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The Daily Caller continues its expose of the media’s suicide pact, as found in the archives of the Journolist. Sarah Spitz, a “producer for NPR affiliate KCRW for the show Left, Right & Center” spewed what can only be considered a craven, despicable and immoral fantasy about watching Rush Limbaugh suffering a heart attack:

In a post to the list-serv Journolist, an online meeting place for liberal journalists, Spitz wrote that she would “Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out” as Limbaugh writhed in torment.

In boasting that she would gleefully watch a man die in front of her eyes, Spitz seemed to shock even herself. “I never knew I had this much hate in me,” she wrote. “But he deserves it.”

Spitz’s hatred for Limbaugh seems intemperate, even imbalanced. On Journolist, where conservatives are regarded not as opponents but as enemies, it barely raised an eyebrow.

Her vile hatred now laid bare, Spitz doesn’t deny writing it, but issues this lame apology:

I made poorly considered remarks about Rush Limbaugh to what I believed was a private email discussion group from my personal email account. As a publicist, I realize more than anyone that is no excuse for irresponsible behavior. I apologize to anyone I may have offended and I regret these comments greatly; they do not reflect the values by which I conduct my life.

Evidently, the “values by which I conduct my life” do not include apologizing honestly for mistakes. She tips her hand that the comments were meant to be kept among her friends … the phrases “private email discussion group” and “personal email account” are in this vein. This implies that it is not the words themselves that were wrong, and that she is sorry she said them, but simply that no one except fellow haters should have seen them.

The weasel words “as a publicist” and “anyone I may have offended” show that Ms. Spitz is not repentant about anything. Like any other person engaging in hate speech, she is still rationalizing away the horrible truth: she is filled with destructive hate, and should seek counseling.

A truly repentant apology would acknowledge that the statements were wrong, and not merely “regrettable”. It would have started with a phone call or email to the person she wronged, apologizing directly. And the public apology would be unequivocal:

“I am sorry for my comments. I have reached out to Rush Limbaugh and apologized to him, and I apologize to his family, friends and fans via this public forum. I can imagine how offended and hurt I would feel if I read something similar about me, or about any one I loved. I was wrong to even contemplate such thoughts, much less express them in an email list among colleagues. We all share a common humanity, and we all deserve more respect than I showed. While I know an apology is a poor substitute for inflicting the pain I caused, I hope that those I have hurt can forgive me.”

But that’s not the “apology” she wrote. Instead, she plays the Muszak of modern political apologies, and wants us to believe it is Mozart.

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The dead tree media is dying. Newspapers and weekly news magazines are wasting away before our eyes. Network broadcast news suffers from steeply declining ratings. It appears to be a natural death, like the death of buggy whip makers succumbing to the steady march of technology.

But it is not what it appears.

The Daily Caller broke the news that Journolist, a private email list of several hundred journalists and academic professionals, conspired to frame the news to support Barack Obama. Their discussions reveal a deep-seated hatred of conservatives, the then-current administration, and, yes, America itself. Chris Hayes of The Nation wrote about his outrage at ABC News. ABC was reporting on the racist, anti-American diatribes of Obama Pastor Wright, and Hayes thought it unseemly:

“Our country disappears people. It tortures people. It has the blood of as many as one million Iraqi civilians — men, women, children, the infirmed — on its hands. You’ll forgive me if I just can’t quite dredge up the requisite amount of outrage over Barack Obama’s pastor,” Hayes wrote.

Hayes urged his colleagues – especially the straight news reporters who were charged with covering the campaign in a neutral way – to bury the Wright scandal. “I’m not saying we should all rush en masse to defend Wright. If you don’t think he’s worthy of defense, don’t defend him! What I’m saying is that there is no earthly reason to use our various platforms to discuss what about Wright we find objectionable,” Hayes said.

You might expect a journalist at The Nation to be liberal, but what is shocking is not that Hayes holds these views. But that he advocates framing and molding the news coverage to support his political viewpoint. Lie, he says, in this very clever way.

More from The Daily Caller article:

“Part of me doesn’t like this shit either,” agreed Spencer Ackerman, then of the Washington Independent. “But what I like less is being governed by racists and warmongers and criminals.”

Ackerman went on:

I do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think you need to. It’s not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright’s defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.

Never mind that no one called Ackerman a race-baiter. Or noted that he besmirches the memory of thousands of victims of racism, those who were lynched, and those who struggled under Jim Crow. Using charges of racism to further a partisan point trivializes the suffering of those who lived under the yoke of oppression. Some disagreed with Ackerman, but not from an ethical standpoint. They disagreed from a purely practical standpoint: false charges would backfire.

I used to think media bias was unintentional, that reporters were, like everyone else, subject to the interpretations that their world view demanded. And that journalists, while they tried to obtain that nirvana-like state of “objectivity”, simply failed a portion of the time. Bias was unintentional, but somewhat inevitable.

But the scales have fallen from my eyes, and the evidence is clear: there is intentional bias, designed to further the reporter’s individual views and beliefs. The journalist is no longer the supplier of objective facts, but the broker of sectarian viewpoint.

The death of journalism is not a natural death, not borne of the modern era as a result of the relentless march of technology. The death of journalism is not a murder plotted by ignorance or apathy. The death of journalism is self-inflicted. It is a suicide.

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PlayOn is a “new media” company purporting to provide the means to stream on-line content from your PC to your living room XBox, PSP, Wii or media PC. For the most part, it works fine, most of the time, providing access to Hulu, CBS, and other online content providers.

The problem with PlayOn: their clumsy attempts to “monetize” the product. Right after buying a one-time “lifetime license”, they announced a “Premium Product” that would have a yearly subscription fee. Early adopters felt betrayed, and PlayOn reacted by announcing a “special price” for the first year of the subscription for those customers. At $4.95, it seemed like a reasonable compromise. Even though it still seemed like a broken promise, it was a $5 broken promise.

I clicked through to subscribe, and found the final insult. The annual fee, to increase to approximately $20 a year after the introductory rate, has to be purchased with a auto-renewal option on your credit card. This means in order to cancel the service you have to proactively remember your renewal date and act before the date arrives. I suspect PlayOn is banking — literally — on subscribers neglecting to be that proactive.

Sorry, PlayOn. You lost me.

I’m usually not that cynical, but I no longer trust this company. They have exhibited, at least, their ignorance of even mediocre customer service skills. Today I received a notice from them that I shouldn’t question, yet I find myself wondering if this is just the first of many events tto encourage premium subscriptions:

We recently had a technical hiccup that affected many of our PlayOn Basic users, where they couldn’t view content from many of the channels included in the Basic license, such as Hulu and Netflix. This was a bug on our part, and we sincerely apologize!

I’m not usually a member of fever swamps, tucking tin foil into my cap and watching out for black helicopters, but as I said, I don’t trust them. This probably was simply a software bug, but the nagging doubt is there.

I may continue to use the “basic” product that will, I’m sure, be more and more limited as the downward spiral of a once promising company has the life squeeze out of it by bad decisions.

xbmc, an open source “front end” for your Xbox and media center PCs, is the likely successor. An active user community is developing scripts to stream Hulu and other on-line content providers from within xbmc. Yes, Virginia, there is a place where the promise of free software is alive and well.

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Sometimes, a local event can illustrate the problem of state and federal regulations run amok. The local newspaper in Ventura, CA, The Star, has a column by Colleen Carson that recounts a chain of events when a residential house painter spilled some paint inside his van:

A while later, he came outside to get something from his van and froze in his tracks.

Before his eyes were two firetrucks, each staffed by three firefighters, including paramedic and hazardous-materials specialists. There were two city of Oxnard code compliance officers. A Harbor Patrol vessel had been dispatched. A California Department of Fish and Game warden also responded. The scene was short only moon suits and a hovering helicopter.

In all, 13 public officials arrived on the scene.

California has strict laws governing the type of paint that can be sold. The painter was using the proper paint. It was low “VOC”, water based latex paint. The painter followed the procedures he learned in obtaining his contractor’s license, mopping up the spilled paint with rags he saved to dispose of properly. But some of the paint had dripped onto the driveway, so he mopped that up and then washed the residue off with a hose.

In Southern California, all run off from lawns, driveways and streets ends up in the ocean. All storm drains lead there eventually. Regulations on the type of chemicals that can be used are stricter than in other areas of the country. Students holding car washes as fund raisers have to be careful that the sudsy water doesn’t go down the storm drain.

The painter’s mistake was washing off the driveway with a hose, and allowing the water to leave the property. According to one official, that made a small spill into a “40 or 50 gallon hazardous spill”.

He has been billed for $534 by the Fire Department for their response. And he faces up to $25,000 in fines for violating the California Health and Safety codes.

Of all the hazards in California, regulation and over-reaction are the pre-eminent ones.