The creator of the popular Web program 'The Young Turks' was a hit as a guest host on MSNBC and he's not stopping there in his push to 'steer the national conversation.' When I ask the Young Turk what stands as competition for his Internet video show on politics, he pauses for a beat.
"Sh," he replies. "I just don't see them yet, thank God. The competition will come at some point and we don't want to be overconfident. But at the same time, right now, we have huge market dominance."
While many others have talked about new media forms and breaking down barriers, the self-styled Young Turk, a.k.a. Cenk Uygur, has administered his own wrecking ball. His Internet video program, "The Young Turks," has become strong enough to power a small but burgeoning network of Web programs. That program's reach has given him the credibility to jump to a spot as a fill-in host on a more traditional platform, cable station MSNBC.
Uygur (his full name is pronounced Jenk U-gurr) has reached the enviable place where he wants, but does not need, expanded air time on cable television. He has shown he can match, and even outdraw, the more traditional cable television hosts he has been replacing. But he attracts enough acclaim and cash via the Web and YouTube channels he founded that he says even a full-time gig on TV would not draw him away from his new-media roots.
It's tempting to view Uygur as the prototype for a new generation of political commentators, who hone their craft with blogs and Web videos and then transition to older platforms. Political commentator and comedian Tina Dupuy calls Uygur "the Tila Tequila of political talk-show hosts." Others, no doubt, will follow.
But unlike the one-video wonders who burst on the pop music scene, it's likely that the future political talkers in the Uygur mode will make their bones more gradually. It takes more than one catchy lyric to build the world view, credibility and tone that win audiences in the long run.
Uygur has been working for a decade or more to get to his current heady place. "The Young Turks" online revenue hit the equivalent of $1 million a year in July, according to Uygur. A new "TYT Sports" channel is due to launch Wednesday. And recent ratings show that the 40-year-old host outdrew MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan on the five days he replaced the daytime host in July and August. (While Ratigan averaged 276,000 viewers in August, Uygur drew an average of 293,000.)
Cable executives hope fill-in hosts can at best hold on to the audiences they inherit. But MSNBC insiders said they believe Uygur did so well because many of those who watch his three-hour weekday Web program, (3 to 6 p.m. PDT) or clips on his YouTube channel jumped to MSNBC when Ratigan was out.
The new-media comer walks a line. He is thrilled with his cable television success and wants more air time, mostly because he says decision makers are still more likely to watch a program on cable than on the Internet. But he also says that "The Young Turks" — where he regularly dogs President Obama and Democrats, along with his usual Republican foils — is his "bread and butter."
"If they said to me, 'You can do cable, but no 'Young Turks,' I would say 'No deal,' even if they gave me a full-time show," Uygur said in a Labor Day interview. "Because it's bigger than any TV show. And I don't say that as hype. It's a reality."
Well, not precisely. "Young Turks" clips drew a total of more than 18.7 million views on YouTube during August, making it one of the most popular regular features on the video-sharing service. Although a heady number, it still doesn't match, say, the average weekly 7.6 million viewers who watch " NBC Nightly News."
The program makes about half its revenue via commercials posted with its YouTube videos, money it shares with the video behemoth. It makes the other half mostly from subscriptions (more than 3,000 pay $10 a month to get podcasts and other features.)
With revenue expanding at a healthy clip, "The Young Turks" (whose guest hosts include Ben Mankiewicz of "At the Movies" on Turner Classic Movies and Wes Clark Jr., son of the general and one-time presidential candidate) recently doubled its staff to 10 and is considering expanding out of its longtime studio on Miracle Mile in Los Angeles.
The Sports commentaries will feature "TYT" regulars but also welcome outsiders. "The whole attitude is, we don't decide what works, the audience does and we go with that," Uygur said. The new feature will join other TYT channels that already focus on movies, video blogs and interviews with newsmakers.
Program namesake Uygur, who is of Turkish descent, sets the conversational tone for the shows. The one-time lawyer and college rugby player with the faithfully liberal political bent will range away from his main topics to football, pop culture or wherever he sees promising fodder.
He has spent plenty of time lately hammering Democrats and President Obama for selling their policies so poorly and doing little, as he sees it, to remind the public that the economic crisis began during a Republican administration.
"Obama spent the first two years of his administration practicing political unilateral disarmament," he said in one salvo. "He laid down his arms to reach out to Republicans, and they ripped his arms off and clubbed him over the head with them."
He had been a Republican until President George W. Bush's decision to go to war with Iraq, Uygur said. He built his first audience on Sirius satellite radio, in large part with his adamant opposition to the Iraqi conflict.
Uygur, who grew up in New Jersey before attending the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia law school, sees Republicans as protecting rich and powerful interests. "But are you going to catch Democrats in corruption too?" he says. His answer: All the time. "What I say is 'Why would I want Charlie Rangel robbing me, instead of Tom DeLay robbing me?'"
He said he was not disappointed that the 10 p.m. EDT time slot his followers had in mind for him recently went to longtime MSNBC personality and former Capitol Hill staffer Lawrence O'Donnell. "It's all working out well," he said. MSNBC President Phil Griffin called Uygur "part of our family" and expects him to get "more and more" air time, though he declined to specify in what time slots.
Uygur said winning more time on TV matters because "I want to steer the national conversation in the right direction, from my point of view. I want to get under Robert Gibbs' skin and Rahm Emanuel's skin and Barack Obama's skin."
He scoffs at the suggestion that MSNBC can't catch up with cable-leader Fox News. "They don't mind throwing bombs and picking fights," Uygur said. "But if anyone on the other side has the temerity, they will have a great success or even greater success than Fox, because there are more progressives out there."
MSNBC has hired frequent guest commentator Cenk Uygur as a contributor and substitute anchor. Uygur, the founder of popular live web video show "The Young Turks" (Uygur is Turkish), began appearing as a regular Friday guest on the net starting at the beginning of the summer.
He has filled in for regular MSNBC staffers on "The Ed Show," "The Dylan Ratigan Show," and "Countdown with Keith Olbermann."
When the Peacock cabler announced last year that it was searching for a 10 p.m. news show, Uygur tried and failed to get "The Young Turks" picked up for the 10 p.m. slot that eventually went to Lawrence O'Donnell.
"Turks" is broadcast on XM/Sirius Satellite radio.
Cenk Uygur is the bombastic host of America's longest-running online political talk show, The Young Turks (TYT for short), and he wants to start a revolution in the US. "I don't mean it like the Tea Party guys who talk about guns and violence, I mean a real political revolution," the former lawyer from New Jersey explains, referring to protests in the US by the Tea Party movement, which supports constitutionally limited government and free markets.
TYT, which came to national prominence in 2005 with a 99-hour "Live, On Air Filibuster" during supreme court nomination hearings, is also part of a media revolution. Its filibustering was quickly followed by a decision to launch on YouTube. It now averages 13 million viewers a month.
Last week, TYT announced its first sponsorship deal with Netflix, the online film rental company. It has deals with other online businesses, such as godaddy.com, SquareSpace and GameFly, in the pipeline as well. Not shy of self-promotion, Uygur, a fixture on TV in the US, says: "We are a rare online show that is profitable and expanding. We've hired three people in the last five months. The growth and the sponsors were organic. We didn't come in with a lot of money or a big sponsor. We created the show, found the audience, then got the sponsors."
Uygur conceived TYT because he believes that online TV will eclipse network programming and that Americans are starved of public service journalism. "We're looking for journalism in all the wrong places. What's the last story anyone on television in America broke?"
TYT began life as a liberal talkshow on Sirius Satellite Radio in 2002. In 2006, Uygur decided to turn down a $250,000 radio-only deal and TYT became the first daily streaming online talk show. It went from zero to 30,000 viewers in a month; in February this year it reached more than 200m views on YouTube. "Before if you got on CNN or ABC in America that was huge and that was the best thing, if you were a cable station it was great – they always bragged about 'Oh, we're in 72m homes'. Now I think, so what? YouTube is in every home."
TYT covers news and entertainment, and Uygur runs a tight ship, with just six full-time and three part-time staff and a monthly budget of $45,000. Income comes from subscriptions and YouTube revenue sharing, and between June 2008 and December 2009 it doubled to more than $60,000 a month, with margins increasing steadily since then. TYT has no advertising budget: its fans, the TYT Army, provide promotion by tweeting links or posting clips on social networking sites.
In fact, if you're looking for a job, the TYT army is recruiting. "At this point," Uygur says, "we only hire from our audience … We're trying to give you news so you're part of the process – the viewers are the Young Turks. If I get something wrong on air, I get 1,000 emails correcting me instantly and most of our story suggestions come from viewers."
The show has been able to keep pace with the mighty networks it competes with by using its popularity to book a wide variety of guests, some of whom may not return: "I heard from [US Senate majority leader] Harry Reid's office, after his interview, that we were effectively blacklisted for future interview requests. I didn't really shed a tear. We're gonna be all right."
In terms of technology awards, TYT beat the competition, including the BBC and Rush Limbaugh, the leading talk radio host, to win Best Political Podcast 2009 at the Podcast Awards and Best Political News Site 2009 at the Mashable Awards. The show was also nominated for the Audience's Choice Award 2010 at the Streamy Awards.
"We worked really hard at getting all the details right. Whether it's the tagging of the video or the thumbnail [image] ... What ultimately mattered most was that we were delivering something the American media wasn't. The American media is delivering nothing but fakeness," Uygur argues.
So how will TYT evolve? Expansion, he says. He and the team have recently launched a sister network, What the Flick , on YouTube, which is hosted by the film critic Ben Mankiewicz. He plans to build more online networks: TYT sports, TYT Moms, TYT food – "Whatever matches our brand, and our brand is just: genuine, real and generally progressive."
TYT apparently gets "a huge amount of feedback" from Britain. "We cover a lot of stories from the UK because your newspapers are more interesting – some of them are just having fun, but at least they're covering interesting stories."
When he was in London for the Changing Media Summit, Uygur was recognised a couple of times on the tube and in the street. Not bad for a American news anchor who has never had a show broadcast on TV.
For many progressives, the presidency of Barack Obama has been deeply disappointing. To hear some prominent lefties tell it, the New Jesus of the campaign trail has morphed into the New Judas of the Oval Office.
"He loves to buckle," MSNBC host Cenk Uygur declared in a July segment called "Losing the Left." "Obama's not going to give us real change — he's going to give us pocket change and hang a 'Mission Accomplished' banner."
Television studios are airport-hangar-size buildings with green rooms, overflow trailers, and people with massive salaries bustling around. I'm sitting instead in a cramped office on Wilshire Boulevard, a mile from Beverly Hills, which has been converted into a makeshift studio for the Internet-based TV talk show The Young Turks. In the control room, three staffers in T-shirts and a perky producer, Ana Kasparian, 23, man eight computer screens and clutch boxes of various Willy Wonka candies. A wall-size window separates them from a modest newscast-esque set.
Just before 4 p.m., host Cenk Uygur, 39, arrives -- "early," he says, so we could talk -- not at all fazed that his three-hour show is streaming live in 10 minutes. I've seen the show; his musings are thoughtful, insightful gems in a sea of digitized diatribes. I look around for a teleprompter. There isn't one. No writers either. Uygur watches the day's video clips for the first time during commercial breaks, seconds before he discusses them on-air.
Uygur doesn't look like a rebel, but there is something revolutionary going on here. Roughly 450,000 people watch The Young Turks on YouTube alone; thousands more in the precious 18-to-35 demo listen on Sirius Satellite Radio and through the TYT Web site, making it competitive with, say, MSNBC's Morning Joe (382,000 viewers a day in September), or CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight (616,000). And that, says Uygur, is only the beginning of a campaign "to take down television."
"When I watch TV, I see robots," he says. "We're not robots; we're people." On a show touching on health-care reform and Senator Max Baucus, Uygur proclaimed, "The mainstream media and the politicians who do these tricks and the media who cover for them -- guess what? You're fucked. We're coming for you. We're coming to your house."
Uygur is no Jim Cramer or Keith Olbermann. There are no props. He doesn't pace or throw papers. On air, he sits at a desk in a news-anchor manner, without the necktie. His style is conversational. Even from the voyeuristic distance of YouTube, he seems to be having an intimate chat with his viewers. For two hours, he comments on what interests him about each sound bite and piece of video, and talks with guests who span the spectrum from Mel Brooks to Mary Matalin. A self-described moderate progressive, he sometimes disagrees with the likes of Michael Moore. For the third hour, cohost and producer Kasparian does softer news.
The Turks' goal has always been to make a television show for the Web and build on that success. "In '97, I knew television and the Internet would merge," Uygur says. "Didn't realize radio would too." TYT was Sirius's first original programming, an arrangement that, by 2006, provided this ragtag crew with an operating budget of $250,000 a year. According to Uygur, the network wouldn't allow them to produce a YouTube video program, so they raised their own funds (mostly friends and family) and worked out a syndication deal with Sirius. The gamble paid off; within a year, revenue reached the $250,000 mark. Today, TYT takes in more than $20,000 a month from YouTube's ad sharing, plus a similar sum from 2,100 subscriptions and ads from its own Web site. Revenue has doubled in the past 18 months.
With operating costs of $35,000 a month, covering five full-time employees and rent, TYT is a lean -- and modestly profitable -- talking machine. There's no makeup person. No wardrobe budget. No craft services. No catered lunches. No grips. No unions. And no 401(k)s. "Yeah, I'm on my wife's health care," admits Uygur.
To create a single hour of cable news, "you're probably looking at a ballpark of $200,000 to $300,000," says Pixel Pictures executive producer Karen Daniel. Compare that to TYT's tidy budget and television looks like a dinosaur blissfully dismissing mammals, or newspapers scoffing at blogs circa 2002.
TYT does absolutely no advertising. Rabid fans, known as the Young Turks' Nation, are the show's most devoted publicists. "Our marketing is purely word of mouth and people linking to our videos and blogs on the Web," says Uygur. Meaning TYT has found a way to crowdsource everything, from fact checking to $10-a-month Web subscriptions to keep the lights on. "If I screw up and say something wrong, I instantly get 100 messages," says Uygur.
What's next for TYT? "Launch a network," says Uygur. "We're crazy cheap." He notes they already have the studio and the equipment to produce another show. It would just take a couple more crew members and a new producer. The model is proven. YouTube is equipped. The TYT brand is ready to expand. Uygur hopes to launch at least one new show in the next three months.
But what if MSNBC, where Uygur had talks last spring about its 10 p.m. slot, comes calling? What if a real television network wants to scoop up TYT? "It would have to coexist with what we have," Uygur says. Cable news is welcome to syndicate its content, but TYT won't shut down the YouTube channel for the old Goliath of cable news. Instead, Uygur says, "we're going to pick their pockets."
Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks is guest-hosting for Dylan Ratigan today on his MSNBC show.
Uygur topped the TVNewser poll in early 2009 when the network was said to be searching for a new 10pm host. He's appeared as a guest on a number of shows in the last year, but this is his first time hosting.
Last month, MSNBC finally filled that 10pmET slot, giving the hour to longtime MSNBC contributor Lawrence O'Donnell.
Cenk Uygur, host of the popular online news show "The Young Turks," turned his attention to Dearborn on Wednesday, asking viewers whether it was appropriate to ban the sweatshirts.
The YouTube video has more than 22,000 views and 1,093 comments to date.
While Uygur agreed with administrators' decision not to punish the students, he suggested their poor judgment should bar them from graduation.
"If you can't see how that's offensive, you shouldn't graduate from high school," he said.
Uygur also pointed out the sweatshirts didn't actually make a lot of sense.
"'You can't bring us down.' But wait a minute. You're the Thunderbird? What does that mean?"
NEW YORK — Television network executives looking for new talent are accustomed to getting pleas from agents urging them to check out their clients.
But in the last few weeks, MSNBC has experienced a different kind of onslaught: a flood of unsolicited endorsements from fans of liberal radio hosts touting them as the network's next potential big star.
The grass-roots campaigns were triggered by the news that the cable channel is contemplating creating a new show for its 7 p.m. time slot, currently occupied by a repeat of "Countdown With Keith Olbermann." That prompted the launch of independent Facebook groups extolling the merits of two radio hosts: Cenk Uygur of the Internet show "The Young Turks" and Sam Seder of Air America.
The lobbying efforts have drawn thousands of supporters and led fans to pepper MSNBC with e-mails in support of their favorite personality. Hundreds of people have posted messages of support online, some even creating their own video spots. (Give the time slot to "The Young Turks," warns one, "or I'll switch back to CNN.") Liberal bloggers on sites like MyDD.com have also weighed in.
They all hope that MSNBC will choose a host cast from the same left-leaning mold as Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, who have helped power the cable channel's ratings.
"You have a block with two unabashedly progressive voices that doesn't exist anywhere else on cable news," said Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of Daily Kos, who urged his readers to back Seder for the spot. "We want to take advantage of locking up that third hour, if we can."
MSNBC President Phil Griffin said he's not necessarily looking for someone who shares the political leanings of Olbermann and Maddow, but is delighted by the response.
"If people identify with us, I'm thrilled," he said.
"Obviously, we're going to have flow between our shows," Griffin added. "But it isn't going to be ideology that drives it. I want that hour to be edgy, to be smart, to be a little snarky."
At this point, the search for a new host is just an "aspiration," said Griffin, noting that the network may not even select someone by the year's end. But he said he had been floored by the reaction, which has included "dozens and dozens of phone calls from people I never thought about or considered."
"It's just incredible and just shows you where MSNBC is," he said. "We've had times when hours have been open and nobody noticed."
New York — CENK UYGUR was pretty sure he had the makings of a good TV show.
Every afternoon, he and fellow liberal talk show hosts Ben Mankiewicz and Jill Pike spent three hours dishing about politics and pop culture for their irreverent Sirius Satellite Radio program "The Young Turks." They already had an avid fan base, including listeners who urged the trio to seek a larger audience.
So last year, the Los Angeles-based commentators shot a television pilot in a rented studio and shopped it to the cable news channels, buoyed by a letter-writing campaign to network executives from some of their followers.
No one bit. So Uygur and his co-hosts took the matter into their own hands. "We thought, 'If they're not going to put us on, let's put ourselves on.' "
With the help of some investors, the Young Turks bought four professional digital cameras and rented a studio space along Wilshire Boulevard's Miracle Mile. In mid-December, they began streaming their three-hour show every weekday on their website, www.theyoungturks.com, billing it as the first live Internet talk show.
In the process, they've helped pioneer the rapidly developing field of online programming -- from webcasts to video podcasts and vlogs (the video version of a blog) -- now delivering content that traditionally would have had to survive the television development season and pass the muster of network executives to find an audience.
"Anybody can own a broadcast power now," says Jeff Jarvis, who writes about media and technology on his blog BuzzMachine. "We're going to have more and more choices. TV will no longer be one-size-fits-all."
Until recently, original video programming on the Internet has resembled homemade films more than mainstream television shows, appealing to niche audiences with pieces focused largely on youth culture, tech wizardry or quirky personal stories. On one of the most popular sites, Rocketboom.com, host Amanda Congdon delivers a wry three-minute daily newscast about new gadgets and oddball stories. The site Vlogmap.org lists more than 480 vlogs in the U.S. alone, including the heavily trafficked 64mm.com, which boasts that it's "The First and Best Skateboarding VideoCast on the Net."
Sixty or so protesters have gathered outside of the CNN building on Sunset Blvd. They are protesting what they say is biased reporting by the news network of the debate over a public health insurance option.
CNN is expected to run coverage of the angry (but peaceful) crowd outside its doors later tonight.
Similar rallies took place outside the CNN headquarters in New York and Atlanta. The protests were organized by The Young Turks and Democracy For America.
Kern Valley Progressive Alliance for Change (KVPAC) held its fourth annual Kern Valley Progressive Freedom Festival in Kernville last weekend, Oct. 24-25, with a music and political outdoor festival at Frandy Park on Saturday, and various workshops at the Oddfellows Hall on Sunday. The theme of this year’s festival was “The Voice of Social Consciousness,” and nationally-know as well as local speakers offered many ideas on how individuals can do their part to improve the world.
Former soldier Dwayne Hunn, now of the World Service Corp., told the story of one mother who is working to raise funds to send her son the proper Kevlar equipment that the army is not providing him, so that he will come home to her safely. Health care reform was a widely discussed topic on Saturday, with many speakers rallying for a public option.
Delores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farmer Workers with Cesar Chavez, spoke to the crowd about healthcare being a basic human right at Saturday’s Freedom Festival in Kernville.
Delores Huerta, founder of the Delores Huerta Foundation and co-founder of the United Farmer Workers with Cesar Chavez, has worked relentlessly to ensure farm workers’ rights. Huerta, who has been the recipient of numerous awards and holds four honorary doctorate degrees, spoke about health care being a basic human right, and not something to be denied due to the balance in one’s bank account. “We need to come together to do something to get health care for all,” she implored.
Keynote speaker Cenk Uygur of Air America’s “The Young Turks,” who has appeared many times as a commentator on CNN, spoke of ways that we can change the world. A self-identified lifelong Republican, Uygur said he became disillusioned with previous administration. Uygur added that while it is exciting that President Obama was elected, he predicts that Obama will only be able to affect a five percent change during his time in office, and the rest is up to us. Uygur had many ideas about how the common man and woman can work together to make sure that our elected officials work for the people rather than the lobbyists. He suggested that a Political Action Committee is formed, much like NRA or NAACP, to bring down one crooked politician through ads in that official’s state, so that the others will take notice and worry that they, too, will be held accountable for their actions. “Nine out of ten politi!
cians are cowards; they want to please everyone and they sell out to those who can give them the highest contributions. They need to sell out to us, the voters,” said Uygur. “The way to change the world is not to rely on politicians, but to do it ourselves.”
In addition to the various speakers, there was musical talent throughout the day, including Out of the Question with a set of bluegrass and folk, in addition to a tribute by Valerie Cassity to Peter, Paul, and Mary’s Mary Travers, who passed away last month. Event emcee R.J. Eskow took a turn on stage showcasing his musical talent, as well as Dos Guys, and the women’s Celtic group Banshee in the Kitchen.
The musical headliner was Brian Vander Ark, a singer-songwriter best known as lead singer for the band The Verve Pipe. Vander Ark wrote the band’s hit “The Freshmen” and many others, and had a supporting role as the bass player in the movie Rock Star. Vander Ark sang for an hour with only his acoustic guitar for accompaniment. Punctuating his songs with brief stories about their origins, Vander Ark told the story of his step father taking his last breath in a hospital with his family surrounding him, and also shared the tale of taking his four-year-old daughter on a daddy/daughter date to McDonalds with her in her princess dress and tiara and him in a suit.
One focus that the festival organizers wanted to emphasize is celebrating sustainability and localism, which was accomplished by having all local vendors selling their wares ranging from locally hand made skin care creams, jewelry and crafts made from local materials, a square-foot gardening system, and more. Children were kept entertained with a bounce house by Kern Kids Party Rentals, bracelet and dream catcher making activities, pendulum art, peace flag decorating, and a patriotic mosaic portrait featuring the Statue of Liberty drawn by Joan Desmond, which had various 6” square pieces of a large picture to be decorated by everyone at the event. There was also a display of the Freedom Wall, which was covered with pictures drawn by local children about what freedom means to them, and included everything from (several) American flags to a girl riding her horse in a field.
The event organizers also wanted to encourage green energy, and invited KV Solar Supply to set up an information booth, as well as CA Green Team Windspire energy systems; a company that sells personal wind energy systems which powered much of the day’s activities.Dawn Jordan pointed out that the stage was made of 100 percent recycled materials, and there were recycling bins throughout the festival area so that the event would create as little waste as possible. On stage, Jordan encouraged everyone to recycle as much of their trash as they could, and that local recycling centers will take almost anything for recycling. “Ghandi’s ‘Be the change you wish to see in the world’ is one of my favorite quotes, and one of the changes we want to see in this valley is more green energy and more recycling,” said Jordan.
Glenn Beck, the hottest right-wing voice on the air, worried aloud to his listeners the other day that powerful, sinister forces trying to destroy America might soon "shoot me in the head."
But there's fear among his critics, including calmer conservatives, that the victim more likely will be one of Beck's many broadcast targets.
After a summer of mob anger at town hall meetings on health care - some of which featured gun-toting protesters - and a burst of Beck-fanned hysteria over President Obama's back-to-school speech last week, the former top 40 deejay has emerged as a goofy dark prince of the right.
His gift for spinning apocalyptic visions of the future is matched only by his melodramatic skill to gin up his listeners.
"'The world is going to hell in a handbasket' - I think that pretty much summarizes Glenn Beck," said Charles Dunn, a Regent University professor and author of "The Future of Conservatism."
"But I also think he's become the head cheerleader of getting people to respond - the tea parties, the health care town halls."
"Glenn is great at what he does," added Michael Smerconish, a conservative whose show runs in New York on WOR, the same station as Beck's show. "But I just wonder - at what cost?
"I mean, disagree with the President - absolutely," added Smerconish. "But be leery of using some of the words that have now entered this debate."
A sampler:
* Beck, 45, has called Obama a "racist" who "has a deep-seated hatred for white people" - comments that have sparked an advertising boycott of his Fox News Channel show.
* He declares the nation is headed toward a "fascist state" and that the White House is infested with "radical, revolutionary and in some cases Marxist" advisers.
* He claims Obama's entire agenda - including health care - is designed to "settle old racial scores" and that Americans must rise up to take back their nation. "The time for silent dissent has long passed," Beck warned last week in a typical call to arms.
It's an us-versus-them view of the world, with Americans' freedom and very lives in imminent peril; a foreboding, racially polarized vision of America under siege by a conspiracy of liberals, "anti-capitalists" and other players in an Obama "thugocracy" who must be stopped at all costs.
Ron Kessler, author of "In The President's Secret Service," notes that although it is impossible to single out Beck as a cause, threats against Obama are up 400% compared with those against President George W. Bush.
"A lot of those threats are racially based," Kessler said. "So there is a real basis for concern."
Even as he echoes far-right theories, Beck tries to cast himself as simply a libertarian - a believer in self-reliance - whose show fuses "entertainment with enlightenment."
A former alcoholic and drug addict, he now mocks himself as a "rodeo clown" - one of the comedy bits he adds to his daily stew on evil government plots.
But here's what Beck critics consider the scariest part: Americans are eating him up.
His radio show is now No. 3 in America, with a following both younger and more female than the top two, conservatives Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.
His TV show routinely pulls in more than 2.5 million viewers daily, placing him third among all cable news programs. On some recent nights, Beck's 5 p.m. show outdrew long-reigning cable news champ Bill O'Reilly, who holds a prime-time slot.
Heady stuff for a self-confessed sufferer of attention deficit disorder who barely attended college and, in his drinking days, once fired an employee for handing him the wrong kind of pen.
A convert to Mormonism, Beck lives in a $4.25 million home in Connecticut, with his second wife, Tania, and their four kids.
Beck spent decades working in morning deejay slots around the country, from Baltimore to Houston to Phoenix to New Haven.
His big break came in 2006, when CNN Headline News gave him a show. Soon Fox came calling and Beck became famous as the crying commentator for his on-air weeping, usually inspired by some new evidence that America was going down the drain.
"I just love my country, and I fear for it," he quavered.
His clout is still growing, and last weekend Beck landed his first knockout punch - the resignation of Van Jones, President Obama's "green jobs czar."
It was Beck who spotlighted video of Jones referring to Republicans as "a-------," and a petition Jones signed suggesting that Bush knowingly let the 9/11 attacks happen.
Not surprisingly, he is now going after other Obama czars as dangerous radicals.
But it is the undercurrent of paranoia that permeates Beck's show that has liberal critics and conservatives alike expressing concern he will inspire violence.
Christopher Balfe, who head's Beck's media company, said that's nonsense. "Glenn has clearly, repeatedly and unequivocally denounced violence and promoted peaceful, nonviolent expression," he said.
But to many, such disclaimers are drowned out by hours of overheated, fear-stoking rants.
"It's a subtle incitement toward violence, all the time," said Cenk Uygur, anchor of the "The Young Turks," a liberal-leaning show on Sirius Radio, who follows Beck closely. "He is saying, 'They are coming for us.'
"And you know, he doesn't need to convince his whole audience to go do something stupid and violent," Uygur added. "He only needs to convince one."
My piece out today on frustrated internet activists in the Republican Party begins with a story from Michael Turk, a conservative activist who ran the eCampaign division at the RNC after the 2004 presidential election. In short, the RNC killed an exciting opportunity for web video just as it began to get some coverage because it badly misunderstood the conventions of the genre. (See the piece for more detail.) That episode presaged the current state of affairs. Four years later, Barack Obama used and is using web video as one of many technological tools to reach out to hundreds of thousands of his supporters, while John McCain had a lackluster YouTube channel and generated little excitement around his web operations.
But it isn't just Obama who is capitalizing on the power of web video. It's the left more generally. Consider The Young Turks. A radio show originally on Air America and now on XM satellite radio, The Young Turks has been broadcasting on the web since the pre-YouTube era. Now that it operates a YouTube channel, it is absolutely killing the game. Just this week the channel passed 50 million views, with 32.4 million views coming in a period that maps with the election cycle (January to October 2008). By comparison, the John McCain YouTube channel has just 25.7 million views in its lifetime.
A progressive satellite radio show did better traffic online than the Republican presidential candidate. The Republican activists that I spoke with have a seriously uphill battle.
After the Democrats won control of Congress in November, the questions started in earnest; How would they oppose President Bush on the war in Iraq, the issue on which the president was most vulnerable? The blogs covered every speech, every change in inflection, deriding and praising along partisan lines. And the Republican filibuster Monday, blocking a vote on a relatively bi-partisan, non-binding resolution criticizing the president’s plan to increase troops in Iraq, also brought bloggers into the debate.
The conservative Powerline Blog said that Democrats, not Republicans, deserved blame for the stalled debate.
“The Republican filibuster did not prevent debate. To the contrary, it was the Democrats’ attempt to invoke cloture that would have ended debate. The filibuster prevented the vote the Democrats wanted.”
The right-leaning Captain’s Quarters blog, said that the Democrats’ complaints about the Iraq war showed hypocrisy and a “lack of political courage.”
The Democrats “voted for the war based on the same intelligence that fueled American policy well before George Bush took office. When that intel turned out to be incorrect, or at least out of date, they panicked.… In the process, they have made it almost impossible for the White House to exercise any flexibility in the war strategy to ensure a positive outcome from the removal of Saddam Hussein.”
The left-leaning blogs saw things differently.
Talking Points Memo, taking the stalled vote in stride, saw hope in the House of Representatives, where Democratic leaders have scheduled debate next week on a similar resolution.
“Efforts to pass judgment on President Bush’s escalation plan may have stalled in the Senate, but they may soon have better luck in the House of Representatives.… As is now very clear, waiting on the Senate to pass such a resolution was not a very good idea.”
“Incidentally, one interesting political dynamic to watch here will be whether a House resolution will rachet up the pressure on the Senate to hurry up and pass its own anti-escalation resolution, already — thus increasing pressure on GOP Senators facing reelection to stop backing the GOP-orchestrated filibuster.”
Cenk Uygur, writing for the Huffington Post, said someone should “force,” the Republicans, to conduct an actual filibuster, complete with “no sitting” rules and no bathroom breaks.
“If the Republicans want to filibuster the Iraq debate, then they should be forced to get up and keep talking about how well the Iraq War is going and what a great idea escalation is … have them in front of the cameras telling the American people why we wouldn’t shouldn’t vote on the most important issue in the country. They want a filibuster? Give them one.”
The Glittering Eye said the debate was important and that the drama in Congress had become a “distraction from the real question: how do we muster the will to prevent us from allowing a catastrophe even greater than the one that’s going on now?”
“The pragmatic argument depends entirely on whether we are better able to prevent the violence in Iraq from overflowing Iraq’s border while within Iraq or from outside and, try as I might, I haven’t been able to provoke anything like a substantial discussion of that question.”
Starting Monday, I'm going to have to seriously consider getting XM Satellite Radio. That's because The Young Turks, the loudly liberal counter to the right-leaning presets on my Sirius Satellite Radio, are jumping ship to XM and taking their politics and entertainment show to Air America Radio where they'll own the very important morning drive time. It was just a few years ago when their spokeswoman called to promote the trio–Cenk Uygur, Ben Mankiewicz, and Jill Pike–to us as the first talk show on Sirius. (Jill's the calendar babe.) Of course, at the time I'd never heard of satellite radio so Sirius had to send me one, and I've been renewing my subscription ever since. Anyway, the trio has gone from little-known talkers to big shots in radio and on the Internet. Love Air America or not, The Young Turks will soon be that network's headliners. On his recent Huffingtonpost blog, Uygur concede!
d that no matter how good the trio is, "our show will not save the world." But they'll sure shake it up. Check them out Monday.
The world of TV news and talk radio is changing. Need proof? Look no further than a smallish third-floor office along a slightly faded section of Los Angeles' Wilshire Boulevard -- not exactly the center of the media universe. That cramped office serves as home to the Young Turks, a trio of left-leaning talk-show commentators. The Turks are opinionated, articulate, and bred on the freedom of the Internet, which can bring fame with the click of a mouse.
The Turks, all under 40 and with an infectious zeal for lampooning the right-wing Establishment, are fun to watch and listen to. "Liar," the head Turk, 35-year-old Cenk Uygur, spits into his microphone throughout President Bush's Saturday morning radio show. "Bastard," says 25-year-old Jill Pike of another offending right-wing pol. The Turks recently televised a 99-hour "filibuster" online to encourage Senate Democrats to mount their own talkathon to block the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito.
SMALL COMMUNITIES. But the Turks are more than just entertaining. They represent what could constitute traditional media's worst nightmare: the ability to bypass gatekeepers and bring a message directly to a niche audience tired of the same old stuff they're getting elsewhere. "It's the democratization of the media," says Josh Bernoff, an analyst with Internet media consultants Forrester Research.
In contrast to traditional radio and TV, the Internet allows for the creation of communities, often based on niche interests. The Turks' audience isn't large: maybe 100,000 a week. But that amounts to enough to get advertisers for their Web-cast TV show and contracts with Sirius Satellite (SIRI ) radio and three local radio stations.
If Big Media isn't paying attention, it ought to. The Internet has a way of producing overnight sensations (anyone hear of MySpace two years ago?). And while it probably won't be The Young Turks, it wouldn't surprise me if some Web-based show breaks out soon. Besides, ratings for traditional news have been dropping. The Big Three newscasts draw 18% fewer viewers than they did a decade ago, according to Nielsen Media numbers. Even the cable networks are seeing their audiences fall: Fox News (FOX ) dropped by 14% in the most recent quarter, and CNN (TWX ) decreased by 5%, says Nielsen.
BARE MINIMUM. That a show like The Young Turks can come to life at all attests to the ease of entry into the news business. Launched by Uygur, a Wharton grad and onetime lawyer, it received financing mostly from his father and some investment-banker types he met along the way. Pike joined up instead of making TV pilots. The third member, 38-year-old Ben Mankiewicz, is a Columbia Journalism School graduate and the son of Frank Mankiewicz, who served as a press secretary for Robert Kennedy.
The Turks started out making radio shows streamed to their Web site, and only recently jumped into video when they couldn't get a pilot picked up by MSNBC (GE ) or CNN (TWX ). Their studio isn't fancy. It has three digital camcorders trained on the Turks, while three twentysomething technicians work at computers on the other side of a glass wall. An intern handles the phones.
What makes these newbies so intriguing is how they've strung together a distribution network and acquired enough eyeballs (and ears) to get their message out. The show draws decent enough ratings on the three local radio stations that carry it on weekends, in Seattle, Pittsburgh, and Wichita. It's turned into a popular iPod (AAPL ) download, and soon (EBAY ) will offer podcasts for $1 a pop. Talks are underway as well with Al Gore's Current TV liberal cable channel.
MARATHON VENTING. No, it ain't CNN. It's DNN -- Digital News Network. The Turks make for the perfect marriage of message and medium, offering alternatives in both content and delivery. In their rush to create an online presence that looks and sounds very much like traditional TV, the large networks have lost sight of what made the Internet unique in the first place: that an infinite variety of offerings can create intimate relationships between a site and its visitors.
The Young Turks get it, and they're only too happy to share it -- for 99 hours straight if need be.
AN esteemed group of TV jour nalists, but no one from ABC News, has been chosen to moderate this fall's presidential debates - raising eyebrows in the industry.
NBC's Tom Brokaw, CBS' Bob Schieffer and PBS' Jim Lehrer will moderate the upcoming debates between Barack Obama and John McCain. PBS' Gwen Ifill will moderate the vice-presidential debate.
But the absence of anyone from ABC has some insiders wondering if the network was snubbed due to last April's Obama-Hillary Clinton primary debate, moderated by Charlie Gibson and ex-Clinton staffer-turned-ABC Newser George Stephanopoulos.
Gibson and Stephanopoulos were criticized, in some quarters, for turning the debate into an ambush-style interview, not a substantive discussion of the issues.
But Janet Brown, the executive director of the Commission on Presidential Debates - the non-partisan body that organizes the events - said that's not the case.
The debate, last spring, she said, "Was not a factor in this decision. This should not be seen as a decision not in favor of any news organization."
Brown said the moderators are chosen by committee by virtue of their individual professional acumen, grasp of the issues and the "understanding that they are there to facilitate a conversation between the candidates, not [to] compete with them." A moderator's network affiliation is not a consideration, she said.
An ABC News spokeswoman said network officials were "disappointed."
"If they didn't take that [spring] debate into account, they should have," said Cenk Uygur, the host of "The Young Turks," a left-leaning talk radio show. "That was a very poorly-moderated debate."
Left wing radio commentator Cenk Uygur made the journey from Los Angeles to speak at KVPAC’s 2nd annual Freedom Festival at Riverside Park in Kernville on Saturday. Cenk (pronounced Jay-nk) hosts his own internet broadcast with Wesley Clark Jr. called The Young Turks. Clark, the son of former Democratic presidential candidate General Wesley Clark, was also supposed to appear at the rally but canceled at the last minute.
Never at a loss for words, Cenk gave the crowd plenty to cheer about with his harsh criticisms of the Bush administration and calls for impeachment, but surprisingly his most scathing judgments came at the expense of the Democrats. 'The democrats are in the majority, but they are not in power', said Cenk, 'They are weak and ineffectual.' He believes the Democrats need to learn how to fight the Republicans and that is the only way they can win in 2008. Nevertheless, he is very optimistic about the democrat’s chances next year. 'It’s going to be a tidal wave in ’ 08 and the republicans will have no idea what hit them', he proclaimed.
Cenk was a conservative Republican until 2003 when his disagreements with the Bush Administration caused him to leave the GOP. He is now supporting Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd for the democratic nomination. Sen. Dodd is considered to be one of the most liberal of all the candidates running for the democrats and, according to Cenk, the only one who has the guts to fight the Republicans. New York Senator Hillary Clinton, the front-runner in the democratic race and the odds on favorite to win the party’s nomination, is considered by Cenk to be the most right-wing of all the democratic candidates.
Aside from hosting his show, Cenk also writes commentary blogs for several left-wing websites including the Huffington post.com, which he has been with since 2005.
He believes the recent criticisms of these sites by conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly are totally unfair. He explains that the right takes the most inflammatory comments made on these sites and presents them as the norm.
As with almost all blogging websites anyone can write whatever they want on them. There are no academic or journalistic standards required for posting an opinion.
This results in what amounts to reading bathroom wall graffiti. 'The right-wing blogs are coo-coo for Coco Puffs', said Cenk.
But not all conservatives make Cenk’s blood boil. He mentions George Will and Andrew Sullivan as two commentators who he has a great deal of respect for.
Cenk was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey until he was eight years old, when his family moved to New Jersey. After finishing college in Philadelphia and law school in New York, Cenk moved to Los Angeles in 2001, right before 9/11, to pursue a career in broadcasting.
A talk-radio host is claiming Stephen Colbert stole his joke.
Cenk Uygur of Air America's morning show "The Young Turks" insisted on his program Wednesday that Colbert used his joke on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report." Uygur posted a video on YouTube comparing his joke — which he claims he first told on his Sept. 7 radio program — with a segment that aired on "The Colbert Report" four days later.
In both jokes, Uygur and Colbert suggest that the Republican presidential candidates sounded like Klingons from "Star Trek" while speaking about the value of honor.
Renata Luczak, a spokeswoman for Colbert, said the comedian had no immediate comment but will most likely address it on the show.
As a mock conservative pundit, Colbert has often engaged in mock feuds.
US NEWS & WORLD REPORT - Washington Whispers. - September 20, 2007
It was hilarious when Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central'sColbert Report compared the GOP presidential candidates to Klingons after the last debate, when they had competed to pledge that it was more honorable to win the war than the presidency. Well, now Colbert has been charged with theft by the cohost of one of Air America's leading shows, the Young Turks. Cenk Uygur charges that Colbert stole the joke from a show the Turks aired on September 7. Colbert told the joke on September 11. Uygur has put a $65 million price tag on his suit.
"Look, he's messing with my livelihood. That's how I put food on my kids' table. If I had kids," says Uygur. He warns Colbert and Comedy Central to "lawyer up."
Comedy Central declined to comment on what's clearly a publicity stunt. How do we know? Uygur explains that he decided on $65 million because he figures his joke is at least as valuable as that pair of pants lost by a Washington dry cleaner that resulted in a failed $65 million lawsuit from an area judge.
"If a pair of lost pants is worth $65 million, then my jokes are worth a hell of a lot more," he says.
This is Cenk Uygur from ‘The Young Turks,’ Air America’s morning show. He is suing Stephen Colbert for $65 million, just like the pants guy, for stealing a joke about Klingons.
You can see both jokes in the clip. Of course, we’re bloggers, so we steal all of our material, but apparently standards are different for basic cable and niche radio people. Still, you can sue for a “stolen” joke? Milton Berle is shaking in his boots while rolling in his grave. After the jump, a fun assignment!
So yeah there’s only a limited number of jokes to be made about, like, Mitt Romney tying his dog to the roof, and we make ten of them every day, so we tend to think that it’s only natural that a room full of “professional comedy writers” working from the same source material might come up with a couple of the same punchlines as two bitter dudes on opposite ends of the country. But on the other hand we’d really like to have enough money to quit before this election gets any worse, so we want in! Please send us any and all examples of any television show, basic cable or network, repeating a “joke” you laughed at first here on Wonkette so we can sue Viacom or GE and get the hell out of here before President Thompson has the CIA send us to the Thunderdome.
Since we're never ones to ignore the announcement of a perfectly good, publicity-attracting, $65 million nuisance lawsuit against a high-profile show business personality, we note Air America radio show host Cenk Uygur's declaration of legal war against Stephen Colbert, whom he accuses of stealing a joke that no two individuals, save perhaps millions of Star Trek fans familiar with the Klingonian code of honor, could possibly have arrived at independently. You can watch him plead his case above; hopefully, this ugliness can be settled out of court, perhaps with an invitation by the Colbert Report camp for Uygur to join their Trekkie host in a Klingon Joke-Off reminiscent of the Metaphor-Off that salvaged Colbert's relationship with Sean Penn.
A talk-radio host is claiming Stephen Colbert stole his joke. Cenk Uygur of Air America 's morning show "The Young Turks" insisted on his program Wednesday that Colbert used his joke on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report." Uygur posted a video on YouTube comparing his joke _ which he claims he first told on his Sept. 7 radio program _ with a segment that aired on "The Colbert Report" four days later. In both jokes, Uygur and Colbert suggest that the Republican presidential candidates sounded like Klingons from "Star Trek" while speaking about the value of honor. Renata Luczak, a spokeswoman for Colbert, said the comedian had no immediate comment but will most likely address it on the show. As a mock conservative pundit, Colbert has often engaged in mock feuds. An e-mail sent to Uygur's spokesman seeking further comment was not immediately returned.
With a sharp focus on national issues and the sizeable audiences they draw, big-name bloggers on sites such as Daily Kos, MyDD and Redstate drive political discussions around the country. But sometimes the most resourceful bloggers are those reporting on state and regional politics -- the ones who break news for the national media to follow.
Today we profile examples of one such blogger.
Cenk Uyger once had a lucrative future at a Washington law firm when he nabbed a political talk show of his own on a local public access TV station. He's now a Los Angeles-based radio talk show host and national blogger on two other high-traffic websites: AOL Newsbloggers and The Huffington Post.
According to the AP, a Senate appropriations committee chaired by Sen. Richard Durbin "moved...to cut off funding for Vice President Dick Cheney's office in a continuing battle over whether he must comply with national security disclosure rules." The Panel "refused to fund $4.8 million in the vice president's budget until Cheney's office complies with parts of an executive order governing its handling of classified information." The AP notes that Cheney's office "argues that the offices of the president and vice president are exempt from the order because they are not executive branch 'agencies.' ... But Durbin insisted that Cheney's office is explicitly covered because the order applies to 'any other entity within the executive branch that comes into the possession of classified information.'" In a piece for The Politico illustrating the left's dwindling patience, Cenk Uygur, co-host of 'The Young Turks' on Air America Radio, notes that a new poll "indicates for the first time that a majority of Americans want Vice President Cheney impeached. ... Meanwhile, the so-called opposition party has promised that they will not even consider this option. That's beyond weird."
HUNTINGTON -- When it comes to politics, people under 30 are often labeled as apathetic and uninterested, but a radio station in the Tri-State hopes its morning show will appeal to a younger audience and help break that stereotype.
"The Young Turks," a nationally broadcast talk show on the liberal Air America Radio network taking on politics, news and pop culture, has been building an audience in the 6 to 9 a.m. slot on WCMI-AM 1340 since September.
WCMI Assistant Program Director Brandon Millman said the show offers a youthful perspective on politics and was a proven success as Sirius Satellite Radio's first national liberal program.
"They're one of the hottest commodities in progressive radio," Millman said recently.
Young Turks co-host Ben Mankiewicz said making politics interesting is always tough.
"You have to do it in a way that is engaging and truly makes it relevant to people who are watching, listening or reading," he said.
Mankiewicz, a weekend presenter on Turner Classic Movies (His grandfather is "Citizen Kane" screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz) and former reporter and anchor, shares duties with Cenk Uygur, an attorney and blogger for The Huffington Post.
Mankiewicz said younger voters are more savvy and can tell when the media is not covering politics honestly.
"I don't mean that the media is lying, but they so easily buy into the spin," Mankiewicz said. "The 24-hour news cycle has made that worse because it's so rapid that the time to add layers and perspective to your coverage has evaporated."
Mankiewicz said politics is too often covered as a horse race. He also said the media tends to reduce issues to a "he said/she said" format. He cites global warming as the biggest example of this practice.
"I'm not an active environmentalist in any way shape or form, but I believe in science and 928 peer-reviewed studies on one side and none on the other," Mankiewicz said. "Talk shows on the right say the jury's out. The jury is in. You want to find 10 guys that claim global warming is not manmade -- they're wrong. Nobody gets talk show hosts and reporters to point that out."
Uygur said many commentators on cable news do not connect with younger viewers and that their approach feels like it comes from another generation.
"I think Tucker Carlson grew up in 1912 or something," Uygur said. "Where did they find a guy who's young and apparently did not grow up with the rest of us?"
Uygur cites MSNBC's Keith Olbermann as one of the few who breaks this pattern.
"It's not just because he's liberal. He does the pop culture stories and has sports references," Uygur said. "He has references I can relate to."
Uygur said that the only candidate running from either party making a successful attempt at luring younger voters is Barack Obama.
"He's talking about the need to change the whole system," Uygur said. "They're tired of this pro-life/pro-choice thing and all the old arguments. It's not their argument and Barrack Obama gets that."
Mankiewicz said the show's goal is to make news something the audience can relate to.
"We're not trying to reinvent the wheel, but we're trying to make things more relevant and honest," Mankiewicz said.
“From little-known talkers to big shots in radio and on the Internet. Love Air America or not, The Young Turks will soon be that network’s headliners.” Paul Bedard, US News & World Report
“The Turks, all under 40 and with an infectious zeal for lampooning the right-wing Establishment, are fun to watch and listen to… More than just entertaining.” Ron Grover, Business Week
“(The Young Turks have) helped pioneer the rapidly developing field of online programming.”
Matea Gold, Los Angeles Times
“Part Howard Stern, Part Howard Dean… The Young Turks offer a host of innovative programs with a political edge.” Kathy Newman, Pittsburgh City Paper
“Maybe (the Democrats) could tune in (to The Young Turks) for some ideas.” The Detroit News
“(The Young Turks are) changing the face of radio.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
“The role and impact of new media on the electoral process grows every year. The Young Turks get it. Their live webcast reaches and engages people where they live and work. It has become a part of the national conversation on the air and over the Internet.” General Wesley Clark
CENK UYGUR at Huffington Post has an interesting roundup of clerics with controversial views and close ties to political figures, most of whom, it turns out, do not provoke media feeding frenzies or demands that respectable politicians utterly dissociate themselves from the religious leaders in question: Jerry Falwell said America had 9/11 coming because we tolerated gays, feminists and liberals. It was our fault. Our chickens had come home to roost, if you will. John McCain proudly received his support and even spoke at his university's commencement.
Reverend John Hagee has called the Catholic Church the "Great Whore." He has said that the Anti-Christ will rise out of the European Union (of course, the Anti-Christ will also be Jewish). He has said all Muslims are trained to kill and will be part of the devil's army when Armageddon comes (which he hopes is soon). John McCain continues to say he is proud of Reverend Hagee's endorsement.
Reverend Rod Parsley believes America was founded to destroy Islam. Since this is such an outlandish claim, I have to add for the record, that he is not kidding. Reverend Parsley says Islam is an "anti-Christ religion" brought down from a "demon spirit." Of course, we are in a war against all Muslims, including presumably Muslim-Americans. Buts since Parsley believes this is a Christian nation and that it should be run as a theocracy, he is not very concerned what Muslim-Americans think.
John McCain says Reverend Rod Parsley is his "spiritual guide."
Mr Uygur attributes the apparent double standard to racism, but I think a better explanation is the one he offers a bit later: The views espoused by Mr McCain's friends in the clergy are easily as offensive as anything Jeremiah Wright has said, but they all fall within a broad sphere of issues we generally recognize as religion's territory, where we tend to tread lightly even when the religious position in question is profoundly repugnant. Mr Wright's controversial comments read as objectionable political views that happened to be delivered in a sermon, and so are not met with the deference normally afforded to views seen as flowing more directly from faith.
Also, I desperately, desperately want a "Rod Parsley is my co-pilot" T-shirt.
The progressive network Air America unveils a new lineup Monday, with Jerry Springer disappearing from local flagship WWRL (1600 AM) and former morning host Rachel Maddow reappearing in the early evening.
The network has also signed a new morning show, "The Young Turks," which combines political commentary with entertainment. That show will not be heard on WWRL, however, because WWRL has kept its own morning show of Sam Greenfield and Armstrong Williams.
"The Young Turks," who are Cenk Uygur, Ben Mankiewicz and Jill Pike, has been on Sirius Satellite since 2002 and been streamed as video on the Internet since last year.
"It's a movement toward being more entertaining without losing our progressive edge," says a spokeswoman.
If all those bankruptcy rumors about liberal Air America Radio are true, then maybe its new morning-drive-time feature show, The Young Turks, can help in more ways than just spicing up the airways. As in sharing profits from its hugely popular $6.99 girlie calendar that features curvy young cohost Jill Pike. "We've made more money off those calendars than Cheney has from Halliburton," says Cenk Uygur, another cohost of the show that debuts on Air America September 18-and also switches from Sirius to XM on satellite radio. The third cohost,Ben Mankiewicz, adds: "Guys want Jill's calendar so much that we're thinking about giving out her phone number so they can just call her and ask her what the date is."
Starting Monday, I'm going to have to seriously consider getting XM Satellite Radio. That's because The Young Turks, the loudly liberal counter to the right-leaning presets on my Sirius Satellite Radio, are jumping ship to XM and taking their politics and entertainment show to Air America Radio where they'll own the very important morning drive time. It was just a few years ago when their spokeswoman called to promote the trio–Cenk Uygur, Ben Mankiewicz, and Jill Pike–to us as the first talk show on Sirius. (Jill's the calendar babe.) Of course, at the time I'd never heard of satellite radio so Sirius had to send me one, and I've been renewing my subscription ever since. Anyway, the trio has gone from little-known talkers to big shots in radio and on the Internet. Love Air America or not, The Young Turks will soon be that network's headliners. On his recent Huffingtonpost blog, Uygur conceded that no matter how good the trio is, "our show will not save the world." But they'll sure shake it up. Check them out Monday.
HOWARD KURTZ COLUMN IN WASHINGTON POSTS - June 29, 2006
Are liberal bloggers about to become part of the Democratic establishment?
This is no theoretical question, now that Hillary Clinton has reached into the cyberspace ranks and plucked a liberal blogger from Salon. (Yes, I'm sure it's just to help her keep her Senate seat this fall.)
The question has been bouncing around the increasingly influential blogosphere and debated by the practitioners themselves. Are lefty bloggers just foot soldiers in a grand effort to help the Democratic Party retake the Hill and the White House? Or are they independent commentators who are sympathetic to liberal politicians but will criticize them when necessary?
Because if it's the latter, wouldn't they zip their lips when a policy disagreement might prompt criticism that would hurt the party?
Hillary has tapped Peter Daou, who worked for John Kerry last time and has devoted his Salon column (which includes cyber-roundups from the left and right) hectoring the MSM for slobbering over Republicans and stiffing Democrats. Daou says his mission is "to facilitate and expand her relationship with the netroots."
Former Virginia governor Mark Warner has already hired his own blogger, Jerome Armstrong, Kos's co-author on the book "Crashing the Gates."
Kos, who did a stint with Howard Dean's '04 campaign, remains independent, though sometimes he makes endorsements, as he did in appearing in a campaign ad for Ned Lamont, the Democrat challenging Joe Lieberman in an August primary.
So are these bloggers just hired as ambassadors to a constituency group? Will they have real influence on campaign strategy? Are they just window-dressing?
A couple of HuffPost contributors weigh in on Daou and the larger issue. Cenk Uygur sees three possibilities in Daou becoming part of Hillaryland:
"1. Hillary will actually listen to what Peter has to say and adjust her views and actions.
"2. They will not be able to see eye to eye and Peter will be ignored and then will eventually leave the job.
"3. Peter will become an apologist for Hillary's current stances on things like Iraq, which are hideous and morally repugnant.
The media landscape in the United States is undergoing some seismic changes. 50 million Americans now turn primarily to the Internet for their news, and they are doing more than just reading about current events when they go online. They are listening and watching, too.
Take, for instance, the cyber punditry being offered by a trio of young, articulate news-watchers who call themselves "The Young Turks." For three hours every day, Cenk Uyuger, Ben Mankiewicz, and Jill Pike dish about politics, news and pop culture to an estimated audience of 11,000 people.
While you can hear The Young Turks on satellite radio and on a few FM stations, their biggest audience is actually made up of people who listen on the Internet. You can tune in live -- or you can download their daily program onto your iPod, and take the show with you.
The Young Turks recently added a video stream to their website. Co-host Ben Mankiewicz says they tried to go the traditional route and broadcast on television, the way other news commentary shows do. But the networks would not take them - and so they turned to the Internet.
"Ten years from now, people are going to be watching those [traditional network] shows on their laptops," Mankiewicz says. "Television is never going away, I don't suspect. But people are going to be watching a lot of content on the Internet. And there was no reason to wait."
Indeed, according to a recent survey conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life project, 71 percent of so-called "high-powered" Internet users are getting their news primarily or exclusively online. High-powered users do things online at least four times a day, and according to John Horrigan, who conducted the study, what these people read or hear on the Internet is determining what they watch on television, and whether they bother to buy a newspaper.
"That wasn't the case even four or five years ago," Horrigan says. "It's a wake-up call to traditional media sources to keep working at integrating online news into how they provide news generally."
It is precisely the way traditional media sources have been delivering the news that the Young Turks say they are rebelling against. Their online commentary show has a definite liberal slant - although co-host Cenk Uyuger says he was a Republican in thought and action until the United States went to war with Iraq. Uyuger says online broadcasting probably would have come about anyway, since it is a matter of technological development more than anything else. But he says liberal Americans in particular are turning to the Internet, because traditional broadcast media outlets are using conservative pundits to deliver their news.
"For example, when you turn on cable TV news, what do you see? You see O'Reilly, Hannity, Scarborough, Tucker Carlson, John Gibson, Chris Matthews, etc., etc. The list goes on and on, and it's nothing but wall-to-wall conservative hosts," Uyuger says. "And so the rise of Internet media became more of a quote-unquote 'alternative,' and it became necessary, frankly."
In that sense, says Young Turks co-host Jill Pike, Internet broadcasting is thoroughly democratic - emphasis on the small "d." She says traditional broadcasters have tended to 'dumb down' their news, in an effort to appeal to the widest possible audiences - and sell the greatest number of commercials. But Pike says with the Internet, astute audiences - even ones as small as 11,000 people - can find a news program that serves their needs… and they can also disseminate their thoughts far and wide. "Until I started doing the show, I didn't realize what kind of voice I could have. You know, I didn't think my vote mattered," she says. "But now with the innovations of the blogs, and being able to do your own radio show, or video show… participate in active discussions on the Internet, to where politicians are really paying attention to that now. I think has become a new form of democracy."
Of course, all three Young Turks acknowledge there may come a time when commercial interests dominate the Internet, just as they do traditional news broadcasting. It is a possibility Uyuger, Pike, and Mankiewicz say they will consider when and if it arises. They admit commercial funding would allow them to reach a greater audience. What they do not yet know is how much they would be willing to compromise in order to get it.
HOWARD KURTZ COLUMN IN WASHINGTON POSTS - February 27, 2006
Cafferty's cutting remarks have made him a hero to some on the left. Liberal radio host Cenk Uygur called for Cafferty to get his own prime-time show, saying on Huffington Post.com that "he is a rare truth-teller on cable news."
Eisler, who lunched with Abramoff a few weeks ago, had advised him to be more accessible to journalists. When Abramoff was planning to invoke the Fifth Amendment at a Senate hearing in 2004, Eisler wrote him, according to the e-mail he provided to The Washington Post: "You claim to be a religious man (I put it that way out of my long argued conviction that Reform Jews are just as religious as people who keep Kosher); and it's Yom Kippur. The past is past, what happened last year is sealed. This is the New Year and it's your chance to tell the whole story totally and completely and let the chips fall where they may. That will take courage. But in the long run it will save you, in more ways than one. If you refuse to answer questions, you are done."
Abramoff, telling Eisler his attorneys did not agree, took the Fifth anyway.
Eisler stresses that he has only published the e-mails in which he was questioning Abramoff as a reporter. But he sounds more like an advocate than a journalist when he describes how Abramoff is reading religious literature and expressing remorse over his crimes.
At one dinner, Eisler says in one of several interviews, Abramoff told him that " 'Bad Jack is dead.' He was acknowledging the fact that there were two Jacks. He had one Jack who ruthlessly pursued this lobbying thing. . . . His attitude toward his adversaries was squash them, destroy them."
Despite Abramoff's guilty plea, Eisler insists: "I don't fully accept the notion that he cheated his clients. He worked 24/6 for his clients. The story line of 'rich white guy steals from poor downtrodden Indians' is a little misguided in my view. . . . Let's not burn him at the stake because of a media frenzy that would rather stick to caricatures."
Jack Cafferty, CNN's resident curmudgeon, is drawing some flak for his rhetorical bombshells.
In a typical rant, Cafferty, a New York local anchor for two decades who now delivers his short bursts on "The Situation Room," said of the Bush administration: "Who cares if the Patriot Act gets renewed? Want to abuse our civil liberties -- just do it! Who cares about the Geneva conventions? Want to torture prisoners -- just do it! Who cares about rules concerning the identity of CIA agents? Want to reveal the name of a covert operative -- just do it!"
Before any legal charges were brought against Tom DeLay, Cafferty said of the Texas congressman: "Has he been indicted yet?" He told Wolf Blitzer that if presidential adviser Karl Rove is indicted, "he might want to get measured for one of those extra large orange jumpsuits, Wolf, 'cause looking at old Karl, I'm not sure that they'd be able to zip him into the regular size one."
And when Dick Cheney, after his hunting accident, granted an interview to Fox's Brit Hume, Cafferty said it "didn't exactly represent a profile in courage for the vice president to wander over there to the F-word network." ("Get your mind out of the gutter," he says now. "The F-word is Fox.")
Responds Fox spokeswoman Irena Briganti: "Jack is about as unstable as CNN's programming lineup -- nobody pays much attention to his incoherent ramblings."
Cafferty's cutting remarks have made him a hero to some on the left. Liberal radio host Cenk Uygur called for Cafferty to get his own prime-time show, saying on http://huffingtonpost.com/ that "he is a rare truth-teller on cable news." But Tim Graham of the conservative Media Research Center writes that Cafferty "has created a little career as a gruff anti-Bush commentator" in "an attempt to be the anti-Bill O'Reilly."
Cafferty disagrees, saying he was often accused of being "a Nazi and a right-winger" when he initially supported the administration's war effort. "I certainly don't picture myself as an apologist for one side of the political spectrum or another," he says. "When I see something that aggravates me or doesn't make sense or seems strange in some way, I express that."
HOWARD KURTZ COLUMN IN WASHINGTON POSTS - June 9, 2005
"You don't see anybody making a move to get rid of him, do you?. . . . I'm telling you, folks, this is what they think. I have been trying to tell you this for I don't know how long. This is what they think of you. Why should this even be a surprise? You know the enmity they have for evangelicals; you know the paranoia and the fear they have of religious people. You know how they hate and don't understand the makeup of people in the red states and you know that they've had these fears for years, many, many election cycles."
"Congressional Democrats never supported Dean for DNC chair. They wanted someone lower-profile and less hyperbolic. Apparently they wanted someone like RNC Chair Ken Mehlman. Still, it was more than a little surprising for Senator Joe Biden, who is not renown for his diplomatic temperament, to take a potshot at the chairman of his own party for rhetorical excess. . . .
"Outside the beltway, Dean is immensely popular with the party faithful. He has raised tons of money and is using it to rebuild the infrastructure at the state and local levels. The same infrastructure Biden will need if he decides to run for president.
"Besides, Dean's statement is precisely the kind of red meat party chairmen are supposed to throw to rev up their base. You don't hear Republicans pulling any punches. So enough of the infighting."
Is there really something wrong with some Democrats saying "don't work for a living" and "white Christian party" go too far? GOP Chairman Ken Mehlman dealt with the latter charge by recalling his Bar Mitzvah.
Cenk Uygur, on the Huffington Post, says overheated rhetoric is the name of the game:
"Does Dean really believe that no Republicans work for a living? Of course not. Does Dean believe Tom DeLay is facing an imminent jail sentence for his ethical problems? Of course not.
"These are simple hyperboles that are commonplace in normal discussion. But we're not having a normal conversation. Our national conversation is dominated by right wing talk show hosts who blow everything Democrats say out of proportion and completely ignore the real problems of America.
"So, in this world, invading a country that didn't attack us and posed absolutely no threat to us is no big deal. But Howard Dean overstating his distaste for Republicans is an enormous deal. In this world, lying about Saddam Hussein's connections to 9/11, his WMD capabilities and misleading us into a highly destabilizing preemptive strike against another country is a tiny issue. What Howard Dean said last week is a giant issue. Tom DeLay's ethical violations aren't an issue, what Dean says about them is an issue.
"C'mon, c'mon, c'mon. How many times are we going to fall into this conservative talking point trap? Democrats shouldn't be backpedaling from aggressive comments, they should be attacking straight ahead."
HOWARD KURTZ COLUMN IN WASHINGTON POSTS - June 23, 2005
"Of course, the memos were written in 2002, so normally we would simply assume that serious planning was done at a later date. However, the evidence says otherwise, and the tone of the memos provides yet another data point to indicate that this lack of planning was consistent throughout the entire prewar and postwar period.
"After all, in March 2002 no one had thought about the aftermath. Four months later, in July, postwar planning was still nonexistent. In August, General Tommy Franks 'essentially shrugged his shoulders at what to do once Baghdad fell' -- and Donald Rumsfeld shrugged along with him."
Durbin may be trying to put the whole Nazi-analogy thing behind him, but by saying he's sorry he has ticked off people like Cenk Uygur who writes at the Huffington Post:
"Dick Durbin's apology on the Senate floor today almost made me want to cry . . . when are the Democrats ever going to learn?!
"I think Dick Durbin is a decent man and very good legislator. So, in a lot of ways, I am sorry to take part in what is bound to be a lot of Durbin bashing for his pathetic apology. Now that I've got that out of the way, it was inexcusable.
"Just when we should be getting on the war path to fight back against the administration, he caves and caves huge. To not only apologize, but to have tears in your eyes. Come on, you can't do that. It makes an already weak party look even more miserably weak.
"If you don't stand up for yourselves, you'll never convince the American people that you can stand up for them!
"Instead of apologizing themselves, Democrats should have demanded apologies from Senator Santorum, Senator Sessions and Senator Inhofe for their own Nazi references. Senator Santorum -- just last month -- compared Democrats to Adolf Hitler. There are millions of Democratic veterans who fought for this country, who died for this country, some of them while fighting against Adolf Hitler. How dare Senator Santorum say that?!
"Howard Dean says Republicans are white Christians and the roof falls in on him. Santorum says Democrats are like Adolf Hitler and not one peep from the media. Durbin says we shouldn't be like the Nazis and there's an avalanche of faux media outrage. The administration condones torture hellip and not a damn thing!"
"Torture isn't a partisan issue. And by apologizing, Durbin caved to those who worked their best to turn it into one. And the right-wing partisans rejoice -- content in their ability to trivialize what is one of the most serious issues facing us morally, as a nation, and practically, on the battleground.
"As for Mayor Daley, who cut off Durbin at the knees -- a pox on his house. His time is coming to an end. I hope Jesse Jackson Jr. takes him on."
Ann Althouse simply says: "Crying??!!!
"Durbin apologizing. I saw this on TV and found it . . . icky. What are you really crying about, Dick? Your own miserable little career?"
THE GOSSIP COLOUMN BY JEANNETTE WALLS ON MSNBC.COM - June 23, 2005
“Crash” wasn’t the only upset at the Academy Awards. Paul Giamatti looked pretty upset after losing a best supporting actor Oscar to George Clooney. Cenk Uygur, host of Sirius satellite radio show "The Young Turks," reported that when he walked into the bar at the Four Seasons Sunday evening, he spotted the very unhappy looking “Cinderella Man” actor there with his wife. She was trying to console him, according to Uygur, but he was inconsolable. “I just want to get some sleep,” he reportedly said. “Let’s get out of here.” . . . Some witches are working on a potion against President Bush. More than 5000 Wiccans and their supporters have signed a petition demanding that the president recognize Wicca and other forms of witchcraft “as a true and valid religion as defined by national law.” If he doesn’t, they say, they’ll file a civil-rights suit. . . . .Who’s going to get whacked on the final season of "The Sopranos"? It’s a question being asked not just by fans of the show, but gamblers as well. PinnacleSports.com, an online betting site, has placed odds on 18 regulars in the show, and Tony Soprano’s nephew, Christopher Moltisanti — with 8/1 odds — is a prime candidate to swim with the fishes. Loyal Soprano crew members Bobby Bacala and Patsy Parisi are both 9/1 favorites to be killed-off first. Tony, Carmela, AJ and Meadow appear safe for the time being, and are the biggest underdogs to get whacked at 90/1 odds.
Radyo programcısı Cenk Uygur, Amerika’nın Sesi’nin konuğu oldu. Cenk Uygur, uydu üzerinden yayın yapan Sirius Radyosunda “Young Turks” – “Jön Türkler” adlı bir radyo programı hazırlıyor ve sunuyor.
California’dan yayın yapan ve Amerika çapında dinlenen Young Turks, sol eğilimli bir siyasi tartışma programı.
Cenk Uygur Barış Ornarlı’nın sorularını yanıtladı:
Barış Ornarlı: Programınız hakkında sohbet etmek istiyorum... Ama önce sizi tanıyalım.
Cenk Uygur: “1978 yılında İstanbul’dan New Jersey eyaletine taşındık. Ben İstanbul doğumluyum, ama ailem Kilisli. New Jersey’de büyüdüm. Pennsylvania Üniversitesi’nde lisans eğitimimi tamamladıktan sonra, New York’ta, Columbia Üniversitesi’nde Hukuk Fakültesini bitirdim.
Bir süre avukatlık yaptıktan sonra, radyo ve televizyon programcılığına başladım. Miami, Boston ve Washington’da çalıştıktan sonra, şimdi Los Angeles’da yaşıyorum.”
BO: Peki, siz işletme fakültesini bitirdiniz, hukuk fakültesini bitirdiniz, şimdi ise radyo programları hazırlıyorsunuz. Neden böyle bir değişiklik yaptınız?
CU: “Çünkü, avukatlık beni çok sıktı. Babam benim GM gibi bir şirketin yöneticisi olmamı, veya bir avukatlık şirketinin başına geçmemi istiyordu. Ben, bir süre sonra ‘Bu işleri bırakacağım, radyo programları hazırlayacağım’ dedim. Babamın ise başka hayalleri vardı. Ama, bana uygun değildi bu hayaller. Zaten avukat olarak çok fazla çalışmam gerekmedi: 6 ay içinde bu işi daha fazla yapamayacağımı anladım – benim ilgimi çekmiyordu. O sırada küçük bir televizyon programı hazırlıyordum Washington’da... İşte o zaman anladım, ömrümün sonuna kadar bu işi yapmalıyım...”
BO: Biraz da “Young Turks” programından bahsedelim...
CU: “Dört yıl önce başladık yayınlarımıza... Ben eskiden “Young Turk” diye bir program hazırlıyordum. Bunu, arkadaşlarla devam ettirmeyi kararlaştırdım. Programı Ben Mankiewicz ve Jill Pike’la birlikte sunuyoruz. Biz önceleri çok küçük çaplı başladık. Haftada iki günlük yayınımız vardı. Young Turks zaman içinde haftada beş gün yayın yapmaya başladı. Daha sonra, Sirius Radyosu bize büyük bir fırsat verdi. Amerika’daki parti kurultaylarına gönderdiler... Siyasi ağırlıklı olduğumuz için seçim gecesi 9 saat canlı yayın yaptık. Daha sonra, Amerika’nın önde gelen politikacıları, gazetecileri, uzmanları programımıza konuk oldular.”
BO: Ben programınızı tanıtırken, sol eğilimli bir tartışma programı olarak tanıttım. Ne gibi konular tartışılıyor?
CU: “İlk başladığımızda, çok belirgin bir amacımız yoktu. Şöyle, bizim ilgimizi ne çekiyorsa, o konuyu tartışıyorduk. Biz gençlere yönelik bir program yapmak istiyorduk, çünkü öbür siyaset programları ciddi ve sıkıcı oluyor. Biz biraz daha renkli bir program yapmak istiyorduk.
Yayınlarımıza başladıktan sonra, çok büyük bir gelişme yaşandı. Irak Savaşı, en önemli konu oldu ve biz de sürekli savaşı konuşur olduk. George Bush, şimdiye kadar Amerika’da iktidara gelen en kötü başkan. Onun kararları, çok kötü neticeler getirdi. Yavaş yavaş, en çok Bush’u tartışır olduk. En enteresan konu buydu.
George Bush gelmeden önce, ben aslında Cumhuriyetçiydim. Bence babası, çok iyi bir başkandı. Ancak, George W. Bush, dediğim gibi Amerika’nın gördüğü en kötü başkan olduğu için, bu çok önemli bir mevzu haline geldi.”
BO: Ne gibi tartışmalar yaşanıyor?
CU: “Irak savaşı başlamadan önce, bunun çok kötü bir fikir olduğunu söylemiştik. Savaş başladığında, bizim muhalefet etmemize tepkiler gelmeye başladı. Şöyle diyorlardı: ‘Siz savaşa karşı çıkamazsınız, Başkana muhalefet ediyorsunuz, ordumuzu desteklemiyorsunuz.’ Biz de, tabii ki karşı çıkarız diyorduk - çünkü saçma bir fikirdi bu savaş. İşte bu tartışmayı başlattık. Ama artık bu da değişti. Şimdi, Cumhuriyetçi seçmenler bile programa katıldığında ‘evet haklısınız, savaş kötü bir fikirdi, ama...’ diye konuşuyorlar.
Amerika’nın fikri çok değişti.”
BO: Amerika’da sağ eğilimli siyasi tartışma programları var... Ancak, sol eğilimli haber programı pek yoktu...
CU: “Yok... Başladığımızda, biz ilktik... Sol eğilimli programlar hiç yapılmıyordu. Hatta, radyo istasyonları bizim programımızı yayınlamak istemiyorlardı. Radyo istasyonları ‘dinleyicilerimizden tepki gelir, sizin programınız iyi hoş da, biz yayınlayamayız’ diyorlardı. İşte biz de bu nedenle, uydu üzerinden yayın yapmaya başladık. O vesileyle büyüdük. Bizden sonra Air America diye sol ağırlıklı bir radyo yayını başladı. Ama yine de, Amerika’da radyoda yayınlanan siyaset programlarının yüzde 90’ı sağ eğilimlidir.”
BO: Nasıl tepki aldınız?
CU: “Çok iyi tepki aldık. Niye? Çünkü, Amerika’da halkın yarısı sağcı, yarısı solcudur... Demokratlara oy verenlerin dinleyebileceği bir program yoktu... Bizi duyanlar ‘Hele şükür, bizim görüşlerimizi yansıtan bir program var’ diye tepki gösterdiler.
Örneğin, Amerika’da geleneksel olarak Cumhuriyetçilere oy veren Kansas eyaletinde bizim programımız birinci oldu. Nedeni ise, bizimki gibi bir yayını daha önce dinlememiş olmalarıydı.
Bunu her yerde görüyoruz: Avustralya’dan, Güney Kore’den, Finlandiya’dan, Türkiye’den, İngiltere’den bize dinleyici mektupları geliyor ve şöyle yazıyorlar: ‘En sonunda Amerika’da aklı başında yayın yapan birileri var.’”
BO: İlginç bir yayınınızı, ilginç bir anınızı paylaşır mısınız?
CU: “Aklıma ilk gelen, 2004 seçimlerinde yaptığımız yayın... Biz normal olarak günde 3 saatlik yayın yapıyoruz, ama seçim akşamı 9 saat canlı yayındaydık. Yayının ilk başında hepimiz çok heyecanlıydık... Çünkü John Kerry kazanacak gibiydi. Programımıza katılan herkes, işin başında çok heyecanlıydı... Ancak, gece ilerledikçe, John Kerry’nin seçimleri kaybedeceği anlaşılınca, bu heyecan giderek azaldı. Çok üzüldük tabii... Şimdi, o yayının CD’lerini satıyoruz. CD’leri en çok Cumhuriyetçiler satın alıyor - bayılıyorlar.”
BO: Peki sayın Uygur, Amerika’nın Sesi yayınları Türkiye’de dinleniyor... Dinleyicilerimize ne söylemek istersiniz?
CU: “Şunu söyleyebilirim: Herkesin tabii ki Amerika hakkında bir fikri var. ‘Amerika şöyledir, Amerika böyledir...’ Ama esasında, Amerika daha komplike bir yer. Burada çok değişik düşünen insanlar var. Demokratların ve solcuların sayısının az olduğu sanılır. Ancak, bence 2006 ara seçimlerinde başarı gösterecekler – 2008 başkanlık seçimlerindeyse, kesinlikle kazanmaları gerekiyor...
Amerika’yı basit görmeyin, komplike bir yer. Bazen, gördüğümüz gibi çok kötü insanlar başa geliyor, ama bazen de çok iyi insanlar başa geliyor... Daha iyi insanlar başa geçip, daha iyi yola götüreceklerdir... Ve inşallah bu olacak...”
Cenk Uygur, 7 Aralık Çarşamba akşamı Alo Washington’da konuğumuz olacak. Cenk Uygur’a canlı yayında soru sormak için, bizi Türkiye’nin her yerinden ücretsiz olarak arayabileceğiniz numara: 00-800-1-30-03-33-51
Sorularınızı, e-postayla göndermeniz de mümkün. Adresimiz: tr@voanews.com
7 Aralık Çarşamba akşamı TSİ 21:15’ten itibaren telefonlarınızı bekliyoruz.
Sirius Satellite Radio's homegrown liberal commentators, the Young Turks, may have a future in TV, thanks to an E-mail campaign targeting MSNBC and pushed by St. Louis blogger Wendy Dickson , who runs commonsensemom.com. Enough E-mails have arrived on President Rick Kaplan 's computer that "we're going to take a look at their pitch," said a spokesman. Why TV? Turk Ben Mankiewicz said there are too many righties there. "The time has come for regime change in American television."
Siriusly Weird It isn't exactly Watergate, but a similar third-rate burglary of a Democratic target is drawing comparisons to the notorious Nixon-era bungle. Recently, the Los Angeles offices of Sirius Satellite Radio's chatty liberal show, The Young Turks, was vandalized. Clipped: equipment that hosts Cenk Uygur and Ben Mankiewicz needed to broadcast. At the same time, Uygur's car was stolen. The scheme worked. Deprived of a ride to work, or a way to get on the air, The Young Turks hosts were knocked off Sirius for a day. Uygur picked his favorite target to jokingly blame. "We knew it was Tom DeLay, " he says of the House majority leader.
What you'll need: A radio, 1550 "The Edge" AM, the Internet , or a subscription to Sirius Satellite Radio.
This quirky radio outfit is part Howard Stern, part Howard Dean, and comes to us from Los Angeles. Their mantra? "We don't make the news, we make the news sexy."
The Young Turks include their founder, Cenk (pronounced "Jenk") Uygar, an East Coaster of Turkish origin (hence the name of the show) who kicked around law firms and mainstream TV/radio stations until he moved to L.A. He started the Young Turks with his friend and former co-worker in TV, Ben Mankiewicz. They have been joined by a twenty-something woman, Jill Pike, who is a cross between the show's sex-kitten mascot and the poster child for their demographic: Pike is a former non-voter who now chastises her audience for being apathetic.
The Young Turks offer a host of innovative programs with a political edge, and a few that are just plain silly. They provided a real-time "play-by-play" of the presidential debates as if the debates were a sporting event. This format, claims Uygar, has since been copied by Michael Savage (on the right) and Janeane Garafalo (on the left). Another segment, called "You're Going Straight to Hell by Pat Robertson" offers "quotes from Pat Robertson's book that in essence tell you why you're going to hell no matter what you do." Another segment, called "Kickin' with Kerry," is a "totally political segment" in which the Young Turks talk to high-level Kerry advisers. This is mostly serious, they claim, except when they ask "what it's like to drink or party with John Kerry."
Today the Young Turks are comfortably left-of-center, but they didn't start out that way. Uygar used to be a Republican. One of his favorite presidents is George Herbert Walker Bush. And he supported Bush Jr. during the war in Afghanistan. But the invasion of Iraq pushed the Young Turks to the left. In the early days of the war they lamented what they call the twisted doctrine of "pre-emptive strike," and the difficulty U.S. troops would face in an urban war zone. They decried the Bush tax cuts. They railed against the "Fake News Channel" (FOX) and what they call the "copycat" networks, CNN and MSNBC. When Uygar and Mankiewicz started peddling their show they met with a lot of resistance from L.A. radio stations. "Station managers," Uygar tells me, "are cowards."
"Then again," he adds, "they have to be. If they try a new format, and it doesn't work, they are fired instantly." One company, however, was willing to take a chance on the Young Turks: Sirius Satellite Radio. Sirius broadcasts the Young Turks and Air America Radio on the line-up they call the "Sirius Left." Sirius spokesman Ron Rodrigues says he sees "a pent-up demand by people who want a liberal viewpoint. Radio stations, including Sirius, are identifying entertaining and liberal talk-show hosts to engage their audience." Rodrigues argues that it took the left awhile to figure out what it was that made Rush Limbaugh successful: "The left got too caught up in Rush Limbaugh's ideology and not his personality. It was both. Finally, radio is getting it."
'Young Turks' is among a wave of original television programming finding a place on the Internet.
Cenk Uygur feels like he's come full circle.
In 1995, he began producing a cable television show called "The Young Turk," airing it on Public Access Television in Arlington, Va. The show, consisting of satirical political commentary, became a local cult favorite. Uygur teamed with Ben Mankiewicz, and the show, now called "The Young Turks," was picked up by Sirius Radio in 2003 as its first original program.
On Monday, "The Young Turks" moved back to TV -- Internet TV, that is.
The show, broadcast Monday through Friday from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. EST with hosts Uygur, Mankiewicz and Jill Pike, now is available over multiple channels: live on Sirius Left 146; on podcasts via RadioPower.org; and as a live Internet stream from www.theyoungturks.com.
The radio show has around 100,000 listeners, with nearly 50 percent of them accessing it via podcasts. "My hope is that a number of them will adjust their viewing patterns and watch it on the Web," Uygur said. At the same time, offering the Internet TV show could greatly extend the audience.
"Ironically, Sirius is a lot more complicated for the user," Uygur said, "while typing in a Web address is the simplest thing in the world." He added that video streaming technology and broadband connections make Internet broadcasts a viable option.
"We've combined all the positives of TV and radio in one big package, and we get to do it in a way we think makes sense," he said. "The Internet gives you the freedom to do what you actually envisioned, and you get audience feedback immediately." "The Young Turks" Web site offers forums and e-mail feedback.
That doesn't mean the video-over-IP portion of the program is easy to produce. "We had to reinvent the wheel on our own," Uygur said. The team built a special studio that incorporates different technologies for each channel.
They also has to reinvent ad sales. The show is supported by ads on Sirius radio and on traditional radio affiliates that air it; in the near term, Internet viewers also will hear the radio ads. The plan to sell Internet video ads could open up the show to more advertisers, as well as offer existing ones better variety of inventory types.
The problem, Uygur said, is each of these channels measures audiences differently and has a different way of selling ads. "None of the different ad agencies accept the other peoples' version. But we'll make that work," he said. "As one of first people to do this, we'll have to break new ground on a lot of this."
Among the 2006 trends identified by IP communications pundit and entrepreneur Jeff Pulver was TV shows premiering first on the Internet, and then appearing on broadcast, cable or satellite TV. "Look for more TV shows to be become downloadable for viewing on personal communication devices," he wrote in a recent note.
Apple's iTunes store already sells episodes of popular shows such as "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost" for paid download. "America's Top Models" offers Internet-only video segments, while the Net plays home to niche programming the likes of Serenity Dragon: Paintball.
IP-based video content and consumption are proceeding along separate tracks, and at very different paces, according to Phillip Swann, an interactive TV consultant and president and publisher of TVPredictions.com.
On one track is what he called "garage and one-bedroom apartment content," that is, homemade videos that may be long on soul but short on production quality. "It's really raw, but very personal and creative," Swann said. That's a fast-moving track. On the other side, and moving very slowly, is a way to get all that content onto a platform where people can feel comfortable watching it. That platform, he insists, is not the PC screen, but the TV.
"The potential of it is enormous," he said. "Once that second track starts going faster, [so that] you can reach out and take broadband-based content on the TV, that's when that will explode."
Swann said that the video search engines being offered by the likes of AOL, Google, Yahoo and Blinkx could be the portals to discovering and downloading Web-based video to television set-top boxes. "Eventually," he added, "the television itself will have the broadband connection." And that's when the opportunity for paid downloads will explode.
If there were any doubt that Internet TV was about to enter the hyposphere, Monday also saw the launch of the iTVcon Internet TV Conference & Expo 2006. Conference promoter SYS-CON stated, "Now that broadband is available to more than 100 million households worldwide, every corporate Web site and every media company must now provide video content to remain competitive, not to mention live and interactive video webinars and on-demand webcasts."
Uygur said he felt that "The Young Turks" was part of a new era.
"It's a perfect free market," he said. "People will put up whatever they've got, from complete hack amateurs, to complete professionals. And the people will get to choose. Time Warner won't get to choose. That's the beauty of the Internet, and we'll find out soon what people want to watch."
Siriusly talk radio Schlock-jock Howard Stern 's move to Sirius, announced last week, awoke us to this whole new satellite radio thing where pundits from both sides have been toiling in this year's political vineyards. But, says Ben Mankiewicz, a cohost of Sirius's left-leaning Young Turks show, "Stern brings us credibility." For the uninitiated, Sirius has a politically left channel featuring the Turks and others and a politically right channel hosting Tony Snow and other conservatives.
Alexandra Kerry is lashing out at the Bush-Cheney team for criticizing her father's reference to Mary Cheney as a lesbian when he answered a question on gays at the third and final presidential debate. She called the attacks from Lynne Cheney and the Bush White House an attempt at "character assassination" on her father. She first aired the charges on satellite radio in an interview on Sirius with the liberal "Young Turks" program this week. A transcript was sent to the Bulletin and U.S. News today. Sirius made headlines recently by signing shock jock Howard Stern to join in 2006 and getting Ford to add the radio system to more models. Asked about Lynne Cheney's claim after the debate that Kerry was a "bad man" for mentioning her daughter's sexual preference, Kerry's daughter said Republicans "do not have issues to run on. This is really about that they are scared and they have nothing to say. (This is) frankly a character assassination on my father." She noted that after Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards made a similar reference in his debate with the vice president, Dick Cheney thanked him. "This is really about that they are scared and they have nothing to say. Instead of going back onto issues, they go on the personal attack." -- Bulletin exclusive from U.S. News
LOA ANGELES BUSINESS JOURNAL - Octoberr 18 - 24, 2004
Howard Stern will have plenty of company in the world of satellite radio--and much of it is home grown.
Nearly a dozen satellite hosts originate programs from Los Angeles-area studios, and some of the names make up a motley list of radio personalities, celebrities and pop culture icons.
Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. boasts the largest stable of L.A. talent.
"If they happen to be located in Los Angeles, we make it easy for them to broadcast there," said Sirius spokeswoman Elise Brown. "It really depends on the talent we find. If it's a program not available anywhere else, and it sits with our programming strategy, we go with it."
Satellite radio works in much the way traditional radio does. Some shows, like Blackwood's, are prerecorded, while others are live and take callers. The main differences: satellite radio is commercial-free and hosts are unfettered by Federal Communications Commission regulations.
On the talk circuit, producer and host Doria Biddle broadcasts from a Wilshire Boulevard studio where she dissects entertainment and pop culture happenings on Sirius' gay and lesbian channel. "Out Q," which launched in February, also features New York-based co-host Frank DeCaro, who appears on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" and writes a column for The New York Times.
On Sirius Left, Ben Mankiewicz co-hosts the left-leaning "Young Turks," an irreverent three-hour program oriented toward young adults in their 20s and 30s. From their studio on Wilshire Boulevard, the three hosts, Mankiewicz, Cenk Uygur and Jill Pike, aim to counter conservative talk radio hosts.
At first, the hosts questioned the legitimacy of doing satellite radio because, among other things, they had no idea how many people were listening. As Sirius' subscriber base has grown, Mankiewicz said he and his hosts have become bullish on the industry's future.
"As with cable TV, it's what everyone will have," he said. "I've never been on the ground floor of anything successful before. It's fantastic."
