Now online, an “utterly fascinating archive of Mike Wallace Interview videos from the 1950s, which are hosted online by The School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin.”

The Mike Wallace Interview archive: Link.

Via Boing Boing:

It’s astonishing to watch television in which the host asks real questions and the guests answer in full sentences. Wallace never lets people off the hook and he smokes cigarettes like the world is ending tomorrow, piling on fulsome praise for his beloved Winstons before each interview begins.

And what a list of guests! He interviews Frank Lloyd Wright, Salvadore Dali, Leonard Ross (a 12-year-old California school boy who won a total of $164,000 on the game shows The Big Surprise and The Sixty-Four Thousand Dollar Challenge), Aldous Huxley, Gloria Swanson, Tony Perkins, Eldon Edwards (Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan), Philip Wylie, Jean Seberg, Earl Browder (former head of the Communist Party in the United States), Mary Margaret McBride (the “First Lady of Radio”), David Hawkins (the youngest of 20 prisoners to defect during the Korean War), Dr. Henry Kissinger, and many more.

- Mark Frauenfelder @ Boing Boing: Link.

Earl Browder: 6/2/1957: Link.
Earl Browder, former head of the Communist Party in the United States, talks to Wallace about Nikita Khrushchev, Joseph Stalin, the cold war, and American communism.

Tower of Babel: The multilingual, multicultural online journal and community of arts and ideas.

Babel seeks multilingual and multicultural writers, editors, bloggers and translators proficient in using web tools to continue building in over 250 languages what has been recognized since 2001 by the United Nations as one of the most import social and human sciences online periodicals.

There are over 250 subdomains of towerofbabel.com ready to be configured by those who are interested in taking the language-oriented subdomains and helping to build the tower ….

Design your language’s tower however you wish but continue what has already been pioneered as an attempt to build a tower aiming for the highest egalitarian, altruistic, philanthropic and humanitarian structures.

Tower of Babel: Link.

Babel English Blog: Link.

“Simply put, the model involved sending miniskirted saleswomen out to sell ads at confiscatory rates to lecherous old car dealers and appliance-store owners.”

Veteran journalist Jon Talton write about the decline of newspapers:

The biggest problem, of course, had nothing to do with the newsrooms. It was the collapse of an unsustainable business model. Simply put, the model involved sending miniskirted saleswomen out to sell ads at confiscatory rates to lecherous old car dealers and appliance-store owners. Protecting these profits, whether from national, local or classified ads, became the central focus of newspaper bosses. These areas were the most vulnerable to new competitors. But the condition of the industry by the 1990s – risk averse, promising unrealistic margins, losing its best talent, ignoring ideas outside its preconceived notions – left it unable to meet these threats.

- Jon Talton @ Rogue Columnist: Link.

Via Boing Boing.

In a new play based on Hunter S. Thompson, “performer and writer ‘B. Duke’ incarnates the Last Free American Writer as he was during the intense and difficult years 1968-1971.”

From an interview with B. Duke, conducted by R.U. Sirius:

I suggested that we use Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist. That’s a collection of Thompson’s letters from ‘68 - ‘76. I had read that a few years earlier and I’d become keenly aware that the nuances of a real man were there.

… He was ferocious. He would start in on speed, probably somewhere around 11 PM or midnight, and he would go to bed about 8 or 9:00 in the morning – around the time his young son Juan was getting up. He’d get up around 3 in the afternoon.

We secured an original 1968 IBM Selectric Model I typewriter off of eBay for the play. I learned from working with it that you can lie through a computer really easily. You can delete whole swaths of material real easily. On the typewriter, you have to think continuously. Also, we’re used to firing out our emails right now. Nobody takes time to think about anything. In these letters, he’d stop and start. They would take hours for him to create. And in between, he was hosting a lot of druggie friends and doing a lot of shooting and some traveling …

… He read tremendously. His inventory of magazines and publications was twenty or thirty publications long — newspapers, magazines. And he didn’t just read one side. It’s not as though he just read all the left-wing stuff. He wanted to know what the other side was thinking. He read religiously.

… It’s very easy to translate elements of his frustration — the Vietnam war to the Iraq war; spineless, useless Democrats to spineless, useless Democrats; vile Republicans to vile Republicans. Oil companies fucking everybody.

… He was from an age where men didn’t really talk about their feelings. They kept it locked up. He didn’t believe in psychiatry. He took it on alone. So he was trying to grapple with all of this agony in his personal life. Meanwhile, the country’s disintegrating around him. He got the shit knocked out of him in Chicago [1968] by the police. He started to feel like the whole nation was really slipping into a type of internal Civil War bordering on anarchy.

… He’d already covered very heavy things as a journalist. He had been in South America for a time, and had covered riots down there and had done some tough reports in New York City and the Caribbean. He knew true toughness. He was unafraid to go into it. And remember, Thompson was like 6′5″ and 185 pounds. He was monstrous.

[Link]

Via Boing Boing.

Press Release

Our dearest friend, our brother, the editor in chief of AGOS newspaper Hrant Dink has been assasinated ruthlessly.

There are no words to explain our pain.

Our deepest condolences for those who can still feel themselves as human beings.

[AGOS Members]

Three Arrested in Turkey for Murder of Outspoken Journalist Hrant Dink

Istanbul governor Muammer Guler said three people were arrested in connection with the murder of journalist Hrant Dink earlier on Friday, CNN-Turk television reported.

No further information was provided on the arrests. Earlier in the day, two people were arrested, only to be released when officials decided they had no connection to the crime. Dink was one of the most prominent voices of Turkey’s Armenian community, and a frequent target of nationalist anger.

[FoxNews.com]

Prominent Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink murdered

Journalist Hrant Dink, one of the most prominent voices of Turkey’s Armenian community, was killed by a gunman Friday [January 16, 2007] at the entrance to his newspaper’s offices, police said.

Dink, a 53-year-old Turkish citizen of Armenian descent, had gone on trial numerous times for speaking out about the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 20th century. He had received threats from ultra-nationalists, who viewed him as a traitor.

Dink was a public figure in Turkey, and as the editor of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos, one of its most prominent Armenian voices.

In his last column for Agos, Dink complained that he had become famous as an enemy of Turks and wrote of threats against him. He said he had received no protection from authorities despite his complaints.

… Turkey’s relationship with its Armenian community is fraught with tension, controversy and painful memories of a brutal past. Much of Turkey’s once-sizeable Armenian population was driven out beginning around 1915.

During World War I, as the Ottoman Turkish empire fought Russian forces, some of the Armenian minority in eastern Anatolia sided with the Russians.

In May 1915, the Armenian minority, one or two million strong, was forcefully deported and marched from the Anatolian borders towards Syria and Mesopotamia (now Iraq). Many died en route.

Armenia says 1.5 million Armenians were killed in this period, either through systematic massacres or through starvation.

It alleges that a deliberate genocide was carried out by the Ottoman Turkish empire.

Turkey acknowledges that many Armenians died, but says Turks died too, and that massacres were committed on both sides as a result of inter-ethnic violence and the wider World War.

Dink had been convicted of trying to influence the judiciary in 2005 after Agos ran stories criticizing a law making it a crime to insult Turkey, the Turkish government or the Turkish national character.

The conviction was rare even in a country where trials of journalists, academics and writers have become common. Most of the cases, including that of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk last year, were either dropped on a technicality or lead to acquittals.

… A colleague at Dink’s newspaper, Aydin Engin, said Dink had attributed the threats to elements in the “deep state,” a Turkish term used for alleged shadowy, fiercely ultra-nationalist and powerful elements embedded in the government and security establishment.

Turkey’s Foreign Ministry released a statement quickly after the shooting Friday saying it was deeply saddened by the killing.

“The actor or actors will be caught in the shortest possible time and delivered to justice,” the statement vowed. The Foreign Ministry offered condolences to the people of Turkey, its press, and particularly to the Armenian community and Dink’s family.

[New Anatolian]

Hrant Dink Received Threatening Messages

“We are in deep sorrow due to the murder of Hrant Dink, editor of Agos newspaper. We strongly condemn this cruel act. Dink, a Turkish citizen of Armenian origin, wrote in his column on January 10th that he was receiving threatening messages,” says the press release of ARI MOVEMENT NGO received by PanARMENIAN.Net. In the words Director Rana Birden, he also wrote that he felt like a fearful dove but “knew that the people of this country would not hurt a dove”.

“Unfortunately, he was wrong. We call for restraint in social reactions at this sensitive time and relate our condolences to Dink’s family, his loved ones, and the staff of Agos Newspaper,’ the release says.

[/PanARMENIAN.Net/]

FACTBOX: Turkish journalist Hrant Dink

• Dink, born in Malatya, southeast Turkey in 1954, was a member of Turkey’s small ethnic Armenian community, and a Turkish citizen.
• He was editor-in-chief of the bilingual Turkish and Armenian weekly Agos (www.agos.com.tr).
• Dink had been convicted of insulting Turkishness — under the controversial article 301 of Turkey’s penal code — and handed a six-month suspended sentence in 2005. The case was prompted by an article he wrote in which he referred to an Armenian nationalist idea of ethnic purity. The European Union has repeatedly called on Ankara to change the law and the government has promised to revise it.
• Of his conviction, Dink told Reuters: “I may be paying the price for this, but Turkish democracy will gain from it, I hope.”

[Reuters.com]

See Also

• Hrant Dink @ Armenipedia

Aug. 22, 2002: reporter Allen Myerson falls to his death, an apparent suicide. No evidence of foul play; but the event is strange, and his investigative reporting (sewage sludge dumping, Enron, etc.) could have made any number of powerful enemies.

Texas Press reports –

Allen Myerson, 47, died Aug. 22, 2002 after falling from the 11th floor of The New York Times building and landing on the roof of a parking garage.

He was assistant business editor/weekends for the Times. Police said the death was an apparent suicide. Myerson joined the Times in 1989. Before that he was a reporter for several years at The Dallas Morning News.

[Link]

NewWatch India observes –

Allen Myerson, 47, was a staffer at the paper, an assistant business and financial editor, and he landed on the roof of a parking garage next door. That’s where police found him. Dead — an apparent suicide.

The next day’s obits ranged from a respectful one in the Times — declaring that Myerson “fell from a parapet above the 15th floor” and that the preliminary police finding was suicide — to the New York Post’s play-by-play of the moments before death and exposure of the editor’s marital and financial difficulties.

[Link]

Lisa DePaulo: Justice for Allen –

When Allen Myerson jumped from the fifteenth floor of the New York Times building, it wasn’t just the tragic end to a respected editor’s life. It was the beginning of a ferocious battle between his estranged wife and the sisters who accuse her of “murdering” him.

[New York Metro: Link]

Paul Kienitz: unnerved by Allen Myerson’s death –

Now this scares me a bit. A New York Times business editor, Allen Myerson, fell to his death four days ago. The police are treating it as a possible suicide — but nobody knows how he fell. He used to work for the Dallas Morning News. This scares me a bit because Myerson specialized in energy industry stories and Enron news, just as I am doing here…

[Enron & Friends: Link]

Interview with W. James Au by R.U. Sirius. Au worked, for a time, as an official embedded reporter in Second Life; and he continues to report on the SL scene:

Second Life is the online 3-D virtual world that threatens to conquer reality as we know it. W. James Au was hired by the game producer, Linden Lab, to be an embedded reporter in an emergent society, covering the news of this alternative game world. While no longer officially under contract with the company, Au continues to be the pre-eminent newsman in this strange new world. He joined us at our studio.

[Mondo Globo: Link]

W. James Au: New World Notes.

Via Boing Boing:

AU: They created what they call a Camp Darfur. So it’s like … tents and campfire and photos of real life refugees in the real life Darfur … This guy found a flaw in the building and he was able to trash the whole camp. And some of it was racist. They started shouting anti-African slurs and they started attacking the camp day after day.

Meanwhile on the other side of the camp, there’s a group called The Green Lantern Core… One of the guys is the Green Lantern — he’s got the Green Lantern outfit on and he’s this huge dude and he’s got the magic ring — he heard about Camp Darfur getting attacked… And so now the Green Lantern Core guards Camp Darfur.

[Boing Boing: Link]

Speaking of Green Lantern — he is the superhero whose powers I’d most like to have.

If I owned one of those Green Lantern rings, I’d be an auto mechanic for a living.

No more toolbox — no more tools — whatever tool you need, the ring makes it, hey presto! I’ll bet I could fix cars three times faster than any regular mechanic.

Moving observations about Louisiana from Jasmina Tešanović:

Used to be a town: Cameron, Louisiana, July 2006

We just missed a twister. We saw its black cloud in the sky, lit by lightning. In Louisiana, some miles after Cameron, a small tornado has toppled trees into the road. Police blocked the highway, workers cleaned the branches away and cool people sat on the porches, watching it all happen. Mostly old people. Why do people stay in disaster sites, living under the volcano? Why do they watch?

We enter the tourist center at the border of Louisiana. We want to go to Holly Beach, we say. Holly Beach isn’t there any more, says the clerk, politely smiling.

But yes, the road to Holly Beach still exists. We see this: tall trees snapped in half, house-trailers blown by the hurricane, landing in the most improbable places, upside down. Dead cars strewn like corpses, rusting anywhere, mangled as if crushed by specialized machines. Wind-shredded American flags. Where beach-houses once stood there are only bare poles. Instead of churches, there are the statues of saints… The trees which survived the storm have weird wind-tattered shapes. New leaves are growing out of their trunks.

Marshlands stretch all around us. My American friend is devastated. He laments loudly: the future belongs to this indestructible marsh-grass.

The houses we see, what’s left of them, have roofs patched with blue plastic, and some, even people living in them: ten months after the storm… why didn’t they rebuild the roofs?

Some empty sites still have street numbers and names: and hand-lettered signs that promise, we will be back…

As for the beach itself, oh well, it has seagulls, brown mud, a lot of fish jumping high in low water in the blazing sun. A massive heat wave is striking the USA.

The graveyards have no fences left, the churches have no windows. These people here are all Catholics, and the state of Louisiana is divided into parishes, not civil counties.

I have seen dead towns before, destroyed by war, not nature. My friend argues. The oil of Louisiana is pumped and produced all over these desolate marshlands as if nothing else matters; fossil fuel is like heroin, selling like crazy since the price is soaring worldwide, and bringing the damage of climate change back to the marshland. The refineries smell of pollution, putrid fish, putrid capitalism.

I am interested in people, not things. But there are not many people around here any more.

[Jasmina Tesanovic @ Boing Boing: Link]

Google: Jasmina Tešanović

Wikipedia: Jasmina Tešanović

From the BBC:

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and [Alexander Lebedev] have bought a 49% stake in a leading Russian independent newspaper.

Mr Gorbachev told an international media forum in Moscow that Novaya Gazeta - often critical of the Kremlin - should maintain a plurality of views.

Mr Gorbachev pioneered the “glasnost” (openness) policy that demolished decades of Soviet censorship.

Critics say President Vladimir Putin now has too much media influence.

Russia’s main television channels are state-controlled and several major newspapers are owned by businesses friendly to the Kremlin.
[Link]

Mikhail Gorbachev is an interesting historical figure; in my eyes, a hero:

• Mikhail Gorbachev

Alexander Lebedev appears in “World’s Richest People” list at Forbes.com:

Net Worth: $1.6 bil

The wealthiest former Soviet intelligence officer turned businessman, Lebedev is also a parliamentary deputy. As a KGB agent in the 1980s he was involved in the effort to prevent capital flight from the Soviet Union. He also worked for five years at the Soviet embassy in London. As a businessman Lebedev has been especially successful in portfolio investing. His sizable holdings in Unified Energy Systems and Gazprom are now worth six times more than his core business, National Reserve Bank.
[Link]

This New York Times ad reminds me of the old Field & Stream magazine, weaponized for the 21st century:

[Link]

This seems like as good a place as any to mention Get Your War On.

Interview with GYWO creator Dave Rees:

I had to get this off my chest. Late one night I was going to update my Web site with the regular, apolitical comics, and it just struck me that I just couldn’t continue with business as usual. Since I was sitting at my computer with the clip-art open, it was like, “Hell, I’ll make the clip-art characters say what I’m actually feeling.” It wasn’t like I was sitting around thinking, “God, I have to come up with a really powerful anti-war tool.” I’m not an activist. I’m not coming from that background. But after September 11, I really had to come to terms with my own death—what felt like an imminent death—because I live in New York City.

That first night I did the strip, I was thinking to myself, “O.K., when I was in high school, my friends and I would play our little punk rock music and sing and yell about Ronald Reagan. But if there has ever been a time in my life to create something about what is happening in the world, now is that time.”
[Link]

A future history of the media by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson, with music by Aaron McLeran.

In the year 2014, The New York Times has gone offline.

The Fourth Estate’s fortunes have waned.

What happened to the news?

And what is EPIC?

Thanks, Christian

Posted by Geov Parrish, This Day in Radical History:

April 5 1956:

Columnist Victor Riesel, a crusader against labor racketeers, blinded in New York City when a hired assailant threw sulfuric acid in his face.

(more…)