The Sam Whitmore Sampler

Who Sucks?

Visit Complaints.com and find out. Type a brand name into the search window and glance through the results. Interesting, eh?

Verizon 2070
AT&T 1900
Comcast 1000
Cingular 651
T-Mobile 345 (Tmobile 47)
Motorola 270
Nextel 264

Ford 1020
Toyota 485
Honda 416
Chevrolet 362
BMW 114
Mercedes 111
Lexus 84
Infiniti 20

McDonalds 257 (McDonald's 108)
Burger King 208
Wendy's 113
Taco Bell 71
Pizza Hut 52
Domino's 29 (Dominos 24)

Dunkin Donuts 47
Starbucks 33

Dell 2070
HP 620
IBM 92

And so on.  There's a similar site called My3Cents.com, also worth visiting.

Bill Moyers and The Secret Government

Bill Moyers created a stir with his 2007 documentary called Buying the War. Twenty years ago he produced an even more chilling work, called "The Secret Government." Want to know how the U.S. really operates? Watch this seven-minute clip. You can view a longer version here. A former aide to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and a 2006 winner of a Lifetime Emmy, Moyers is, well... here's an archive of his work for PBS. It speaks for itself.

How to Talk to the Press

Online community expert Matthew Haughey offers this advice to those who must deal with media interviews. The comments are as good as the piece itself. Still the producer of PVRblog, Matt helped me big-time three years ago when I was researching this column on TiVo for Forbes.com.

Name That Aphrodisiac

What's C₅₀H₆₈N₁₄O₁₀ ? You'll soon find out. According to a segment in the excellent G4TV series Wired for Sex, the sexual wonder drug Bremelanotide (formerly PT-141) is well into its Phase III clinical trials and is due to hit the market next year. Meanwhile, the drug's manufacturer, New Jersey-based Palatin Technologies, Inc. needs to come up with a brand name. What would you call a nasal spray that gives men erections, women "genital warmth, tingling and throbbing" and made rats horny as hell?

Watch Words

It's impossible to know every program and movie available on one's cable TV system unless one steps through the on-screen program guide line by line. I recently did just that, on my Comcast system, to observe which words occur in TV show and movie titles most frequently. My goal: to see what video pros think will compel us to watch something. Below are the most frequently recurring words:

1. America (or American) -- 71
2. My -- 50
3. Secret (or Secrets) -- 33
4. King (or Kingdom) -- 26

Maybe someone should produce a new show called "My Secret American King."

SWMS Tech Media This Week: BusinessWeek Comes to Airline Tray Tables

Fortune is redesigning, according to the New York Post's Keith Kelly. Condé Nast Portfolio's gorgeous first issue must have had an effect. Meanwhile, today on Fortune.com we can read David Kirkpatrick's exclusive on "Facebook's New Face," proving once again the power of an NDA. Negotiated exclusives are Fortune's trademark.

Next time you fly, pull down your tray table to see whether there's a BusinessWeek column stuck on it. We're not making this up. This Ad Age article explains BW's latest gambit to expose its brand to the jet set. Meanwhile, BW blogger Stephen Baker suggested that TechCrunch "appears to have a level of influence I have never seen at the magazine." The blogosphere buzzed about this pseudo-admission but we found it telling that only one BW reader bothered to post a comment.

Hear all this and more in the latest edition of the SWMS Tech Media This Week podcast (6:58), which is now posted.

To listen to our podcast right now, click on the URL below:

http://slapcast.com/users/SWMS

To receive our podcast automatically each week, paste the following link into iTunes or whatever podcast receiver you use:

http://slapcast.com/rss/SWMS/index.xml

Mistakes

We all make 'em. If you like reading about 'em, visit Regret the Error. It tracks goofs and corrections across dozens of newspapers, magazines and broadcast networks, and points to other useful online resources for media truth-seekers. Some of these errors are nothing short of colossal.

You can find a variation on this theme at the 16-month-old Bad Pitch Blog, launched because authors Richard Laermer and Kevin Dugan "got tired of reading one editor after another call out the minority of our hard-working industry for bad taste, poor writing and lazy pitching." With a respectable Technorati authority rating of 163, others must be tired of it, too.

If You Like C-SPAN, You'll Love FORA.TV

It's been about a month since Wall Street Journal columnist Lee Gomes filed this piece about FORA.tv, which he dubbed "YouTube for wonks." FORA.tv is really more like Joost for the globally-minded and politically-conscious, aimed squarely at those left behind by ad-supported media. It publishes free videos under the topics of arts and culture, business, education, environment, politics, religion, science and health and technology. They also are grouped by geography: Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, Middle East, Northern America, Oceania and Transregional.

FORA.tv viewers are encouraged to leave comments and blast one another. And they do, as the example below shows:

Member 1: I am sure the leaders of our Fora community here will come out and paint this man as a Cassandra in trousers but let me be the first to stand up and say that very real parallels do certainly exist between the extreme totalitarian states of fascist Europe and Russia and the more modern and stylized version here at home—right now. [THE PATRIOT ACT for starters.]

As an aside, Phillip Roth's fictional novel The Plot Against America is a referential read that I like to point out that may also lend some metaphorical weight to Conason's arguments as well. Shades of gray everyone... please.

Member 2: You know, I find it only too ironic that the most self-righteous, hyperbolic, and blatantly ideological FORA.tv regular is the guy always calling for moderation and agreement on common ground. You're a big fat hypocrite, pal, and I'm ashamed to I find myself on your side of anything.

"A Matter of Comity," Part 2

Some follow-up on yesterday's post:

* It took less than three days for the article "Bush to be Dictator in a Catastrophic Emergency" -- published by roguegovernment.com -- to receive more Digg votes than any other Bush article ever.

* A colleague at a major US daily newspaper saw our post yesterday and searched Nexis on the May 9 Presidential directive. On May 10 The Washington Post ran an article titled "Bush Changes Continuity Plan" on page A12 as well as online. All other MSM outlets were silent. This is pathetic.

* The Post article stated:

Other former Bush administration officials said the directive formalizes a shift of authority away from the Department of Homeland Security to the White House.

We all wanted our government to respond better than it did after Hurricane Katrina. Maybe National Security Presidential Directive 51 and Homeland Security Directive 20 will help. But absent debate and discussion, it all looks like what Doc Searls called it -- "another click in the ratchet."

"A Matter of Comity"

Today's top story on Digg (but curiously, nowhere else) is President Bush's "National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive," announced May 9.

Being a word guy, I especially admire the wording of this (run-on) sentence:

(e)  "Enduring Constitutional Government," or "ECG," means a cooperative effort among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the Federal Government, coordinated by the President, as a matter of comity with respect to the legislative and judicial branches and with proper respect for the constitutional separation of powers among the branches, to preserve the constitutional framework under which the Nation is governed and the capability of all three branches of government to execute constitutional responsibilities and provide for orderly succession, appropriate transition of leadership, and interoperability and support of the National Essential Functions during a catastrophic emergency;

According to Dictionary.com, "comity" means "mutual courtesy" and refers to "the principle by which the courts of one jurisdiction may accede or give effect to the laws or decisions of another."

Let's hope so. The directive appears to give the President unprecedented Constitutional powers in the event of a "catastrophic emergency." We can't know for sure because the directive contains classified "annexes" that spell out exactly how our Government in Comity would function.

Don't assume the 2008 Presidential election will be held as scheduled.

UPDATE: This story is no longer listed in Digg's Top 10. Why?