Media Curmudgeon

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August 27, 2004

Friday, August 27, 2004. Out

Friday, August 27, 2004. Out With the MBAs
I have always had a prejudice against MBAs. It probably started when a Harvard MBA became head of a TV and radio station group back in the early 70s. I was VP and general manager of CBS Radio Spot Sales, an organization now defunct, and we repped the group's top radio station. The MBA was a little twerp with terrible people skills, plus he was arrogant and self-absorbed--a real triple-threat. He was hired by CBS to run one of its television stations and he was a miserable failure, as he was when he ran a medium-market TV station after CBS fired him. He not only failed, he was hated.

This summer I read a book by a respected management researcher, author, and teacher, Henry Mintzberg, titled Managers Not MBAs: A hard look at the soft practive of managing and management development. Mintzberg makes a thoroughly researched, detailed, and compelling case against MBAs and traditional business school education in the United States. He claims that MBAs are taught to analyze and calculate, but not to manage. They can do spread sheets and do deals, but they are more interested in their own self-improvement than in any company they work for. They tend to be selfish, greedy individualists who are more concerned about big salaries for themselves than about loyalty or job performance. They typically jump from top job to top job just for the money and perks.

Mintzberg claims that much of the ills of business today can be traced back to the greedy, short-term, selfish attitudes of MBAs. He also writes that MBA CEOs have been, for the most part, failures. One of the author's most damaging exhibits is a table titled "Ewing's Nineteen of 1990: The Performance of Harvard's Best?" that reprints a list from David Ewing's book, Inside the Harvard Business School. The table lists 19 CEOs of major companies that graduated from the Havard Business School class of 1990. Only two of the nineteen were successful (Lou Gerstner of IBM and Warren Batts of Premark) the performances of the other 17 ranged from questionable to disastrous. Two of the most hated and villified CEOs of all time were graduates of the class of 1990, William Agee of Bendix and Morrison Knuden and Frank Lorenzo of Eastern Airlines, Texas Air, and Continential.

On page 160 Mintzberg writes, "In summary, beyond the earlier critiques (summarized above), the MBA carries a lot of tacit baggage that has no business in business. MBA gradualtes who believe they can manage anything are quite simply a menace to society (emphasis mine)."

Well, you can guess where I'm going. The current inhabitant of the White House is the only president of the US ever to have an MBA. Not only does he believe that God wanted to him to have the job, but he clearly believes that because of his MBA (and subsequent greed and failures in business) he can manage anything--the nation, the government, a war, or relations with our allies around the world. I agree with Mintzberg that people like this are a menace to society.

So, down with MBAs and MBA selfish, greedy attitudes and values and up with managers who have years of practical, on-the-job training and industry and function-specific education. Up with managers who think of their companies, their fellow employees, their communities, and the public before they think of themsleves. Where are these managers in media companies? Too often stuck in middle management, slogging along, not playing politics, but getting the work done and raising stock prices for greedy, selfish, power-hungry CEOs.

Posted by Charles Warner at 10:15 AM | Comments (0) | Print |

August 25, 2004

August 25, 2004. Media Covering

August 25, 2004. Media Covering Media Covering Media
Marshall McLuhan wrote that "the medium is the message," and never has this been more true than in the past few weeks during the Swift Boats Veterans for Truth controversy.

The media, such as Editor & Publisher, the New York Times, and the Washington Post all had stories about how the media was covering the controversy as well as about the controversy itself. Often the stories about media coverage of the swift boats flap were played bigger than the flap itself. No one seemed to want to deal with the truth, just the controversy and its coverage.

Editor & Publisher ran a story titled "Editors Grapple With How to Cover Swift Boat Controversy" by Aya Kawano on August 24 on its Web site that read, in part: "Alison Mitchell, deputy national editor for The New York Times (Click for QuikCap), points to the changing media landscape and its impact on what newspapers choose to cover. 'I'm not sure that in an era of no-cable television we would even have looked into it,' she said. Near the top of a front-page article on Tuesday, the Times' referred to the 'mostly unsubstantiated accusations' of Kerry's swift boat critics.

But Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. said newspapers can still drive their own agenda. 'I don't think we are lessening at all our judgment of the news,' he told E&P. 'There is much more media, but we still judge for ourselves which facts we report in The Washington Post.'

In the past week, Page One stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today and other dailies both scrutinizing the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and its accusations against Kerry, while also reporting on the effect the group's advertising is having on the Democrat's strategy."

So what is happening is that the media is reacting to coverage of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth's attempt to smear John Kerry. (As an aside, you can be pretty sure that any organization in an election year that has "truth" as part of its name is all about telling lies.) The Fox News channel, the unabashed mouthpiece for the right wing and the White House, played up the swift boats veterans' smear attempts big, so what were legitimate news outlets to do? Not dignify the lies and mud slinging with coverage that was best done by the National Enquirer, the Star, or other tabloids and rags that feature stories that are pure bullshit or cover it? Unfortuantely, the legitimate press attempted, as usual, to be "balanced" (although I'm not sure how you can balance pure bullshit) and, therefore, repeated the false, unsubstantiated claims of the vile veterans, which is exactly what Fox, the truth squad, the right wing , and the White House wanted.

When is the legitimate, journalistically responsible press going to stop making the media the message and make truth the message? Fox News's right wing, anti-liberal, anti-Kerry, anti-truth agenda is well known and well documented. It's old news. Stop covering it. Stop making their biases news.

Because I began this blog with a McLuhan quote, it seems fitting that I end it with two McLuhan quotes. The first is, "The nature of people demands that most the them be engaged in the most frivolous possible activities--like making money." That's what Fox is all about--making money, which means supporting a Bush White House agenda of more broadcast deregulation, more waivers for Fox-owned TV stations and newspapers in the same market, and more tax breaks for the rich and big corporations. Covering Fox News's biased news coverage is helping to promote its money-making agenda to the detriment of the truth and the public interest.

The other McLuhan quote is, "Tomorrow is our permanent address." Yes, we must all think about tomorrow and how the world will be tomorrow, not about maximizing media profits today by covering meaningless controversies and promoting lies.

Posted by Charles Warner at 9:34 AM | Comments (0) | Print |

August 24, 2004

August 24, 2004. Blogger Dereliction.Julia

August 24, 2004. Blogger Dereliction.
Julia and I went on a marvellous walking tour of the Basque country in Spain and a fabulous time--great food (the best in Europe I'm told, and I believe it). We felt welcomed and no one gave us a dirty look because we were Americans. We ended the trip in Bilbao and went to Frank Geary's Guggenheim Museum, a monumental work of art. I've never been so awed by a building/sculpture. It's worth a trip to Bilbao just to be awed and inspired by the incredible power and fertility of a man's imagination. It gives one the feeling that anything imaginable is possible.

When we returned from Spain we went to Weekapaug where I raced a Beetle Cat, fished, spend time with my grandson, PF, and my youngest son, Will. Too much fishing, pool, ping-pong, sailing, and poker in the evening to even think about blogging. Also, my computer was attacked by a virus and I had to reinstall my operating system software, which put me out of action and out of sorts for several weeks. In the process of dealing with customer support from Dell, Verizon (my Weekapaug DSL provider), Microsoft, and Netgear (my wireless router), I must have talked to several dozen technical support people, most of them in India. I found the level of support extremely uneven. I could barely understand many of the people in India and the men were harder to understand than the women. The support from the Indians was adequate at best; they couldn't problem solve and had no suggestins or insights other than what they read from their computer screen. One support person from the Phillipines was the best for Dell--genuinely friendly (not scripted, false friendly like the Indians). Overall Verizon DSL had the worst, most ignorant, most confusing support (but the Fillipino who finally solved a problem was from Verizon) with Neatgeat running a close second. Dell was the best.

In New York I have a Linksys wireless router that allows me to send and reply to e-mail, using Outlook, from my missouri.edu account and for Julia to access AOL on her Mac Powerbook. The Netgear router wouldn't allow this and it took my two weeks and dozens of calls to fingure out a special setting for the Netgeat router that would allow me to send e-mail from my missouri.edu account (I still can't reply to e-mail) and Julia to access AOL. I'm relating this to warn you against buying a Netgear wireless router--too much trouble.

In the ten weeks since I last blogged, a lot has happened in the media that I think is worth commenting on. One of the most significant was the July announcement by Clear Channel that it was cutting the commercail loads on its 1,200 radio stations. That's a big step from a company that I and many media critics have blasted, especially for cancelling Howard Stern on several of its stations. Even though some cynics thought Clear Channel's decision was made to garner favor with the FCC in order to push its deregulation agenda, but for whatever reason, the cutback was good for listeners and advertisers alike.

The July 19, 2004 Jack Myers Report read, "In a move certain to rock the radio industry, Clear Channel president John Hogan iss announcing today a major 'Less is More' enterprise-wide commitment to significantly reduce the amount of commercial and promotional inventory on every Clear Channel radio station." Later on in the Report, the following appeared, "In a even more radical decision that could have reverberations on Clear Channel's competitors and on the television industry, Clear Channel stations are going to begin selling specific positions in commercial pods, charging premiums for first and last positions in pods, and stations will begin offering an hourly stand alone spot within an exclusive envirnoment."

Well, the commercial reduction may be good news for listeners, but not such good news for advertisers. No matter what spin Clear Channel puts on it, what it is doing in reducing commercial loads but raising rates in several ways that will make up for the money lost by cutting back commercial inventory. Therfore, will advertisers and their agencies spend more money in radio as Jack Hogan indicating he was hoping for in the Jack Myers Report? I doubt it.

The latest report on media spending from Media Post's Media Daily News 8/24, headlined "Cable, Web Boost Ad Budget Share, Broadcast, Print Erode," which indicates, "The greatest lost of ad budget share went to local radio (-0.29 points), B-to-B magazines (-0.28 points) and local newspapers (-0.26 points). " This report by TNS Media Intelligence/CMR showed that overall ad spending on the 17 media measured by TNS Media Intelligence/CMR rose 9.1 percent to $62 billion through the first half of 2004, but radio showed the biggest share loss.

So at the beginning of the second half of 2004, Clear Channel cuts commercial loads--hmmmm. Could it be that when demand is a little soft that it's a good pricing tactic to cut supply to prop up prices? Sounds like it to me, then to make sure prices don't fall, raise them for special positioning (forget the fact that advertisers who have a less desirable inside position will get screwed by not having a fair rotation).

But, whatever, as a radio listener, I'm pleased that there will be fewer commercials on Clear Channel stations, if I ever listen to one. Unfortunately, the station I listen to most often is the Infinity station, WCBS-AM, Newsradio 88, for the Yankees games. I guarantee you that Infinity hasn't reduced the commercial load on the Yankees broadcasts. Every move on the field, almost every pitch, every scoreboard is sponsored. There are so many commerical drop-ins, sponsor IDs, and billboards that the broadcast has become almost unlistenable: official water of the broadcast booth, , 15th out, high-speed pitches, pitching changes, and on and on and on. I pray that Infinity and the Yankees Network get the Clear Channel religion (however self-serving) and reduce commercial clutter.

Posted by Charles Warner at 12:14 PM | Comments (0) | Print |