Media Bits and Bytes -- Much Ado About Plenty Edition

Outage outrage; What dunnit; The big hack; Trump's parachute; Busting media in SD; Merger mishugas

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Lindsey Grayzel, an independent film-maker from Portland, Oregon, was arrested and jailed on 11 October while filming at a pipeline protest in Washington State,Ben Grayzel

Internet Outage Takes Down Twitter, Netflix, Paypal and Many of the Web's Most Visited Websites

By Andrew Griffin and Tim Walker
October 21, 2016
The Independent

A major Internet outage affected many of the world's biggest online firms on Friday, with websites including Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, Reddit, PayPal and eBay down for long stretches. Other services such as PlayStation Network also appeared to be hit by the outage. Google and Facebook were unaffected.
The widespread disruption was the result of a coordinated assault on some of the underlying infrastructure that powers the Internet. Dyn, one of several companies responsible for hosting the crucial web directory known as the Domain Name System (DNS), suffered a sustained so-called “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attack, leading many people intermittently to lose access to specific sites or to the Internet entirely.

The Internet Apocalypse Map Hides the Major Vulnerability That Created It

By Andrew Webster
October 24, 2016
Verge

During Friday’s massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on DNS service provider Dyn, one might be forgiven for mistaking the maps of network outages for images of some post-apocalyptic nuclear fallout. Screenshots from sites like downdetector.com showed menacingly red, fuzzy heat maps of, well, effectively just population centers of the United States experiencing serious difficulty accessing Twitter, Github, Etsy, or any of Dyn's other high-profile clients. Aside from offering little detail and making a DDoS literally into a glowing red menace, they also obscured the reality of just how centralized a lot of internet infrastructure really is. DNS is ground zero for the uneasy tension of the internet’s presumed decentralized resilience and the reality that as of now, translating IP addresses into domain names requires some kind of centralized, hierarchical platform, and that’s probably not going to radically change anytime soon.
 

WikiLeaks and the 2016 US Presidential Elections: Why America Seems Intent on Silencing Julian Assange

By Luis Fran
October 23, 2016
ITech Post

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Soon after the first leaks, the U.S. accused Assange of working with Russia, and since that moment, nothing was the same again. The WikiLeaks leader promised to release every single document regarding the presidential election before November 8. Some published documents revealed the link between Clinton and Goldman Sachs, and suddenly, the Ecuadorean embassy sabotaged Assange´s internet, seemingly in an attempt to protect the elections.
Rising beneath all of these events has been the U.S. government's intentions to silence the radical transparency organization, and the position that American media, society and politicians have taken regarding this action. This eventually resulted in efforts to discredit Assange´s leaks because of his sexual abuse accusations, or endorsing his mission of making people know the truth behind politics.
 

Trump TV is Definitely Coming: Be Afraid! But What the Hell Will It Look Like?

By Matthew Sheffield
October 20, 2016
Salon

Even before he officially announced his candidacy, the famously orange tycoon has been a lifeline to the dying cable news channels, helping them reverse years of declining viewership. The first presidential debate during the Republican primary season was watched by a record 24 million viewers, three times more than the audience for the most-watched GOP debate in 2012.
With Trump’s supporters emphatically in his corner against Fox News stars like Megyn Kelly and Brit Hume, the former reality TV star is perfectly positioned to take away the audience that Fox News captured from CNN and the broadcast networks 15 years ago. He wouldn’t be the first Republican washout to try his hand at media entrepreneurship, either.

Documentary Film-makers Face Decades in Prison for Taping Oil Pipeline Protests

By Sam Levin
October 20, 2016
Guardian

Two documentary film-makers are facing decades in prison for recording US oil pipeline protests, with serious felony charges that first amendment advocates say are part of a growing number of attacks on freedom of the press.
The controversial prosecutions of Deia Schlosberg and Lindsey Grayzel are moving forward after a judge in North Dakota rejected “riot” charges filed against Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman for her high-profile reporting at the Dakota Access pipeline protests.
But authorities in other parts of North Dakota and in Washington state have continued to target other film-makers over their recent reporting on similar demonstrations, raising concerns that the lesser-known journalists are not getting the same kind of public support and national attention.
 

AT&T-Time Warner Would Join a Long Line of Post-Internet Media Deals

By David Z. Morris
October 23, 2016
Fortune
http://fortune.com/2016/10/23/att-time-warner-would-join-a-long-line-of…
It’s official—AT&T is buying Time Warner for $85.4 billion dollars. That would make it the 11th biggest buyout of any kind since 1995, and the third-biggest media buyout. Some have said that big media deals don’t usually work out—in fact, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said exactly that in 2009. Time Warner has itself been through the wringer on prior deals, and as recently as 2014 Bewkes refused a bid from Fox.
For some possible insight into why Time Warner was on board this time around, and what the future holds, here’s a look at the top 6 major media deals completed since 1995. It shows, above all, a media market in near-constant upheaval as companies (and regulators) try to figure out exactly how the Internet is changing their world.