Media

"Some of the nation's largest corporate advertisers, seeking greater control over television, are proposing to create their own shows to air on the major broadcast networks," the Los Angeles Times writes. With network advertising revenues down, some TV executives are open to corporate sponsored shows. Both Ford Motor Company and Coca-Cola are developing TV shows to promote their products. Ford's "No Boundaries" premieres on the WB network in March. Coca-Cola's "Stepping Stones" is set for NBC's summer season.

Mark Crispin Miller examines the growing power of the world's 10 largest media multinationals: AOL Time Warner, Disney, General Electric, News Corporation, Viacom, Vivendi, Sony, Bertelsmann, AT&T and Liberty Media. "The media cartel that keeps us fully entertained and permanently half-informed is always growing here and shriveling there, with certain of its members bulking up while others slowly fall apart or get digested whole," he observes.

Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange, a human rights organization based in San Francisco, recently sent a fact-finding delegation to Afghanistan and Pakistan. "I didn't know that massive numbers of people were not getting food aid because the U.S. was blocking an international force from coming in to open up the roads so that aid could get in," Benjamin reports. "And I also had no idea of the extent of innocent victims, who were killed by U.S. bombs, until I realized that everywhere we went, we found people who had stories to tell of loved ones who were killed in the bombing. ...

A recent essay by Fouad Ajami in the New York Times Magazine described Al Jazeera, the 24-hour Arab satellite channel, as "irresponsible," "inflammatory," "anti-American" and "anti-Israel." Some people disagree with this assessment, including MSNBC correspondent Michael Moran<