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.

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.

"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."

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."

Thanks, Hillary, for making this crystal clear.

"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.

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.

"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."

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.

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.

This purchase occurred in the same week as the publication of former CBS newsman Roger Mudd’s well-reviewed book, The Place To Be: Washington, CBS, and the Glory Days of Television News. On the last page of the book, Mudd writes about the CBS News Washington Bureau: “We had no doubts about how good we were; we had no doubts about our values; we had no doubts that our mission was to cover the news without flattering or tricking the viewer. Most of us thought ourselves chosen. It was if we had been lifted up by a journalistic deity and dropped in the middle of the Washington bureau to serve our country by doing God’s work.”

In the glory days of CBS News Mudd appeared three times a day from the steps of the Capital reporting on the Senate filibuster debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Today CBS is more about sugary fluff like whether Katie Couric will stick around for the inauguration and “The Big Bang” than about nourishing news and entertainment.

It’s ironic and telling that CBS is buying International Outdoor Advertising (IOA), a company that has no content except for advertising – a goal CBS and the other television networks obviously embrace as they steadily increase the number of commercials and crowd out content. It’s a vicious cycle: More commercials drive away viewers, which lowers ratings, which necessitates putting in more commercials to maintain profit levels, which drives away viewers, and so on until death do us part. Also, IOA is strong outside of the US and is moving to digital billboards – giant TV sets in other words.

Therefore, what CBS is doing is taking TV out of the living room and onto the streets of the world and putting nothing but commercial messages on the big screens. So if we get sick of the sugary fluff on TV at home and try to escape it by going outside, we are accosted by huge TV sets showing nothing but commercials. Heads they win, tails you lose. The move is perfect Orwellian doublethink by CBS CEO Les Moonves, who got a 29 percent raise for driving the stock down almost 40 percent and who believes “news is entertainment,” who probably believes that “war is peace,” and who is more than likely laughing up his cuff linked sleeves at Mudd’s notion of a journalistic deity dropping him and other newspeople in the middle of the Washington bureau to serve their country by doing God’s work.

God’s work, as everyone knows, is to make a profit by delivering advertising to the world.

Barstow’s story, “Message Machine: Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand” in the Sunday, April 20, Times is a thoroughly researched, eye-opening investigative article that details how the Pentagon and the Bush Administration manipulated television network military analysts to push the administration’s pro-war, everything-is-great agenda for the Iraq invasion and occupation.

Not only were the TV analysts, mostly former generals, willingly manipulated by the Pentagon, but they were also not required by the networks to be transparent and reveal their conflicts of interest – their ties to lobbyists, consultants, and contractors desperate to get a piece of the war spending bounty.

The bad news is that even though the military analysts look bad – complicit and greedy – the networks look even worse – careless and duplicitous. The Times article by Barstow reminds us that we can’t trust television network news, especially FOX News, CNN, and MSNBC which were the most frequent users of the analysts.

I don’t know why we still delude ourselves by calling television “news” news. It isn’t news; it’s entertainment. Bill O’Reilly, Chris Matthews, Sean Hannity, Keith Olbermann, Katie Couric, Wolf Blitzer, Charles Gibson, Lou Dobbs, and Joe Scarborough are not journalists, they are entertainers. Like all entertainers, their goal is to be rich and famous. And to do so, they have to get noticed, they have to be outrageous, different, or cute, or, best of all, simplistically controversial and confrontational.

There is virtually no difference between these “news” entertainers and professional wrestlers. They all become popular by being over-the-top outrageous, fake, pumped up, overly made up tough guys who strut to a scripted “fight.” The animal ids of Americans have an increasing appetite for bloody fights and fighters – even in our politicians. It must be a reaction to collective frustration and anger at our powerlessness to make leaders and television executives care more about us than about themselves – their fame and wealth. Celebrity is the goal, not integrity. It’s Orwellian: Deception is truth; war is peace; entertainment is news.

There is one ray of hope. The Media Post Center for Media Research Brief reports:

"According to the Newspaper Association of America, new consumer research conducted by Clark, Martire & Bartolomeo and commissioned by Google, among people who research products and services after seeing them advertised in newspapers, 67 percent use the Internet to find more information, and nearly 70 percent of them actually make a purchase following their additional research.

John F. Sturm, NAA president and CEO, said '...newspaper advertising is incredibly effective in motivating consumers to make a purchase. This new study... demonstrates that print ads also drive people to conduct additional product research online.'"

This is the first good news I’ve seen about newspapers in over two years. The report suggests that a combination of newspaper and online advertising works best for advertisers, which might slow down the decline of newspaper advertising, thus allowing newspapers such as The New York Times, the Washington Post, and other great newspapers to survive as both print and online publications and to continue to serve the public interest and counteract the toxic, non-news entertainment of television.

Neil Derrough writes:

"Let's say that it was just found that John McCain had a long term friendship with David Duke. That he had supported Duke's past campaigns and had included him in his circle of advisers. And, when the press probed this relationship they were accused of sensationalizing and covering "dirty laundry". How much credit do you think that argument would get.

The messenger can be blamed for unfairness for covering Obama's past relationships but a rational public knows better."

Paul Atkinson writes:

"Obama was correct - that 45 minutes of "gotcha" questioning on the ABC debate was a waste of time.

But from a conservative's perspective, Obama's "fresh way of looking at real issues" inevitably involves three standard thrusts
1) virtually any economic or social ill affecting Americans today can and should be ameliorated by government action

2) the insurance, drug, mortgage and oil companies are the root of all evil and

3) it is an article of faith that income taxes must be raised on those who already pay 44-45% of every incremental dollar they earn in income taxes

When you examine Obama's positions, he emerges as an orthodox Democratic liberal. If he truly wishes to create a new paradigm for the 21st century, " the voter as victim" is not going to cut it.

Even Bill Clinton was willing to challenge the victimization rationale in the black community by ending "welfare as we know it" and was willing to acknowledge America's need to compete in a world of free trade."

Bruce Braun writes:

"We start by throwing out gerrymandering to protect incumbents that currently return 98% back to office every election cycle and impose term limits of not more than 12 years in the senate or congress or in combination. We limit the president and most governors, why not the rest of them.

Impose restrictions for no less than two years upon those leaving office from working for lobbying on behalf or representing any company that came before any committee they served upon. The executive branch and cabinet officers are prohibited from such employment and have been since Nixon left. Preclude ex-presidents from profiteering on their tenure by prohibiting any consulting or advising,etc for anyone for at least four years! Write all the books you want but learn to live on your presidential pension.

Eliminate congressional pensions and free healthcare during and after being in office. Make them pay for it, like everyone else. No more junkets all over the world so they can play junior secretaries of state or defense or free transport on military aircraft. No more free bumps to first class when flying commercial. No luxury rental cars or luxury cars paid for by taxpayers...limit them to Chevy Cobalts. And if you are arrested for drunk driving, getting a blowjob from an intern, wagging your weenie in a men's room, are caught performing an unnatural act with a 9 year-old boy or barnyard animal, you are suspended without pay until found innocent.

Once we take out the career hacks, coat-tailers (like Hillary) and all the perks and benefits, we will most likely have some folks who really are in the service of the public.

If only I were King!"

I am blessed to have so many friends with such diverse opinions -- it keeps me young.

Shame on ABC

Wednesday night’s Democratic debate was the most shameful use of TV air time I have ever seen. First rate journalists like Charles Gibson and George Stephanopolous used their stage at the Independence Center to sweep the major issues of our time off the table, and encourage the candidates to air their dirty laundry before the voters in Pennsylvania and the rest of the country. The idea that voters are truly concerned with “baking cookies” and what some pastor said in a church, instead of how they are going to pay their bills, get healthcare for their families and send their children to college, is insulting the intelligence of every citizen of our country. Any American who enters a voting booth next November, and casts their ballot based on race, religion, gender or age, deserves exactly what they get. We did not need ABC to add fuel to the fire in a race between the first woman and first African American to run for the presidency.

Gibson and Stepanopolous were clearly out to sensationalize the debate by fanning the flames of an already contentious campaign between Senators Clinton and Obama, and thereby cheated voters who tuned in to see and hear a discussion of real issues. ABC’s top people steered the candidates into a corner on Iraq as well, by asking for ironclad commitments about troop withdrawals. They also added fuel to the fire with regard to taxes, asking each candidate for a solemn pledge that they would not raise taxes on those earning less than $200 Thousand Dollars per year.

As a result of their myopic handling of the debate, Gibson and Stephanopolous cheated the American people, and the two candidates, from a real discussion of the monumental problems either will face if elected President.

If you are not an Obama supporter you probably loved the questions that were asked, so don't waste your time on the video.

Here's the video: