Poor Chris Dodd — he just got the top media lobbying job in Washington, D.C., at the very moment that the strong-arming-pols, scare-the-children, Jack Valenti era in media lobbying is now decidedly over.

It’s obviously a very confusing time for big media these days, on a lot of fronts. But any of the consummate insider moves once used by the legendarily pugnacious Valenti (pictured here onstage at our first D: All Things Digital conference in 2003) had a hard time this past week, as Internet players went very public in protesting two Congressional bills aimed at combating piracy online.

Not that Dodd didn’t try to cope.

The former Senator — who is now the chief lobbyist for the once much more powerful Motion Picture Association of America — gave a can’t-we-all-get-along interview to the New York Times on Thursday, in which he called for a meeting with techies to come to some acceptable compromise.

Wrote the Times:

“In an interview Thursday, Mr. Dodd said he would welcome a summit meeting between Internet companies and content companies, perhaps convened by the White House, that could lead to a compromise … ‘The perfect place to do it is a block away from here,’ said Mr. Dodd, who pointed from his office on I Street toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

But on Friday, after politicians quickly moved to delay both the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate’s PROTECT I.P. Act (PIPA) — after successful protests pointing out that the legislation could lead to censorship — Dodd went to the full Valenti again:

“We applaud those leaders in Washington who have chosen to stand with the millions of hard working Americans all across this nation whose livelihoods are threatened by foreign criminal websites designed to steal. As a consequence of failing to act, there will continue to be a safe haven for foreign thieves; American jobs will continue to be lost; and consumers will continue to be exposed to fraudulent and dangerous products peddled by foreign criminals.”

Foreign criminals! Foreign thieves! Is it just me, or does Dodd sounds like Cher, singing, “Gypsies, tramps and thieves”?

(Let’s be clear, that utterance could never top Valenti’s most infamous quote: “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.”)

To be fair, Dodd is hindered by strict restrictions on his lobbying Congress until next year. That said, this is not an old-timey, private Capitol Hill fight, but a modern-era, social-media-charged one.

And it’s pretty clear that the old scare tactics used by big media will no longer work as well, as consumers — as much as they like their movies — seem to love their Internet more.

Thus, what has happened is that — at least for now — the MPAA and media companies have lost and lost big, after the typically fractious Web powers decided to lock arms for once and cooperate with a creative, take-it-to-the-people approach of showing a disabled Internet.

Dramatic? Yes. Effective? Certainly. (That Facebook and Google agree on anything? Astonishing!)

Where it goes from here is unclear — the MPAA and its constituents could certainly rally and put forth their own protest. Ironically, the most effective way to do that is not via the airwaves or other former means of broadcast to the public, but on the Web.

Which is controlled by Dodd’s foes. (You see the problem here.)

The answer, in the end, might have to be the cooperation he first suggested.

As he told the Times:

“The companies, Mr. Dodd said, are ‘rethinking everything,’ not just about the bills, but about their relationship with an estranged Silicon Valley. That need for rapprochement, he said, ‘has come home in a way that no rhetoric of mine could express.’”

Much more to come, obvi.

What’s not to love about more “shaming videos,” as New York Times columnist Virginia Heffernan calls them in her “Screens” blog, which is a regular feature on the New York Times Web site. This week, she points to a video of former “Baywatch” star David Hasselhoff in a drunken stupor, which was shot by–wait for it–his daughter. It’s an embarrassing moment for Hasselhoff, a recovering alcoholic, but such fare is now pretty inevitable with the ubiquity of Web videos, as the astute Heffernan writes:

With all this child-parent surveillance–and the straight-to-online capacity to go very public whenever one records the Hoff or, say, Alec Baldwin mouthing off–will celebrity children no longer have to write “Mommie Dearest”-style memoirs, as their tales of woe will now be meted out to the world in leaked voicemails and uploaded videos? Will, moreover, camera phones and other recording-and-publishing devices put to rest thorny questions about the accuracy of memories of childhood abuse, including sexual abuse?”

It’s a shame that the blog by Heffernan, who also writes for the print edition, is buried so deeply in the New York Times online stew. It is always interesting to see what her eclectic mind will choose for the online column, which focuses on “here-goes-nothing online” Internet video, from Hoff hijinks to funny Norwegian videos to sappy clips from “Gilmore Girls.”

Says the author in her mission statement: “‘Screens’ will find, review and make sense of all those senseless new images: Web video, viral video, user-driven video, custom interactive video, embedded video ads, Web-based VOD, broadband television, diavlogs, vcasts, vlogs, video podcasts, mobisodes, Webisodes, mashups and more.” Not so senseless to me.

Also, a nice succinct essay by Matt Marshall of VentureBeat on the the implications of the Digg revolt and how such an event is likely to occur more often. He writes (and is right, too):

If there’s one lesson learned, it’s that the Web tends toward radical openness, and that aggressive censorship is futile.”

And, one of the more insightful writers on one of my favorite sites, Mike Masnick of Techdirt, has a good question he asks of the Motion Picture Association of America. Masnick asserts in the piece that the powerful lobbying group makes up film-piracy numbers, this time specifically about Canada and its role in camcording piracy. More important, writes Masnick:

Insiders will still leak copies (that are much better in quality than camcorded ones) and they’ll still be available on the Internet. Instead of focusing on pointless legal solutions, the industry would have been better off making the movie-going experience better so that people actually want to go out to the movies. In the meantime, though, why doesn’t anyone ask the movie industry to actually back up the numbers they put forth?”

That’s the kind of challenge former MPAA head Jack Valenti would have taken up and run with. The spitfire lobbyist, whose personal style and zest for a good political fight were legendary, died last month after decades of passionately defending the movie industry. While many did not agree with his aggressive, defend-the-fort-at-all-costs manner, he was also always willing to mix it up and, in fact, was onstage at our very first D conference in May 2003.

He delivered (with his patented sly smile, of course) one of my favorite moments when he told Excite and also JotSpot Co-Founder Joe Kraus that he was essentially a thief and perhaps even a communist for compiling a personal video for his newborn that contained a lot of very short movie clips. Kraus had created it to show just how stringent the laws were, and it was, if truth be told, a shameless attempt to get Valenti riled up.

It worked in a great way that resulted in an insightful debate on the important issue. And, more important, thinking back on it, it makes one realize what a shame it is not to have Valenti around anymore in these even more interesting times.