Many assume that mature viewers, with their $2 trillion a year in spending power, would be welcomed by the networks.

Well, they aren’t. Advertisers want to lock in viewers’ buying habits early in life, not struggle with them to change brands in their last few decades.

The key demographic in the weekly Nielsen ratings report is 18-49. Anyone outside that range is undesirable.

People over 49 do not buy interesting products. They detract from the hip environment advertisers seek. The shows they watch tend not to become “water cooler” shows. They are not, as one media buyer puts it, “an opportunity audience.”

The majestic glacier that is network television is very gradually melting. Many young viewers, particularly males in their 20’s, have been stolen away by such lures as the Internet, iPods, the Xbox and opera.   more »

As a former theater critic, Frank Rich has the perfect credentials for writing an account of the Bush administration, which has done so much to blur the lines between politics and show business.

Not that this is a unique phenomenon; think of Silvio Berlusconi, the media mogul and master of political fictions, or Ronald Reagan, who often appeared to be genuinely confused about the difference between real life and the movies.

Show business has always been an essential part of ruling people, and so is the use of fiction, especially when going to war.

What would Hitler have been without his vicious fantasies fed to a hungry public through grand spectacles, radio and film? Closer to home, in 1964, to justify American intervention in Vietnam, Lyndon B. Johnson used news of an attack in the Gulf of Tonkin that never took place.

What is fascinating about the era of George W. Bush, however, is that the spinmeisters, fake news reporters, photo-op creators, disinformation experts, intelligence manipulators, fictional heroes and public relations men posing as commentators operate in a world where virtual reality has already threatened to eclipse empirical investigation.   more »

Forty years ago, in a scathing and prescient manifesto against consumer capitalism and celebrity culture entitled The Society of the Spectacle, the French situationist philosopher Guy Debord described everyday life as "a permanent opium war''.

Modern capitalism was an "immense accumulation of spectacles'' and what was once "truly lived has become mere representation''.

This is helpful. We can better understand the impact of the sensational counter-spectacle of 9/11, described by its principal inspirer as an "America struck by Almighty Allah in its vital organs''. Vital, of course, only because of their symbolic importance.

Might Allah have been reading Debord? The events transformed Osama bin Laden into a global celebrity, a sinister Darth Vader figure who is an object of fascination for friend and enemy alike.   more »

Never mentioned is the one shameful American war that can be truly compared to the Iraq misadventure. It is the mostly forgotten Philippine-American War or, as it was long known here, the Philippine Insurrection.

(The Library of Congress didn't acknowledge the Filipinos were fighting for their independence and officially designate the insurrection a war until 1999.)

Imperialism became all the rage after the United States won the Spanish American War in 1898 and one of the spoils of that war was the Philippines, whose people had begun fighting for their freedom from Spain in 1896.

The U.S. bought the Philippines from Spain for $20 million in order to make it a colony but the Filipinos, who had formed an independent republic when the Spanish left, wanted no part of foreign rule, whether Spanish or American.   more »

ExxonMobil is the world's most profitable corporation. Its sales now amount to more than $1bn a day. It makes most of this money from oil, and has more to lose than any other company from efforts to tackle climate change.

To safeguard its profits, ExxonMobil needs to sow doubt about whether serious action needs to be taken on climate change. But there are difficulties: it must confront a scientific consensus as strong as that which maintains that smoking causes lung cancer or that HIV causes Aids. So what's its strategy?

The website Exxonsecrets.org, using data found in the company's official documents, lists 124 organisations that have taken money from the company or work closely with those that have.

These organisations take a consistent line on climate change: that the science is contradictory, the scientists are split, environmentalists are charlatans, liars or lunatics, and if governments took action to prevent global warming, they would be endangering the global economy for no good reason.   more »

In the United States, the scope of the democratic retreat has been breathtaking.

Under the guise of an undeclared state of emergency, the Bush administration has been methodically tearing down the constitutional order.

As frequent revelations of torture, secret prisons and large-scale domestic spying show, government by secret decree and presidential whim has become normal practice.

In well-screened secrecy, the administration has granted itself vast extra-legal powers: the power to break international treaties, violate conventions and engage in preventive wars.   more »