Media Curmudgeon

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October 29, 2009

The NY Times and Bloomberg Act as Stenographers for MSNBC on Anti-CNN Coverage

On Tuesday, October 27, New York Times reporter Bill Carter wrote an article titled “CNN Last in TV News on Cable” in which he gave 25-54 ratings and rankings in prime time for the four cable news networks. He did not indicate where he got the numbers.

Sarah Rabil wrote a similar article on Bloomberg.com posted at 3:18 p.m. EDT and titled “CNN Falls to Fourth Place in Prime-Time Cable News” in which she wrote: “CNN, owned by Time Warner Inc., placed fourth among cable news networks in prime-time audience ratings in October, according to Nielsen Co. data provided by MSNBC.”

OK, now we know where Bill Carter got his numbers – the MSNBC flacks had been spinning the story to media reporters and columnists – and Sarah, as a good reporter should, wrote where she got the numbers. Bill Carter didn’t, but you know as well as I do what the original source of his information was.

Carter and Rabil acted as virtual, or rather digital, stenographers for the MSNBC public relations flacks, just like the flacks wanted them to. Neither Carter nor Rabil gave much insight into why the ratings might have been the way they were.

When I returned to the Bloomberg.com site at about 7:15 p.m. to link to the CNN story , I noticed it had been updated at 7:58 p.m. and the name of another reporter, Brett Pulley, had been added. The story’s headline was “CNN Falls to Fourth in Prime-Time Cable News Ratings (Update1),” was longer than the original one, and mentioned that the ratings information was “according to Nielsen data cited in an e-mail by Alana Russo, a spokeswoman for MSNBC.”

At least the Bloomberg.com reporters were transparent about where they got their information, but the journalistic question is “would the story get played to make CNN look bad if it wasn’t sold by MSNBC flacks?” and “Do the stories give insight or are the reporters merely acting as stenographers for their source?’

Carter’s New York Times story was more insightful and gave some possible reasons for CNN’s decline: CNN was down from 2007 and 2008, which were dominated by political news, and because MSNBC and Fox News in prime are filled with opinion programming and CNN, except for the ridiculous Lou Dobbs, isn’t. Prime time was emphasized because that’s where ratings and, thus, ad dollars are highest.

But neither Carter nor Rabil and Pulley’s story made the connection between CNN’s rating declines and the drastic change in the news network’s channel position on Time Warner Cable in New York, where almost 10 percent of the country’s TV homes are.

CNN was moved from the favorable Channel 10 position on Time Warner Cable in New York to the unfavorable position of Channel 78 and Fox’s FX network was moved to Channel 10. Why do you suppose this happened? Could it possibly have anything to do with the fact that in February, 2007, Time Warner spun off Time Warner Cable into a separate public company?

When Time Warner owned both Time Warner Cable and the Turner Broadcasting System, which owns CNN and HLN (previously Headline News), they were in the same family and CNN got favorable treatment from Time Warner Cable.

But after the divorce in 2007, the newly independent Time Warner Cable wasn’t in a mood to be nice to its former family members. After February 2007, Time Warner Cable was in a position to maximize profits for itself, not for its former family members.

I suspect Time Warner Cable instituted a pay-for-play policy and began to charge cable networks for more favorable channel positions. I’ll bet Fox sweetened the pot and got FX moved to Channel 10 in New York. I’ll bet that MSNBC ponied up, too, and got a more favorable position (Channel 14 in New York), next to its sibling, CNBC on Channel 15. It doesn’t look like CNN or HLN (Channel 58 in New York) coughed up enough, if any, money and got buried on Channel 78, which could affect the ratings.

The Nielsen ratings sample is notorious small and, thus, is not terribly stable from rating period to rating period, In October, according to MSNBC’s numbers as fed to the Times and Bloomberg.com, CNN in prime time had 202,000 viewers 25-54 and MSBNC had 250,000. Those 48,000 viewers could be a rounding error caused by the change in channel position (although CNN lost in a couple of months to MSNBC before the channel switch) or to sampling error.

But perhaps the larger questions is, “What does it matter to cable subscribers if Time Warner Cable is making more money because of pay-for-play, if indeed it is using this strategy?”

Well, my wife and I pay Time Warner Cable $142 a month for cable and an internet connection, and I can’t remember the price of our service ever going down. Well, that’s not entirely true; we recently got a measly $1.00 taken off our bill for eliminating paper and paying electronically. But the point is that our cable bills are going up, the service is passable at best (the internet service is fully automated by means of voice recognition and you have to give up two fingers and a toe to get to talk to a real person), and Time Warner Cable is now making more money than ever.

Not what you’d call consumer friendly. No wonder the cable industry is vilified in public opinion polls and shows up lower than even journalists and politicians (and that’s lower than whale dung). Consumers are angry, and having the cable companies inconvenience them with senseless channel switches just to make more money is going to make them angrier.

Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company (Time Warner is number two), is in negotiations to buy 51 percent of NBC Universal from GE. Congress will give this proposed merger close scrutiny because both Congress and consumers are angry, and when they both find out about play-for-play, they’ll be angrier, I’ll bet.

And it doesn’t help when business and media reporters don’t scrutinize stories the are fed by PR flacks and act as stenographers for cable company spin.

Posted by Charles Warner at 4:10 PM | Comments (0) | Print |

October 22, 2009

The Media Are Schrodinger’s Cat

The media today are like the visitor (a dybbuk?) in the opening scene of the Coen brothers’ new movie, “A Serious Man” – no one knows if it’s alive or dead. Or, it could be, like Schrodinger’s Cat (a mathematical problem referred to in the Coen movie) in a state of being simultaneously alive and dead.

The Schrodinger’s Cat paradox is a problem of quantum mechanics and exceptionally difficult to get your mind around. When applied to the media landscape today, it brings to the fore a number of puzzling and complex questions: Are newspapers alive or dead? Are the main-stream media fair and balanced or hopelessly biased? Is the New York Times too liberal or not liberal enough? Is the NPR business model fair to competing commercial radio stations and does its programming skew liberal?

The Scrodinger’s Cat paradox is a thought problem meant to demonstrate that the superposition (simultaneous inert and moving) properties of quantum particles collapse into a definitive state (inert or moving) only at the exact moment of quantum measurement.

Applied to media, this would mean that a particular media outlet (cable network, newspaper Web site, or blog) is simultaneously fair and balanced and hopelessly biased, and that a newspaper is simultaneously dead and alive until they are examined; then they become one or the other. Two specific examples come to mind: Fox News and The New York Times.

Such Fox News vaudeville (Neil Postman’s label in Amusing Ourselves To Death) performers such as Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity are clearly hopelessly biased entertainers whose emotional appeals attract an uneducated or incurious audience. On the other hand, Fox News reporter Major Garrett and anchor Shepard Smith seem to be as advertised – fair and balanced.

The New York Times newspaper, if not dead, is clearly dying. This week it laid off another 100 people from its newsroom, and advertising revenue continues to tank. The Times Company announced it wasn’t going to sell the Boston Globe, not because of kindness to its staff or a desire to do a public service but because it couldn’t find a buyer willing to take the dying paper off its hands. We’ll have to wait and see if its San Francisco edition can make it. On the other hand, the NYTimes.com Web site is flourishing. It’s the best newspaper site and best, most innovative news Web site. It’s very much alive.

There are many other examples of media in a simultaneous state of life and death, fairness and bias, and left and right that become one or the other when examined by critics, which, of course, simplifies their complexity and leaves out multiple nuances.

It took a brain as huge as Einstein’s to conceive of quantum physics and someone as thoughtful as Schrodinger to help us to begin to understand the concept. Today understanding the media is almost as difficult as understanding quantum physics.

The problem is that everyone in America today isn’t thinking about the media as Schrodinger’s Cat, but about the Balloon Boy, or who won on “American Idol,” or texting their friends. So who are the modern media Schrodingers who can help us understand the media?

Certainly not the self-absorbed gossip mavens such as Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolff and most other popular, superficial, celebrity-obsessed media critics. On the other hand, pay attention to The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta (subscribe on iTunes). Never miss a broadcast or podcast of Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone’s “On the Media” (subscribe on iTunes). Subscribe to Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody’s blog, and keep up on what Jeff Jarvis writes, on this Buzz Machine blog, even though he will probably infuriate you, as he often does me. Finally, read Neil Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves To Death because it’s still scarily relevant today.

Posted by Charles Warner at 12:44 PM | Comments (0) | Print |

October 14, 2009

Rush Thrown For a Loss

Rush Limbaugh was thrown for a loss by the NFL players union when NFL Players executive director DeMaurice Smith “made a move to solidify the union against a bid by conservative talk show radio host Rush Limbaugh as part of a group that aims to purchase the St. Louis Rams,” according to ESPN.com.

ESPN.com reports that:

In an e-mail to the union's executive committee on Saturday specifically addressing Limbaugh's bid, Smith said, "I've spoken to the Commissioner [Roger Goodell] and I understand that this ownership consideration is in the early stages. But sport in America is at its best when it unifies, gives all of us reason to cheer, and when it transcends. Our sport does exactly that when it overcomes division and rejects discrimination and hatred."

Good for Smith and the players union. And those words are difficult for me to write because I have a deep-seated suspicion and dislike for most unions because unions have been a major factor in the decline of the American steel and automobile industries and are a major impediment to improving education.

I have created a Web site at www.act-uawlocal7902iswrong.com that details why the United Auto Workers (UAW) is wrong for The New School and NYU, where I am a part-time faculty member, and why the UAW and unions are wrong for higher education.

As an academic, I’m outraged to be represented by a mechanics’ union primarily because the union’s mission and goals are totally opposite from those of universities. The union’s push for seniority and guaranteed work loads stifle innovation and are antithetical to a te4aching meritocracy.

On the other hand, the NFL Players union is doing the right thing by speaking out against the hate mongering, racist entertainer Rush Limbaugh being a partial owner of an NFL team on which over half of its players are African-American.

It would be better for the country if more unions and other organizations, such as church groups and social clubs, spoke out against hate mongering and racism by media bloviators such as Limbaugh and Glen Beck. Perhaps they could moderate the extremism better than the greedy media conglomerates and broadcasters that have abandoned the responsibility of being a public trust and caved into craven commercialism.

It is ironic that a union has taken on the role of speaking out against extremism when the media that distribute the extremist views of the Limbaughs and Becks are not responsible enough to moderate these exclusionary hate mongers.

Go NFL Players union!

Posted by Charles Warner at 6:50 PM | Comments (1) | Print |

Bruce Braun at October 16, 2009 6:46 PM writes:

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October 8, 2009

Google, Group Polarization, and Jon Stewart

A vast majority of people use Google to search for information, and those searches can contribute to group polarization and extremism.

In the October 12 issue of the New Yorker, Ken Auletta, in an article titled “Searching for Trouble” about Google, quotes from Nicholas Carr’s book The Big Switch

A company run by mathematicians and engineers, Google seems oblivious to the possible social costs of transparent personalization. They impose homogeneity on the Internet’s wild heterogeneity. As the tools and algorithms become more sophisticated and our online profiles more refined, the Internet will act increasingly as an incredibly sensitive feedback loop, constantly playing back to use, in amplified form, our existing preferences.”

And Auletta continues:

Carr believes that people will narrow their frame of reference, gravitate toward those whose opinions they share, and perhaps be less willing to compromise, because the narrow information we receive will magnify our differences, making it harder to reach agreement.

Tax Day Tea Party protesters, birthers, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh fans on the far right and anti-nuclear power and legalize-marijuana activists on the left do not search for information that does not confirm their biases. They seek information, typically by searching for it on Google, that reinforces their prejudices, as, frankly, we all tend to do. We then fan the flames of our prejudices by watching demagogic bloviators on TV or listening to them on radio as they give us our reinforcing dopamine fix.

In his book Going To Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide Cass R. Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor and head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration, writes about group polarization, or how when groups discuss an issue and share their views with each other, the views tend to move toward extremes.

As an example, Sunstein discusses the spread of conspiracy theories:

For the purposes of understanding the spread of conspiracy theories, it is especially important to note that group polarization is particularly likely, and particularly pronounced, when people have a shared sense of identity and are connected by bonds of solidarity.

Thus, self-selected and self-defined members of a group with a shared sense of identity, such as anti-Obama right wingers or anti-regulation business people, are likely to share information (blogs, message boards, etc.) and, thus, become polarized and more extreme in their views.

We tend to believe that lots of information is good for a democratic society, and in theory it is. However, in practice there is now so much information (content) available that it is possible by means of selective searches and selective perception to create an echo chamber so that opposing sounds are never heard.

When America got its news from just three network early newscasts, and then mostly from Walter Cronkite, there was a homogenizing effect. Virtually all adults were exposed to the same relatively balanced (and bland) news. They had to work hard to get information from the John Birch Society delivered in brown envelopes in the mail.

Today wing nuts can easily go on Google and create their own hate-filled echo chamber. Therefore, Google, the king of search, is unintentionally aiding in group polarization; whereas Fox News is intentionally doing so.

As responsible citizens, we can do nothing to stop this group polarization and extremism at both ends of the political spectrum, but we can be aware of it and see these positions for what they are – poisonous extremes – and understand that the antidote consists of inserting diverse and opposing opinions directly into the veins of polarized extremists.

Short of using force to accomplish this feat individually on extremists, it is the duty of the media to point out the irresponsibility and craziness of these extreme views. No one performs this duty better than Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show.” He is the best antidote to the group polarization and extremism that is being enabled, in part, by Google searches. Watch “The Daily Show” and stay sane.

Posted by Charles Warner at 4:40 PM | Comments (0) | Print |