Blight Of Man

Dear readers,

If you think you have been living in a free country you are probably in a much better place than we are. In fact, you are probably on a much better planet. Today we want to bring you another example of media censorship right here in the United States of America executed in the best traditions of Chinese government.

Last weekend Saturday Night Live aired a hilariously honest skit on the Bailout Bill bashing Republicans, Democrats, Wall Street brokers, Sub-prime companies, and ordinary assholes that so readily took out loans they could not repay. Two personal shots were directed at billionaire George Soros and at Herbert and Marion Sandler, who apparently sold their sub-prime portfolio to Wachovia for $24 billion. The skit was available on Hulu, Youtube, and NBC’s own online video service for a short time.

And then, all of a sudden the video disappeared from the internet, even from the SNL show archive hosted by NBC. Due to the amazing level of hilarity in the skit, the question,”where the hell did it go” begs to be asked. Michelle Malkin came up with an interesting theory that we think does a very good job explaining disappearance of the video. She thinks that NBC must have received threats of legal action from either Soros, or the Sandlers, or both. We happen to agree. In fact, our own research that NBC went to a lot of trouble to remove all copies of the video it could find. For example, all of the copies on Youtube have been taken down with the following message: “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by NBC Universal”, which is Youtube’s way of saying “we received a DMCA takedown notice”. For those of you not in the know, a DMCA Takedown Notice is essentially a piece of paper that effectively turns our copyright law into a perfect censorship tool.

Unfortunately, instances of such censorship are commonplace on the internet today but it does not mean we should stop talking about it. The good news is that Michelle Malkin posted a transcript of the skit with screenshots. Additionally, one of Malkin’s readers uploaded the video to FileFront and posted the link in a comment to her article. Go check it out.

Very disgruntled

Steve & Mike

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P.S. NBC is owned by the NBC Universal company, 80% owned by General Electric and 20% owned by Vivendi, who also produce MSNBC, Newsweek, The Weather Channel, and other television channels and news publications.

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UPDATE: According to Michelle Malkin’s latest post, Saturday Night Live is currently rewriting the skit because it “did not meet their standards”. In our book this is PR-speak for “we have been bent over, and they aren’t using crisco.”

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UPDATE: Looks like the video is back up there… or was never taken down to begin with, or was hidden in the back. Either way it’s back up and here’s the link

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ANOTHER UPDATE: Looks like the video is back up there… and it’s been changed from the original version aired on Saturday, October 4th 2008. One point that jumped out quickly was the Sandler’s caption in the posted version has been removed, where it originally said “People who should be shot.” There is also a noticeable continuity jump toward the end of that segment.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 at 3:39 pm and is filed under Bailout, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.