations with heroic videos - but no blood or gut hanging out - do not offend …

There is not much TV (via the Internet) which is worth watching, but "30 Days" is a great show. It is TV at it’s best: showing people other people and their way of life - so we can learn from each other and gain insights that are usually hard to achieve.

All "30 Days" episodes are built around the same mechanism: one person has to live with another group of people - with a contrary lifestyle or opinion. For example a bible thumbing guy has to live with a San Francisco gay dude or a meat munching hunter lives 30 days with a vegan family.

Most reality TV is built on "stupidity sensationalism" - which means they show the stupid sides of people and their actions and make fun of them. Jerry Springer talkshow is a typical example of this breed of television.

Morgan Spurlock and his team try to keep it real and show both sides of the argument / lifestyle. They never preach, they never portrait any side as better or superior - and they don’t use any cheap television effects to dumb it down.

I really hope there will be some day an international version of these - because it is obviously very US-centric - but nevertheless good.

More? 30 Days - Official Site and Wikipedia

You can only get as smart as the programs you decide to watch on the telly. Most people chose crap - so they stay stupid. But also most so called educational broadcasters like Discovery or History Channel are pretty dumb. Fancy computer graphics are no substitute for excellent researchers and writers.

Is this supposed to be funny? Or a documentary? Or simply a reflection of a trivial everyday thing by even more trivial multimedia artists?

These "people" have their own channel on YouTube and many other places. Even more terrifying is, that so many seem to watch and LIKE this kinda stuff.

I wish channels like ForaTV or RealNews would get as much attention! But reality always seems to loose against triviality in our day and age.

Hollywood has long lost it’s hunger for musical, simple romance and naive Kitsch. The great dance movies of the 1940’s are long forgotten.

But don’t despair: another booming nation is willing to fill your head & heart with naive Kitsch.

India’s romantic  Kitsch crap is making people all over the globe. It’s simple mixture of sing & dance, naive cliches and archetypes right out of fairy tales are easy to understand for those craving some happy and brainless entertainment.

These variations lack all the cynicism and twisted modern identity crises of modern romance and most western romantic Kitsch. In India woman are still old fashioned woman and behave like a proper princess.

So audiences not only crave Kitsch romance, but simplicity itself. Why not move to Saudi Arabia instead, where traditional roles are strictly enforced?

The meat on the mass media gets younger and younger - and sluttier and sluttier. The Clique Girls are all born between 1994 and 1996 - and they already marketed like professional music whores.

Call me old fashioned, but I think a 12 year old should neither watch or make such videos. But I guess it sells - and every layer of society is allowed to have it’s dreams of fame and richness. No matter how much it twists their minds …

Click image for more channels.

I love Maestros Friedlander’s art. He is such a great observer and social commentator at the same time.

This modern view is know to any traveling business men and woman. Your lousy hotel room and a TV. Nothing else. I like that there is a kid on TV - suggesting the far away family and being away from your loved ones.

Today we would see a notebook with a webcam - talking to your family or watching crappy clips on YouTube.

When the whole US campaign started is very happy to Madame Clinton running for office. Here we have someone - I thought - who really has experience and the balls to get back at the Republicans.

A few months later Hillary has made almost every mistake she could have avoided. For a pro she was terribly naive and unfocused. Plus she has a huge amount of debt.

All she has archived  is to prove almost all of her critics right and paint herself as a "greedy political bitch from hell".

Too bad.

But what’s even worse is that the Democrats are once again keen to kill themselves over internal politics instead of focusing on McCain. So I am afraid that we will have a third Bush term if the DEMs don’t sobber up.

Photoshop and a great operator can greatly improve your career, even when you are already old and wrinkled. Hotness is no longer in the eye of the beholder, but based on the right image manipulation.

I am sure this guy "fighting" Chris Matthews isn’t really dumb - but it was really dumb not to say "I don’t know". I love this kind of media coverage …

Do we care about our TV animal celebrities only because we feel guilty for killing off the rest of the species? Do we watch and say to ourselves “See, they are not all gone!”

Isn’t mass illusion a nice thing to clear our collective consciousness?

CNN: Student ‘Twitters’ his way out of Egyptian jail 

This is a typical high-tech non-story. If this guy simply would have called someone nobody would have cared. But because he used a high-tech gizmo suddenly it’s a story.

I think for causing such a stupid commotion he should be jailed - and all his Twitter buddies and the journalists too!

*Thanks to Edosan for not Twittering this to me*

After all that bullshit - this expresses my thoughts perfectly (at the last quarter of this video). Thanks Bill!

In the Age of TV families shared quality moments together in front of the screen. In the Internet Age we sit quietly in our rooms and maybe chat via AIM together. Computer screens don’t provide the same social glue as TV screens.

Several people fighting for the remote control was bad enough - but a consensus could be reached which show to watch for an hour or two. But you can’t have four people controlling a computer and surf different websites at the same time.

TV serves as the radio today - it provides the noise to our life, but it is the computer with it’s highly individualized interaction that grabs our FULL attention.

So our media experience is more and more individualistic - and all these digital toys and gadgets (especially cell phones and instant messaging) keep us “busy” and distracted all the time.

In front of the TV the whole family could switch off - today that switch has been lost. We are always “ON” …

Journalists should be able to read / understand what some people said - analyze them and put the into context.

But most US journalists lack these skills today.

Mass media seem only to deliver triggers for scandals instead of content. Stoking anger on all sides seem the only mission.

Anyone remember that saying “A house divided against itself cannot stand” by Abraham Lincoln. But hardly anyone in American Politics or Journalism is capable of delivering or understanding such great speeches anyway.

Let’s stomp out these ugly reports comrades …

It is easy to blame only the evil communist in China for all the censorship and blatant disregard for Tibet’s Freedom.

But Chinese Nationalism is as rampant as the state controlled suppression of the Tibetans. One only needs to remember the extreme rage against the Japanese during the last years. Japan has a lot to apologize for to China and Korea - and never has done so - so some of the outrage was “just”. But it was mostly insanely angry and fueled by Nationalism instead by a call for justice.

Chinese people - like the Russians, Iranians and North Koreans - live in a mental vacuum. They have no real news, only glints of reality and they don’t really know what’s going on in the world. Freedom of speech, public discourse and social experiments are absolutely limited and controlled by the state.

That is why many Chinese people defend their countries “actions” in Tibet as “just” and “fair” on the intranets. They are simply blind and ignorant. Patriotism is an ugly political disease, doesn’t matter if you scream “China! China!”, “USA! USA!” or “Heil Hitler!”.

HBO - like the BBC - is one of the great producers of astonishing stories, series and movies. It’s newest mini series “John Adams” is simply amazing - or at least the first two episodes so far.

Paul Giamatti is simply breath taking as John Adams - and Laura Linney as his wife simply blows me away.

The script is well written, the dialogues intriguing and one gets a pretty good feeling how hard it must have been for the so called founding fathers to break away from the British Empire and start their experiment called the United States of America.

Highly recommended!

Is it just me or are these TV presenters get hotter every year, with even bigger red lips and tantalizing outfits? Can’t we have simply ‘normal’ women not dress up dolls as presenters?

Star Trek featured the first kiss between a white and a black person (no, it’s not african-american) on US-TV. But they were actually forced to do it by some alien overlord … actually that’s a pretty good excuse.

Are there any taboos left for Star Trek to break? We had a woman captain, a black captain, an Asian captain, we had lesbian encounters … can’t remember any Gays on any Star Sip so far?

I personally think that American right wing attack dogs are very embarrassing for this great nation. They often are the very essence that smears America and has reduced it to a second rate country: greed, incompetence, distraction, war mongering, fear mongering, hate of others and most of all hypocrisy.

The GOP is obsessed with fighting causes that are irrelevant and don’t matter. Who cares if someone can burn the American flag or not? Who cares if gay people can marry or not? Who cares if Obama wear that bloody pin or not?

These issues are (brilliant) distractions from important stuff: America educational system (no child left behind?), the rampant militarism (no money for body armor, but for shiny new Star Wars systems), the pork & waste in Government bills (need a bridge to nowhere dude?) and care for the environment (the jury is still out on global warming and evolution).

The biggest shame is - that so many Americans still listen and CARE for these issues. The dumb discussions really have dumbed down American political culture as well (if you have ever read a speech made by Lincoln or any other great American president you know what this country is capable of).

Populism is certainly not an US invention, but they really made an new artform out of it.

Did McCain have an affair? Nah, not really interesting.

But I actually think such little squabbles will do him some good, because it implies that he still “got it”. In our hierarchical societies symbolism still is important - and nobody really wants an impotent leader. The countries top dog should also be a top sperm spreader.

Watching fertile bimbos playing with rubber swords and acting to bad scripts doesn’t give you any real insights into antiquity.

Shows like Xena and the related Hercules - and many Hollywood and Walt Disney movies have totally twisted our understanding of the good old heroic days. I would consider “Life of Brian” almost as historically accurate as these sins.

All these script writers, directors and most of all producers should be properly crucified for these sins!

Greece and Roman history offer many amazing and breathtaking stories. Also the myths are brilliant. There is no need to spice these stories up - there is loads of blood, sex and drama in them.