AOL and Time Warner's marriage of insecurity
BY SCOTT ROSENBERG
(01/10/00)

and

The Net on AOL's Time Warner deal
BY JANELLE BROWN, DAMIEN CAVE and LYDIA LEE
(01/11/00)

When the Fort Worth chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union investigated complaints of censorship and anti-minority hate in user profiles on America Online, AOL's news search engine failed to find a single reference to this nationally reported story. (See Wired Strategies.)

Our public posts in AOL discussion groups seeking information from others censored by AOL resulted in my AOL account being cancelled for "commercial solicitation." AOL's "community action team" told me that I could not receive copies of my own customer records, and I was hung up on.

The thought of AOL chairman Steve Case in charge of Time magazine and CNN is indeed chilling.

-- Frank Provasek
President, ACLU Ft Worth Chapter, Texas

Scott Rosenberg's article was an interesting discussion of the AOL-Time Warner merger. But amid all the talk of "missing the broadband bandwagon" and increasing "market share and power," a much more fundamental question emerges: Why are we handing over the lifeblood of democracy -- information dissemination -- to corporations?

Rosenberg notes that "Corporate media power really is getting scarily concentrated." It's not "getting," but has been concentrated since the downfall of the independent labor press. The Net was developed with taxpayer money within the Pentagon high-tech industry welfare system. That a company like AOL should reap profits by charging for access to a product that the public has already paid for is an absurdity. And for Salon to moan about how companies like AOL are getting too big misses the point -- the truly "scary" thing is that they exist in the first place.

-- Damon Poeter
Bangkok, Thailand

The AOL-Time Warner deal is another brick in the wall of making big business too big for anyone to regulate or stop. When the Exxon/Mobil Oil merger went through I asked myself, How in the name of all that's right will this benefit anyone but the stockholders?

There is an increasing tempo of big mergers, which only concentrate more economic control in fewer hands while reducing price and product competition for consumers. It seems to go almost unnoticed that the resulting huge businesses have a disproportionate effect on government regulators, and government itself through lobbying and the almost unregulated political fund-raising which is rapidly eroding the last vestiges of fairness in our political process.

The SEC and other federal regulators are not being allowed to do their jobs because the political will to allow them to function has been co-opted by the increasingly evil political campaign funding, which threatens to exchange the American oligarchy for a real plutocracy.

-- John Barker

The government should first make AOL clean up its own service before it even considers approving this merger. AOL cannot take care of its own subscribers now. They censor all kinds of speech with their TOS ("Terms of Service"). The spam AOL'ers receive is unreal and many times the amount a person would receive with a normal ISP account.

Try signing up for a free trial period and see how much you get in the first hour you are online. Most of it is for MFM ("Make Money Fast") schemes or for pornography. Then try and cancel and see what happens. This merger can't be good for anyone except Steve Case, the former toothpaste salesman.

-- John Hozian

Well, damn. Many of us who -- for reasons unknown -- still use AOL are getting miserably slow service, with regular bootings. (In AOL's case, "Internet service provider" is almost a malaprop.) So, if AOL buys Time Warner, does that mean my Entertainment Weekly will show up late or not at all, too?

-- Regina Deavitt

Ghetto Trippin'
BY ERIC BOEHLERT
(01/07/00)

and

Curtis Mayfield
BY JODY ROSEN
(01/07/00)

I was afraid that Curtis Mayfield's passing would be overlooked amid all the end-of-the-century hype. The fact that he died only a few days before the end may be an omen. Thanks for Eric Boehlert's on-the-money essay on the idiocy surrounding the popular trend in black urban music. Mayfield's music was filled with such pain and dignity that it's a crying shame that Puffy and the like are his successors. What's even worse is that these contemporaries are likely achieving much more popular success than Mayfield and his contemporaries ever obtained, without even a fraction of the talent and artistic vision.

Artists like Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye so eloquently brought the suffering of urban blacks to the rest of America and paved the way for a new generation of musicians. The result? Benefactors like Puffy can flaunt jewelry and live out B-movie fantasies and "sample" the hard-earned tracks that they laid down. What a shame.

-- Alex Perez

Salon is at it again. It seems that over the last year it has become sport at a supposedly "liberal" magazine to criticize and rebuke black people for any instance that does not conform to the limousine liberal standard of behavior -- i.e. Maxine Waters, Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson and now Jay Z. I suppose the black poster child for Salon is Colin Powell. I wonder if this is a Clintonesque move to establish credibility by moving closer to the center through public spankings of outspoken blacks. From David Horowitz to Debra Dickerson, it seems that Salon's intent is to lash any black person who wanders out of the mainstream with the editorial whip while simultaneously reassuring the white audience that they have nothing to fear from these exceptional black people.

Boehlert employs a few verses of Jay Z's lyrics to brand his entire work as glorification of violence and misogyny. In fact, Jay Z's reputation as a thinking rap artist stems from his clever lyrics, use of word play and his attention to the consequences of one's actions. Does he mean to suggest that no rappers preach against the use of drugs on the basis of one rapper's lyrics? Try Outkast, Goodie Mob, 8Ball & MJG, Public Enemy, Common Sense and the Roots.

-- Josh H.

Eric Boehlert's article about Curtis Mayfield's influence on hip-hop clearly illustrated the main problem with hip-hop music. Too bad it wasn't the point he was trying to make. It's ironic that someone who covers the music industry chooses to focus on the negative acts of a few isolated individuals like Puffy, Eminem or Jay-Z, while ignoring all of the creativity that flourished in hip-hop in 1999. Perhaps Curtis Mayfield's legacy lies in the musicianship of the Roots, or in the creativity of Prince Paul, or in the poetic nature of the lyrics of Mos Def or Common. The real problem is members of the mainstream press not giving coverage to the real talent in the world of hip-hop while wasting ink on the talentless likes of Puffy, Jay-Z, et al.

-- Nick Adams

Eric Boehlert focuses on the text, or "lyrics," when comparing today's gangsta rappers to the late great Curtis Mayfield. But let's also mention the droningly obvious: Rap, in general, is a tuneless rant, devoid of lyricism and a medium that would only have thwarted Curtis Mayfield in exploiting the uniqueness of his singing voice, much less his own harmonic and melodic compositional style. The general musical nastiness of rap nullifies the sensual and advocates a nihilistic approach to music in general.

-- Charles Greenberg

Glad to see a Curtis Mayfield obit/retrospective that finally mentions his wonderful eponymous album of the early '70s. It stands up well to the justly praised "Superfly" album. I still find myself humming "Move on Up" and "Wild and Free" all these years later. R.I.P. Curtis !

-- Henry Balke

What's at stake in the 2000 elections?
BY MICHAEL ALVEAR
(01/10/00)

Until today I've been a big fan of Salon.com. I enjoy reading Garrison Keillor and find that in general Salon's coverage in all areas is refreshing and thought-provoking.

Now I'm going to have to consider finding some other source of good writing online. Why? Because this publication has chosen to give David Duke a stump for his anti-Semitic, inflammatory rhetoric. This man is not a serious journalist and the only possible reason I can think of why the otherwise discerning editors and publishers of Salon would provide him with this forum for the hate that oozes out of his diseased cortex is that they have finally succumbed to the profitable lure of sensationalism.

Perhaps the editors of Salon believe that the views of David Duke are so far removed from what we now consider sane and reasonable that they can be provided as a sort of self-parody. Ladies and gentleman, that is a mistake, for even if no reader takes his poison seriously, the legitimization of these bitter, pernicious and vile throwbacks merely encourages them to continue their warped crusade against all social progress and justice; surely if we continue to encourage the dissemination of this vileness we'll still be seeing tragedies like the dragging murder of James Byrd Jr. at the end of the next millennium.

David Duke certainly has a right to say what he likes and promote his views as he likes, even though those are views I find personally abhorrent. But Salon certainly has no obligation to provide him with a forum, as I have no obligation to read it.

-- Thomas K. Burkholder

The remarks of David Duke and Matthew Hale certainly add a freak-show element to Salon's political coverage. However, I trust the magazine won't be adding them to its regular stable of political pundits. It's probably better to stick with the toothless bluster of Camille Paglia.

-- Mark Carlson

I think it's vile that Salon would choose to voice the opinions of this man [David Duke] who has incited racial hatred. While free speech is a cornerstone of the Constitution, this editorial decision is unspeakably wrong. I will notify all those I can to protest this decision and to no longer read this Web site.

-- Michael Nathanson

Show me the hungry
BY ARIANNA HUFFINGTON
(01/04/00)

My gratitude to Salon and Arianna Huffington for bravely parting the bullshit "prosperity" sea to reveal the growing divisions between rich and poor. Huffington's words on this issue will carry far more weight than a liberal like me shrieking for no apparent reason.

I recently had the chance to ask a panel of Internet millionaires assembled at the Columbia School of Journalism about the growing divide between rich and poor, and where the money of this new gilded age was going. Alexander Gardner of the [investment advice site] Motley Fool said (and you can look this up in the Village Voice): "I don't think there's a problem with the gap between the rich and the poor." That cost the panel what little credibility they had. (Gardner went on to attack investigative journalism, calling it bad for business.)

I'm glad Huffington sees the problems that men like Gardner do not.

-- Brian Lyman