In my mind when I first heard about this I saw a full-page, flexible screen with flashes pointlessly shimmering down it a la any Philip K Dick story adapted by Hollywood. The reality is a tiny wee screen housed in some cardboard pages that’s sure to annoyingly interrupt your enjoyment of all the beautiful people.

Lamer yet is when you find out that this is costing CBS thousands and thousands of dollars, and is only getting put in mags for subscribers in LA and NYC. Not sure how the numbers got crunched here, and the channel is keeping quiet on budgets, but I think it was conceived in their “cool stuff that makes it look like we’re really innovative, no matter how unsustainable the cost” department. Admittedly the traction is getting increased by people like us talking about it, but the reality is that this campaign just isn’t going to reach enough people to justify its cost. With ad margins getting smaller mid-recession, this kind of showboating seems like a dangerous course to take.

If you do expensive, limited experiments, do them like Fallon recently did with their Make Me A Supermodel campaign. By creating an interactive shop window, they wrung every bit of engagement from and exposure to its audience, which was constantly refreshing itself on the pavement in front. By contrast, CBS’s video screens have much less reach, and will look very average once the battery runs out. They also have to be inserted by hand, which makes the whole thing take on a distinctly pre-Cambrian tone.  

But perhaps the most annoying aspect of this whole thing is the stuff its actually advertising, the toxically unfunny “comedies” How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, Two And A Half Men, and new show Accidentally On Purpose, whose title alone makes it sound like it’s straight out of a two-minute brainstorm in 1986. These are shows which can only be enjoyed when off work with swine flu, when ER seems like Len Loach and when you need a show with an extra-loud laugh track to flag the jokes up for your tired, monged-out brain. If this is the future, then its sitcoms still suck.

The UK media landscape having been sculpted by the caring hand of first Reith and now Ofcom, one-sided political ranting outside of clearly demarcated zones of madness like Question Time and Jeremy Kyle is against the law, which is good for our populace as it means people can’t get sucked into a news/opinion feedback loop that reinforces and strengthens their political views until they’re warped, extreme and written on a placard. No such legislation in the US though, which is bad for the aforementioned placard-wavers, but great if you’re a Brit who wants to get your mind boggled by what people actually get away with saying.

Specifically: Fox. And Fox’s brand of soft news, with the bothersome and dull business of fact transmission smeared with the crazy that comes from its presenters’ brains. Fox and Friends is one such show, mocked on a weekly basis by Gawker, which would be lazy blogging were every episode not so worthy of derision. At least that show has three people to bat the madness around – others, like the soapboxes created for Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, are monolithic opinion edifices, like a tabloid column made manifest in mid-priced suits, scornful glances, and that editing that American TV uses where the screen flashes white with every cut.

Now the latest to join the Fox stable could be Don Imus, the shock jock famously fired by CBS for making racist comments. He referred to a black female basketball team as “nappy-headed ho’s” and “jigaboos”; when talking about a suspended football player, he asked “what colour is he?”, and when he realised he was black, he replied “Well, there you go”. He also has a rather progressive attitude to the word “nigger”, apparently peppering his speech with it when off-air. We all know that Glenn Beck doesn’t like racists at all, recently branding Obama one, saying that he had “a deep seated hatred of white people, of white culture”, but hopefully he and Imus will get along.

Imus doesn’t have kneejerk reactions against just black people – the Jews haven’t fared much better. Check this video, in which he first displays a pragmatic approach to the mechanics of political correctness (on the Blind Boys of Alabama: “they’re handicapped, they’re black and they’re blind, what more do you want?”) before going on to attack the Jewish heads of CBS for being “money-grabbing bastards”. He also said Howard Stern should be “castrated” and “put in an oven”.

Still, he does look after kids with cancer, and is suffering from prostate cancer himself. Maybe the experience will mellow him somewhat, but then he is going to Fox, whose atmosphere doesn’t exactly discourage firebrands. Expect Imus, Beck and Hannity to imperceptibly spur each other on to greater moments of inappropriateness until Glenn is wearing a white hood on air and we haven’t really noticed.

Facebook’s creative marketers are now selling the Web 2.0 starship as “a powerful way to share credible news and information and tap into the implicit trust that people have with their friends.” What does that mean? Well, it’s Facebooks attempt to position itself as the primary filter for the news. Tools like Facebook Connect already allow users to log-in to other web-sites like CNN and CBS, a clever move by Zuckerberg’s camp to encourage people to find, digest, and discuss information primarily through Facebook. Icelandic twenty-somethings, 96% of whom are on Facebook, are using it organise social revolts and demonstrations; Egypt is now feeling the Facebook revolution during its tensions with Gaza. And according to Facebook marketing man Randi Zuckerberg: “When you get a news clip from a friend, they are putting their own personal brand on the line, saying ‘I recommend THIS piece of content to you out of all the content that is out there.’”

More importantly though, every minute web users spend searching for information through Facebook is a minute they’re not offering their attention to the Adwords of competitor Google. 

By tapping into to this virally driven traffic, journalists and newspapers could regain some of the mindshare lost as the web took over as the primary info hub. It’s also probably a more meaningful way to attract attention on the web than just trying to strong-arm your way up the Google rankings using the dark arts of SEO, and forcing your reporters to place popular phrases like ‘Britney Spears’ through your news articles. As a recent report by Reuters explained, chasing clicks and page-views both dilutes a newspaper’s image, as well as their appeal to advertisers. A rush to get clicks, rather than readers, “may in fact erode the distinctiveness of the brand and its connection to a specific audience.”

Facebook may have found a powerful way of changing that. It will soon advertise content, take people to that content, let advertisers know who is taking rides where, for how long, and how often. This social networking taxi-service would stay free, advertisers would be happy, the news industry and the world would be saved. Right? Except, in this taxi, as well as steering the driver would be furiously taking notes about everything you did and said along the way…