Nielsen, the television ratings giant that determines how successful shows are by measuring viewership, is finally going to start including the millions of households that stream media to their computers, set-top boxes, game consoles, and other streaming devices. … Read More
Is this the sign Democrats need to try again on guns?
We’ve already seen some political fallout for senators who cast key votes either way on the compromise bill to expand background checks that the Senate killed two weeks ago — and it may bode well for the round-two push on gun control currently in the works. In Alaska, Arizona, Nevada, and Ohio, four Republican and one Democratic senator faced a “serious backlash” to their votes against the bill, with a PPP poll finding a drop in their approval ratings and a plurality of voters saying the votes make them less likely to support their senator in the next election. Opposing background checks even helped make Arizona GOPer Jeff Flake the least popular senator in America.Continue Reading… … Read More
Nielsen announces pilot program to measure online audiences
Nielsen will soon begin to measure the television viewing behavior of people that watch content online as part of their new Digital Program Ratings. The pilot program kicks off in May and will run through July with participation from the following networks: A&E, ABC, AOL, CBS, The CW, Discovery, Fox,… … Read More
Bobby Jindal kills controversial tax plan
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal scrapped a plan to replace income and corporate taxes with a new sales tax, following public outcry and a precipitous drop in his approval ratings.The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that Jindal announced that he will pull his plan in a speech opening this year’s legislative session, telling state lawmakers that he will not ”pout” or “take his ball and go home.” From the Times-Picayune:The speech is a major concession that Jindal’s proposal, a complicated plan contained in a total of 11 bills, is unpopular both within and outside the Legislature. The proposal has come under increasingly heavy fire in recent weeks as business groups and advocates for the poor have assailed its effects and think tanks have questioned whether the math in the proposal adds up. Jindal acknowledges the strong opposition to the proposal in his prepared remarks.Continue Reading… … Read More
What Other Types of Guns Can Sen. Feinstein Fail to Ban? What About Ones Made of Pixels?
Having
all but failed in her ill-considered, poorly argued efforts to
ban assault weapons (the usual caveat: whatever “assault weapons”
are), now California Sen. Dianne Feinstein seems ready to fail and
fail harder going after violent video games.
At a speech in San Francisco on Wednesday, she took her typical
aim against the National Rifle Association. But then she all but
joined the NRA in complaining about the
glorification of violence in video games. Via the Associated
Press:
Feinstein also encouraged the entertainment and video game
industries to take voluntary steps to produce products that do not
glorify big, powerful guns before Congress feels compelled to step
in. She mentioned that Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old man responsible
for the Sandy Hook Elementary School slayings, practiced shooting
both at a range with his mother and on a video screen.
Video games play “a very negative role for young people, and the
industry ought to take note of that,” she said. “If Sandy Hook
doesn’t do it, if the knowledge of these video games this young man
played doesn’t, then maybe we have to proceed, but that is in the
future.”
Well, we can all look forward to that future failure as well.
One: Just as with movies, the video game industry has a voluntary
ratings system that thoroughly documents a game’s contents and
recommends appropriate ages. Two: The Supreme Court has ruled that
the contents of video games are
constitutionally protected free speech in a case that
originated from Feinstein’s own state.
The idea of video games playing “a very negative role for young
people” is just unsupported nonsense without
foundation. Yesterday, when I wrote about film critic’s
Roger Ebert’s awkward relationship with the creative culture of
video games, I noted the gap between Baby Boomers and the younger
generations over the role of the medium in their lives. The
industry took Ebert’s dismissal of video games as a potential art
form as a challenge.
Feinstein’s poorly chosen words and vague threat will likely not
inspire much introspection. She doesn’t understand the medium at
all and clearly has no interest in understanding the medium. But
unlike Ebert, Feinstein has the power to shape government policy,
or at least try to, anyway. It would be interesting to see how the
heavily California-based video game industry would respond to
Feinstein actually trying to go after them.
Below, Reason TV highlights several extremely stupid
Congressional hearings where politicians presumed to justify
censorship against various forms of media:
President Obama’s approval ratings dropping
http://www.youtube.com/v/7SrsRDDYUPg?version=3&f=videos&app=youtube_gdata See original: President Obama’s approval ratings dropping
