#Chicago Public Radio

[roysexton]

“Podcasts should not just exist to placate someone’s ego… If it’s not bringing in a lead or awareness or audience growth, you need to pull the plug or re-tool.” Thank you, Jeff Vidler and Signal Hill Insights!

Thank you, Jeff Vidler and Signal Hill Insights, for this lovely shout out. Full article here. EXCERPT: “A total of 1,418 CMOs, content marketers and podcast producers registered for the first-ever conference or summit dedicated specifically to branded podcasts. For the first time, branded podcasters from around the world connected online to learn from the experts – and fill the chat box with…

[thoughtportal]

This week, we talk about Netflix’s reinvention of the video store, the right way to board a plane, and the art of advice-giving with Chicago Sun Times’ new advice columnist Ismael Perez and Brandon Pope, who hosts WBEZ’s Making podcast and On the Block from Block Club Chicago and WCIU.

Then, author V.E. Schwab talks about the latest installment in her “Shades of Magic” fantasy series, The Fragile Threads of Power. This will be her fourth time on Nerdette, because her books are just that good. You may know her from her bestselling novel The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue or one of her other 23 published books.

[bruce-adams]

A good face for podcasting.

It's been a good week for folks broadcasting my voice across the etherwaves.

Jim Derogatis and Greg Kot were kind enough to host me on the Sound Opinions broadcast. It was fun to talk with the Siskel & Ebert of music criticism, I'll let you decide which is which.

J.C. Gabel is a transplanted Chicagoan running Hat & Beard Press in Los Angeles now, and it was a delight speaking to him about You're with Stupid, Chicago in the 90s, and the state of things now on his Big Table podcast.

And finally, Monday, February 6, at 9 pm EST WFMU will broadcast a session I did with Daniel Blumin. Daniel and I have known each other since he ran a label called Roomtone and kranky started, this conversation was our first meeting in the flesh. Like all great conversations, we played our favorite music.

[thebearer]

I know reader is a social media manager but do you think Camrys uses insta? Is he public or private does he ever post?? Just wondering your thoughts on this

he barely uses it lol.

he has one and it’s public (or he made it public when he won a james beard bc he was told it would “be good publicity”) but it’s just dishes and a few random photos. was most active in Copenhagen, fell off when he went back to nyc, went radio silent when he moved back to chicago and then when the bear opens he starts up a little. definitely a post about the restaurant and then silent again.

until he meets social media manager au. he posts stories (usually ones she’s taken) and that’s his way of sorta flirting? like posting it and being like “no you made it look good” to be cute.

he’s not super active by any means, even when he gains an influx of followers from blowing up on tiktok (unbeknownst to him) as the hot chef. he probably posts three or four times a year, depending on the year and what’s happened. never a super active social media person tho.

[dirtyzucchini]

Let me tell you something about Constable Benton Fraser, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who came to Chicago on the trail of the killers of his father and, for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, remained, attached as liaison with the Canadian consulate.

There was never much of a chance that Benton Fraser would grow up to be what most people would casually call "a regular guy". From what little insight we get, no part of his childhood would have been standard. Looking at the anecdote Bob Fraser tells in Burning Down The House, we can assume that Benton grew up in a cabin his father built by hand, in a location remote enough and far enough North that living in an igloo during the construction of said cabin was a sensible thing for his parents to do. We see one picture of the family in Good For The Soul, and it is a puzzler:

Now, I wasn't around in the mid to late 1960's when that photo would have been taken, and I've never been to Canada's far North, but everything I could find anywhere tells me that that is not how (white!) people dressed then even up there, and no, I am not talking about trendy fashion. Everyday clothing looked pretty much like what we still wear today, but the people in that picture don't. They look like this guy - a European "explorer" whose picture was taken in 1889:

Side note: I am purposely only talking about white/western/mainstream society in this post because the Frasers are white.

I wonder what drove them to live like this, and so far away from other people? It can't have been money, Bob would have made enough to support them. I guess Fraser's parents weren't regular guys, either.

Anyway, we know that Bob wasn't around much while Fraser's mother was alive, and even less so after her death. He handed the boy off to his own parents instead, and Benton was raised by literal, real life Edwardians, people who were born before the invention of band-aids and bubblegum. Public radio broadcasts were cutting-edge technology when they were young. I'm glad they stepped up, and I'm sure they did their best, but they weren't exactly well-equipped to prepare a child for life in modern society. They were librarians who for some reason moved around a lot. When he was eight, they took Benton to a place called Alert - the northernmost continously inhabited place in the world. Unfortunately it's inhabited by soldiers and researchers who go there on six-months-tours, but it counts because the tours overlap. Fraser would have been the only child there, and, the times being what they were, his grandmother the only woman. What librarians would have done in Alert we can only speculate about, but between this and the fact that they helped build an English-speaking library in China before the revolution, we can safely assume that we are dealing with another generation of non-regular Frasers here. This idea is supported by the fact that they fed Fraser arctic tern for Christmas. Each bird weighs under 130 grams, and they would be hard to come by in northern Canada in December because they migrate to literally the other end of the world after breeding in the Arctic in the summer. I'm not entirely certain what this says about Fraser's grandparents, but it sure says something, doesn't it?

This bird may scream, but it does not scream Christmas to me.

Listen, I LOVE that Fraser's grandmother taught him how to box from a book.

Perhaps this one from 1922? In this book, the writer "not only describes the various moves of the game and traces the history of their development but deals comprehensively with all the factors of body and mind that make for success in the ring." Sounds like a good choice!

I do NOT love that she taught him that being in the hospital for three weeks after being shot in the back is "babying yourself". She also raised Bob Fraser to be the kind of man who tells his journal "The last time I saw Ben, he was barely tall enough to reach my belt. When I said good-bye he shook my hand. Never a tear or a complaint. Seven years old and he's already a stronger man than I'll ever be. Someday I'll tell him.", and friends, I DO NOT love that at all. That is NOT a healthy way to deal with emotions, and I think we can agree that growing up guided by these mindsets did Fraser no favors at all. Look at how he lives! His apartment is absolutely bare-bones, no personality, and after that he literally lives in his office - this is a man who gets REALLY uncomfortable when he's comfortable, is what I'm saying. Everything he does is quick and efficient to make sure he can devote a maximum amount of time to his work. I'd bet "Idle hands are the devil's workshop" was a very common saying in the Fraser household.

Look, our upbringing informs who we become, how we approach life, how we connect to those around us. Fraser's view of the world is completely different from how other people see it. Long before he's displaced geographically, he's displaced in time.

He grew up without TV, and while living with librarians gave him access to a large number of books, the libraries they worked at served remote communities and would not have been all too well funded. It stands to reason they would have had to make their books last as long as possible, and that new purchases would have been, shall we say, conservative? Copies of beloved classics, books with general appeal, books with educational/instructional value would have made up the bulk of purchases. Even if the librarians wanted to, there would have been little money to buy more controversial books - and it doesn't seem likely that Fraser's grandparents would have wanted to. Fraser probably grew up on adventure tales, detective stories and, as a teen and young adult, the classics from Austen to Shakespeare.

When he gets to Depot in Regina to become a Mountie he has nothing in common with the other recruits, and that continues throughout all his career. There's a reason he's still a Constable after all his years of service: he's severely lacking in social skills, and his upbringing is a big part of that problem*. He was raised by Edwardians on Victorian (and Romantic) mores and values, and bridging that gap to make connections with people from what's essentially a different world is very, very hard.

TL,DR: Fraser is both an alien and a time traveler, and we should remember that when we talk about him.

*Other parts of the problem are his queerness and neurodiversity, but those are topics for another essay. Please know that by problem I do NOT mean there's something wrong with him, I mean that there's something wrong with how society treats people like him.

Big thank you to @sammaggs and @sammeltassensammelsurium for excellent feedback!

[lythecreatorart]

We Both Reach For the Gun - Chicago

Val is gone, the Vs are in rage

Husk went to Al to use radio to broadcast as a publicity stunt for the new overlord that kill Val

Inspired and I want to make an animatic of rise of Overlord!Angel Dust based on We Both Reach For the Gun from Chicago

I know this song was use when Viv want to have a headcanon voice for Angel few years ago, his song got evolve over time but I still find this to be fun idea

[kindwarrior]

Tucker Carlson is Outing Obama as Gay. But Everyone is Missing the Big Story. I’m Obama’s College Classmate. I’ve Been Trying to Warn America for 15 years!

By Wayne Allyn Root

I’m Barak Obama’s college classmate at Columbia University, Class of ’83. I’m also the author of the #1 bestselling hardcover book in America in 2012, “The Ultimate Obama Survival Guide.”

I’ve always had Obama’s number. I understand what makes him tick. I understand his goals.

First let’s get the “gay issue” out of the way. I’ve reported on both my radio and TV shows for 15 years that my wealthy, connected friends in Chicago have always said, “Obama frequented gay bath houses and gay clubs. Everyone in the know, knows Obama is gay.”

Now that we’ve heard from Obama’s biographer that Obama wrote about his daily gay fantasies, I think it’s pretty clear my Chicago pals were right. Tucker Carlson is onto something!

But gay is not the issue. The issue here is fraud. If Obama is in fact gay, then he was lying to the American people from day one. He portrayed himself as a happily married family man with a wife and two beautiful young daughters. That’s called fraud.

If America had known the truth in 2008, does anyone honestly think Obama would have been elected president?

But all of this is small potatoes. This is not the big story.

Why does any of this matter now? Because Joe Biden is a brain-dead puppet. This is the third term of Obama. The proof is we are all reliving the nightmare Obama economy. Great for Wall Street and billion-dollar multi-national corporations. But a disaster for the American middle class and Main Street.

Second, Biden is fading fast – and everyone can see it. At the same time Biden’s cognitive health is in freefall, all of his corruption from the past is pouring out of the closet. Biden is finished. He is toast. He will never make it to 2024.

Sometime this fall Biden will have a very public “episode” and be hospitalized. Soon thereafter he (or Jill) will announce he is stepping down for “health reasons.”

Who will replace him? Either Michelle Obama or Gavin Newsom. But whoever it is, Obama will be calling the shots from his nearby Washington DC mansion. That’s why this story matters.

I’ve had Obama pegged from the first day. Obama is the ultimate “Manchurian Candidate.” Gay is unimportant. What matters is he was groomed to be president by the Deep State and communist, fascist, globalist enemies of the United States. What matters is Obama is a radical Marxist tyrant carrying out the destruction of America.

Obama was tame in his first two terms. He was “boiling the frog slowly.” But Trump ruined his plan. Now Obama is trying to destroy this country as fast as he can before Trump has a second chance to undo the damage. And at the same time, Obama is coordinating the attacks on Trump to either imprison him, kill him, or disqualify him.

My guest on my show, “America’s Top Ten Countdown” on Real America’s Voice TV last week was former Illinois Governor Rod “Blago” Blagojevich. Blago’s Governor’s mansion was raided by an early morning FBI Swat team. Sound familiar?

I pointed out to “Blago” that Obama’s fingerprints were all over his frame job… and FBI SWAT raid… and long prison sentence. Obama set him up. Obama took away his freedom. I asked him to comment. Blago reported, “Obama set up the meeting that led to my arrest.”

Do you get it now? It’s the exact same M.O. as what’s happening to President Trump. The same FBI raids, persecution, frame job. The same weaponization of government to destroy Obama’s political adversaries.

I’ve always said the key to understanding Obama was his time at Columbia University.

First, there is the “Ghost of Columbia” mystery. I was a Pre Law, Political Science major. So was Obama. He had to be in all the same classes as me. But he was never in one class. I never met Obama, never saw him, never heard of him, never met anyone at Columbia who has.

Obama got in, so why didn’t anyone ever see him? My educated guess is Obama was in the Soviet Union studying communism. Columbia had a “sister school” in Moscow. That would be the only real answer as to why Obama was rarely if ever seen at Columbia. He was being groomed way back then by the enemies of America.

Secondly, at Columbia we learned a plan to destroy America called “Cloward Piven.” I’ll bet Obama spent two years in the Soviet Union at our “sister school” becoming the world’s expert. Look around. Everything happening in America today is Cloward Piven…

The open borders bringing millions of foreigners into our country, changing our demographics forever.

The explosion of welfare and bailouts.

The Green New Deal.

The destruction of our military.

The end of the dollar as world reserve currency.

The plans for pandemic lockdowns, climate change lockdowns and Central Bank Digital Currency.

The censorship, banning of dissent, and weaponization of government against conservatives and Christians. Defund the police.

The vicious criminals let out without bail.

Critical Race Theory and Transgender brainwashing.

Persecution of PTA parents.

Conservatives and Christians classified as “domestic terrorists.”

The arrest of political opponents.

87,000 new IRS agents.

It’s all about Cloward Piven and communist-level control.

Sound familiar? It’s what Obama the “Manchurian Candidate” learned in the Soviet Union from the best. This man was groomed from day one by the communist and globalist enemies of America. He was sent to destroy us.

Now he’s working behind the scenes to finish the job. He is the man who ordered the spying on Trump. The framing of Trump. Now he’s the man directing the nonstop government attacks against Trump. Just as he did to Blago.

So, Obama being gay is the least of it. America is being destroyed. Obama is at the root of every evil thing happening.

[petervintonjr]

"As black America approaches the 21st century, our capacity or our failure to build a solid bridge . . . of works will determine whether millions of young blacks already with us or yet unborn will cross over into the new century, or fall into the abyss."

Another name you almost certainly didn't know: M. (Moses) Carl Holman, civil rights activist, writer, and poet. Born in 1919 St. Louis, Holman showed an early gift for writing, and at the age of 19 won a scriptwriting award from a popular syndicated radio program. He graduated magna cum laude from Lincoln University and went on to acquire Master's degrees from the University of Chicago and from Yale. While at Yale he published his first collection of poems, and began regularly writing articles for various newspapers and magazines on income inequity, urban poverty, literacy, and other issues important to Black Americans. In 1962 he taught English at Clark College in Atlanta, giving him a front-row seat to key events in the earliest days of the civil rights movement. As some of his students participated in sit-ins and the Freedom Rides, he found himself appointed to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, of which he eventually became deputy director in 1966.

In 1968 Ebony magazine named Holman as one of the 100 Most Influential Black Americans. That same year Holman published what is probably his best-known work: The Baptizin', a play which won first prize in the National Community Theater Festival. In addition to multiple collections of poems, Holman also published a definitive overview of the civil rights movement in the U.S., from 1965 to 1975.

Perhaps most significantly, in 1971 Holman was named Vice President of the National Urban Coalition. This organization had re-formed in 1967 in the wake of the so-called "long, hot summer" of racial strife and injustices. During this time Holman's singular talent for delivering quiet and polite, but still powerful, speeches came to the fore and he jumpstarted a great many local housing, education, job training, and economic development programs aimed at disadvantaged Black and Hispanic communities.

In his later years Holman forcefully addressed the issue of "dual literacy" for Black children --emphasizing that such students not only needed to be well-versed not only in the fundamentals such as reading, writing, and public speaking; but also in math, science, and technology. His 1988 obituary notes that Holman "had an uncanny ability to form a coalition out of the most diverse elements, and it was often said that the key to his ability to do this was the fact that he never appeared to have an agenda for himself."

(Teachers: Need some resources to engage your students this Black History Month? I'll send you a pile of these trading cards, no cost, no obligation. Just give me a mailing address and let me know how many students in your class. No strings attached, no censorship, no secret-relaying-of-names to Abbott or DeSantis or HuckaSanders.)

[rockermazy]

Yay - I get to share my love for tidbit Hazbin lore while sharing knowledge that makes me look like a millennial boomer XD Ahem... Alastor, our favorite overlord, for all intents and purposes, is a fucking elemental. His abilities are absolutely terrifying from a scientific standpoint. Okay, so remember how during the "Stayed Gone" number, Vox starts glitching out and "loses his signal" - then the Pride ring subsequently has a blackout? That is entirely Alastor's (or whatever-the-fuck-is-benefactoring-him's) doing. A powerful enough radio signal can do that. No horseshoe magnet required. IRL real shiz. Despite being digital enough to render a bluescreen while compromised, Vox might still have older hardware from his former days as a rabbit-eared, extra-thick thick cathode-ray tube.

And Alastor is our radio demon. Keep this in mind. IRL, once upon a time during the 1940s - before digital television - there was no "Channel 1". That's because in the US, a very long time ago, both radio and TV shared the band that we call "Channel One":

"Until 1948, Land Mobile Radio and television broadcasters shared the same frequencies, which caused interference. This shared allocation was eventually found to be unworkable, so the FCC reallocated the Channel 1 frequencies for public safety and land mobile use and assigned TV channels 2–13 exclusively to broadcasters. Aside from the shared frequency issue, this part of the VHF band was (and to some extent still is) prone to higher levels of radio-frequency interference (RFI) than even Channel 2 (System M)." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_1_(North_American_TV))

Then for a short stint, Channel One was exclusively reserved for radio:

Channel 1 was allocated at 44–50 MHz between 1937 and 1940. Visual and aural carrier frequencies within the channel fluctuated with changes in overall TV broadcast standards prior to the establishment of permanent standards by the National Television Systems Committee. In 1940, the FCC reassigned 42–50 MHz to the FM broadcast band. Television's channel 1 frequency range was moved to 50–56 MHz. Experimental television stations in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles were affected. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_1_(North_American_TV))

Every local TV channel and radio station has a frequency range on the electromagnetic spectrum. For those who still listen to radio on non-internet-reliant radios devices, those funny little numbers next to a station's name are a ballpark number for the frequency the station broadcasts in the Hertz unit. A Hertz (Hz) is one wave per second. A KiloHertz (KHz) is 1,000 waves per second. A GigaHertz (GHz) is 1 billion waves per second. Modern AM radio stations are 535-1605 kHz Modern FM radio stations are 88-108 MHz   TV VHF Channels 2 thru 13 are 54-216 MHz TV UHF Channels 14 thru 36 are 470-608 MHz And no, that's not a discrepancy between VHF and FM radio: the frequencies designated for FM radio are nestled right in there with TV ones - between Channels 6 and 7.

(chart from http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Audio/radio.html) Even today, radio and TV are slightly shuffled in there in regards to designated frequencies. This implies that depending on Alastor's band of preference, if Vox still has some of his older hardware, Vox could, in his sleep, theoretically be able to hear Alastor's broadcasts of screaming victims without a physical radio nearby. IRL in fact, in older televisions where a knob is used to change channels, much of the static you'd hear in-between channels is actually background radiation from deep space - along with any radio interference from man-made sources nearby. No wonder Vox is obsessed with Alastor. Alastor can torment him in an in-between realm-channel daily, like Freddy Kruger.

Yet, if radio signals were only a Vox problem, why did nearly every light and electronic device go out in the Pride except the emergency lights at the Heaven embassy?

It might depend on how we define the word "radio". Is it radio, as in "those radio stations we can listen to without the internet"? Maybe radio, as in "any frequency utilized in modern communications, including TV and Radio"? Or is it radio, as in "almost any signal on the electromagnetic spectrum with a frequency lower than friggin' heat?" People, below is an IRL over-simplified chart of the electromagnetic spectrum and its usages by human.

When radio is defined as a specific part of the electromagnetic spectrum, it is basically any frequency below infrared. *** Cellphone service and WiFi use radio signals within this range. Most cellular services are between 600 MHz and 39 GHz WiFi routers are about 2.4-5 GHz (6 GHz in newer models)  That's where the "G" in "4G" and "5G" come from - the "G" stands for "Gigahertz" Radio, local television, cellphone service, WiFi, and basically any point in the internet that isn't linked by a landline - these are all safely within the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that the scientists would call "radio". If Hell's technology is supposed to mirror the real world, then most electronic devices need radio frequencies in order to communicate. The VVV's empire is truly fucked, should Alastor so choose. The only plot hole in this explanation I see is why all the lights went out. These devices don't run on radio - they communicate using it. My best-educated guess is that the on/off switch for Hell's power grid is on an open network and at least part of it wireless. Or maybe Alastor's radio attack works like a general EMP and he can just break stuff by "brute force". (I am not an expert on these sorts of things like telecommunication... or network security... or physics.... I politely ask that someone in the comments, please enlighten me U.U ) ------------------------------------- Also, notice that Alastor's Tower, Cannibal Town and the Heaven Embassy were the only regions with lights on during the blackout.

is that...?

Cannibal Town?

If this is, in fact, Cannibal Town, then my only guess is that the Cannibals are so hipster, many of them only light their homes and businesses with candlelight and leviathan whale oil. Neither candlelight nor oil-burning rely on wifi. Only some of their region's light was lost in the blackout. They might use some electricity (as many during the Victorian era did, which Cannibal Town seems to be inspired by), but they don't fully rely upon electricity. This suggests that Alastors friendship with Rosie might be less of an organic friendship and more like a strategically slick alliance. Rosie's territory is one part of Pride that Alastor can't completely shut down (other than the Embassy). But, who knows?

Alastor's derision of modern tech now seems to have more merit than just being "hipster", or avoiding leaving a digital footprint that Vox can manipulate, (the latter of which I once head-canoned before this epiphany). Alastor can literally just shut most of Hell's tech down. This might also suggest why Alastor is homies with Zestial - another known old-timey prick.

Alastor makes alliances with demons he can't easily overpower with his abilities. This might seem self-contradictory to Alastor's seeming over-confidence in teasing Lucifer - until you realize he did this only after he learned angels could be killed during the Overlords' meeting. (And yes, I know what I wrote about Alastor a couple of tumbl notes back with the "popsicle" evaluation. I do not consider flip-flopping a moral issue if done so by epiphany. That note stays, because it's funny XD ) ----------------------- Another theory! Ok, so this theory isn't entirely my own-own, I'm just building off of it based on what I've just said (mostly Roo stuff). So IRL, scientists decided to take an image of the observable universe in the microwave range. Microwave energy is in the upper ends of radio, but just below infrared in frequency. What they found was cosmic background radiation - a lot of energy that isn't coming from the stars themselves.

(Image source: https://www.space.com/33892-cosmic-microwave-background.html) Some scientists theorize this is because this particular energy is left over from the formation of the universe. So about Roo:

In the first non-pilot episode, The Story of Hell, as read by Charlie, states that the angels of pure light "worshipped good and shielded all from evil." During this line, imagery of two faces are shown before the angels: one face of light and another face of twisted red and black.

Subsequent lines and imagery in the episode suggest that this "evil" existed before Lucifer fell or Eve allowed this evil to enter the world - even before the Earth was created. Some Tumblrs who have been in this fandom longer than I have may know of Roo, a character that appears in some of VivziePop's older works within the Hazbin/Hellaverse. Some of Roo's monikers include "The Root of All Evil" and the "Tree of Knowledge". I'm wondering if in the Hellaverse, the cosmic background radiation of the universe is a manifestation of Roo when she isn't bound to a tree. Could Alastor's radio powers come Roo, the background "dark" energy of the universe's birth? Did Alastor bite the apple the second third time for mankind? XD

------------------------------------------------- While researching for this paper, I learned that microwave ovens and 2G cell phones operate within the same frequencies at around 2 GHz. Apparently, the only reason cell phones don't cook our brains is because the wattage is too low. (I dunno what wattage means. I'm not a scientist.) But now, Alastors singing lines in S1E8 had me thinking: "The constraints of my deal surely have a back door  Once I figure out how to unclip my wings,  guess who will be pulling all the strings" Knowing what Alastor is capable of with radio, this has me wondering if Alastor's radio powers are coming from one source, all while be is being chained by another entity entirely. Someone might have gone out of their way to get Alastor into a contract - if only to keep him from literally baking the universe for his viewing pleasure... on a rotating glass plate.

Being able to cook a soul in microwaves would require that they be at least partially made of water, however. Buuuut... I guess if there are working ACs in Hell, I really shouldn't read too much into it XD -------------

Do you think the mad scientists from Helluva Boss, Lyle Lipton and Loopty Goopty, ever chat over coffee about the abilities of the overlords based on casual observation?

One day, Alastor's name comes up... ...and after four minutes of discussing facts over coffee, they're both just like "Nope"?

XD {END} *** Note: Googling "Electromagnetic Spectrum charts" will yield different results. Some charts will have different designations frequencies lower than radio, like Extremely Low Frequencies (ELF). I do not know whether this difference is a reflection of a newer categorization, or if most charts online are made for laymen such as myself. Most charts I saw years ago only designated "radio" as "everything below microwave". I want to assume that the "only radio below microwave" categorization went into the writer's designing of Alastor's character simply because such charts are more common (while also making for a more interesting power scaling).

______________ Disclaimer: I am composed of chauffeur knowledge. I know nearly nothing about communication science little about radiation stuff. I took an astronomy elective in college once, so I sorta knew where to look when it came to frequency stuff. I have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about. I know that I confused frequency and wavelength somewhere. Please, #sciencesideoftumblr feel free to correct me. ----------------- TLDR: Most tech IRL uses radio waves to communicate. That Includes TVs, WiFi and cell phones. Alastor can make the Pride Ring go kaploowee if he looks at it funny. I don't know what he's cooking.

[roysexton]

“What will brand podcasts look like in 2024?” … plus I *may* offer a musical homage to “The Little Mermaid” … inaugural Brand Podcast Virtual Summit organized by Lower Street

Such an honor to have participated in this panel yesterday. Truly a robust and fun conversation about podcasting for brands. You can catch the replay here. What will brand podcasts look like in 2024? Find out with the industry’s finest. Roy Sexton – director of marketing at Clark Hill, Lynn Teo – CMO at Northwestern Mutual, Nick Howard – podcast architect and senior manager at Boston Consulting…

[kemetic-dreams]

Minnie Julia Riperton Rudolph (November 8, 1947 – July 12, 1979) was an American singer-songwriter best known for her 1975 single "Lovin' You" and her four octave D3 to F♯7 coloratura soprano range. She is also widely known for her use of the whistle register and has been referred to by the media as the "Queen of the Whistle Register."

Minnie Riperton grew up in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side. As a child, she studied music, drama and dance at Chicago's Lincoln Center. The youngest of eight children in a musical family, she embraced the arts early. Although she began with ballet and modern dance, her parents recognized her vocal and musical abilities and encouraged her to pursue music and voice. At Chicago's Abraham Lincoln Center, she received operatic vocal training from Marion Jeffery. She practiced breathing and phrasing, with particular emphasis on diction. Jeffery also trained Riperton to use her full range. While studying under Jeffery, she sang operettas and show tunes, in preparation for a career in opera. Jeffery was so convinced of her pupil's abilities that she strongly pushed her to further study the classics at Chicago's Junior Lyric Opera.

The young Riperton was, however, becoming interested in soul, rhythm and blues, and rock. In her teen years, she sang lead vocals for the Chicago-based girl group the Gems. Eventually the group became a session group known as Studio Three and it was during this period that they provided the backing vocals on the classic 1965 Fontella Bass hit "Rescue Me".

After graduating from Hyde Park High School (now Hyde Park Academy High School), she enrolled at Loop College and became a member of Zeta Phi Beta sorority. She dropped out of college to pursue her music career.

Her early affiliation with the legendary Chicago-based Chess Records afforded her the opportunity to sing backup for various established artists such as Etta James, Fontella Bass, Ramsey Lewis, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. While at Chess, Riperton also sang lead for the experimental rock/soul group Rotary Connection, from 1967 to 1971.

On April 5, 1975, Riperton reached the apex of her career with her No. 1 single "Lovin' You". The single was the last release from her 1974 gold album titled Perfect Angel. Riperton's third album, Adventures in Paradise was released in 1975. Despite the R&B hit "Inside My Love", some radio stations refused to play "Inside My Love" due to the lyrics.

Her fourth album for Epic Records, titled Stay in Love (1977), featured another collaboration with Stevie Wonder in the funky disco tune "Stick Together".

In 1978, Richard Rudolph and Riperton's attorney Mike Rosenfeld orchestrated a move to Capitol Records for Riperton and her CBS Records catalog. In April 1979, Riperton released her fifth and final album, Minnie. "Memory Lane" was a hit from the album.

Riperton provided backing vocals on Stevie Wonder's songs "Creepin'" from 1974's Fulfillingness' First Finale and "Ordinary Pain" from 1976's Songs in the Key of Life. In 1977, she lent her vocal abilities to a track named "Yesterday and Karma", on Osamu Kitajima's album, Osamu.

In January 1976, Riperton was diagnosed with breast cancer and, in April, she underwent a radical mastectomy. By the time of diagnosis, the cancer had metastasized and she was given about six months to live. Despite the grim prognosis, she continued recording and touring. She was one of the first celebrities to go public with her breast cancer diagnosis but did not disclose she was terminally ill.

In 1977, she became a spokesperson for the American Cancer Society. In 1978, she received the American Cancer Society's Courage Award, which was presented to her at the White House by President Jimmy Carter.

Riperton died of cancer on July 12, 1979 at the age 31.

During the 1990s, Riperton's music was sampled by many rap and hip-hop artists, including Tupac Shakur, Dr. Dre, A Tribe Called Quest, Blumentopf, The Orb

[misfitwashere]

October 15, 2024 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

OCT 16

After Trump’s bizarre performance last night in Oaks, Pennsylvania, when he stopped taking questions and just swayed to his self-curated playlist for 39 minutes, his campaign this morning canceled a scheduled interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box, according to co-host of the show Joe Kernen. The campaign did not, though, cancel a scheduled live interview today with Bloomberg News and the Economic Club of Chicago. That interview echoed last night’s train wreck. 

Trump showed up almost an hour late to the event with moderator John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News. When he arrived, things went downhill fast. Micklethwait asked real questions about Trump’s approach to the economy, but the former president answered with aimless rants and campaign slogans that Micklethwait corrected, repeatedly redirecting Trump back to his actual questions. Trump quickly grew angry and combative.

When Micklethwait corrected Trump’s misunderstanding of the way tariffs work, Trump replied in front of a room full of people who understand the economy: “It must be hard for you to, you know, spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you're totally wrong.” Referring to analysis that his plans would explode the national debt, including analysis by the Wall Street Journal—hardly a left-wing outlet, as Mickelthwait pointed out—Trump replied: “What does the Wall Street Journal know? They’ve been wrong about everything. So have you, by the way….. You’ve been wrong about everything…. You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff.”

The economy is supposed to be Trump’s strong suit.

The former president seemed unable to stay on any topic, jumping from one idea to another randomly, or to answer anything, instead making statements that play well at his rallies—referring to people with insulting names, for example—or by rehashing old grievances and threatening to end traditional U.S. freedoms. He made it clear he intends to "straighten out our press,” for example. “Because,” he said, “we have a corrupt press."

As Micklethwait tried to keep him on task, Trump asserted stories that were more and more outlandish. He claimed that children could do the work of U.S. autoworkers in South Carolina, for example, and that he would be a better chair of the Federal Reserve than Jerome Powell. 

Micklethwait did not fight with Trump, but he didn’t indulge him either. When Trump explained that “you don’t put old in” the federal judiciary because “they’re there for two years, or three years,” Micklethwait replied: “You’re a 78-year-old man running for president.” 

And therein lies the rub. 

Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who watches and clips Trump’s speeches, called the appearance “bonkers.” Journalist David Rothkopf of Deep State Radio wrote: “The past 24 hours seem to have been a dividing line in the Trump campaign...and in Trump. He went from being periodically adrift and sporadically demented to being 24/7 unfit and in need of permanent medical attention. He's one cloudless night away from baying at the moon.” 

Likely reflecting this shift, trading in shares of Trump media, the parent company of Trump’s Truth Social social media site, was stopped briefly today as the price plummeted in unusually heavy trading. Trump took to social media to hawk tokens for his new crypto project, although the nature of the project is still unclear and investing simply offers voting rights in the new platform. The website crashed repeatedly during the day. 

Trump’s issues make it likely that a second Trump presidency would really mean a J.D. Vance presidency, even if Trump nominally remains in office. 

Currently an Ohio senator, J.D. Vance is just 39, and if voters put Trump into the White House, Vance will be one of the most inexperienced vice presidents in our history. He has held an elected office for just 18 months, winning the office thanks to the backing of entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who first employed Vance, then invested in his venture capital firm, and then contributed an unprecedented $15 million to his Senate campaign. 

Vance and Thiel make common cause with others who are open about their determination to dismantle the federal government. Although different groups came to that mission from different places, they are sometimes collectively called a “New Right” (although at least one scholar has questioned just how new it really is). Some of the thinkers both Vance and Thiel follow, notably dystopian blogger Curtis Yarvin, argue that America’s democratic institutions have created a society that is, as James Pogue put it in a 2022 Vanity Fairarticle, “at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning.” Such a system must be pulled to pieces.

Thiel has expressed the belief that the modern government stifles innovation by enforcing social values like equality and anti-monopoly. Those limits have caused society to stagnate, a situation he warns could lead to an apocalypse. “We are in a deadly race between politics and technology,” Thiel wrote in 2009. To move society forward, he calls for freedom for technological leaders to plan a utopian future without government interference. 

It is at least partly the promise of dismantling the administrative state and its regulation of technology that has brought other technology elites, most notably Elon Musk, to support the Trump-Vance campaign. These technology entrepreneurs envision themselves, rather than a government, planning and then creating the future. New campaign records filed today show that in just over two months, from July to the beginning of September, Musk invested almost $75 million in his pro-Trump America PAC to get Trump and Vance elected.  

Like Thiel, Vance has spoken extensively about the need to destroy the U.S. government, but while Thiel emphasizes the potential of a technological future unencumbered by democratic baggage, Vance emphasizes what he sees as the decadence of today’s America and the need to address that decadence by purging the government of secular leaders. A 2019 convert to right-wing Catholicism, Vance said he was attracted to the religion in part because he wanted to see the Republican Party use the government to work for what he considers the common good by imposing laws that would enforce his version of morality. 

Their worldview requires a few strong leaders to impose their will on the majority, and both Thiel and Vance have rejected secular democracy. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009. 

In 2021, Vance called American universities “the enemy” and said on a podcast that people like him needed to “seize the institutions of the left, and turn them against the left.” In a different interview, he clarified: American “conservatives…have lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they’ve ever been. We’ve lost big business. We’ve lost finance. We’ve lost the culture. We’ve lost the academy. And if we’re going to actually really effect real change in the country, it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class…. I don’t think there’s sort of a compromise that we’re going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re going to keep losing.” “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” he said. 

Vance told an interviewer he would urge Trump to “[f]ire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” This plan is central to Project 2025, whose main author, Kevin Roberts, has a book covering those ideas coming out soon—it was supposed to come out this month but was postponed when Project 2025 became a lightning rod for the election—for which Vance wrote the foreword. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay [sic] ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon,” Vance wrote. 

Like Roberts, Vance wants to dismantle the secular state. He wants to replace that state with a Christian nationalism that enforces what he considers traditional values: an end to immigration—hence the lies about the legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio—and an end to LGBTQ+ rights. He supports abortion bans and the establishment of a patriarchy in which women function as wives and mothers even if it means staying in abusive marriages. Vance insists this social structure will be more fulfilling for women than becoming “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.“

That desire to get rid of the current “ruling class” and replace it with people like him has prompted Vance to say that if he had been vice president on January 6, 2021, he would have done what former vice president Mike Pence would not: he would have refused to count the certified electoral ballots for President Joe Biden. 

“Let’s be clear,” former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) said. “This is illegal and unconstitutional. The American people had voted. The courts had ruled. The Electoral College had met and voted. The Governor in every state had certified the results and sent a legal slate of electors to the Congress to be counted. The Vice President has no constitutional authority to tell states to submit alternative slates of electors because his candidate lost. That is tyranny.”

Early voting began today in Georgia, where more than 328,000 voters smashed the previous record of 136,000 set in 2020, during the worst of the pandemic. One of those voters was former president Jimmy Carter, who turned 100 on October 1 and said over the summer he was trying to stay alive to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.

At a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, tonight, a slurring, low-energy Donald Trump told the audience: “If you don’t win, win, win, we’ve all had a good time, but it’s not gonna matter, right? Sadly. Because what we’ve done is amazing. Three nominations in a row…. If we don’t win it’s like, ah, it was all, it was all for not very much. We can’t, uh, we can’t let that happen.”

—

[crimesandcuriosities]

The Unsolved Double Murder of the Grimes Sisters

Teenage sisters Barbara and Patricia Grimes spent an evening together at their local cinema but never returned home.

During the evening of December 28th, 1956, teenage sisters Barbara and Patricia Grimes left their home in Chicago, Illinois, and headed to Brighton Theatre to see Elvis Presley’s new movie, Love Me Tender. Both girls were huge fans of Elvis and they had already seen the movie multiple times, so they had travelled this same route together on numerous occasions. However, this would be the last time they were seen alive.

Barbara (15) and Patricia (13) were due to return home by midnight, but when they failed to show up their mother began to worry. After three late-night buses went by and the two girls were nowhere to be seen, an unsettling concern that they were not coming home began to set in, so at 02:15 in the morning their panicked mother filed a missing persons report with the Chicago Police Department.

During the weeks that followed, thousands of police officers and volunteers searched extensively and Elvis Presley himself made a public plea via radio and television for their safe return. Canals and rivers were dredged, the authorities knocked door-to-door, and over 15,000 flyers were distributed around the local community. However, on 9th January, snow had begun to fall and blanketed the entire area, which significantly impeded search efforts.

The last person on record to see the sisters alive was one of Patricia’s school friends, a young girl named Dorothy, who came forward to state that she was at the same movie screening as the two sisters and was sitting in the row behind them. She claimed the last time she saw them was in a queue for popcorn, and they seemed relaxed and happy.

Sadly, on 22nd January 1957 — almost one entire month after they disappeared — the sisters’ bodies were discovered alongside a secluded road in Willow Springs, which is approximately a 20-minute drive from the theatre they attended.

You can read the full story here.

[palestinegenocide]

Zionism will never be viewed the same after the Gaza genocide

How do you wrap your head around genocide? As one numb week follows another, our leaders blind themselves to massacre and famine.

Joe Biden can see no “compelling alternative to how Israel [wages] a war in these circumstances without doing grievous harm to civilians,” Aaron David Miller writes in the New York Times, excusing the president’s support for genocide. So, Israel isn’t being deliberately cruel and sadistic. The Times coverage would just have you believe they just have no choice– as Donald Johnson wrote in a letter to the paper. “There is no middle ground between what Israel is doing and Gandhian pacifism: They just had to use 2000 lb bombs in urban settings. They have to torture captives and cut off food.”

Miller and other liberal Zionists have adopted that stance, but they are having little influence on Democrats. Polls show that the American people favor giving humanitarian aid to Gaza in far greater numbers than they do giving military aid to Israel, and the progressive base of the Democratic Party has started a political “firestorm” over U.S. support for genocide. The Zionist group J Street postponed its 2024 conference, surely because its own rank and file are enraged by Israel.

James Carville said on MSNBC this week that if Biden loses, it’s Israel’s fault, because the catastrophe in Gaza is an issue “all across the country.”

“This Gaza stuff, this is not just a problem with some snot-nosed Ivy League people…This is a problem all across the country. And I hope the president and Blinken can get this thing calmed down because if it doesn’t get calmed down before the Democratic convention, it’s going to be a very ugly time in Chicago. I promise you that. No matter what happens, I know it’s a huge problem.”

Last week, Brad Sherman, the Israel-loving Congress member from Los Angeles, fought back, accusing “anti-Israel forces” of an “attempt to penetrate and muddy our national discourse.”

Protesters affiliated with the antiwar group Code Pink seek to ask Rep. Brad Sherman about his support for the massacres of Palestinians in Gaza, in a video posted March 20, 2024. The congressman from Los Angeles/Malibu ran away from the protesters and accused them of seeking the genocide of Jews. Screenshot.

Sherman accused them of antisemitism. “There’s blood on your hands for the genocide—you’re trying to kill every Jew.”

That is the chief refuge for Democrats who excuse Israel’s actions. To say that critics of genocide are motivated by antisemitism.

But even liberal media are giving a platform to progressive critics. “The United States is complicit in genocide,” Mehdi Hasan said this week on New York public radio, and when the host pushed back and said Hasan was not blaming Hamas, Hasan said of course he denounces Hamas, but his tax dollars are not going to support Hamas. He also pointed out the inevitable consequences of military occupation. “The oppressed will always rise against the oppressor.”

And in wonderful media news this week, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg withdrew from a speaking engagement in Kentucky after students questioned his record in the Israeli military nearly 40 years ago.

Jeffrey Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic, withdrew from a scheduled speaking event at the University of Kentucky (UK) Wednesday, citing a last-minute schedule change, amidst concerns from students about his past as a former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) prison guard and his views on Zionism…. “We were informed that students expressed concern as to why a former IDF prison guard would be speaking on democracy and journalism at an event celebrating the integration of UK. Students were told he withdrew to not cause harm on campus,” the representative [of a Palestinian solidarity group] stated.

The event was billed as “The Future of Journalism and the Health of Our Democracy.” That’s a little bit of accountability. The editor of the Atlantic is finally being called out for his service for Israel. The writer Yakov Hirsch repeatedly explained on our site that Netanyahu could not have maintained his faultless reputation in the U.S. mainstream without Goldberg fostering “hasbara culture.”

And bear in mind, that Goldberg used to brag about his military service. He wrote a whole memoir about it. Now, times are changing. And other editors who carried water for Israel will surely be called on to defend that work.

This process is just beginning. Zionists still have esteem in the U.S. discourse. The view that Israel supporters promote bigotry against Palestinians is still off-limits. Even as mainstream Jewish organizations assert that those who support Palestinian rights are bigoted against Jews.

“Israel supporters should be seen as on the same moral level as supporters of Bull Connor, but in the U.S. and Western mainstream you can only point to antisemitism— you can never point to anti-Palestinian racism on the Israel side,” Donald Johnson has written on our site.

“We cannot make progress on this issue if the extreme racism of the pro-genocide side is never discussed. People have to be able to say that any group, whether white southerners or South Africans or Nation of Islam members or Christian evangelical Zionists or Germans or, yes, Jewish supporters of Israel, can be racists. They can make racism central to their ideology. But Zionist racism is still a taboo subject, automatically branded as antisemitic, because fundamentally Palestinians are seen as lesser.”

[mariacallous]

Now that the Democratic National Convention is over, the next major battleground in the 2024 election is the media.

The Harris-Walz campaign needs to be ready.

Although former President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has struggled to respond to the new Democratic ticket, Republicans will likely get in line with a unified media strategy. The message they will seek to promote is that Democrats are running the most radical, leftist candidates in U.S. history.

In recent elections, Democrats have had difficulty with the new turbocharged, fast-moving and unfiltered media landscape. In 2016, Trump beat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, harping on the investigation into her emails. In 2020, President Joe Biden defeated Trump, but under unusual pandemic circumstances that put much of the conventional campaign processes on hold. As campaign conditions returned to normal this year, things did not go as well for Biden. One televised debate, noted New York Times columnist James Poniewozik, brought his candidacy to an end: “There was simply a horrendous TV outing—less than two hours that changed history.” But even before Biden stepped onstage, his poll numbers were lagging after a conservative media onslaught about his age and alleged corruption.

To sustain the energy that boosted Vice President Kamala Harris through the convention in Chicago, Harris’s campaign needs to devise an effective media strategy tailored to the current era. To do so, her team should look back to 1992, when then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton’s savvy war room figured out how Democrats could thrive in another new age—of cable television, investigative journalism, and state-of-the-art political advertising. While the news media has evolved significantly in terms of form and content since Clinton won the presidency, Harris will need to achieve a mastery similar to that of Clinton’s historic campaign team.

The early 1990s seem like simpler times. In January 1994, NBC Today Show’s Bryant Gumbel asked his cohost Katie Couric: “What is the internet anyway?” Email was a novelty. Surfing was done in the ocean. Cable news played by the traditional rules of objective reporting. Smartphones were in development, and cell phones remained a luxury. Social media meant going to the movies with friends.

Yet the 1992 presidential campaign—which pitted Clinton, then-incumbent President George H.W. Bush, and independent candidate Ross Perot against each other in a race for the White House—took place across a media landscape that had changed dramatically since the 1960s. Cable had created a 24-hour news cycle where stories came out quickly. These stations, as well as the increasingly popular one-hour network news zine-style shows (Nightline, for example), depended on a healthy audience share for their livelihood, in contrast to the public service ethos of the half-hour nightly news programs from earlier times. This shift meant that sensationalism became a hot commodity. Investigative journalism born from Watergate had given rise to a generation of reporters who were constantly on the hunt for wrongdoing. Moreover, conservative talk radio had exploded after the Federal Communications Commission abandoned the fairness doctrine in 1987. Syndicated hosts such as Rush Limbaugh commanded between millions of listeners on over 600 stations. Daily tabloid newspapers and comedic shows, too, were having a greater impact on politics.

And in advertising, the “Morning in America” campaign that helped then-incumbent President Ronald Reagan win reelection in 1984 set a new standard for sophisticated production techniques. Television spots became like short films, capable of seducing and devastating all at once.

Starting with the 1980 election, and as a party felt to be on the outs from the mainstream culture, the GOP saw an opportunity to shape the national conversation through an aggressive media strategy that defined the way the public perceived its opponents and itself. As they built a new conservative majority, Republicans made huge investments which very often paid off.

In 1980 and 1984, Reagan’s campaign team managed its message to transform the one-time conservative extremist into the nation’s savior. Then, in 1988, Bush pulled together one of the most brutal campaigns of modern history under the direction of South Carolina campaign consultant Lee Atwater. Atwater tore down all the guardrails as to what was permissible, institutionalizing an anything-goes philosophy. Playing on themes of patriotism, religious nationalism, and a racial backlash, Bush and Atwater redefined the promising Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis—an intelligent technocratic reformer—into a heartless left-wing radical who looked terrible in a tank.

In 1992, from its perch in Little Rock, Arkansas, Clinton’s inner circle was determined not to repeat these experiences. It had been hardened during the primaries when its candidate barely survived a sex scandal involving Arkansas state employee Gennifer Flowers. James “the Ragin’ Cajun” Carville had guided Clinton through the crisis and emerged as the central figure behind the “comeback kid.” In a scene captured in the 1993 documentary The War Room, which provides the best look into this critical campaign, Carville warned his staff that Democrats needed to step up or conservatives such as Fox News chairman Roger Ailes would destroy them. With Carville leading the way, Clinton’s war room also included George Stephanopoulos (communications), Paul Begala (chief strategist), Stanley Greenberg (polling), and Mandy Grunwald (advertising).

Several principles guided Carville’s army. Speed was essential. In the cable era, sitting out of stories was no longer an option. Being patient could leave a candidate in the dust. The war room deployed a rapid response style that left no charge unanswered for long and aimed to provide counterarguments before allegations could set in the public mind. When reporters raised an accusation, Clinton’s team rejected the claims with resolve and force. At the same time, whenever Carville and Stephanopoulos got hold of any potentially damaging information about Bush or Perot, they released it to the media immediately rather than trying to think up the best spin.

Tired of the defensive and despondent outlook of Democrats following the political bloodbath in 1988, Clinton’s war room insisted that Democrats needed to play offense. “Why can’t we attack George Bush?” the documentary shows Carville asking his team. The film portrays an effort that fizzled as the team tried to stir a story about Bush having campaign material made overseas rather than in the United States. Nor was it shy about ripping into the weaknesses of Bush’s record.

In doing so, the Clinton war room also elevated clarity into an artform. Carville’s team grasped how long and complicated arguments did not fly in an age of soundbites. They famously drew on a board: “the economy, stupid.” There were two other punchy slogans to guide them: “Change versus more of the same” and “don’t forget health care.” That reminder to staffers was also an example of how to convey a message with simplicity. According to the Los Angeles Times, the crew in Little Rock “share[d] a belief in the primacy of ‘the message’ as the driving force in a presidential campaign, downplaying the importance of such traditional political tools as precinct organizations, registration drives and Election Day turnout efforts.”

The team also worked to sell the message through the realm of popular culture, traditionally dismissed as undignified. Clinton appeared on the Arsenio Hall Show and MTV, in People, and more. The campaign blitzed talk show hosts with information that made Bush look like an out-of-touch well-to-do who only cared about foreign policy while constantly reminding them of Clinton’s humble origins.

In November 1992, Clinton won with 370 Electoral College votes. Four years later, he defeated Sen. Robert Dole and was reelected.

Subsequent Democrats could not replicate his success. In 2000 and 2004, respectively, Vice President Al Gore and Sen. John Kerry failed to be as effective on the media stage. Decorated Vietnam veteran Kerry, for instance, was shell-shocked when then-incumbent President George W. Bush’s campaign tagged him as a flip-flopping politician and an independent group invented the concept of “swift-boating” by throwing out false accusations to discredit his military record. Political consultant Chris LaCivita, who is currently co-managing Trump’s campaign, was one of the people who produced the spot for the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” smear campaign.

Barack Obama reset Democratic campaign strategy in 2008. David Axelrod and his band of campaign operatives updated Carville’s model, demonstrating how effective use of social media tools such as Facebook, well-produced television spots with Reagan-like narratives, and not responding to the daily noise from the internet and cable television could provide a recipe for victory. Sen. John McCain and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, were no match.

Of course, the media campaign was a complement, not an alternative, to an aggressive turnout strategy that focused on driving up total votes in all 50 states.

The media challenges in 2024 have expanded again, even as the old ones remain relevant. One of the most grueling challenges facing Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will be to survive the onslaught of disinformation, deepfakes, and openly partisan news that will hit them from all sides in the months to come. The recent hack by Iran, which Trump claims targeted his campaign, is a reminder that foreign interference will also be a problem.

Harris also needs to compete successfully in what New York Times columnist Ezra Klein has called the “attention field.” News moves at a fast speed and those who consume political news tend to move on very quickly. Attention spans are not easy to maintain. An effective campaign has to figure out how to keep the media focused on its candidate and message for substantial periods of time.

Between now and Election Day, Harris will be facing an opponent who has proven to be effective at working the media. Trump has repeatedly demonstrated an instinctive feel for the rhythm and dynamics of the news cycle. As president, he capitalized on the interconnected relationship between social media, cable news, online newspapers, and podcasts to dominate the national conversation and harden perceptions about opponents. He handled televised debates like a reality show, using body movements, facial expressions, controversial comments, and vicious insults. Most recently, he capitalized on an attempted assassination, standing up with blood dripping down his ear, surrounded by U.S. Secret Service agents, defiantly pumping his fist in the air and yelling: “Fight! Fight! Fight!” It was as if he could see how the event looked on a television screen.

Thus far, Harris’s team has been extremely effective on this playing field. It has staged the rollout methodically to generate good feeling, excitement, and constant media attention. Harris’s memes have caught fire on social media. Harris appears to have selected Walz as her running mate in part because of how adroit he has proven to be in this playing field despite being 60 years old. By uttering one word, “weird,” Walz remade the messaging of his entire party. When Republicans lobbed their initial attacks against Walz’s military record, the social media army hit back hard, although some commentators believe it needs to hit back harder.

The fight is only beginning. Democrats should not fool themselves into thinking Trump will simply lay down his gloves and walk away. When backed into a corner, Trump traditionally becomes more brutal.

But as Clinton’s war room demonstrated in the 1992 election, a savvy Democratic campaign updated to suit the modern media environment can take down the fiercest opposition and pave a road that leads to the White House.

[harrisonarchive]

“‘I never listen to the radio to keep up with current trends,’ he admits. ‘It may sound funny, but at home in England it’s cause the DJs always talk too much, and here in America there’s too many stations and I get confused, so I tend to stick with the ones that play the old rock ’n’ roll.’ […] Does Harrison feel as if the current scene has left him behind? ‘In a way, but sometimes you want to be left behind,’ he points out with a smile. ‘It’s like I was saying, I used real drummers and real pianists on my album cause I’m sick of hearing all that electronic music. Even Prince, whom I like, is beginning to sound like all those TV commercials, because everyone can use those drum machines and boxes of tricks. So now all you hear are the great grooves, but no real songs.’ ‘The Beatles experimented with all the new studio technology that came along but we never let it get in the way of the songs, and I’d like to see today’s music return to the approach — good songs played well. ‘Of course, once you’ve been a Beatle, you’re never really out of it [the public eye],’ he comments wryly. ‘People always want to know what you’re up to, and if you don’t immediately tell em, that’s when they start making stuff up.’” - Chicago Tribune, October 18, 1987 (x)