Iran Arrests Entire Newspaper
In your overwhelmed Friday media column: Iran just arrests everyone, for reporting, Conde Nast's September prayers will not be answered, a new chairman at the FCC, and the Mark Sanford source remains at large.
The Iranian government is taking the direct approach to censorship: They arrested the entire staff of opposition candidate candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi's newspaper. Reporters Without Borders says about 40 journalists in all have been arrested in Iran since the protests began. The Iranian government is run by jerks.
Conde Nast would really like Vogue to have a very strong September—traditionally the fattest month for fashion magazines—to help rescue the flailing company's finances. But Keith Kelly says that it doesn't look like it's going to happen this year. Vogue's biggest September issue ever came in 2007, when it had 727 ad pages; this year, the publisher's predicting "over 400 pages of advertising." Buy more fashion for the sake of the media!
Julius Genachowski has finally been confirmed as the new chairman of the FCC. He's a former venture capital guy, a close friend to Obama, a supporter of net neutrality, and generally not a moralizing wingnut, as was the standard at the FCC during the Bush years.
The South Carolina paper that broke the story of Mark Sanford's Argentinian affair spoke on how the hell they sat on the love-letter emails for six months without publishing: They emailed the addresses back and never got a response! So they couldn't confirm it. And we thought that level of investigative malaise was solely confined to the blogsphere! They also say they still don't know who tipped them off originally, which is really the most interesting remaining part of this story until the XXX photos come out.