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'Tis the whore of the big media apocalypse and her name is Judith Regan

I am writing this post if only because Roxanne Cooper pinged me this morning about the woman who gives a face to the expression media whore.

Rox was brainstorming with Amanda Marcotte and they came up with the idea of having a Dear Judith national campaign, urging her to donate ALL NET PROCEEDS from the sale of OJ Simpson's book to organizations that help women escape from living in abusive relationships.

Jill at Feministe is on the case as well.

Why it's taken me this long to write about the recycled OJ Simpson scandal? Well, words failed me. As Michael over at The Daily Gotham : Michael wrote, it seemed so much like a hoax that when I found out it was true, well, I was feklempt.

He finds the words that escaped me:

This story is juicy on so many levels, not all of them immediately obvious. First, of course, it's delicious to see Bill O'Reilly sputter (quite untruthfully, if that's even necessary to note) that he, the Happy Warrior defending Christmas, has nothing to do with all of this tawdriness â€“ except that he and O.J. report to the same boss, Roger Ailes, a former head of the RNC and Reagan adviser.

Then, there's the Rudy angle. As improbable as it may seem to his former constituents, he's presently the front-runner for his party's 2008 nomination; except that his unsavory associates seem to continually make bad news for him. The three degrees of separation are: Rudy hires Bernie Kerik; Bernie Kerik pumps Judith Regan with a view of Ground Zero; Judith Regan publishes O.J.'s book. Pretty stuff.

Lastly, I can't help but think of those values voters. Their favorite channel is hawking a book that seeks to profit from murder. Do you think that maybe, that was a strategic miscalculation by the money-grubbers over on Sixth Avenue? Forget for a moment all the other sleaze that cost the 'conservatives' their majorities in the election; now, the publishing colossus most firmly identified with their discredited ideology is hawking murder. Think those values voters might be getting a clue about the real goals of their favorite media enterprise?

Emphasis mine.

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Words to live by

So the recent struggles about network neutrality have led me to recognize something I hadn't quite seen before. And that something in turn makes more puzzling the debates that have been raised around network neutrality. The something to recognize is that in a fundamental sense, fair use (FU) and network neutrality (NN) are the same thing. They are both state enforced limits on the property rights of others. In both cases, the limits are slight --the vast range of uses granted a copyright holder are only slightly restricted by FU; the vast range of uses allowed a network owner are only slightly restricted by NN. And in both cases, the line defining the limits is uncertain. But in both cases, those who support each say that the limits imposed on the property right are necessary for some important social end (admittedly, different in each case), and that the costs of enforcing those limits are outweighed by the benefits of protecting that social end. So from this perspective, it is easy to understand those who reject FU and NN (who are they?). And it is easy to understand those who embrace FU and NN. What gets difficult is understanding those who embrace one while rejecting the other --at least when that rejection is articulated in terms of "government regulation".

—

Lawrence Lessig