Sponsorship Models

With new sponsorship models being developed, even further influence over content from the corporate side can be expected. Co-operating with Barnes & Nobel Booksellers, the bookish e-zine FEED for instance is in part relying on sponsoring. Whenever a specific title is mentioned in the editorial, a link is placed in the margin - under the heading "Commerce" - to an appropriate page on Barnes & Noble. Steve Johnson, editor of FEED, says "We do not take a cut of any merchandise sold through those links.", but admits that the e-zine does indirectly profit from putting those links there.

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Globalization as a modern Disinformation

Globalization is another disinformation we are not doing anything against; and it has a system. It pretends that the entire world is one, but in reality it seems that there exist various lifestyles, chosen or not, that do not connect to each other. The idea of globalization undermines the fight for one world as it suggests that this one world, where all fight for the same ideals and belong together, has already come into existence. We should rather doubt that it ever will.
The disinformation in this case has worked so perfectly that in the meantime even the profoundest skeptics seem to no longer doubt the existence of globalization.

Globalization of course is a very important part of modern mass-media, too. They associate. Through globalization the access to the news gets easier. People cannot only watch the national news but also others. And this means an opening, one would think. But as the media tend to associate their reports as well, homogenization of the messages is the consequence; disinformation?

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FEED

http://www.feed.com/

http://www.feed.com/
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Barnes and Noble

Massive online retail bookstore housing more than a million titles. Includes a book recommendation "personalizer,", a comprehensive list of The New York Times bestsellers, a "live" community events calendar with a daily survey and several forums, "highlighted" books from 19 subject areas, browsable categories such as antiques, ethnic studies, and pop culture, Books in the News, and weekly features such as reviews, excerpts, recommendations, interviews, events, "roundups" of popular titles, and quizzes.

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NATO

The North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington on 4 April 1949, creating NATO (= North Atlantic Treaty Organization). It was an alliance of 12 independent nations, originally committed to each other's defense. Between 1952 and 1982 four more members were welcomed and in 1999, the first ex-members of COMECON became members of NATO (the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland), which makes 19 members now. Around its 50th anniversary NATO changed its goals and tasks by intervening in the Kosovo Crisis.

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Saddam Hussein

Saddam Hussein joined the revolutionary Baath party when he was a university student. In 1958 he had the head of Iraq, Abdul-Karim Qassim, killed. Since 1979 he has been President of Iraq. Under his reign Iraq fought a decade-long war with Iran. Because of his steady enmity with extreme Islamic leaders the West supported him first of all, until his army invaded Kuwait in August 1990, an incident that the USA led to the Gulf War. Since then many rumors about a coup d'état have been launched, but Saddam Hussein is still in unrestricted power.

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