Kory ... these are phenomenal. Certainly it's a niche, but exploit it for all it's worth. It's funny and well done.

Sound is so tricky. What you perceive to be a small improvement I consider a quantum leap in clarity. Are you using Audacity for your audio?

I could probably go on a huge tear about propaganda, but it is suffice to say that it would be a largely semantic argument ... one man's news and all that.

Glad to see you're starting to get some recognition at the tube.

Congrats on your following at Youtube. That's kinda cool.

That's very cool, and well deserved.

And now that I have the sound back on my computer, I can go back and enjoy all your previous stuff that I missed.

Thanks! I really like the new email notifications when people post comments. Unfortunately I'm not at liberty to post long responses from work... heh.

Audio: I dunno what Audacity is, but I'm looking into it now. The major improvement was just getting a better "studio-quality" microphone. I also clean up the audio a little differently now since the noise the new mike picks up is different. I still use wavpad for that tho.

Regarding the propaganda examples, they're totally debatable. Disregarding minor nuances, I think I was overall pretty accurate. In the end the whole thing was me drunkenly ranting. I just had some notes I scribbled down first since otherwise I might have forgotten what topic I was even talking about.

A funny thing I found online is that "propaganda" is actually the word for "advertising" in many spanish-speaking countries. Southern rim states or whatever they call it

The media, as in journalism specifically, kind of bugs me these days. It's not so much what they report or what they say or don't say, because it's all pretty much fair enough in my book. I'll set aside discussion of the "fourth estate" for some other time/venue. The thing that generically bugs me about the media is the continued pretense of journalistic objectivity. Journalism is more and more op ed style in content these days. Most sides of the political spectrum seem to be represented... I just wish they'd openly acknowledge that they're representing, vs. "presenting."

I mean we listen to normal people talk with bias all the time and it doesn't subvert our own thoughts. It's perfectly fine to be biased (read "have opinions and beliefs") as long as you don't perpetuate a myth of objectivity. "Fair and balanced," indeed. :P

- Kory

As I'm sure you've found out by now, Audacity is a freeware audio editing program. It was created in and operates similarly to Adobe Audition (which used to be Cool Edit Pro).

It's cool because you'll be able to do all kinds of neat audio effects, normalize your audio, tweak things as necessary and just have fun learning the program. Most blogger podcasters use Audacity, or at least started with it. I use it now instead of Cool Edit because it's newer and there's stuff constantly being produced for it by the end users.

On propaganda: Surprisingly, I'm not sure that my thoughts on media are formulated. Sometimes I think they are and then something comes along that makes me reevaluate my opinion about the subject.

Completely agree with you about the "objective" news media. It seems as if they believe that their commentators can report whatever opinions they hold and as long as they offer commentators with opposing points of view, it's balanced. Of course, the big F was the first to gain popularity doing this, but everyone's following suit.

I do believe that the media as a collective unconscious will always produce a balance of news. You'll never get your objectivity from any one source, but several sources and types of media give you the objectivity you crave. Theoretically.

No major disagreement. But your addition of "theoretically" leads me to nitpick a little. You never actually get the objectivity, you just get it in theory. Just like no American family actually gets the 2.5 kids.

It's certainly not spoonfed to you. You do have to work to get your objectivity. But I'd argue that that's always been the case.