1) The NFL season kicks off this week, but the organization has been in the news for less-positive reasons as of late. First, ESPN cut ties on an upcoming collaboration with PBS’ Frontline for a special investigating concussions (“League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis”) after allegedly bowing to pressure from the NFL, an accusation ESPN denies. The special was meant to include ESPN images and logos in a co-branded production. While it is not clear exactly why ESPN pulled out, though ESPN president John Skipper claims his viewing of a promotional trailer that appeared “sensational” made him turn sour on the deal. PBS plans to move forward with the special, condensing the two-part series into a single broadcast backed by a massive media blitz. While the NFL can deny involvement in ESPN’s decision, they cannot deny the recent $765 million settlement to thousands of former players over long-lasting injuries (including Alzheimer’s, dementia, and encephalopathy) caused by concussions. The agreement avoids the hassle of addressing all the individual claims, but may set a wide-reaching precedent for future lawsuits against them or in other sports.

2) Turning to what I’m calling the “Story of the Summer,” Time Warner and CBS are still fighting over retransmission fees, with the CBS blackout in three major markets lasting over a month hurting consumer perception of both brands. In the meantime, CBS has extended its deal with Verizon’s FiOS, with CBS CEO Les Moonves claiming Time Warner Cable has been offered and rejected a similar deal. There was a brief détente when Time Warner agreed to suspend the blackout in New York City for the airing of two high-profile political debates, making this the biggest news a comptroller debate has ever made (Thanks, Spitzer!). Both sides have taken strides to curry favor, with Time Warner offering a free preview of the Tennis Channel during the U.S. Open as well as offering free antennas, as well as providing a $20 credit through Best Buy to buy their own. CBS, on the other hand, has begun airing ads in the three major markets featuring NFL stars Peyton and Eli Manning emphasizing the lack of NFL coverage should the blackout continue. And if you are wondering what the FCC is doing, they have finally stepped up to help end the dispute in a limited capacity.

3) From the “Story of the Summer” to the unofficial “Song of the Summer” (though I give it to Daft Punk if only for the Stephen Colbert clip), Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” has come under attack from the estate of Marvin Gaye over the song’s similarities to “Got to Give it Up” and Funkadelic’s “Sexy Ways,” leading the song’s producers (Thicke, Pharrell, and T.I.) to file a pre-emptive lawsuit. Thicke’s side offered a six-figure settlement, which Gaye’s family allegedly declined. You can judge for yourself, with this YouTube mashup featuring a guy’s cat playing with fish:

4) Speaking of YouTube and copyright infringement, Lawrence Lessig has filed a lawsuit against Liberation Music Pty Ltd after a video of a lecture of his featuring a set of clips to the song “Lisztomania” by Phoenix was taken down from YouTube with the claim it violated Viacom’s license. The founder of Creative Commons is now fighting for the very thing his organization strives for: more open creative uses of licensed content.

5) Ok, one more music-based lawsuit. Satellite radio powerhouse SiriusXM is being sued for compensatory damages by SoundExchange (a nonprofit music royalty collector), alleging SiriusXM has been underpaying copyright owners, especially those from pre-1972 recordings. The suit claims between $50 million and $100 million in back payments. In a hilarious quote from SoundExchange’s attorney, he states, “This is serious. Pardon the pun.”

6) Another large lawsuit just ended, with the MPAA winning its copyright infringement case against cyberlocker Hotfile, a site that allows for the uploading, storing, and then downloading by other parties of copyrighted material. This looks to be a landmark case, as it is the first time a US court has held a cyberlocker like this accountable for copyright infringement.

7) In an update on the Fox Searchlight/intern lawsuit from a few months back, in which interns on the film Black Swan filed a class action suit for fair labor, Fox Searchlight has won the next battle, with the judge granting a limit on the time period others can join the suit, limiting the scale Fox will have to deal with and possibly pay/settle.

8) One last lawsuit, I swear. In this one the newly launched Al-Jazeera America is suing AT&T for not carrying the network for its U-Verse subscribers. Al-Jazeera America is claiming AT&T wrongfully terminated an existing contract that existed prior to Al-Jazeera’s purchase of Current TV possibly for religious reasons, with the high number of U-Verse subscribers in conservatives states in the South.

Because it is a slow news time, here are two silly stories to lighten the mood as summer unfortunately comes to an end.

9) Hopefully you have been following Jason Mittell’s weekly feature here on Antenna, Breaking Bad Breakdown. If so, you’d be happy to hear that after last week’s episode, the Mexican restaurant featured prominently in one scene (Garduno’s Dip) reports a surge in orders for table-side guacamole (It’s made in front of you!), due in no doubt to the server in the episode’s insistence upon its deliciousness.

10) In an update to our last edition’s story of Michael Jackson’s glove, which the US is currently suing for against the son of the dictator of Equitorial Guinea, I am pleased to report that while the case is far from over, the US will get to retain the glove during the trials proceedings. U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A!

For experience is […] a broadening and an identification, a passage from the particular to the universal, the experience [épreuve] of scission, of the finite, of the conditioned. It is voyage (Reise) and migration (Wanderung). Its essence is to throw the “same” into a dimension that will transform it. It is the movement of the “same” which, changing, finds itself to be “other.” (p. 44)

I thought of this passage when I read about the January 2nd deal to sell the U.S. cable station Current TV to the Qatar-based news network Al Jazeera. I have a longstanding interest in how TV news translates foreign experience for viewers (see here and here): How do journalists explain to viewers how members of a foreign culture understand the world and their place in it? But what makes the Current TV/Al Jazeera deal interesting is it inverts that question: How might a foreign network explain Americans to themselves? Might Al Jazeera provide something like an “experience of the foreign” for Americans? What would that even look like?

A number of analysts have provided useful accounts of the deal and its implications. (Here’s what the New York Times had to say, and here’s the Columbia Journalism Review.) Current TV began in 2005, a creation of Al Gore’s. At first, it had a populist, DIY-inflected approach, and it solicited videos from viewers. It evolved in the following years, never finding much of an audience. Most recently, it tried to brand itself as a liberal news outlet, and in 2011, it hired Keith Olbermann, formerly of MSNBC. It fired him a year later, but the image stuck. When the Al Jazeera deal was announced, pundits on Fox News began to rave about links between liberals and Osama bin Laden, leading the Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart to call the announcement the “first Fox boner alert of 2013.”

Al Jazeera, of course, is a network with a global reach that has so far failed to penetrate the US market. Al Jazeera English is currently available only in New York, Washington, DC, Burlington, VT, Toledo, OH, and Bristol, RI, for a total reach of just under 5 million viewers, although people can stream it online. What Al Jazeera gains in the deal with Current TV is not so much the network itself as access to its viewers. Current TV is available to about 40 million cable and satellite subscribers, although some cable operators dropped it after the deal with Al Jazeera was announced.

What makes the deal interesting to me is that Al Jazeera plans to launch Al Jazeera America instead of airing Al Jazeera English. Rather than focus on the majority world, as Al Jazeera English has done, Al Jazeera America will focus on domestic news, but from a perspective other than that of its major commercial competitors. As commentators like Danny Schechter argue, it could succeed precisely because it reaches viewers who don’t find themselves represented elsewhere:

An Al Jazeera America needs to plug in to and resonate with American sensibilities and our mix of opinion from A to Z, not just A to B. It needs to understand our country’s growing anger and frustration with such issues as inequality and dissatisfaction with posturing politicians of all political stripes.

In other words, Al Jazeera America’s “translation” might have a paradoxical effect: its “foreign” lens might bring into sharper relief distinctive (and distinctively) American perspectives that are absent from CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and even NPR.

Of course, I’m not sure Al Jazeera America is the right network or the only network to provide a foreign lens for Americans to examine themselves. And Matt Sienkiewicz is right to encourage a healthy skepticism where Al Jazeera’s claims are concerned. Nor am I so naive as to believe it will attract many viewers who aren’t already inclined to think outside of a “mainstream” American framework. But its potential to do something new will make it a very interesting network to watch.

* “Man” is the historically accurate term here — the Romantics were writing in the eighteenth century.

True. I’ve explained until I’m spent what is happening, how it happened, the government’s response, the historical context, poverty, hopelessness: everything but a definitive why. This is partly because all of that contextualization is already the why, and short answers don’t work. But also partly because there is no singular why. Real life doesn’t always have a proper narrative, at least while it’s in the process of composing itself.

But ‘real life’ rears its annoying head as I prepare to teach my intro film class. Real life requires I temporarily put aside troubling thoughts of my family in Alexandria and Cairo. It doesn’t work: I think of the darkness and moral corruption within Egypt as I put together my notes on film noir. Tahrir Square becomes dimly lit and punctuated with melancholy. It becomes the urban nightmare populated not by Humphrey Bogart but by his anonymous Egyptian doppelgangers. Egyptians, like those troubled subjects of bleak 1940s films, yearn for an innocent past before the ravages of experience stole their innocence. For Americans it was the brutality of WWII. For Egyptians, how could anything be the same after their government unleashed the full brutality of the police on them for the crime of asking for their rights?

But the protests go on another week, and my job doesn’t stop because I’m busy worrying about Egypt. Film noir shifts to horror, which is even more appropriate. I think of the pain of Egypt as I watch televised images of bodies being eaten up by the state in its various forms; as if the state were Count Dracula in need of blood to carry on. In class I show clips of zombies, vampires, killers, and the insane and tell the students about film theory. “Psychologically speaking, we can view cinematic horror as a mouthpiece for the socially repressed…”

I see in my mind’s eye images of Egyptians protesting. Images of Egyptians being run over by police vans, shot by security forces, beaten with sticks, tear gassed, smashed in the face. “Blood!” screams Anthony Perkins as I show a clip from Psycho (1960), feigning surprise at the murder ‘his mother’ has committed; just as Hosni Mubarak feigns surprise at the blood his forces have spilled in Egypt’s dusty streets.

The return of the repressed. You beat people when they ask for their rights, yet someday they will return. You laugh at people when they demand an education, yet they will return. And just like horror movies, I can’t take my eyes away (though I sometimes cover them with my hands). As I watch these images spilling across my various screens: iPad, laptop, television, telephone, I find myself caught up in their aesthetic essences. Watching these horrific images is compelling.

Here I am trying to talk about Egypt and why this is all happening, but all I find myself talking about are movies and TV. Horror, film noir… But of course this is the answer. This is the why that I can’t really fully represent to my friend.

Benedict Anderson talked famously about “Imagined Communities” in which print capitalism allowed Europeans for the first time to see themselves addressed as national groupings. People from Manchester could open up a newspaper and have pretty good idea of what the folks down in London were thinking about at that exact same moment.

Satellite television, Twitter, Star Academy, Jersey Shore, Lost, iPhones, ESPN… these things blow Anderson’s Imagined Communities out of the water. And even more, they don’t function in a national context, but a transnational context. The imagined communities have been replaced with imagined worlds.

I’m not the only one watching Humphrey Bogart movies. I’m not the only one watching the Big Lebowski. So are Egyptians. And Sudanese. And everyone. The borders that limited imagination have been erased, and by things as seemingly inconsequential as a soccer game broadcast from London, a British comedy, or an Al Jazeera broadcast of the revolution in Tunisia.

Just as we can put ourselves in the worn sandals of Russell Crowe in Gladiator, so too can Egyptians and Tunisians and Saudi Arabians and Chinese. They, too, are capable of imagining themselves challenging Cesar for justice. They, too, can imagine a world different than this awful one that we live in, the brutal one of tyrants whose reality is now not the only game in town. That is the why.

Trying to watch itself, Egyptian state TV has lost its collective mind. They have slid into a self-comforting psychosis. They don’t reject reality as much as they simply create a whole new one. It’s painful to see the announcers, dressed in their clean suits or dresses, perfectly made up as if it were just another day at the office and yet with a subtle kind of fear in their eyes, scramble about reading the latest pronouncements from the government. As they castigate the demonstrators, treat them, using the very words of the government, like children, as they describe the paralyzing crisis overtaking the country there is one thing they never, ever do: say why this is all taking place.

Although on every other media outlet on the planet the message is loud and clear — “Mubarak Must Go!” — the words have never been mentioned on state television. Never has a protest sign been allowed to freeze on the screen calling for the president to step down. While the world shows the millions of demonstrators throughout Egypt, state TV cameras frame the calming images of the river Nile, flowing from south to north as it has always done. An observer untrained in critical thinking faculties — and there are millions of these in Egypt as the result of a deliberate weakening of the national education system — would think that a group of radical criminals had suddenly descended on the mother land with a solitary purpose: destroy everything. I think of the black-dressed nihilists smashing the Dude’s stuff in The Big Lebowski (1998) as they snicker, “we believe in nothing!”

Egyptian state television is psychotic. Is it possible that because they say a tree is a house plant or a pebble is a mountain that this becomes true? Do they believe their own nonsense? Will they wake up tomorrow or next week and blurt out to themselves, “sorry, sorry, sorry. I lied, I’m shameless. I could have quit”?

Earlier today a group of what can only be described as pro-government thugs posing as counter-demonstrators came riding into Tahrir square on horses and camels to smash the faces and crumple the bodies of pro-change demonstrators. I found myself watching those images and thinking about Lawrence of Arabia. Specifically the scene where the heroes go rolling into Aqaba on their camels to throw off the oppressive Turks with all of their industrial military might. But when some of these thugs were torn off of their horses and camels, they were found to be in possession of police ID badges. Not heroes at all, but dastardly villains. (In fact Omar Sharif, the doe-eyed star of Lawerence, came out in support of the demonstrators, but he’s too old for a camel counter-charge now.)

Do these villains really, really believe the alternate reality of Egyptian state television? Does saying something over and over in the face of material reality make it true either to yourself or to those who are listening to you? As I watch Al Jazeera replay the images of charging camels I begin to doubt all truth. Maybe this is a teaching moment; maybe I can ask both myself and my students to reflect on the ways in which American television might be forcibly birthing its own reality through constant repetition.

I am tempted to think, as I watch Egyptian state television, that I’m watching the end of a regime of representation just as surely as I’m watching the end of a political regime. That in their last dying kicks, isn’t it symptomatic of the end that state broadcasting is repeating the same kinds of lies for which it was famous in the 1973, 1967, 1956, and 1948 wars? Surely these dinosaurs are on their way out and there is no room at all in the modern world for such an utter disregard for reality.

But then I remember the Bush administration and how, despite coming from the most consciously modern nation on the globe, they also made up their own reality.

There are so many different angles from which to approach this historical moment. As such, we at Antenna wanted to open up discussion among our readers and contributors in our “What Do You Think” column. Below are a few issues we’re thinking about; we invite you to add your take and/or your questions.

• As Al Jazeera’s English live streaming broadcast became the leading go-to source of information on the situation in Egypt, many have called this Al Jazeera’s “Challenger Moment,” referring to the news event that catapulted CNN to relevancy in the 1980s. How might this impact Al Jazeera’s global reach, international brand, or cultural relevancy in the West?

• How are mainstream American television and other media outlets constructing and circulating particular narratives in relation to these events?

• What do we make of the turns to “old media” (faxes, dial-up Internet, landline telephones) in response to the unprecedented constrictions on “new media”? How is this being covered by news agencies and/or commentators?