Media Curmudgeon

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May 29, 2008

You Get What You Pay For – Unfortunately

The HBO two-hour movie, “Recount,” that debuted last Sunday night to deservedly rave reviews brilliantly and dramatically makes the point that “every vote counts” only when the vote-counting system is not corrupted and politicized as it was in Florida in 2000.

This lesson is especially relevant today, eight years later, as Hillary Clinton, in increasingly more desperate attempts to wrest the Democratic nomination away from Barack Obama, tries to corrupt and politicize the voting process. It is a scary irony that she and Bill are using the same deceitful, hate-filled strategies that their mortal enemies, the neo-con Republicans, Bush, and Rove, used in 2000. The intelligent HBO film “Recount” and the Clintons remind us that all is fair in politics and war. The Clintons tell us they are “fighters,” supposedly to remind us that politics and war are dirty, deadly conflicts in which the ends justify the means and winning, not truth or decency, is the only thing that counts.

But Americans have to pay to be reminded of the importance of the concept that “every vote counts” only when they are counted properly and honestly. They have to pay to receive basic cable service and to pay an additional monthly fee for HBO, thus reinforcing the old saw that “you get what you pay for.” To get high-quality drama that deals with important and meaningful ideas without being bombarded by a gaggle of interruptive commercials, you have to pay extra – unfortunately.

Can you imagine the free networks (aka advertising-supported networks) such as ABC, CBS, FOX, or NBC putting on thought-provoking movies like “Recount” that serve the public interest as well as interest the public? In another irony that unmasks the irresponsibility of the commercial broadcast networks, it’s the commercial-free, paid-for HBO that puts on meaningful, uplifting programming when no public interest regulation makes them do so, and it’s the commercial broadcast networks that are distributing banal, lowest-common-denominator programming such as “Dancing With The Stars” to television stations that are licensed to serve the public interest.

But the commercial broadcast networks (at least ABC, CBS, and NBC) are not totally ignoring their public interest responsibility. This week the three networks with evening newscasts announced that they “have agreed to set aside the same hour of prime-time television on the first Friday night in September for a live, joint telethon benefiting cancer research.” Charles Gibson, Katie Couric, and Brian Williams “have agreed to put aside their competitive instincts, albeit temporarily,” according to the Times, and raise money to fight cancer, which has taken the lives of members of all three anchors’ families.

This joint effort is certainly worthwhile and in the public interest, but it is also, unfortunately, all too rare for the three commercial broadcast networks involved – to say nothing of FOX, which is not involved. To fulfill their public interest obligations, these networks should be doing much more to fight cancer, to educate people about global warming, and to deal with issues of public importance in all types of programming, including both news and entertainment programming. And as HBO proved with “Recount,” meaningful programming doesn’t have to be preachy or boring.

Also this past week, HBO announced that New York Times columnist Frank Rich would join former New Yorker and Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown as a creative consultant to the network. Felix Gillette, in his New York Observer piece, suggests that Rich will bring a wealth of ideas (my play on words, not his) to HBO. I have read Frank Rich religiously over the years and believe that he has a deep understanding of cultural and political issues, has a conscience, and is committed to serving the public interest. I believe he will bring his conscience and commitment to HBO and that HBO will be the better for it.

Too bad that one of the commercial broadcast networks didn’t hire Frank Rich first – they really need his conscience and commitment. But then again, as we know, you tend to get what you pay for – unfortunately…unfortunate for those who can’t afford cable or HBO.

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

May 28, 2008

Never Again

Guest blogger Marilyn Keenan writes:

The whole matter of Iraq grieves me -- from how we went there, to how we've conducted ourselves there, to the repeated tours, to how our service men and women have been treated upon their return, especially those with injuries and health issues.

I fly in and out of Baltimore/Washington International Airport all the time. And it is always full of our service people in uniform flying out to or in from Iraq. I look at those young faces and just choke up every time. Most of them really do look like kids. One night very late I went to the Starbuck's to get coffee for the drive home while Steve waited for luggage. There were six young women in uniform with Air Force name badges waiting for coffees. I asked them if they were going to Iraq and when they said yes, (as MPs), I broke up.

One said to me, "Don't do that. It doesn't help." I bought all their coffees, gave them hugs and wished them Godspeed. Oh, God, are they brave. We really must always honor them. And, like you, I still believe that the best way to honor them is to never, ever send them into harm's way unless it is absolutely necessary.

Yes, Charlie, I do hope the media and all of us will honor these young people in every way we can, including getting them home safely as fast as we can.

Posted by Charles Warner at 05:49 PM | Comments (0) | Print |

May 27, 2008

Welcome Home, Brother

My wife, Julia, and I went to a Memorial Day service in the Weekapaug Chapel this past Sunday, and one of the speakers was a veteran of the Vietnam War who had been wounded several times. But when he came home, he was not greeted as a hero because of the unpopularity of the war in America. He told us that when veterans of the Vietnam War were able to identify another vet, they would say, “Welcome home, brother,” because no one else was welcoming them.

Black, white, or Hispanic, it didn’t matter. They were all brothers who were bonded by their mutual understanding of the common hell they had all endured. They were also bonded by the lack of gratitude they experienced at home, and dealt with it by nodding their heads knowingly and saying, “Welcome home, brother.”

The veteran who spoke at the chapel made the distinction between the war, which was bad, and the veterans, who were good – who did their jobs. He told the small congregation that he hoped those who came home from Iraq received a better welcome than the Vietnam vets did. The vet received applause of agreement from his sympathetic listeners. But will we remember?

Will we remember to say sincerely, “Welcome home, brother,” to those who served in an even more unpopular and ill-conceived war than the one in Vietnam? Will we remember when the Bush government forgot them -- tried to hide the coffins and provided criminally negligent medical care at Walter Reed?

It seems to me that, in general, the media has been pretty good in reminding us of the sacrifice, valor, and service of veterans of past wars and in honoring them. But will the media say, “Welcome home, brother,” when the veterans in Iraq come home?

President Barack Obama will not bring the troops home all at once; he will withdraw them slowly and responsibly. But he will withdraw the vast majority of them. Will the media say, “Welcome home, brother” in dribs and drabs? Let’s hope so. They deserve it.

Posted by Charles Warner at 11:21 AM | Comments (1) | Print |

Media Curmudgeon at May 27, 2008 06:51 PM writes:

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May 21, 2008

Media Owning Sports Teams: Bad Mix

When Jon Stewart was interviewed by Larry King on CNN this past February, King asked Stewart, “What do you think about the candidates?” Stewart, ever funny and ever truthful with his comedic ability to expose the man behind the curtain, at one point asked the rhetorical question “is the country ready for a female or black president.” Stewart’s reply implied that the question was irrelevant because nobody asked the question eight years ago if the country was “ready for a moron.”

Now, visualize Larry King interviewing a sports reporter from Newsday, the Long Island newspaper recently purchased by Cablevision, which is controlled by the Dolan family. Cablevision owns Madison Square Garden (MSG), the Knicks basketball team, and the Rangers hockey team. Jim Dolan is the son of Cablevision founder Charles Dolan and runs MSG, the Knicks, and Rangers because he is a charter member of the media Lucky Sperm Club; not because he’s competent. How would a Newsday sports reporter respond to the question from Larry King, “What do you think about Jim Dolan?” Can you imagine the sports reporter exposing the man behind the curtain, telling the truth, and saying, “He’s a moron.”

On May 13, the wry and wise former Newsday media critic Marvin Kittman wrote on The Huffington Post:

Nobody has ever accused father Dolan of being stupid. The same thing cannot be said about his son, James. Perhaps the most important reason for buying Newsday is to get the paper to stop all the criticism on the sports pages about the way Jim has been running the Knicks into the ground. Not to mention the Rangers and Madison Square Garden…

…With the Cablevision purchase of Newsday, it's one less newspaper to harp on all the mistakes Jim Dolan has made in mismanagement, misfeasance and malfeasance in running the New York market's beloved franchises.

Kittman clearly points out the problem with media companies owning sports franchises.

Chicago Tribune Public Editor, Timothy McNulty, wrote on May 16:

This is an old sportswriters rule: No cheering in the press box.

Expect to see that rule broken whenever Tribune Co. sells the Chicago Cubs.

Ever since the parent company of the Chicago Tribune bought the ball team in 1981, Tribune journalists have lived with the suspicion of bias, favoritism and conflict of interest in covering professional baseball in Chicago…

…Tribune Co.'s ownership of the Cubs has been a bane not only to those who write and edit sports pages, but to business and metro reporters as well. I hear about it constantly. The Cubs are more than a sports franchise in terms of news coverage. Decisions about zoning regulations and parking in the neighborhood, about renovations to the treasured stadium and the sale itself are issues that have the potential to raise ethical questions.

The Yankees control the YES cable network – the Yankees don’t actually own YES outright, but, in reality, control it through a complex ownership agreement – otherwise it wouldn’t be named the Yankees Entertainment and Sports network. So, knowing what control freaks the Steinbrenners are, it is not surprising that former Yankees manager Joe Torre cancelled a YES network contract that paid him a tidy sum to do post-game interviews because he was uncomfortable answering questions that were being sent by top-level team executives (quite possibly on directives from Steinbrenner) to the on-field reporter, Kimball Jones.

Furthermore, in 2003, former Yankees bench coach Don Zimmer said some negative stuff in the media about Steinbrenner. In response, “The Boss” was rumored to have ordered YES not to show Zimmer on camera during its Yankee cablecasts.

When sports teams own or control the broadcast and cablecast rights to games, the announcers are either hired by or approved by the teams. Thus, what you get are non-critical homers who may be knowledgeable (YES announcers Ken Singleton, John Flaherty, and David Cone, and Paul O’Neill, e.g.), but they aren’t going to call ownership morons “morons.”

Journalistic integrity and honest, candid reporting is compromised when media companies own sports teams or control the coverage by reporters (print, radio, television, or bloggers). What can be done about the problem? Because it’s a bad idea for the government to get involved in sports team ownership issues, the sports leagues are going to have regulate themselves, and I would hope that leagues would not approve any media ownership of sports franchises. Fans should be aware that coverage controlled by teams and their owners will never do like Toto did and pull back the curtain and reveal who is pulling the levers or call a moron a moron.

The best sports reporting is currently being done by ESPN.com, ESPN Radio, and local sports radio stations that don’t broadcast a team’s games, and by bloggers. Even though ESPN owns a piece of the Arena Football League, I don’t feel it affects its coverage, and the columnists on ESPN.com and in ESPN the Magazine are quite good – none better than Peter Gammons on baseball. Of course, no one owns or controls independent sports bloggers, who exist to give their opinions, such as Seth Mnookin’s Feeding the Monster. If you read a cross section of sports blogs, you’ll get to know the man behind the curtain very well and get a good fix on who all the morons are.

Posted by Charles Warner at 04:05 PM | Comments (0) | Print |

May 20, 2008

Appalachia Media of Choice Revisited

A friend and blog reader was kind enough to send me a link to updated cable TV penetration information by state, which was a nice way of saying that my hunch about cable penetration in West Virginia was wrong.

So in a very rare spurt of humility, I looked at the numbers to see what the facts were and compared cable penetration in West Virginia to that in Kentucky and Oregon, where there are primaries today (Tuesday, May 20), because Kentucky is projected to give Hillary Clinton approximately as big a margin of victory as West Virginia did and Oregon is projected to go big for Obama. I wanted to see if I could draw any inferences from these comparisons. Here’s what I found:

		  Average  Average EBI  Average Market

		  Wired    Index        Rank

West Virginia     67.09       71        147

Kentucky          57.9        83.5       56

Oregon            58.4        86.8      119

The EBI Index is the household effective buying income in a state compared to the average of the US household EBI, which would be 100 percent. Thus, an EBI Index of 71 is 39 percentage points below the national average.

What these numbers show in that the five DMA (designated market areas) in the Appalachian state of West Virginia, contrary to my assumption, have a relatively high wired cable penetration, which does not include satellite TV penetration, which tends to be higher in rural areas. Of course, what these numbers do not show is the household penetration of high-speed Internet access, but it would be safe to assume that it would be concomitantly higher in the five West Virginia DMAs that the two DMAs in Kentucky and the four DMAs in Oregon.

So if cable penetration and broadband Internet access is relatively high in West Virginia, what would account for voters’ choice as compared to Oregon? It could be income, which is significantly higher in Oregon, but then Kentucky, a Clinton state, is not significantly different, so income alone can’t be the difference. Nor can race, since all three states have a much higher white population than black.

Perhaps, as I suggest in my previous blog, it has to do with media choice. Perhaps, as I suggest in my previous blog, it has to do with anxiety about change and degree of acceptance of new ideas. I suspect it as a little to do with both, but my suspicions, or hunches, have been wrong in the past. What do you think?

Posted by Charles Warner at 01:22 PM | Comments (1) | Print |

somalley at May 21, 2008 01:09 PM writes:

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May 19, 2008

The Media of Choice In Appalachia

There has been a lot of speculation about why Barack Obama lost by such a wide margin to Hillary Clinton in West Virginia and probably as big in Kentucky. TalkPointsMemo.com posted a piece by Jonathan Tilove of the Newhouse News Service who suggests it’s a Scots-Irish problem of “fighting” people who “migrated directly to the wilderness of the Appalachian mountains” and that these people are today in “…the lower rungs socially and economically.”

In a New York Times Op-Ed Column, Charles Blow suggests that Obama has an Appalachia problem that includes counties from New York State down to Tennessee – a region that is “whiter, poorer, older, more rural and less educated than the rest of the country, and seems to be voting like a bloc.”

The reasons Appalachia does not vote for Obama very well may include the people’s fighting Scots-Irish heritage or the fact that they are poorer, older, more rural, and less educated. But I believe that another reason for their voting behavior is that they live in the “wilderness of the Appalachian mountains” where broadband Internet access is very low.

I searched via Google for cable television (the main provider of broadband Internet access) penetration in West Virginia and other Appalachian states, but was unable to find any recent statistics. Therefore, I’m going on a hunch and on my assumption that cable and broadband Internet penetration tends to be lowest among “poorer, older, more rural, and less educated people.” If my hunch is correct, then the success of Obama’s campaign and fund raising efforts is as much related to media access and usage as it is to race, age, income, or education.

People who get their news from and are heavy users of the Internet are probably more likely to support Obama than those who get their news from the dinosaur media – radio, newspapers, and broadcast television. These people probably tend to be older and mired in pre-1960 media habits.

As Joshua Green points out in his excellent article in the June Atlantic titled “The Amazing Money Machine,” the “…story of Obama’s success is very much a story about money,” which was made possible by his brilliant use of the Internet. If Obama is elected in November, he will be the country’s first Internet president, and he will owe his victory to a generation (mostly younger) of Internet-savvy voters and donors.

Not only was Obama able to outspend Hillary on television advertising (“six-to-one” as Hillary whined), but probably the video with the most impact was iWilli’s “Yes We Can” which has had over 7.5 million views on YouTube.com alone, which doesn’t include the millions of views from its viral distribution, views on Obama’s and other’s Web sites, and coverage on television.

Another reason for the voting behavior of people in Appalachia, I believe, is anxiety – something close to the “bitterness” that Obama mentioned in an interview, referring to blue-collar workers in small towns in Pennsylvania. In an interview on the Harvard Business Review “IdeaCast” podcast (available on iTunes, in “Podcasts” and in “Business”), Robert Rosen, author of Just Enough Anxiety, said that modern Americans tend to be “…shackled by an outdated mind. Change and uncertainty is dangerous, it makes us anxious. We see anxiety as bad, as a sign of weakness.” He also went on to say, “We do one of two things. We deny or resist the anxiety, which gets in the way of us changing and moving forward, or we try to attack and control anxiety – we get hijacked by it…”

I think the “whiter, poorer, older, more rural and less educated” people of Appalachia are anxious because they are anxious about the future and about change, and, thus, stick with old ideas and old media. They not only more than likely do not have broadband Internet access, but are also more than likely anxious about using it if they did.

I can’t imagine the folks in Appalachia grooving to iWilli’s “Yes We Can” video. They are probably watching re-runs of “I Love Lucy” on TV sets with rabbit-ear antennae and listening to “The Grand Ole Opry” on Saturday nights on WSM-AM radio – the king of Appalachia media. And they more than likely won’t watch Obama’s inauguration speech, which is sure to be a humdinger. But I can imagine that the majority of Obama’s ardent young, post-racial, post-Appalachia supporters watching their president’s inauguration address on their computers – the media of choice of a new, young, educated generation -- not the media of choice in Appalachia.

Posted by Charles Warner at 06:56 PM | Comments (4) | Print |

Roger at May 21, 2008 12:50 PM writes:

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Media Curmudgeon at May 20, 2008 12:26 PM writes:

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Media Curmudgeon at May 20, 2008 12:24 PM writes:

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Media Curmudgeon at May 20, 2008 12:21 PM writes:

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May 15, 2008

NBC Does Digital...Wrong

The same week that the The New York Times announced the “involuntary layoffs” (HR speak for “terminations”) of 15 newsroom employees, NBC announced “that it will start a 24-hour local news channel along the lines of cable’s New York One. It will de-emphasize the identity of the NBC network’s flagship station, WNBC, Channel 4 in New York, rechristening it a ‘content center,’ and making it one part of a larger local media effort,” according to a story in none other than The New York Times.

As newspapers decline in circulation, advertising revenue, and employed newsroom personnel, television stations appear to be attempting to increase news content by using their new digital channels to distribute news to stem the declines in their audience levels and advertising revenue.

WNBC-TV acquired these additional digital channels when Congress passed the Digital Television and Public Safety Act of 2005 that put into law the new digital TV transmission system, which the FCC instituted in order to manage the TV sections of the radio spectrum more efficiently. The law mandated that all TV stations, except a few in small markets, had to broadcast a digital signal by February 17, 2009.

Because digital signals take up less spectrum space than analogue signals and they can carry more data when compressed, less spectrum space is needed, thus allowing the FCC to auction off for billions of dollars portions of the UHF and VHF spectrum to companies that want to use the freed-up spectrum for voice and data services, which is what happened when Verizon and ATT recently won the majority of the freed-up spectrum in an FCC auction.

Local television stations can use their new digital channels for either two high-definition (HDTV) channels or up to five standard-definition (SDTV) channels. Because TV networks are now delivering HDTV programming, especially in prime time and for major sporting events, virtually all TV stations are broadcasting one HDTV channel and, so, they can have two additional SDTV channel at their disposal. It works out this way because HDTV signals have twice as many lines in them as SDTV signals, thus making them twice as clear, crisp, and life like.

NBC’s announcement was significant because it was the first TV station to make public its decision of what it was going to do with this new local TV station digital channel capacity. Furthermore, according to The Times

NBC will begin to take the same steps with the other stations it owns, in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia. NBC owns 10 stations; two of them, in Miami and Hartford, Conn., are for sale. The reasons for the reshaping of WNBC are tied to the coming expansion in digital capacity for local broadcasters as well as the sharp decline in profitability for local stations. Stations will soon be able to add a number of separate channels as digitalization will make possible the division of the local broadcast spectrum. (NBC may also add a separate channel devoted to local lifestyle coverage, like real estate listings and restaurant reviews.)

Congress created the FCC in 1934 to manage the electromagnetic spectrum to keep radio stations from interfering with each other and to ensure that they would “serve the public good, convenience and necessity.” The assumption was that since the spectrum belonged to the public, those who used it free (stations) should pay for it by doing some sort of public service.

The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and station owners (led by corporate owners) have lobbied away most of the public service requirements over the years in an effort to increase station profit margins. And so what does NBC do with its new digital channel that it gets to use free? It uses it to bolster up its margins (remember CEO Jeff Zucker manages for margins, not ratings, and certainly not for public service) in an attempt to turn around “a sharp decline in profitability for local stations.”

NBC asked itself “how can we make more money with these free new channels,” not “how can we serve our community better with these free new channels.” It probably didn’t ask community leaders or its audience what it wanted, either. Why do you think NBC decided to go with a 24/7 local news channel? To serve the public interest? No, it chose news because that’s virtually the only product WNBC-TV produces – news. It can repurpose its news product from WNBC-TV local news to the digital local news channel without hiring any new people. Here’s what NBC’s John Wallace, president of local media, said:

Though it will offer round-the-clock live news, NBC is not planning to employ additional staff on the new channel, relying instead on expanding the duties of its present employees, many of whom will have to be retrained, Mr. Wallace said. He called it “a work-flow change.” He said, “There will be no added staff; we’ll just use them differently.”

Producers, for example, whose previous focus has been “getting the show on the air at the assigned time,” will be re-trained to produce video segments instead of shows, aiming to spread the segments across the various local NBC platforms.

So NBC’s decision was not to hire new people, to make its current news personnel work harder, and to make up for declining revenue instead of considering something that might serve the community better than another headline news service to compete with New York One and Cablevision’s News 12 news channels.

Of course, NBC didn’t ask me, but if it had, I would have suggested that it consider putting up a New York Green channel and fill it with environmental-news-you-can-use content. Many viewers, especially younger viewers with children, are interested in how to save money while they save the environment. Viewers might be thrilled to have a channel that gives them related news stories and tips on how to lower carbon emissions, on how to live greener, on how to save the planet, and to know where local politicians and candidates stand on green issues and what local government is doing to lower emissions.

If you live in New York, what do you think? Do you want repurposed news from WNBC-TV 24/7 or would you like some green niche news? Let WNBC-TV know. Unless we call them out, they won’t be motivated to serve the community more than they have to. If you live in a market where NBC owns a TV station, give them a piece of your green mind.

Posted by Charles Warner at 01:00 AM | Comments (1) | Print |

somalley at May 16, 2008 02:35 AM writes:

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May 13, 2008

NBC’S Zucker Outs Himself As a Philistine

NBCU’s CEO Jeff Zucker outed himself as a philistine in an interview with TV Week http://www.tvweek.com/news/2008/05/upfront_qa_zucker_on_going_fir.php when he said prior to this week’s breaking upfront market that “…we’re managing for margin, not for ratings.”

TV Week’s interview was rather lengthy, but here is Zucker’s answer to a question about ratings:

“We want to have great shows. We think we do with “Heroes,” and “Law & Order: SVU” and “The Office” and “30 Rock” and “Friday Night Lights,” you know, up and down the line. But we’re managing for margin, not for ratings. So it’s the expense of our shows, the consistency of our shows being on the schedule. It’s not determined by the size of the ratings, because the size of the ratings of a show we cannot afford is not going to do us any good anymore. This is not because we do not have the outsized hits that we once did. This is because we are in a different environment where the difference between the first and fourth or second and third is incredibly minimal.”

Regardless of what you may think about a man with a Harvard education using the phrase “incredibly minimal,” what he’s really saying if you translate his words from corporate TV network speak into plain English is, “my excuse for being the fourth-place TV network and for not having developed any new programs with socially redeeming values is because GE requires me to make a profit.”

Profit margins might be more important than social or cultural responsibility for NBC, but is NBC that different from other commercial media you might ask. And I would answer with, “No NBC is probably not much different from other media conglomerates such as CBS, Disney (ABC), and News. Corp (FOX), but there are media that do have a conscience and a sense of social and cultural responsibility in addition to caring about making a profit.”

The Harvard Business Review is one such responsible media organization. It makes money, but it also tries to do some good. An example is one of the Harvard Business Review’s Web sites, HBRGreen.org. http://www.hbrgreen.org/ Check out the video below to see HBR’s Editor, Tom Stewart, describe the opportunities for savings and profits in the environmental movement.

The media have responsibilities as a public trust, not just as margin maximizing businesses. They can make a profit and be socially responsible. They can do well by doing good. And we should demand that Jeff Zucker, NBC, and all of the media do more than just manage margins … like HBRGreen.org does.

Posted by Charles Warner at 05:37 PM | Comments (0) | Print |

May 12, 2008

Myer Berlow Spanks Me, And Rightly So

Myer Berlow posted the following comment on the Media Curmudgeon Web site, but I'm sending it out because Myer calls me out, and rightly so, for being snide, elitist, and patronizing, and I want everyone to have the benefit of his intelligent insight.

"I love you Charlie but your latest post is the problem of the Democratic Party in a single paragraph.

The Democratic party has a 10% advantage over the Republicans and although it is only 7 points short of a majority has only won 5 of 14 presidential elections in my lifetime. It is an extraordinary level of failure which almost appears to be something that one would have to work hard to do. The only way it was possible is that the party gave up the "uneducated" white people you refer to here.

This is the audience the Democratic Party lost and your attitude (and that of Adlai Stevenson, John Kerry, Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, and McGovern) is the reason we lost it.

Smart, rich educated people like Roosevelt and Kennedy joined the democratic party of because they were committed to the Democratic principles of the party that supported unions, farmers, and the dispossessed. They were not the party. Without the support of the real dispossessed in this country we wont take back the White House. Blacks and suburban liberals are not the majority of the dispossessed Americans. Its the workers in the mid west and south who lost their jobs to a misguided trade and economic policy. These are the people who put their trust in America. These are the people who fight in our wars, give to the United Way, go to church on Sunday and hope for a better life for their children. They are the people of average income and intelligence, that make up the majority. They are the mean but they are not naturally mean people.

To class them as "uneducated" may be accurate but it is neither relevant or their fault.

What's worse is they are the people who left the democratic party and wont come back to a party who thinks their belief in the 2nd amendment and their belief in God are nothing more than the reaction of ignorant people to economic frustration. They are the people who will decide the election.

We all know how many delegates Obama needs to get the nomination but somehow you have forgotten that to win the election he needs 45,000,000 more votes and most of them are these uneducated, people who do not like being made fun of and patronized."

Posted by Charles Warner at 02:48 PM | Comments (5) | Print |

Media Curmudgeon at May 14, 2008 09:34 AM writes:

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Media Curmudgeon at May 14, 2008 09:31 AM writes:

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Media Curmudgeon at May 12, 2008 05:45 PM writes:

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Media Curmudgeon at May 12, 2008 05:33 PM writes:

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Media Curmudgeon at May 12, 2008 05:29 PM writes:

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Smart NY Times Conversation

I’ve always tried to associate with people who are smarter than I am because it’s the best way to learn anything. Furthermore, one of the reasons I blog is to try to create an open, public dialogue – to create a conversation, which is really what a blog should be. Following is an e-mail conversation among three smart people in response to Roger Black’s guest blog about The New York Times.

To: Roger Black
From: Jesse Kornbluth

I actually thought your piece was -- between the lines -- pointing less to Murdoch than to the Bloomberg model: writer as content producer, who also does radio and TV

For the Times, that's beyond imagining.

Indeed, the utter failure of the recent Page 1 Times blast about military "experts" appearing on news shows struck me as due largely to the absence of a strong TV partnership -- if not the outright failure to own important TV.

From: Paul Atkinson
To: Charles Warner
(Forwarded to Jesse Kornbluth and Roger Black)

The real story there was that Brauchli was as greedy as anyone else - he took $3-5mm of Murdoch's money and said "to hell with the special News Overseers Committee" - he didn't even loop them into his resignation.

From: Roger Black
To: Jesse Kornbluth

What I was getting at is that the Journal staff was acting like babies throughout, and they're supposed to be working for a newspaper devoted to the market economy!

From: Roger Black
To: Jesse Kornbluth

[The Bloomberg Model] would have to be case-by-case, but the [best] newsroom model is blogs. Find the local equivalents of [The Times’] Sewell Chan -- reporters who are tireless and smart even if they don't get out much. Put each in charge of one of a dozen verticals. Let them write for entertainment, currency and connection to what people are actually interested in.

Then, online, hook up something to relate the vertical to the rest of the world, like “Inform” or “DayLife,” and you're off.

The real problem in making the needed changes is the institutional mind-set [t]hat makes everyone stay in their own "industry." But the TV guys are having the same problem. It's like they never heard about that old Harvard Business Review story about the New York Central passenger managers thinking of themselves as "railroad men."

Posted by Charles Warner at 09:11 AM | Comments (0) | Print |

May 09, 2008

Thanks, Hillary

When Hillary said that Obama can’t win the white, male, blue collar (read “uneducated”) vote, she finally stated what we’ve known all along but were afraid to say out of politeness. The unmistakable conclusion is that 90 percent of the black population and younger white women in America are a lot smarter than white, blue-collar (uneducated) men.

Thanks, Hillary, for making this crystal clear.

Posted by Charles Warner at 09:34 PM | Comments (1) | Print |

myer berlow at May 12, 2008 12:38 PM writes:

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The Newspaper Disease

Guest blogger Roger Black posted the following on his excellent blog, available at RogerBlack.com. Roger is the leading magazine, newspaper, and Web site designer in America, so he knows whereof he writes:

"INSIDE AND OUTSIDE of the paper, there’s no confusion about who the paper belongs to. Not the editors who built it, not the reporters who fill it with articles, but the men who bought and paid for it."

This was the killer graph of David Carr’s mournful recent column, “At the Journal, the Words Not Spoken.” There are two big assertions here—ones that helped cause the great slide in the newspaper business. First, Carr implies newspapers are for the newsroom, not for the readers. And second, he suggests that there’s something wrong with the owners of a paper actually running it.

These are wrong ideas, ones that have tripped up journalism over the last 50 years, setting a fluid, dynamic business like concrete, into a stiff, unresponsive institution. J-school defined the methodology; the unions dictated the job descriptions; and the big chains, with their organization charts and greed did the rest.

Reporters, led by The Newspaper Guild, acted on the assumption that their profession was as permanent as that of doctors and lawyers, and as such, could survive all kinds of specialization, never mind featherbedding. More than a profession, the newsroom was convinced that journalism was a public trust, which implies that the public was somehow complicit in this. Journalists believed that they had deserved this trust. The business was so good that the permanence of their social institution was taken for granted.

Of course the public was involved in the deal, but not in the way journalists came to think. People bought the newspapers, not so much because they needed them, but because they liked them. Newspapers were useful, yes, and even necessary during wars and recessions, but people paid money for them because they were interesting and sometimes fun.

The 1920s-style, general-assignment reporter (cf., "The Front Page") who could cover anything and write it up beautifully, all the while drinking heavily, was actually interested in selling newspapers. He (and it was mostly male in those days, notwithstanding "His Girl Friday," the remake of "The Front Page," starring Rosalind Russell) took delight in a zesty mix of crooks, crackpots, clowns and crooked politicians. Newspapers ran the photo of plane crashes, the maps of battles, the profiles of movie queens and breakaway baseball players and random escaped zoo animals. There were not a lot of correspondents down at the city hall waiting for press releases.

They had competition at the beginning, but it was with other newspapers that might have writers who would occasionally be guilty of juicing up a quote to make a better read. Or worse. This underpaid hack was gradually replaced by a better-trained, more responsible specialist who turned in less copy. The rewrite desk, with wordsmiths in the “slot,” was abolished. By the time I started working on newspapers in school, the daily had become a boring update on minor changes to the social status quo, crime and traffic stories, and an occasional big “enterprise” piece that reminded you of a chapter in your social studies textbook.

Radio, TV and then the Internet carved away the assumed franchise and started to sap the great profits that the newspaper owners had gotten used to. In the last quarter, the newspaper decline seems to have taken a steeper dive, and some senior news executives doubt that they’ll be able to pull up before the revenue line crashes below the expenses line.

As with the federal government, it won’t help to keep doing more of the things that aren’t working. It won’t work to keep cheapening the product. To use Gordon Bethune’s line about a similar problem in the airline business: “You can take so much cheese off the pizza that nobody will eat it.”

A New York Times employee told me this weekend that an editor at NYTimes.com can’t put copy on the Web site. Only a “producer” can do that. This is a perfect example of running newspapers like they were permanent fixtures on the landscape that could be loaded with all kinds of redundant job descriptions and still stand up. The designer who told me this probably has a better idea of what to do to turn around the paper than does Arthur Sulzberger, along with all of his sisters and his cousins and his aunts.

What is needed is a fundamental restructuring of the newspaper business. And it has gotten too late to expect the inmates to redesign the asylum. It’s going to have to be done by the proprietors. Willful, single-minded, near-genius proprietors like the ones who built the business. Sam Zell may not be the man to do it. He has not reduced the insanity at the Tribune Company no matter how many have quit or been laid off or fired. But he’s in a better position to fix the problem than the McCormick and Chandler heirs, or the stagnant old managers, or the stultified newsrooms in L.A. or Chicago (unionized or not).

Newspapers have about a year to get rid of all the people who can’t pull their own weight and to redeploy all the smart energetic journalists who can find the great stories and push them out to print, web and video. Some papers still have lots of talent, but they must push it to the front so readers can find it and find that they like it. Papers who continue to bury the smart people (or have already driven them away) will not make the cut. With the current recession, if newspapers don't move quickly, the market will crush them.

Rupert Murdoch knows something about markets and about restructuring (e.g., The Wapping dispute, 1986). He has a better chance of saving The Wall Street Journal than the Bancroft heirs did. Taking a page or two out of the Hearst or Pulitzer or Thomson books, Murdoch can work quickly and instinctively to change the paper. He already has by putting in more non-business news. Whether he is on the right track, time will tell. But I wouldn’t bet against him. Nor would I assume that “the Dirty Digger,” as they called him when he arrived in London, doesn’t understand good journalism. He is a born journalist. He takes great risks and will support great reporting, even when the establishment is pushing against him and the lawyers are lined up at the gate. (I was at the old New West when they did a piece on Jim Jones, whose legacy is the horrible Jonestown mass suicide by “drinking the Kool-Aid.” Murdoch owned New York and New West then, and when a number of California big wigs tried to get the magazine to stop the investigation, Murdoch said, “If you’ve got the goods, print the story. I’ll back you up.”) That’s what sells papers.

Whether The Times will counter by out-reporting and out-writing The Journal on its own turf — business — is unlikely, but that would be an easier goal than Murdoch’s. This competition might save both papers’ business propositions.

The reporters and editors of The Wall Street Journal, of all papers, should know this, and know about the value and rights of private property. If they had been truly watching the markets, they would have known that the newspaper business is in a tailspin, and unlikely to pull out of it. They should have been ready for the crash.

David Carr, a media columnist at The New York Times, described their sadness to see a colleague, The Wall Street Journal’s Marcus W. Brauchli go. But they shouldn’t have been surprised.

Posted by Charles Warner at 03:36 PM | Comments (1) | Print |

myer berlow at May 12, 2008 06:59 PM writes:

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May 08, 2008

Note to Senator Obama

To: Senator Barack Obama
From: Charles Warner

My wife, Julia Bradford, and I have both ardently supported you since the beginning of your campaign when we attended your March, 2007, fundraiser in New York. We are maxed out in our contributions to your primary campaign to become the Democratic Party’s nominee and have given over $1,000 to your presidential campaign because we are convinced that you will be the nominee. I co-hosted a party that raised over $10,000 for your candidacy. We took a bus from New York to Philadelphia the Sunday before the Pennsylvania primary to canvas door to door for you in South Philadelphia.

We believe in you and are convinced you will be a president who America and the world will be proud of. We are convinced you will be a president who will tell the truth to the American people and begin to make some necessary changes that will help to repair America’s reputation internationally and help to save our precious environment.

We did not give Hillary Clinton a penny. Her mendacious, destructive, poorly managed, and pandering campaign has demonstrated how unfit she is to be president. We did not give your campaign money to see it go to her. If your campaign agrees to pay off any of her campaign’s debt in order to bribe her to get out of the race, you will have betrayed our trust in you and you will plummet to her unprincipled level in the gutter.

You have promised to change the ways of Washington politics. Stick to your promise. Don’t bribe her. Don’t give her a dollar – not a penny of our money. If you do, you will not only break your promise of change, you will also not get any more money from us or millions of other people, and, most importantly, you will lose the mantle of idealism and hope that attracted us to you in the first place.

Finally, idealism is nice, but realistically, you don't need to bail her out. You're going to win the nomination without bribing her. Save the money and invest it in beating McCain. We'll help if you keep our faith and the money we've already given you.

Posted by Charles Warner at 10:04 AM | Comments (0) | Print |

May 07, 2008

I Know You

Guest blogger Paul Talbot writes:

"I’ve found you, you pathetic fool. You are the whisperer. You’re the one with a lot to say but you don’t have the guts to come out and say it. You are doing everything you can to disrupt, derail and deride Barack Obama. But you just don’t have the guts to admit that you are afraid of him because he is black.

I’ve got your number and I’ve got your picture.

That’s you, isn’t it, 42 years ago, holding a copy of “Meet the Beatles,” beaming for the Memphis newspaper photographer, getting ready to sidearm the album onto the preacher’s bonfire.

That’s you, isn’t it, indignant because John Lennon compared his band’s popularity to that of your main apostolic man.

That wasn’t even your album. You stole it from your older sister because she told your parents she caught you whacking off in her closet.

And the only reason you showed up for the Beatles burning at that evangelical church was because you thought Linda Sue Morris would be there.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t. Linda Sue and two of her girlfriends told their parents they were going to a horse show. But they actually went to see Otis Redding.

That sad, intolerant church. It’s sure come a long way, hasn’t it? You’ve got that big video screen now and a sprawling parking lot just like the one at the Winn Dixie.

No, you back off, because I’m allowed to mock your so-called church. I’ve got the right. I was an Episcopal choirboy at St. Gabriel’s in Marion, Massachusetts, where, as part of our indoctrination to capitalism, we were paid to both rehearse and perform at services.

And had we known at the time, we wouldn’t have cared too much about our negro Senator banging Barbara Walters.

So, after you burned that Beatles album, after your stint with Nixon’s Young Republican goons trolling the hotel lobbies at the Miami convention for hot babes and getting nowhere, you sank into the kind of moral swamp your heroes Erlichman and Haldeman would have been proud of.

And today, you’re skulking out of your swamp to badmouth Barack. I’ve heard you and you’re not bad, you’re just credible enough to be dangerous.

But the caper’s up when you tell us we need to be drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to keep America strong and help our working families.

Ironclad, irrefutable proof that you just don’t get it. You don’t see that oil is soon to be yesterday’s news. Hay, oats.

And you don’t even see that the news, yesterday’s, today’s, whatever, well, that’s sort of yesterday’s news also. The news is something else now, and I’m not quite sure what kind of a label to slap on it.

But I know what kind of label to slap on you, you tawdry, shopworn, backwater cracker, yearning for some kind of approval, some kind of belonging, some kind of redemption.

Imagine.

If Otis Redding had performed on a different date, if you had a shot at Linda Sue Morris the night your church burned those Beatles records, there’s no telling how your politics may have turned out."

Posted by Charles Warner at 10:55 AM | Comments (2) | Print |

Steve Touhill at May 7, 2008 10:39 PM writes:

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Media Curmudgeon at May 7, 2008 01:57 PM writes:

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May 05, 2008

NBC’s Kentucky Derby Coverage Was Not Yummy

NBC covered the Kentucky Derby like a state primary election – only worse. First, all the coverage leading up to the race was speculation about who might win, during the race it was about who was leading and coming on strong, and at the end of the race it was all about who won. The coverage deified the winner, once again reinforcing Vince Lombardi’s motto that “winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing,” and ignored the tragedy of the gutsy, overbred filly Eight Belles who ran herself to death.

Covering the tragedy might have been a bummer for Derby’s fast food sponsor, Yum Brands, and so NBC joined CBS in proving that it was in the advertising delivery business. Guess who NBC interviewed first after the obligatory rider-owner-trainer interviews and after the official winner was announced? Right, the CEO of Yum Brands, which has its corporate headquarters in Louisville. Of course it was more important to cover the sponsor than to cover the tragedy of Eight Belles and the issue of the greed and overblown ego of owners who over-breed their horses to give them the lungs and heart of an elephant and the ankles of a gazelle.

At least in covering a state primary election, the TV networks interview the candidates and supporters of whoever came in second and even third. At least they discuss to some degree the strategy for the race and even some of the major issues that might have led to the outcome. But I don’t recall even the most egregiously commercial of them conducting a multiple-question cream puff interview with an advertiser.

In the age of public-service-be-damned over-commercialization of the media, as especially television, the walls that used to exist between church and state (editorial and sales) have been demolished by profit-maximizing, greedy CEOs and their MBA, bean-counting minions.

For those who might remember the good old days when the integrity of the news or editorial product was more important than the feelings of an advertiser, and for those of you who can’t imagine that such a halcyon time ever existed, please read the following anecdote sent to me by Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter and author, Nick Kotz, after my previous blog about CBS being in the advertising delivery business.

“In 1967-68, long after I had written a long series of stories about abuses in the meat packing industry, someone at the Des Moines Register, where I was working then, sent me the copy of a speech that the late Frank Eyerly, managing editor of the Register, had made to the Register and Tribune's advertising department. In effect, he told them that they should be proud that the newspaper continued to publish the meat packing stories, even after one of the paper's largest advertisers – a meat packing company – had pulled its advertising in protest of the stories. The stories won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. But that's not the point. The point is that the news editors, backed by management, stood their ground, and then explained to the advertising department why this was a good thing and they should be proud of their paper's integrity. And never a word was ever mentioned to the reporter who wrote the stories. The editor didn't want me to know that the paper was getting economic retaliation. Those were the days.”

Maintain editorial integrity and risk pissing off advertisers. Try suggesting that to NBC’s CEO, Jeff Zucker. He won’t think it’s so yummy.

Posted by Charles Warner at 03:24 PM | Comments (1) | Print |

Jesse Kornbluth at May 7, 2008 12:50 PM writes:

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May 02, 2008

Call Me Irresponsible

The song “Call Me Irresponsible” was written in 1962 by Jimmy Van Husen and Sammy Cahn for Judy Garland to sing at a CBS dinner to celebrate her upcoming variety show and to poke fun at herself for being flaky. Later that year Frank Sinatra recorded it for his “Sinatra’s Sinatra” album and it became one of Old Blue Eyes’ biggest hits.

I claim to “write about the media – the good, the bad, and the irresponsibly ugly.” But being ugly and irresponsible depends on what you stand for and where you sit.

I was proud to have worked at CBS in the glory days of CBS News in the late 1960s and early 1970s and for NBC in the middle and late 1970s when Julian Goodman, former head of NBC News, was Chairman of NBC, then owned by RCA. I believed that broadcasting was about serving a community’s and the public “interest, convenience, and necessity” – it was a public trust first and profits are what allowed a broadcasting company to survive, thrive, and serve. When I was the general manager of radio stations, I believed that entertainment programming (primarily music) was a confectionary topping that made the medicine of news and editorials palatable – yes, we did editorials in those days and even endorsed candidates for local office (CBS and NBC were too timid to let the general managers endorse candidates for national office).

Starting in the late 1980s I was proud to teach for 10 years at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, the country’s first journalism school. I taught management, sales, and media economics courses that emphasized the concept that the goal of management and sales was to deliver revenue and profits in order to sustain the media’s mission as a public trust and serve as a vitally important vehicle for informing the polity so it could make good decisions about its government and its leaders – to protect our democracy, in other words.

Thus, for the media to be responsible, it meant that it must keep the public reliably informed about important issues, in my public-trust view.

But in the 1980s, the media industry was invaded by MBAs who were taught in America’s graduate business schools that they were primarily responsible to media owners, stockholders, to maximize their wealth – to maximize shareholder value. Agency theory and free market theory posted that managers were surrogates for stockholders, and that self-interest, as opposed to public interest, was proper because it lead to market efficiency.

These theories led to deregulation of the media, manager greed, disastrous mergers, conglomeration, unconscionably astronomical media executive pay, and celebrity news – to news as porn.

Thus, for the media to be responsible, it means that it must maximize the wealth of media executives and faceless institutional investors – the public be dammed – in the maximize-shareholder-value view. Or, as Marie Antoinette was incorrectly attributed as saying, “let them eat cake.” Or, as CBS CEO Les Moonves might say, “Let them watch ‘Survivor.’”

So, who’s irresponsible, the public-trust-first (PTF) people or the maximize-shareholder-value-first (MSVF) people? You know who’s right, but the MSVF people are winning and will continue to win as long as you watch television – the biggest offender.

Turn off your TVs and click on ads on The Huffington Post or JackMeyers.com, ad-supported websites where this blog appears, so that advertisers will know that in order to reach a very smart, well-educated, group of gorgeous people with high incomes, they have to buy advertising on sites that appeal to us.

Posted by Charles Warner at 03:41 PM | Comments (2) | Print |

Media Curmudgeon at May 5, 2008 11:09 PM writes:

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Jesse Kornbluth at May 2, 2008 04:20 PM writes:

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