Media Curmudgeon

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January 31, 2008

Murdoch’s NY Post’s Strategic Obama Endorsement

Barack Obama has made empathy and conciliation a hallmark of his campaign for the Democratic nomination, but no one has ever associated the combative, curmudgeonly Rupert Murdoch with those ideas. So when Murdoch’s NY Post endorsed Barack Obama for the New York Democratic primary, writing that “Obama represents a fresh start,” some observers thought Murdoch and the NY Post had gone soft.

But when the NY Post wrote, “His [Obama’s] opponent, and her husband, stand for déjà vu all over again — a return to the opportunistic, scandal-scarred, morally muddled years of the almost infinitely self-indulgent Clinton co-presidency,” others said, “Oh, well, it’s just Billary bashing – The NY Post and conservatives hate Billary so much they’d endorse Micky Mouse.”

However, the Obama endorsement was not about politics or Billary hating as much as it was about business. Anyone who doesn’t think the endorsement was all about business strategy, doesn’t know Murdoch—the most brilliant (and toughest) strategic thinker in the highly competitive and rapidly changing media business.

Murdoch has had his eye on the Wall Street Journal for decades because he wants to challenge the NY Times in the U.S. and the Financial Times globally. He wants to be the most powerful and influential media owner in the world, and don’t bet against him. Here’s how his thinking might have gone: “I hate the NY Times and want to position the NY Post as its opposite, especially after the NY Times endorsed Billary. By endorsing Obama I appeal to many of my core readers, especially younger ones, which advertisers love. By endorsing Obama before the Daily News does, I get a nice little circulation pump and I put the Daily News in a bind – a strategic dilemma. If it endorses Billary like the NY Times did, it will piss off many of its readers and look like it is taking a cue from the NY Times. If the Daily News endorses Obama, that’s good because it might help defeat Billary, plus it will make it look like it is following the NY Post -- a win/win in either case for me.”

Murdoch’s NY Post is in a mano y mano fight to the death with Mort Zuckerman’s Daily News. Murdoch is richer, smarter, more strategic, and, most important, willing to be patient – he’s got News Corp.’s money behind him in his fight to put the Daily News out of business. He’s won the circulation battle, recently cutting the price of the NY Post to 25 cents, getting upscale readers addicted to Page Six, and moving more effectively to the Web -- proving he's willing to lose $40 million a year to win. Now, Murdoch has placed an early bet on Obama and achieved another edge on the Daily News, even if he had to get under the political bedcovers with liberal Ted Kennedy.

What could make the old liberal lion Ted Kennedy (76 in February) and the old conservative fox Rupert Murdoch (77 in March) agree: A mutual revulsion of the Clintons, yes, but for Murdoch, more than anything, it’s business. The old fox is crazy like a FOX…which brings up the question, how will FOX News treat Obama? Stay tuned.

Posted by Charles Warner at 11:07 AM | Comments (0) | Print |

January 29, 2008

Moonves Programs For His Boss, Age 84

CBS CEO, Les Moonves, seems to be programming the network for his boss, CBS and Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone, who is 84 and will turn 85 in May. CBS has the oldest demographics of any of the five networks and one of its top-rated shows, “60 Minutes” looks like it’s in a wheelchair.

“60 Minutes” is the longest running prime time program on television. This year it will celebrate its 40th anniversary with a group of five regular reporters whose average age is 64. If you include 89-year-old Andy Rooney, the average age jumps to 68. Occasionally Katie Couric, 51, appears, which brings down the average, but so does Mike Wallace, 90, who shoots it back up.

Remember the two old geezers who regularly appeared in “The Muppet Show” and how they’d cackle with decrepit delight at some stupid joke? Can’t you see in your mind’s eye the 84-year-old Redstone cackling as he’s watching the 89-year-old Rooney wheeze through a silly commentary and then calling up Moonves and saying, “That was really funny. Don’t take ’60 Minutes’ off the air.”

And you know that Redstone and Moonves talk regularly. During the Imus flap last year, Moonves and CBS, the owner of WFAN-AM on which Imus appeared, hesitated to take any action after Imus made his insensitive remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team. Redstone called Moonves and he fired Imus immediately after the call. It was clear who was calling the shots then and, certainly, is now.

It’s been widely reported that network television ratings are down for the current 2007-2008 season, a trend that began at the beginning of the season and has accelerated during the writer’s strike. FOX’s megahit “American Idol” made its season debut in January and immediately shot to the top of regular programming (The NFL Playoffs were the only programs to beat it), and the show will probably assure FOX another season prime time win.

“60 Minutes” and “American Idol” are contrasting mirror images of what’s happening to American broadcast network television: 1) News and news-related programming is attracting only older, declining audiences, and efforts to lower the demographics by hiring cute anchors like Katie Couric aren’t working; and 2) The future of network television is live sports and pop-culture entertainment programming that co-ops DVRs – in other words live events in which the goal of viewing is to find out who wins, after which viewing becomes less urgent.

So by keeping “60 Minutes,” Les Moonves might well save his job, but he’s not going to save CBS or network television from their inevitable audience erosion and migration to the Web. Redstone wouldn’t like it, but Moonves probably ought to move “60 Minutes” to the Web as weekly blog on the Huffington Post, which has twice as many monthly unique visitors as CBS.com and probably about as big an 18-49 year-old audience as “60 Minutes” on television does.

Posted by Charles Warner at 01:25 PM | Comments (2) | Print |

digibandit at January 29, 2008 06:53 PM writes:

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digibandit at January 29, 2008 06:53 PM writes:

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January 26, 2008

Coffin Nails

I remember when in the late 1950s, after Surgeon General Leroy E. Burney declared it the official position of the U.S. Public Health Service that the evidence pointed to a causal relationship between smoking and lung cancer, that one of my best friend’s mother, a heavy smoker, kept her cigarettes in a ceramic box labeled “coffin nails.” I smoked at the time (I stopped when I was 30) and laughed along with her at our guilty pleasure. She lived to be 83, and she didn’t die of lung cancer.

In 1957 neither the Surgeon General nor my friend’s mother could have imagined that 50 years later the city of Paris would pass laws banning smoking in restaurants.

Scotsman James Watt patented the steam locomotive in 1784 which eventually powered the growth of railroads in America and Europe. Neither Watt nor the railroad industrialists could have imagined that 80 years later railroads would enable artists to easily leave their studios in Paris and travel to the countryside to paint en plein air and create a revolution in art called Impressionism.

The first handheld mobile phone to become commercially available to the U.S. market was the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, which received approval in 1983. Mobile phones began to proliferate through the 1980s with the introduction of "cellular" phones based on cellular networks with multiple base stations located relatively close to each other, and protocols for the automated "handover" between two cells when a phone moved from one cell to the other.

In 1983 neither the FCC nor Motorola could have imagined that cell phones would lead to wireless technology that would allow people to connect to the Internet and eventually enable consumers to by-pass local television stations and cable systems to get their favorite TV programs (commercial-free, subscription-based “Wired” or commercial-laden, free “Lost”).

My previous blog, titled “Bang, Bang, Bang” received comments which opined that Wal-Mart’s taking the New Yorker off its racks was not a particularly devastating nail in the coffin for the New Yorker specifically or magazines in general. Those who commented are correct in the short term – the New Yorker will probably live on regardless of Wal-Mart’s decision, but whether its life is in an expensive-to-produce-and- mail print edition or on the healthier, smoke-free Web is another question.

The point I was trying to make is that printed and either mailed or store-bought magazines’ health is in peril in the long run, and Wal-Mart’s decision was a just another nail in printed magazines’ coffin or, perhaps I should say, in their eventual demise as paper-based dinosaurs.

Posted by Charles Warner at 12:17 PM | Comments (1) | Print |

digibandit at January 27, 2008 02:55 PM writes:

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January 25, 2008

Bang, Bang, Bang

Several announcements this week sound like of the banging of nails being pounded into the coffin of the old media:

1. Wal-Mart is pulling the New Yorker, BusinessWeek, Forbes, and Fortune from its racks. As Silicon Valley Insider writes, “…make no mistake - this is a disaster for the magazine world, which depends on Wal-Mart for an estimated 20% of retail sales…” and “Wal-Mart is ruthless about maximizing every inch of its floorspace, and it's clearly decided that it's only worth keeping a handful of magazine titles on its racks.” Guess what kind of titles Wal-Mart is keeping…probably doubling shelf space for People and other celebrity gossip rags. Wal-Mart’s decision is just another nail in the coffin of the printed magazine business. During the same week, The Atlantic announced the upgrading and opening up of its website to the magazines entire content, which is symbolic of the reality that the future of magazines is on the Web, not on Wal-Mart’s racks.

2. HBO announced that it will begin testing HBO on Broadband, a service, according to Shelly Palmer’s Media 3.0 blog, “that will allow current subscribers to watch the channel’s content online.” This service is also a nail in the coffin of broadcast and cable television as we know it. As more and more television content becomes available online, TV stations will be deprecated and the battle will be between cable, telephone, and wireless companies to see who can provide the cheapest and fastest access to the Internet and its infinite store of video to consumers.

3. The FCC is currently in the process of auctioning off the part of the electronic spectrum being freed up when all television stations go digital by 2009. Whichever company wins the bidding for the biggest chunk of the spectrum will be able to offer nationwide wireless access to the Web by mobile phones or computers, thus winning the battle with cable and telephone companies and disintermediating broadcast and cable television. Companies bidding are kept confidential, so we don’t know who is ponying up the billions being bid, but everyone suspects it is Verizon, ATT and, maybe, Google. Will Google win and provide free wireless to everyone? Who knows?

But one thing is certain; we can hear the nails being pounded in the coffins of the old, old, dead media…bang, bang, bang.

Posted by Charles Warner at 11:55 AM | Comments (3) | Print |

Media Curmudgeon at January 25, 2008 09:37 PM writes:

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digibandit at January 25, 2008 04:57 PM writes:

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Paul Talbot at January 25, 2008 02:01 PM writes:

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January 15, 2008

Guest Blogger Responds With Conspiracy Theory

Guest blogger Greg Todd writes:

"You like to stir up controversy! I guess that's one function of media.

The numbers are actually pretty interesting. The polls in this case were way off. It's not as if there was a margin of error they fell outside of. This is not "inexplicable," it is just unusual. And note, importantly, that the polls were "consistent" with the results in the hand-count districts, while dramatically inconsistent with the Diebold optical scan machine districts -- and again curiously, "uniformly" inconsistent: a neat 7% reversal. There's a good deal on this at Bradblog.com, as I'm sure you know.

Some other interesting facts. Someone (the Washington Post?) did some research on the NH primary elections in 2000 and 2004, when these same Diebold machines were in place, and found the same skew. The Post concluded, without reflection, that this showed the Diebold districts just "vote that way." Maybe so. But that same skew away from the paper districts is an interesting fact -- that there is the same pattern of voting, with essentially the same reversals of margins -- why should that be? Was the difference between Gore and Bradley the "same" difference as between Hillary and Obama? From a statistical point of view, it's curious. Does "curious" mean the results were rigged? Not at all! But why are the pundits so sure -- without ever once having had an audit -- that the results are accurate? How do they "know" the results are right? I worked at Price Waterhouse for two years. There are such things as audits.

And there are some other issues.

The Diebold machines are easy to hack into. The machines were accessed throughout the day by the LHS techs, who swapped memory cards on the scanners.

As you know, all election districts in NH that use Diebold scanners contract with one company, LHS. The principal owner of LHS turns out to have 12-month suspended sentence felony conviction for sale of controlled narcotic substances, dating,I believe, from the late 90s. Did New Hampshire do a criminal background check? Don't know. Does this mean he should not be running the state-wide voting system? Not necessarily. We don't know what the drugs were - pot vs. heroin would make a difference in my mind. Should we guess it was coke? But he was convicted for selling, not using. Does that make a difference?

I know what you're saying: "Who CARES?! The American public doesn't CARE, because they know that the machines do not lie".

There is a minority of people, however, who view this as an opportunity to test the integrity of the optical-scan systems.

The optical scanning systems permit, in theory, the exact tabluation of paper ballots actually filled in by people against the machine tally. If there are miscounts, we can find that out. Let's see if that system really works.

A serious problem arises, however, because, unaccountably (it seems to me the most basic violation of audit controls), the paper ballots in New Hampshire's scanner districts are left in the custody of the same people that run the machines. What was New Hampshire thinking? Or -- were they thinking? The prior drug felony makes one wonder.

So, contrary to your point, this seems to me an EXCELLENT test case for the optical scanners. We here have a situation of a possibly dodgy guy owning a company, which controls all the machines and all the ballots. We have anamalous results, both between scanner vs. hand-count districts, and scanner district results vs. (wide margin differences) polls. IF we can satisfy ourselves that the ballots have not been tampered with -- and because of New Hampshire's lack of custody controls maybe that's an issue -- then you could recount a batch of randomly selected election districts, counting each ballot cast in each district. Or you could manually count ALL the scanner election districts. It is just NOT a lot of votes to count.

How long would it take? A week? It's a minimal investment of time, but the integrity of the results -- or the uncovering of flaws -- can be determined now, early in the process.

But for some reason, the mainstream media -- afraid perhaps they will be made fun of by Fox and Matt Drudge --- are just peeing in their pants to show how much they trust in, and rely on, these election results, absolutely, and without a shadow of a doubt! There has never BEEN a test case of optical scanner counts in the wild (so far as I know), and all the pundits KNOW that the counts are good!

As you know, I have no interest in Obama vs. Hillary. I am glad Kucinich has asked for a recount, since I just want Americans to be working with voting systems they CAN rely on and which they BELIEVE they can rely on. I think many Americans are just past wanting to worry -- so they say, "I just won't"!

p.s. Matt Drudge and his friends have many mainstream media people thinking that election fraud is just a paranoid fantasy by leftists and kooks. The media should be cautious here. Check this out:

On December 6th, 2004 , The BRAD BLOG published a sworn affidavit [PDF] by Florida software programmer Clint Curtis. In his affidavit and videotaped sworn testimony presented before members of the U.S. House Judiciary committee, Curtis claims to have been asked by U.S. Congressman Tom Feeney (R-FL) to design a "vote-rigging software prototype". This request took place in October 2000 during a meeting at Yang Enterprises, Inc. (YEI), a computer consulting firm in Oviedo, Florida.

Curtis, a life-long Republican up until then, had been a programmer at YEI, which had several top-secret clearance contracts with the state, NASA and other government agencies. Curtis' understanding at the time was that the prototype he was being asked to create (built to the very precise specifications of Feeney) was to address Feeney’s concerns that the Democrats might attempt to electronically rig the election and Feeney wanted to know what to look out for in that event. After informing YEI CEO Mrs. Li-Woan Yang that he would not be able to hide the vote-flipping routines in the software source-code as Feeney had requested, Curtis testified that Mrs. Yang informed him that the program was needed to "rig the vote in South Florida ".

At the time of the alleged meeting, Feeney was the incoming Speaker of the Florida House, and also a registered lobbyist and the general corporate counsel for YEI. Previously, he had been the running mate of Jeb Bush during his 1994 unsuccessful first bid for Florida Governor. In November 2000, Feeney gained national notoriety after declaring open defiance of the Florida Supreme Court by vowing to choose Presidential electors for George W. Bush regardless of whether a court-ordered recount showed that Gore won Florida . He eventually ascended to the U.S. Congress and today sits on the House Judiciary Committee. Although he was outspent two to one by his Democratic opponent in 2002, Feeney beat him handily at the polls and then ran unopposed for the same seat in 2004.

Posted by Charles Warner at 01:37 PM | Comments (0) | Print |

January 14, 2008

How Many Polls Does It Take to Change a Light Bulb?

That old, ethnic, politically incorrect joke setup was meant to demean the intelligence of people of Polish decent, but it works just as well spelled “polls,” because some uninformed, stereotyping people want to scapegoat the polls over the bad call in the New Hampshire primaries.

It’s just another case of killing the messenger. Even the old warhorse, Tom Brokaw, whupped up on the media and the pollsters for calling the outcome wrong. Well, it’s time for the contrarian Media Curmudgeon to stick up for the pollsters.

First, the media, especially the broadcast media, don’t bother to give the sample size and margin of error of poll results because viewers wouldn’t stand for it. Can you image how fast people would reach for their remotes if a TV anchor said, “The latest results from the Mark Penn Company polls of voters in the New Hampshire primary are in. But before we tell you the results, you should know that the sample consisted of 1,100 telephone interviews …” Thirty percent of the audience – CLICK. “…weighted for certain demographics, based on a random sample of non-cell phones, and with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points…” Fifty percent of the audience – CLICK. “…the poll taken between 10:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m…” The remaining 20 percent – CLICK. “…yesterday shows that 38 percent of those responding indicated they would vote for Senator Obama tomorrow, if they voted, and 30 percent would vote for Senator Clinton, if they voted,” as the anchor talks to only the unmanned camera – the cameraperson having left with the sports anchor for a Bud Light.

Second, the pollsters merely reflect what people tell them during the time a poll is taken. They are the messenger for what people tell them. They can’t interpret what people really mean, if they are lying, if they are giving what they perceive to be a socially acceptable answer, or if they are saying something just to please or throw off someone who is listening to them in the room in which they are talking. In other words, the pollsters don’t predict an outcome, they merely report on what people told them at a given time with a margin for error, which no one pays any attention to.

The media is lazy and just spouts a headline, without any explanation or caveats. The media outlets are also gutless because they know that if the predictions are wrong, as they were in New Hampshire, that they can blame the pollsters and not take any responsibility for being wrong.

The headlines Tuesday night and Wednesday morning after the New Hampshire primary should have been, “Voters Change Their Minds!” or “Voters Lie to Pollsters!” or “It’s a Statistical Tie!” or “Obama and Clinton Tie For Delegates!”

Get real. Polls are not going away and the media are not going to stop reporting on the polls – people are dying to know what’s going to happen; it’s human nature to speculate on an outcome, even to bet on it. For example, check out Intrade Prediction Markets and see what the latest odds are for Clinton and Obama. Also, the polls are not going away even if no one responds, as Arianna Huffington naively recommends.

People aren’t going to stop watching weather reports because all the weather bureaus and TV weathermen said there was going to be a big snow storm today (Monday) in New York and it just sprinkled a little. The weather forecast was dead wrong, but we’ll keep listening to the forecasts because we want to know what the weather’s going to be, even when we know the forecasts are wrong occasionally.

If I were a gambling person, I’d set up an off-shore betting site – it’s against the law to have a betting website in the U.S. – I’d do one for betting on how accurate the political polls were going to be. I make a lot of money because people would bet against the polls after the New Hampshire error, but the polls would be right much more often then they were wrong.

So, how many polls does it take to change a light bulb? Just one, dummy.

Posted by Charles Warner at 11:53 PM | Comments (2) | Print |

Media Curmudgeon at January 15, 2008 06:34 PM writes:

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Media Curmudgeon at January 15, 2008 06:30 PM writes:

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January 09, 2008

Kristol Is Boring

There was an outcry from bloggers on The Huffington Post and other liberals about The New York Times hiring conservative pundit William Kristol as an Op-Ed columnist, so they piled on when his first column appeared with an embarrassing attribution error. But everyone missed the point – yes, he’s not a reporter; yes he’s a political hack; and, yes, he’s a wingnut supporter of the war in Iraq. The worst thing about Kristol is that he’s a terrible and boring writer.

Huffington Post blogger Marty Kaplan wrote a funny, satirical, mock-Kristol column that was much better written than Kristol’s first column. Read it instead of Kristol; you’ll learn more and laugh to boot.

As Jack Shafer points out in his Slate article, “In drafting Kristol, the Times gets a political specialist, not a journalist, similar to the deal the paper cut in 1973 when it hired PR flack and Nixon spear-chucker William Safire. Safire, a self-described libertarian conservative, weathered the same catcalls from the liberal establishment that Kristol hears today.

“I attempt no defense of Safire's "journalistic" work when I say he wrote interesting copy during his three decades on the [Times Op-Ed] page and brought to his earliest columns political perspectives that nobody else on the page—Tom Wicker, Anthony Lewis, James Reston, et al.—could match. As one who speaks to Republican leaders hourly, Kristol will perform similar service, rewarding liberal readers with dispatches from the ‘alien’ world of conservatism.”

Shafer makes the right point – that Safire wrote “interesting copy.” Kristol spews out dull, uninteresting, poorly written copy that contains minimal and inaccurate reporting. Even my conservative friends who hate Frank Rich and despise Maureen Dowd read their Op-Ed columns because they are journalists who do their homework, do some original reporting, and who write brilliant – often biting and caustic – copy. But, most important, they are never dull.

I applaud the Times for wanting to publish a diversity of opinion, but the editors lower their standards when they hire someone who is as poor a writer as Kristol is. In an age when the Times needs to differentiate itself from the often dull, mediocre, inaccurate, partisan reporting and writing that is widely available on the Web and in other newspapers. It isn’t helping itself by publishing ordinary, dumb writing. Is Matt Drudge the next hire?

I’d love to know what David Brooks, another conservative voice at the Times, thinks about having Kristol as an Op-Ed conservative bedfellow. Brooks is very smart and is an excellent reporter and writer. Kristol has none of those attributes. He’s boring.

Posted by Charles Warner at 10:40 AM | Comments (1) | Print |

Media Curmudgeon at January 10, 2008 08:59 AM writes:

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January 07, 2008

Thoughts On the Horse Race

Guest blogger, Nick Kotz, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist and author, writes:

"Clicking around the TV channels unscientifically but hungrily last Thursday night, searching for facts and cogent analysis, it struck me that Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews on MSNBC were at least fresher in their comments and more interesting – entertaining is perhaps the right word.

You are right on the mark with questions about the lack of questioning about the mantras of "experience" and "change." Kinsley provided some sobering reality about the catch phrases in his New York Times piece on January 6th.

Listening to Obama's victory speech – along with about 15 other well-meaning, upper-middle to upper income limousine liberal enthusiasts – I too was moved by the man and his words. Not to be the party pooper, I never expressed my thought to my friends that the speech was filled with fine rhetoric, well-delivered – appealingly calling for change without defining it – but, it could end up being very hollow when the opponents get down and dirty, and all of us start demanding specifics.

Another thought on the psychology and reality of the "horse race" which we all right-thinking bloviators so deplore every four years. Failure to address the key substantive issues and to define catch phrases such as "change" and "experience" is a failure of the media and news analysts. Having said that, the horse race is, in fact, a reflection of and measurement of public opinion at various stages of the election process. A given at the start is that most – a vast majority – of Americans have paid very little attention to the presidential contests at this point. And many who have paid attention have very shallow attachments to whichever candidates they say they favor. Stronger attachments come only after Labor Day of election year, and even then many voters remain only loosely committed until late in the process. And so it is quite natural that the results of an early primary – or polls just before that primary – will influence millions of voters who have barely, if at all, started thinking about the candidates.

What I'm saying is that the problem, if indeed it is a problem, goes well beyond the media's obsession with the horse race. Non stop, informed, intelligent 100 per cent devotion to coverage of issues at this stage will have little effect relative to the powerful effect of early polls followed by early primaries. The American voter, who I believe over the long run has good common sense in picking political leaders, is at this stage going to jump on bandwagons, and be influenced by the very dynamics and dramatics of the horse race."

Posted by Charles Warner at 09:31 PM | Comments (1) | Print |

Media Curmudgeon at January 8, 2008 08:21 AM writes:

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Television Blurrs the Lines

Guest blogger Bill Grimes, former CEO of ESPN, writes:

"Your blog about media coverage of politics as sports got me to thinking. I agree with your observation that television is purposely blurring the distinction between these two activities.

It seems to me that the news reporters who stand in the cold sidewalks waiting to shout a question at a candidate who is scurrying to his or her next venue are like their sports counterparts who hustle into a strategic position on the football field where they can best intercept the frantic coach who is running into the locker room and pepper him with questions about his decisions and the opposition. The reporters who are actually at the debates seem to convey that the atmosphere there at the conference hall is like that of a wild card NFL playoff -- “it’s important, fans, but there’s a long way off until the Super Bowl” or that of Dick Vitale’s boosteristic delivery of a Duke/UNC hoops game.

Then there was the normally demure Diane Sawyer dressed in high chic designer black barely containing her excitement over her network’s presentation “of this doubleheader debate”. A doubleheader? Sounds like two games to me.

Having watched during the last two evenings of debates as the candidates dodge, shuffle, interfere, and intercept each others’ (verbal) shots, passes and runs (did I miss any sports verbs or nouns here?) I have consciously accepted what I have known for some time – is there a meager difference in the stated positions of the Democrat on any issue of substance and same with the Republicans? More importantly, and sadly, there is no way for any of us to know what any of them would do in a crisis situation because none of them know for certain what they would do either. All candidates can articulate a decision they would make in moments of international peril or how they would change domestic programs such as Social Security, taxes and immigration – and their positions on all are strikingly similar – but such protestations are, of course, made in a theoretical or academic moment of early 2008, not in 2009 and years forward when real decisions which must take into consideration a blurred multitude of interests will have to be made.

In such a situation, how do we decide who to support? How do we select our candidate? We do what so often we human beings do in making most of our life’s decisions: we develop a verbal rationale why we believe in and support candidate A or B, but that decision is made much more on emotion than reason.

That we decide such issues in this subjective, qualitative manner has bothered me over the years, because we human beings with larger brains than any other form of life on earth should be more rationale, quantitative and objective in our decision-making than we are. I have now concluded, as Robert Wright contends in The Moral Animal , that we human beings, not that far removed from our gorilla predecessors and who now face extermination by misdeeds of us smarter animals, make most of our decisions based upon emotional, subjective, qualitative feelings which conform with our needs to be loved, recognized and accepted by those we respect and admire.

To his thought I would add that our decisions are also affected by feelings of guilt. (After all, as Wright demonstrates, we humans are the moral animals, but we are still mostly animals when it comes to pure intellectual reasoning and understanding.) I think our feelings of guilt which differ, of course, from person to person affect our decisions on which candidates to support as well.

To this point I recall as if it were yesterday when in 1974 as head of the CBS AM Radio Station Group I had to select my successor General Manager at WEEI, Boston. There were three viable candidates within the Broadcast Group. Gene Lothery was one. I was not convinced that he was the best candidate but neither was I convinced that he was not. But because he was African American I decided to select him. I was quite proud because he was the first black Vice President in the company. My pride emanated, I believe, from guilt over the plight of blacks in our country. I could remember playing college basketball on our all-white team in 1960 when we would play West Virginia State which was at the time a “Negro College.” I can clearly recall how difficult it was for me to look into the eyes of our victorious opponents when shaking their hands after a game because I knew that they had much less opportunity in life than I had.

My decision turned out not to be my best hire of my career, but how could I have known in advance?

That is how I feel, mostly, about the candidates from both parties in this campaign. Those from both parties sound alike on almost all issues; each possesses differentiating experiences and skills from others but we do not know how any will perform when he or she is in the Oval Office faced with real decisions.

And, therefore, politics may as well be accorded the same level of thought, analysis and decision-making as sports. We select our teams and politicians based upon how closely they match our feelings for our individual needs for recognition, admiration and respect of others and our feelings of guilt, envy and hope – all subjective and elusive.

Such is the imperfection of we humans. We’ve come so far, but have we arrived at a state where our decision-making, judgments and behavior can be guided by intellect, analysis and morality?"

Posted by Charles Warner at 04:07 PM | Comments (1) | Print |

digibandit at January 7, 2008 06:10 PM writes:

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January 06, 2008

Politics As Sports

Television news is covering the presidential primaries like they were sporting events, and the coverage is not nearly as good as ESPN’s – the sets, graphics, and visuals aren’t as good, the reporters aren’t as good, and the analysts aren’t as good. It’s a sad comment on the current state of the media that sports gets much more intelligent coverage than politics does and that politics is covered as though it were a game.

The nadir of coverage was CNN’s the night of the Iowa caucuses. CNN seems to believe that if it repeats a lie often enough, viewers will believe it – the same belief that Fox News has. The CNN lie Wolf Blitzer kept repeating was that CNN had television’s best team of analysts and reporters. At least Fox News’ lies, “we report, you decide” or “fair and balanced,” are clever marketing slogans that not only attempt to position Fox News, but also to position the competition. CNN’s bogus claim was like the chest-thumping bragging of an insecure child trying to boost its confidence.

CNN’s clumsy, unattractive, malfunctioning graphics were supposed to wow viewers, but instead they were laughably amateurish, and the analysts were merely regurgitating results or spouting obvious platitudes – the only CNN analyst who provided any insight was, to my surprise, the conservative William Bennett, who graciously said he was proud of Iowa and the country for honoring diversity and giving Obama the win.

The best analysts I watched were Mark Shields and David Brooks on “The News Hour With Jim Lehrer,” who, unlike most other analysts, had a few intelligent, insightful things to say. However, even Shields and Brooks couldn’t stay away from the politics-as-sports model. I would love to hear some analysts talk or write about interpreting the language of the campaigns — what the words used by the candidates, pundits, and public really mean.

For example, what does “experience” mean, how should we ordinary citizens translate the word? When Hillary Clinton, Bill Richard, or people 60 or older (both Hillary and Bill are 60) use the word “experience,” what do they mean? If you substitute the word “seniority” for “experience,” you’ll understand. The two candidates have a union, time-in-grade mentality, like most older people do. They are saying, “I put in my time, so now it’s my turn; I deserve it because of the seniority system. Those are the rules – I’m entitled.” And they act petulant if they think the seniority system isn’t going to pay off for them.

“Change” is another word that the pundits should translate, but don’t. “Change,” when Obama says it, means to do something differently, to go another, a new direction. When Hillary Clinton uses the word “change,” it means to do something the way her husband did it in the 1990s. When she says, “I’m for change,” it means “I’m for doing it the way we did in the 1994” or merely “I’m for doing something. – anything that will get your vote – and I’ll change it if you don’t like it.”

The best explanation for why television analysts/pundits keep their jobs is also because of seniority, certainly not because of a free-market merit system. And like the older candidates, the analysts/pundits believe that change means covering elections like they were covered in the 1990s—like ESPN would cover sports—only not a tenth as well.

Posted by Charles Warner at 05:26 PM | Comments (1) | Print |

digibandit at January 6, 2008 11:20 PM writes:

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January 03, 2008

Fuzzy Deans

On December 22, seven deans of prestigious university journalism programs signed an op-ed piece in the New York Times titled “A License for Local Reporting” that was fuzzy in its writing and thinking. Their hearts are in the right place, but their heads weren’t.

I read the piece several times, and here are some of the main points I think the deans were making:

1. That local television and radio stations should (my emphasis) “be doing their own news gathering, rather than merely serving as support systems for news gathering by newspapers.”
2. That the F.C.C. “ought to treat a broadcast licensee’s commitment of resources to original local reporting on public affairs as a key factor…” when renewing a station’s license and that “Companies should be required to make a persuasive case that they will increase their commitment to local reporting…”
3. That broadcast license renewal is too easy and that “…the pretense that there is a connection between the grant of a broadcast license and a promise to report on one’s community is all but gone.”

As Jeff Jarvis wrote in his Buzz Machine blog, “The deans sound like union organizers trying to protect headcount.”

But let’s go deeper and look at the basic assumption for the government regulating broadcasting. In 1927 Congress created The Federal Radio Commission, the predecessor to the F.C.C., to regulate radio "as the public convenience, interest, or necessity requires" and to bring order to the chaos of overlapping radio frequency usage. The assumption at the time was that the electromagnetic spectrum, which included frequencies used at no cost by radio stations, was a common asset belonging to the public and, therefore, should be used to benefit the public in some way.

Government regulations worked as long as stations had to demonstrate how they were assessing community needs and serving those needs in order to renew their licenses. But the F.C.C. changed those regulations in 1996 after intense lobbying by broadcasters and license renewals became virtually automatic. Broadcasting went from being a public trust to a private trust to benefit station owners, not the community.

And now, the F.C.C. is going to auction off a big piece of the electromagnetic spectrum which will become available when TV stations go all digital, HDTV in 2009. Don’t ask me how it works, because it’s too complicated for me to understand. But I do know that an auction will take place and that Google is considering bidding at a price that might be around $7 billion.

But if the electromagnetic spectrum is a community asset – an asset that the public, in a sense, owns – then how can the government sell it (or, rather, sell access to it) if we own it? If the government sells this community property for $7 billion, will I get my $20 share? Of course not, but I should get something that benefits me. Therefore, I think if the government is going to sell access to the electromagnetic spectrum to Google, then it ought to require that Google do something that benefits the entire community and has consequences built in if Google doesn’t do it (unlike the current no-consequences system for broadcasters).

The rumor is that Google wants the electromagnetic spectrum to create a nationwide wireless network – a reliable network from which Google cell phones could access the Internet free. Such a system would essentially put Verizon and ATT Wireless out of business, a situation that most citizens, especially me, would be thrilled about. Free cell phone service would be a terrific community service – a much better community service than I’m getting from my commercial radio and television stations.

The other assumption upon which the deans base their op-ed column is that local radio and television stations “should be doing their own news gathering.” In other words, that serving “the public convenience, interest, or necessity” means doing their own, original news gathering and that the news gathering we’ll get from local radio and television stations will give us news that “the American system needs to function at its best.” Not a good assumption, to say the least.

So here’s the issue: The public owns the electromagnetic spectrum; therefore, whoever uses the spectrum for free must give the public something useful in return. The government, with the help of journalism academics, I guess, will decide what is useful, what is in the “public convenience, interest, or necessity.” The deans obviously think more jobs in gathering local news are what are useful. But broadcasters are now faced with competition that in 1927 and 1996 didn’t exist – the Internet – and its usage is virtually free, and those who use it don’t have to give the public something useful in return because the F.C.C. doesn’t regulate it.

It’s not a situation in which merely the rules have changed; it’s an entirely new game – a new set of rules, new players, new teams, and a new playing field – and the deans don’t seem to understand it’s a new game and they attempted to apply the old rules to the new game. It doesn’t work that way.

In the new game, it doesn’t make any sense to require by regulatory fiat that broadcasters must hire more local news reporters or program more local news when doing news is not what their mediums do best. As I wrote in my November 20 blog post, “Wrong, But Right,” “I don't care who owns a radio or television station, which is what the FCC regulates, as long as the stations serve the public good, convenience, and necessity. Public service should be the issue, not ownership...” This seems to be the position that the deans take, which I, obviously, agree with.

However, the problem is defining public service (which isn’t just news gathering) and then putting a system in place that has consequences for not providing the defined public service. The F.C.C. has failed on both counts. But the F.C.C. has recognized that broadcasters are facing new competition and, therefore, must consider new business models to survive. So let’s hope the F.C.C. makes the right decision when it auctions off our electromagnetic spectrum and makes whoever buys the right to use it give me free cell phone service and mobile access to the Internet – what a public service.

Posted by Charles Warner at 09:04 PM | Comments (0) | Print |