mediaville, ny 14607

The future of the BBC

2006-04-21T09:24:00.000-04:00

I like to keep tabs with what's going on with the BBC--the British Broadcasting Corporation--and this has been a big year for "Auntie Beeb". The UK government last month published a white paper on the BBC that basically guarantees its future as a public service broadcaster for the next 10 years (although with some significant changes. There's a lot of debate just now about what the license fee should be set at and just how commercialized the BBC should be allowed to get. But the Corporation's not about to be privatized . . . yet.

I must admit: I love the BBC. I particularly love the fact that, thanks to UK public funding, the BBC puts so much of its material on the web--for free. But I fear that with every time I get some wonderful new piece of information - in text, audio, or video - from the BBC's enormous free web archive, I (and millions like me) annoy numerous commercial operators who would like to charge fees for similar services, but who are unable to do so because of the BBC's dominant presence. I worry that the government, pushed on by the increasingly powerful commercial lobby, will continue to try to undermine the BBC's funding and its editorial independence.

Some background. Of course, the BBC has often had an antagonistic relationship with British governments over years. Margaret Thatcher and her "rottweiler press secretary" Bernard Ingham hated the BBC in the '80s, especially in light of its relatively balanced news coverage of the Falklands/Malvinas conflict and the IRA campaign (Click here to see how Peter Snow covered the Falklands for BBC Newsnight in 1982; and Gavin Esler's piece on the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA)). Thatcher's ideological opposition to public service broadcasting also led her to push hard for commercialization of the corporation in the 1980s - though the 1986 Peacock Report rejected that strategy and helped preserve the license fee funding model. (See this piece by Jean Seaton in British Journalism Review for some more context).

The BBC survived - somehow - the era of director-general John Birt and succeeded in having its charter renewed again in 1996. However, the Blair government itself became a source of opposition to the BBC, especially with the Iraq War. Blair attempted to use the Hutton Inquiry (into the suspicious death of a UK weapons inspector, Dr. David Kelly) as a stick with which to beat the BBC into quiesence. Again, Lady Luck was on the Beeb's side, and an outporing of public support for the corporation over the duplicitous government persuaded the Blair administration to back off (especially after the resignation of communications director Alastair Campbell).

Another source of attack has been the growing power of the commercial media in Britain. the private press has always been lukewarm about the BBC. But the proliferation of new over-the-air, cable, and satellite channels brings with it new battalions of media lobbyists committed to the U.S. commercial model and fundamentally opposed to the notion of public-financed broadcasting. In particular, the BBC's massive presence on the Web has drawn fire from commercial operations complaining about their inability to compete against this free treasure trove of news and information (and this has led to occasional calls for the elimination of the BBC's web presence. More broadly, commercial pressure groups have attacked the BBC and its license fee financing system. (To get a flavor of the debate see the following selection of articles from The Guardian and The Observer, tracking pro and con arguments: pro-license fee; BBC's excessive commercialism; BBC web operations; Channel 4 attack; anti-BBC.)

Despite the opposition, the BBC remains strong, and it's even getting more "cool" again. Most importantly, it still has strong public support - that's what has saved its bacon a number of times during disputes with the government - but the corporation amasses enemies all over the place. As a British Journalism Review editorial reminded us at the height of the Andrew Gilligan/David Kelly affair: "Among journalists who work for rival news media, the BBC has never had a great number of friends." And, to paraphrase Elrond's reminder to Gandalf in "The Fellowship of the Ring": The BBC's list of allies grows thin.

But Auntie Beeb battles on regardless. British governments setting out to hobble the BBC for one reason or another have usually pulled back from the brink. (Incidentally, for a quickie guide to BBC-government controversies down the years, check out this Answers.com page, titled "BBC Controversy".) And the BBC's commercial opposition has failed - so far - to land a telling blow. The BBC is to get its funding renewed for another 10 years, taking the current system potentially to 2016. And the BBC continues to argue for its unique position in British society - and indeed, it is working to expand that role, most prominently in cyberspace (see the Beeb's own arguments in its Future of the BBC report.)

But here's what really worries me. The question arises as to how the BBC would fare if it came under sustained assault from the much more conservative global and especially U.S. political-business establishment. As the BBC expands its reach - geographically, around the globe, and rhetorically, through providing a broader range of opinion both from within its walls and from greater interactivity with its audiences - it is open to the threat of retaliation not only from domestic commercial media in the UK but also, increasingly, from global (mostly U.S.-owned) transnational media corporations. This is a potentially fatal development for the hard-earned integrity and political/economic independence of the BBC. It is not unreasonable to speculate that if the BBC continues to extend its reach into the U.S. market, becoming dependent on U.S. revenue and coming to be perceived as “domestic” U.S medium, this could have a deleterious impact not only on its “alternative status” in the States, but also on its independence from American political forces. In others words, if the BBC moves from being considered an alternative news outlet to being a mainstream outlet it risks being drawn into the same political-economic pressures that have so successfully constrained U.S. news media in recent years.

That would be very bad.

Free Newspapers: Another nail in the coffin?

2006-04-17T15:39:00.000-04:00

For students (and faculty) attending SUNY Geneseo it might seem like newspapers are free--after all, piles of copies of the New York Times, USA Today and the Democrat and Chronicle are distributed around campus gratis every day, for anyone to pick up (all part of increasingly desperate efforts by newspaper companies to encourage young people to pick up the daily newspaper reading habit). But the fortunate situation here shouldn't disguise the fact that, for most people, newspapers cost money, and have to be paid for ... or at least that's the way it's always been, until now.

More and more, we're seeing the emergence of a whole new class of free daily newspapers that are undercutting the traditional, paid-for newspapers. Of course there are the daily or weekly shoppers that come in the mail, but these are little more than ad sheets. But recent years have seen the rise of a whole new class of free newspapers: the big city "Metro"-type papers (started in Europe) that are increasingly available to bus and train commuters in major metropolitan areas. These free commuter papers -- some started by serious media groups such as the Washington Post Co. and the Tribune Group -- have already spread to big cities like New York, Washington, Boston, and Chicago.

But increasingly, traditional paid-for newspapers are feeling competition in their last real stronghold: the stoops and porches of suburban America, where the delivery of the morning newspaper is still a ritual and a strong tradition. Traditional newspapers are starting to see competition from free daily papers. Bright, breezy free tabloids have already been introduced in San Francisco and Washington. Now it's Baltimore's turn, as the Wall Street Journal (paid registration required) reports. Earlier this month, the Baltimore Examiner, America's newest daily newspaper, hit 250,000 homes in the Baltimore area--instantly allowing it to boast a bigger circulation than the 169-year-old Baltimore Sun.

Of course, as the Benton Comm Policy listserv notes (drawing on the WSJ piece), "no one is sure what that quarter-million papers will really mean to advertisers because they will be delivered unsolicited and at no charge." But at a time when traditional newspapers are under intense pressure, this new development can only cause them further pain.

The Baltimore Sun itself, in reporting on its new competitor, drew attention to the Examiner's possible right-of-center tendencies and its lack of depth. The paper is owned by "conservative billionaire" Philip F. Anschutz and his Denver-based Clarity Media Group Inc. Apparently, a promotional issue delivered to Baltimore doorsteps noted the paper "will include columns by Morton Kondracke, a regular contributor to the Fox News Channel, and former longtime Sun columnist Jules Witcover." That same promo also boasted of the new paper's "devotion to brevity: It said the paper would be housed 'in a convenient package you can read in less than 20 minutes.'" Pointing to the Examiner's sister paper, the Washington Examiner, most of that "paper's local and sports stories were written by staff reporters, but its foreign, national and business pages were filled almost entirely with Associated Press dispatches."

Asks Thomas Kunkel, dean of the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism, in the WSJ: "Can a mature subscription-based daily paper -- even one as respected as the [Baltimore] Sun -- be vulnerable to an upstart that's giving news away? . . . It really and truly is a very interesting and open question."

VNRs are back ...

2006-04-09T19:46:00.000-04:00

Actually, they never went away. VNRs are Video News Releases, which are video versions of press releases, i.e., defined as "video clips that are indistinguishable from traditional news clips and are sometimes screened unedited by television stations without the identification of the original producers or sponsors, who are commonly corporations, government agencies, or non-governmental organizations." They're better described as "fake news"--because that's what they are. (Here's the Wikipedia entry on news releases and VNRs, and a backgrounder piece on the practice by David Folkenflik from last year's "All Things Considered" on NPR.) Those of you who think that TV news produces all its own material are in for a shock. A lot of it they pick up off the rack for free.

We're now getting a better sense of just how widespread this practice is. Last week the Center for Media and Democracy reported on the extent to which news stations are using this "fake news" in their regular nightly reports. The New York Times reports that "Many television news stations, including some from the nation's largest markets, are continuing to broadcast reports as news without disclosing that the segments were produced by corporations pitching new products." The Times report notes that although television news directors denied that VNRs were being used to any extent, CMD assembled strong evidence of such use among dozens of stations across the country.

The report said none of the stations had disclosed that the segments were produced by publicists representing companies like General Motors, Capital One and Pfizer. The center also said that many of the 69 stations took steps to blend the fake segments into their news broadcasts. Some had their news reporters or anchors read scripts supplied by corporations, the report said, and many had altered screen graphics to include the station's logo. The report said that a few stations had introduced publicists as if they were their on-air reporters. Only a handful of stations added any independently gathered information or videotape, it said. The 69 stations reach about half the population of the United States.
David Folkenflik at NPR quotes Diane Farsetta, a senior researcher at the CMD, who tracked local TV news use of VNRs, finding "dozens of stations passing them off as actual news reports." Says Farestta: “'It was pretty amazing to me, personally, how willing TV newsrooms appear to be to keep all the product mentions, all of the obvious promotional aspects of a video news release . . . It’s a pretty damning look, to be honest, at television newsrooms.'” (Click here for the NPR audio piece, including a segment where Folkenflik "plays a local TV report from WBFS in Florida and the video news release it's based on... word-for-word copy.")

This might all seem depressingly familiar to those who keep a close eye on what our nation's pennypinching local news broadcasters are up to. A year ago VNRs were also in the news--though that time it wasn't corporate fake news that was the issue; rather it was fake news produced by the government. The Bush administration has been a big fan of VNRs. Last April the New York Times and other news outlets reported extensively on the aggressive media policy pursued by the Bush administration--a policy that focuses on the federal government's penchant for

a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production.
So VNRs have been around for a long time. News stations love them because they cost nothing. And most viewers don't notice the difference--because local stations do their utmost to cover up the fakey origins of their fake news. But there's a price to be paid. And here's the thing. I don't like it when corporate interests or the government produce fake news (although it's even worse when the government uses taxpayer dollars to do it.) But at least if news organizations are going to use such material, they should state clearly where it comes from. But 9 times out of 10, they don't. They want to preserve the illusion that they are creating and presenting this "news" on their own. This is a basic issue of ethics for TV news station managers. Stations need to accept that they must acknowledge where they're getting this material from. It's inconceivable to me that any station manager worth her salt wouldn't do this.

As for the federal government, as I said last year: If it's so intent on producing this propaganda then they should put it on a government-run TV service and call it by its nice name: public diplomacy. At least then no-one would be under any illusions about where the information was coming from. And btw, the government already does this for people overseas. Government-funded instruments of propaganda/public diplomacy have been around for decades. You may have heard of them: Voice of America; Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; and TV/Radio Marti, among others.

April Fool, UK media style

2006-04-02T22:27:00.000-04:00

The British news media (including the "serious" press and even the BBC!) are well known for their April Fool's Day pranks. As the New York Times noted last year, "the fake April 1 article is a fine British newspaper tradition, befitting a country where the news media revel in not taking themselves too seriously." This year was no exception, as the BBC points out. Among this year's gags:

"The Guardian has Coldplay's lead singer, Chris Martin [pictured above], agreeing to release a version of one of the band's hits in an effort to persuade young people to vote Conservative. The song Talk has been renamed Talk to David, after Mr Martin's actress wife Gwyneth Paltrow met party leader David Cameron's other half Samantha at a yoga class.
"The Daily Mirror shows an oak tree with 'abnormal growths' in the shape of the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales. But the exact location is being kept secret 'because of fears it could attract druids'.
"On a sadder note, The Sun shows a lone jackass penguin strolling along the south bank of the Thames, having been accidentally taken from his Antarctic home by fishermen. Straining the credulity of even the most gullible reader, it quotes "one joker" as say the creature was 'popping into Savile Row to p-p-pick up his penguin suit for a black tie do'."

It is, of course, all complete rubbish! When the New York Times looked into the April Fool traditions of the British media last year, it reported on the sorts of gags that would never be allowed in its own pages. "British newspapers are less serious than American newspapers," said Jonathan Brown, a reporter at The Independent, which ran an article last April Fool's Day claiming that the Conservative Party was then pinning its hopes not on Chris Martin, but on a new candidate for Parliament: the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver. The Times noted some of best Brit press gags over the years, including a famous example from The Guardian, a newspaper that is high-brow yet famous for the numerous typographical errors that appear in its pages.

The Guardian

The New York Times also mentioned what is perhaps Britain's most famous April Fool fake news story, which took place on--yes, you guessed it--the good old BBC, back in 1957. "That was when eight million viewers watched a BBC documentary showing a family in Ticino, Switzerland, harvesting spaghetti by carefully plucking cooked strands from a tree and laying them to dry in the sun." Apparently, according to the authoritative voice of the BBC's Jonathan Dimbleby, 'it was a good year for spaghetti, . . . because of the mild weather and the success of the Swiss spaghetti weevil eradication program. The BBC was deluged with calls'."

Peeking into Web surfers' brains

2006-03-29T08:30:00.000-05:00

An interesting new study reported on in Sunday's USA Today purports to be "a sneak peek into people's brains,” according to the research firm's research director. The Nielsen Norman Group claims to offer companies an insight into what works and what doesn't with web site design. Their study underlines a key problem facing all web sites: the difficulty of finding a balance between good design and effective information provision. It points to web sites such as Jet Blue's, which they say get it right. On the other hand, one of Sony's websites (the report isn't clear which one) is apparently an example of ineffective web design.

The study's findings include the following:

Knight Ridder's woes and Excellence(?) in journalism

2006-03-26T20:03:00.000-05:00

One of America's highest quality news groups, the Knight Ridder newspaper chain--owner of the owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Miami Herald, is going away. Like many traditional newspaper companies, it's been underperforming for some time (see my Jan 17 entry, Can we save newspapers?), and it's finally going under--to be bought up by rival publisher McClatchy Co. for $6.5 billion.

Knight Ridder will be sorely missed. As American Journalism Review notes, Knight Ridder "was an amazing newspaper company. It was a newspaper company that stressed the newspaper more than the company. It really cared about the journalism. It made a lot of money, sure, but it invested enough in the product to do great work." Eventually, though, it stopped making enough money, and because it failed to squeeze out consistent 20 percent profit margins, it was ripe for cutbacks and then takeover.

Many see this as another body blow to solid high-quality American journalism--and a worrying development that is happening just as The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s third annual “State of the News Media 2006” report has been released. This is in effect America's annual report card for its media. And once again, the report is worrying.

According to Eric Alterman at the Center for American Progress, the report is very timely. With the McClatchy Co.-Knight Ridder news, "a new round of speculation about the health of the newspaper industry is well underway." Unfortunately, such bouts of anxiety about journalism's future are rarely misplaced. This time is no different, as "McClatchy immediately announced that it was selling off 12 of the 32 papers it inherited from Knight Ridder and the little-known fact reported by the San Jose Mercury News (one of the papers to be dumped by McClatchy), that eight of the 12 papers to be sold are union shops." While, as Alterman notes, this has all taken place since PEIJ study was completed, "the congruence of the two events simply added to an increasing sense of foreboding about the industry for nearly everyone who cares about its future."

Alterman notes that the PEIJ study confirms once again "something that many close observers certainly suspected: More and more news outlets are crowding themselves around fewer and fewer stories, hitting the public over the head with them until the blood flows from the cranium." This has little to do with the press acting as a viable Fourth Estate and everything to do with the pursuit of corporate profits.

The trouble, as I've written before in this blog, is that levels of public confidence in the U.S. mainstream media are rapidly declining, and this can be laid squarely at the door of corporate America's relentless desire to squeeze high profits from a medium that relies above all on its ability to function as a credible source of impartial news and information--and that requires investment. Last year at about this time I noted research by the Pew Research Center's Trends 2005 report, the National Opinion Research Center, and USA Today. (See here for a U.S. News take on the Pew report, by Jay Tolsen; and Nicholas Kristoff covered the issue for the New York Times - see my blog entry for a review on that piece.

It's worth reviewing again some pertinent statistics and points:

1. 45 percent of Americans believe little or nothing in their daily newspapers, up from 16 percent two decades ago.
Pew Research Center's "Trends 2005" report (available online).
2.Between 1973 and 2002, confidence in the press has fallen sharply, from 85% to under 60% - and the press is now almost at the bottom amongst public institutions (only beaten by the legal system).
National Opinion Research Center survey, 2004
3. A 2004 survey of 112,000 American high school students showed:
- 32% of them believe that there is too much freedom of the press
- Only 10% believe that there is not enough.
- 36% would prefer that the media be subject to government control
USA Today survey

Some comments and insights:

"The public sees the [mass] media as self-centered and self-promoting."
Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.
"I think commercial factors are the overriding factor shaping the collapse of professional journalism.”
Robert McChesney, professor of communication, University of Illinois
"Media companies are more concentrated than at any time over the past 40 years, thanks to a continual loosening of ownership rules by Washington."
Ted Turner, CNN founder
"As people move online, the notion of news consumers is giving way to something called 'prosumers,' in which citizens simultaneously function as consumers, editors, and producers of a new kind of news in which journalistic accounts are but one element."
Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, writing in The State of the News Media 2004
(Above comments all from U.S. News)

Ebert goes to the movies ... in Rochester!

2006-03-20T11:51:00.000-05:00

One of the best things about Rochester is the George Eastman House and the Dryden Theatre. These institutions are devoted to film preservation and film presentation on the big screen, and the Eastman House's Motion Picture Collection is "one of the country’s five major film archives, alongside [the] Library of Congress, UCLA Film and Television Archive, Museum of Modern Art, and the Academy Film Archive."

I've been volunteering at both places for more than four years now, and every now and again I introduce one of the films in their excellent ongoing film calendar that includes classic and hard-to-find films (here's a list of the films I've introduced). But I try to get along to see films there whenever I can. Last week, for example, we went to see Jack Arnold's The Incredible Shrinking Man, a fascinating 1957 sci-fi film I remember quite vividly watching on TV as a kid; it was great seeing it again--and this time on the big screen, as it was meant to be seen.

One of the best things about having the Dryden on our doorstep is that it attracts some pretty big names in the film world to this little corner of Western New York. Some of the Big Names I've got to see at the Dryden include John Landis, Jeff Bridges, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Last weekend it was the turn of film critic Roger Ebert to visit the Dryden. Ebert is one of America's foremost film critics, and he's seen just about everything there is to see--and he has a great perspective on the state of American film today (here, fyi, is his wikipedia bio). He was here last weekend to pick up an honorary George Eastman Scholar award and present and talk about some of his favorite movies. My better half and I were fortunate to be invited to a private matinee screening of the 1975 film Night Moves, with Gene Hackman--which Ebert is considering adding to his "Great Movies" series of essays (and which I would call a fine movie--not sure if it's a great one, though). Later that evening we went along to a public screening of Robert Altman's 1977 film 3 Women--which wasn't really my cup of tea, but was worth seeing just for the fascinating discussion with Ebert it sparked. I'll quote my wife's take on Ebert that night, as she got it just about right:

Deuce Bigalow, European Gigolo

Ray

The Aviator

Million Dollar Baby

Sideways

Finding Neverland

Ray

Walk the Line

3 Women

March Media Madness

2006-03-19T11:37:00.000-05:00

March madness has begun, and while I'm spending my spring break frantically working on two chapters of a book I'm writing (well, co-writing), my wife is dragging me into the strange realm of NCAA "March Madness." My wife, like so many people who live and work in an office environment in the United States, has gone and joined a March Madness office pool. And now someone who typically pays little attention to basketball--baseball and football are more her things--is sitting glued to CBS hoping that her first and second round picks make it to the next stage. (Too bad, Syracuse!) As she says: "I know exactly nothing about college basketball. As I was doing my picks, I found myself favoring colleges that I had attended conferences at, or that had offered me graduate assistantships in the past. That's how I ended up with an all Washington state championship game, which has as much chance of happening as I have of being named Queen of Spokane." And because she's getting sucked in through the power of the office pool, I'm getting sucked in too! Maybe the final will be between The Huskies and Gonzaga! :-)

This state of affairs isn't all that uncommon. At this time of year millions of people get sucked into the National Collegiate Athletic Association Men's Division I Basketball Tournament--an event and a sport they often know little of, but which manages to build up the sort of buzz of excitement that any Hollywood movie studio exec would kill to have for their big summer tentpole release. Sixty-four (well, actually 65) college teams are playing (many are already out), and even though four games are on at roughly the same time for the first few days, viewers get to see most of them for at least a few minutes as CBS frantically switches from game to game. But now, for the first time, the games will be available free over the internet on CBS Sportsline. The media have run some stories about employer anxiety over lost productivity (here's NPR's take on a story that's essentially a media creation.) In fact, March Madness facilitates a powerful centripetal media effect on society. That's a fancy way of saying it's one of these great sports events that can bring people together--in offices, in clubs, in families, and across the whole country--through the power of a media spectacle. People, even those who normally care not a whit about basketball, get caught up in, bet a few bucks on (and for most people, it is only a few bucks), and feel they're part of something special that's bigger than they are. It gives people something to talk about, something to riff on, something to get excited about. It's like the Super Bowl but it lasts for 20 days. It gets lots of people through the dreary month of March, and by the time it's all over the weather will be getting warmer--and baseball season will be upon us!

Now, ahem, back to writing that book!

On "youths" and getting a bad press

2006-03-19T11:32:00.000-05:00

Recently I heard from an old student of mine who passed on a newspaper article that reminded her of a "framing the news" assignment she'd completed in my Mass Media & Society class. The article, which apppeared in the San Bernardino (Calif.) Sun earlier this month, concerned a "youth riot" that supposedly broke out after a punk rock concert in that city (Article is available online here). My old student had been at the Woodstock '99 festival (which had also been slammed by the news media for turning to violence, sexual assault, and looting--stories that were almost certainly overhyped). So this event had caught her eye. She told me that, after dissecting the piece, she was "really appalled at how blatantly biased this piece actually is." She was concerned at how the article, in her eyes, failed "to answer or at least address all the readers' questions," and she was still left wondering, for example, why cops tear-gassed a crowded hall with 4,000 kids in response to a stabbing? And why weren't venue security staff able to handle the incident? She signed off: "This article has really come to embody all that I loathe about the media. I just thought I'd pass it along! :)"

Well, looking over the article and the way it presents the events, I think she probably has a point (of course I wasn't there to see the event first-hand, so I'm going on past experience with these sorts of things). The story is certainly framed in such a way as to downplay the opinions and concerns of concertgoers, and to play up the police's and local business community's version of reality. One thing to always note in articles such as these is who's being quoted in the piece--and who gets quoted first. Police spokesmen are always readily available to the press to "spin" the local PD's preferred reading of events. And local business owners (usually conservative by nature) are often able and willing to come forward and support that version--since the police have framed themselves (and the media accept and legitimate the frame) as protectors of law and order (and property) against the perceived anarchic hordes. This is a frame built up over generations of media coverage of "rowdy" youth culture, and an easy pigeonhole to place young people into.

What you don't see anywhere is a spokeperson for the concertgoers, the "youth." This group's members aren't organized, have no spokesperson available to take press calls and speak on their behalf (and even if they did there's a good chance that the media would ignore them or downplay their opinion are less legitimate). This group (if you can even call it a "group") is therefore safely marginalized as a source of opinion, and can safely be placed in whatever frame has been set for them by these other, more organized parties. What's left is a nice simple narrative of "riot," good cops and citizens versus bad punks, and the press happily weaves a tale of disorder and the necessary restoration of order. It's been told a thousand times. It's a news perspective that flows primarily (though not exclusively) from one of Herbert Gans' most potent "enduring values": the need for the restoration and maintenance of order in society--especially, in this case, social and moral order. That's usually how it works. If you were to get caught up on the wrong side of this narrative or these news values, it could be very scary.

Congratulations, Philip, but the Oscars ... sucked

2006-03-06T11:08:00.000-05:00

I only have time for a brief mention of last night's Academy Awards, so I have to go with my heart rather than my head. Apologies for the insouciant tone of this entry: I'm genuinely glad that Fairport's own Philip Seymour Hoffman won the Best Actor Oscar for his wonderful performance in Capote, which I really liked (and I got a chance to see him in person at Rochester's George Eastman House last year). But for the most part the Oscars ceremony really, well, sucked! No other word for it. They were dire. Here's why. Fortunately we had friends over last night so we could commiserate with one another, but it was still, IMHO, one of the most boring, lifeless, anodyne performances I've seen. Even Jon Stewart couldn't make it work (see BBC the piece headlined "Stewart's Oscars show lacks edge"--although I think the problem lay more with the producers and the audience than with Stewart). The only injection of life came when Best Song went to Three 6 Mafia (whose "It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp," from Hustle and Flow, finally gave Jon Stewart something to work with.) I'm too old and boring to get into rap, but I am very glad those guys managed to get up on stage for a while.

Enough.

Here comes Ma Bell again

2006-03-06T08:42:00.000-05:00

The more things change, the more they stay the same. With the announcement that AT&T is to buy Bell South for $67 billion, the world of telecommunications is moving one step closer to the reassembly of an old monopoly: namely the old "Ma Bell"/AT&T local and long-distance telephone monopoly that dominated U.S. telecommunications for nearly 70 years. The monopoly (or near-monopoly) was not dissolved until 1984. It was allowed to remain in place for so long because AT&T managed to argue successfully that its business was a "natural monopoly" that wouldn't work effectively in a competitive environment.

Now one of the "Baby Bells," Bell South, is coming back to momma in a deal that, if approved, will see four of the original 7 Baby Bells brought back together under AT&T's wing. Ironically, perhaps, the old "monopoly" is reassembling precisely because of fear of competition. And it's not exactly a monopoly anymore precisely because of all that competition--which is not from other traditional phone companies but from cable companies, cell phone companies, internet companies and other hi-tech firms all entering the digitally converging new media environment of 2006.

So it's a very different AT&T ("Ma Bell") than the one that used to rule the roost from the 1920s through the 1970s. But although it won't be a monopoly--natural or otherwise--it will be huge. The New York Times notes that with all this competition, "and more and more services available on mobile phones and on the Internet, companies like AT&T are trying to bulk up and turn themselves into one-stop shops for all communications needs." And AT&T is really bulking up for this battle. The "new" AT&T--which, as NPR's Jim Zarolli notes, already has more customers than any other U.S. telecom--will be dramatically expanded under this deal. The combined company "would also have full control of Cingular Wireless, the largest cell phone provider in the U.S." It will have 360,000 employees, 70 million local telephone customers, 10 million broadband customers, and it'll be a massive player in all aspects of the telecom business. And it'll be streets ahead of its nearest rival, Verizon. In fact it might be a bit too big and powerful for its own good. The deal has to be approved by the government's antitrust regulators in the Justice Department. Let's see what happens there.

Is HDTV really worth it?

2006-02-28T08:52:00.000-05:00

The Christian Science Monitor asks whether HDTV (High Definition Television) is really living up to all the hype. The Monitor's Gregory M. Lamb notes that, while some high-tech gadgets have been adopted by Americans in astonishing numbers over a very short period (think DVDs, iPods, and digital cameras), High-Definition TVs haven't yet followed suit. Although there was a spike in interest in late January (thanks to the Super Bowl), that hasn't yet translated into the sorts of sales figures that many were predicting four or five years ago. Notes Lamb:

While nearly everyone has heard of HDTV, only 15 percent of American families have bought one since their introduction in the late 1990s, according to Ipsos Insight, a market research firm. Worse yet, only 15 percent more are seriously considering buying one in the near future. What's holding back the other 70 percent? Prices that can soar well into the four digits and suspicion that they are going to drop sharply are big factors. So are hidden hassles. For instance, getting an HDTV set to actually display a high-definition picture involves a process that a surprisingly large number of people either don't know about or don't bother with. And for many, the value of a fantastic picture that's available on just a few special HDTV channels hasn't outweighed the cost and frustrations.
Having recently purchased an HDTV ourselves, my wife and I came head-to-head with some of these issues. By last December our old TV was on its last legs, and we needed a new one. But we wanted an upgrade rather than just buy another low-def analog TV set. In fact we'd been wanting an upgrade for 18 months, and had been thinking about a widescreen HDTV all that time, but we couldn't justify the expense. Like most people in our situation, we weren't prepared to pay thousands of dollars for a product that in its previous form cost no more than a couple of hundred. We procrastinated endlessly, but after about a dozen visits to Circuit City, Best Buy et al, we finally bought a slimfit version of a more traditional CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) high-definition TV set. It's a 30-inch screen, looks great, and cost well under a thousand dollars. (If we had plumped for a flatscreen LCD or plasma set, it could have cost 2-3 times as much.) Still, there were hidden costs attached, such as the $50 it cost for a set of high-definition "rabbit ears" (antenna for over-the-air broadcast signals), $150 for a new DVD/VCR combo (our old ones were shot), $60 for a special HDMI cable (necessary for optimal viewing of DVDs), and a $100 installation fee for the Best Buy guy to come over and tune in the TV for an optimal signal. (I nearly balked at that last "hidden fee," but I am glad we did it.) So our upgrade ended up costing a bit over a grand after all. At that price, we felt it necessary to make savings, so we cut back on cable (and I cut back on lattes at the coffee shop). Now most of the TV we watch is via over-the-air high-definition signals--just like the old days (except for the high-definition part)! We can get some good, though limited HDTV signals over the air for free. We've now got four PBS channels provided by Rochester's WXXI. And we can invite friends over to watch the Super Bowl, the Olympics, and the Oscars in high-def widescreen glory! But we still suffered serious sticker shock from the experience. We're definitely not going near digital cable or DVRs or satellite anytime soon.

So there you have it: HDTV is cool--but it's not cheap! It will get cheaper and cheaper as time goes by, but I think it's fair to say that it'll never be as cheap as the "good old days" of analog. And there's lot about HDTV that is confusing and obscure. But as we get closer to the FCC's Feb 2009 analog cutoff, more and more consumers will have to come to terms with the same issues we had to face in making what was a pretty difficult decision. And more American families might think twice about whether they really need that expanded cable TV package.

NBC takes an Olympic knock

2006-02-23T10:33:00.000-05:00

It's a real shame: What if they held a Winter Olympics, and nobody watched? Nobody from America, anyway. For those who haven't been paying attention - and judging by the ratings figures, that's a lot of people - the Winter Olympics have been underway in Turin (or Torino), Italy, for almost two weeks. Now I like the Olympics (especially the curling, since I do that as a pastime), but I love it even more if I think the rest of the country is joining in the fun. But increasingly, that's not happening, if NBC's Olympics early ratings figures are to be believed. MSNBC.com notes how last week the Olympics were consistently beaten by competing big network shows such as ABC's Lost, Grey's Anatomy, and Fox's American Idol, which doubled the Olympic audience.

What's going on? Are the Olympics dying in this country because nobody cares anymore, or is it just NBC's inability to make the event exciting. Of course, with the general fragmentation of the viewing audience, ratings figures for the Olympics (and most other big sporting events, with the exception of the Super Bowl) have been declining for years. But maybe NBC's not helping. The Baltimore Sun quotes University of Maryland media scholar Douglas Gomery, who argues that NBC's "got no style, no narrative and no ratings . . . NBC is watching its money go down the toilet, because we're not watching the Games." Gomery blames NBC first and foremost, though he notes that "changes in the audience and the way in which other networks are competing have something to do with it, too." What that last point means is that other networks are now challenging Olympic coverage with their own top shows -- i.e., aggressive counterprogramming. They're doing it because they know that NBC is vulnerable, partly due to their incompetence in showcasing the Olympics. Notes the Baltimore Sun:

Right vs Left on the Sunday talk shows

2006-02-19T21:29:00.000-05:00

An interesting new study by Media Matters for America suggests that there is systematic bias in favor of the right wing in the old networks' Sunday morning talk shows (on ABC, CBS, and NBC) "where policy makers state their case, the conventional wisdom takes shape, and the left and right in American politics debate the pressing issues of the day on equal ground." Or not so equal, apparently. As Broadcasting & Cable notes, the study (released last Tuesday) examined Meet the Press, Face the Nation and This Week during both the second term of President Clinton's administration and President George W. Bush's time in office to date. The Benton Communication Policy listserv points to the study's main contention that "conservative voices significantly outnumber progressive voices on the Sunday talk shows." Among the study's key findings:

So how damning is this report? Well, Broadcasting & Cable notes a response from NBC's Meet the Press stating that the study is "misleading." Meet the Press's Executive Producer Betsy Fischer points out in her show's defense that if the study had included Clinton's first term, "the same analysis would have found that, on Meet the Press, for example, the guests skewed heavily toward Democrats." (Media Matters noted that it was unable to analyze Clinton's first term "because of limitations of the data and the fact that it had to cut it off somewhere.") Fischer also noted,

B&C does note that "there is something intuitive in the findings, given that key administration figures are the plum guests on those shows" and this suggests a natural "skew toward the party in power." And indeed this is what tends to happen in journalism: The people who are in power are the people who get quoted and interviewed most often. And there's lots of research on journalism newsgathering routines that has noted the heavy reliance of journalists on official sources in gathering and framing the news. This, in fact, is closely related to the "indexing hypothesis" proposed by Lance Bennett, who in a key 1990 article in Journal of Communication argued that journalists "tend to 'index' the range of voices and viewpoints in both news and editorials according to the range of views expressed in mainstream government debate about a given topic." It might not be right that the talk shows skew right, but it's probably inevitable, certainly until the Democrats start winning again. At least Lance Bennett must be happy that Media Matters for America has found more evidence to support his hypothesis.

"The sky is actually falling right now:" Good or bad?

2006-02-10T09:03:00.000-05:00

If anyone's got some good insights into the direction our mass media are going in, it should be David Carr, the New York Times media critic and long-time writer for the alternative press in Washington, DC and Minneapolis. The media are now Carr's beat for the Times, and in addition to his regular writing he also composes the Times's Carpetbagger blog. Carr speaks about his take on the media next Wednesday, February 15 at SUNY Brockport's MetroCenter in downtown Rochester. And judging by this interview for the Rochester City newspaper, he's got a lot to say.

Carr is less than ecstatic about what he sees in media-land, though he seems simultaneously energized and shocked at the changes underway. City's Krestia DeGeorge kicks off her piece by noting that "he almost passed on the chance to be a media columnist with the Times" as he was so tired of media issues. But he "came around," and he now says he's glad he did, because he has something to say. And that brings us to his quote about the sky "actually falling right now." He thinks it's "fun and interesting and scary all at the same time to watch the ways in which media are atomizing and becoming commoditized." So, it's a mixed bag, then?

Yes, indeed. There's lots of cool stuff going on, but Carr seems to be concerned about the general lack of news awareness among young folks today. And the changes in technology aren't helping as much as everyone assumes. No matter how many blogs and news groups inhabit the Internet, we still absolutely need a "robust press"--both mainstream and alternative--because that's the only place where this stuff will get critically analyzed. He points out something that's pretty obvious to anyone of my generation, but might not be to someone in their teens or early twenties:

Comic books and movies after 9/11

2006-02-08T14:04:00.000-05:00

I got an interesting email the other day from a former student who's now enrolled in a Master's advanced writing program at Syracuse University. He's working on an article for a magazine that deals with comic book movies--with the focus on Marvel comics superheroes, beginning with 1998's Blade (starring Wesley Snipes). He's examining whether the financial success of these movies (think Spider-Man and X-Men) can be attributed in any way to "America's collective post-9/11 psyche."

This sounds like a fascinating topic/hypothesis, but also a tough nut to crack. I should note that I was a big Marvel Comics fan when I was a kid in the '70s (when they were just starting to distribute Marvel in the UK). And I've seen most of these new movies, including Blade (that's the vampire movie where Snipes famously states that the world is just a "sugar-coated topping"--lovely line!). But that's the limit of my "expertise." Still, it got me thinking.

Why is this such a tough question? First off, it's hard to say exactly what the "post-9/11 psyche" actually is--it seemed clear enough after the WTC/Pentagon attacks, when we were all talking about the "death of irony" and a new seriousness in how we conduct our affairs--but IMHO that all dissipated surprisingly quickly, or metastasized into something else. Bush was too busy getting us back out shopping for the economy and avoiding any mention of sacrifice. Business as usual!

There surely is a link, all the same, but I don't know how direct and causal it is. The rise of comic book-based movies has been a feature of the past few years, but it could also be explained by many factors, such as new technology, i.e., the development of CGI that's good enough to render these fantasy worlds as realistically as possible. But that can also explain the making of Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Harry Potter, King Kong, and so on. And though the CGI in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man is excellent, the same can't be said of Ang Lee's Hulk.

Another obvious explanation for the popularity in comic book movies is the commercial conservatism of Hollywood, their love of fads, and their aversion to original screenplays (comics are a tried and tested source of ideas and characters). And of course comic book heroes--mostly DC stuff, Superman & Batman--were being turned into movies long before 9/11 (as was Blade, which was made in 1997). We're talking mainly about Marvel here as the primary source for recent superhero movies. Is there a specific link between Marvel's superheroes, who are generally thought to have more depth and character than their DC counterparts?

We also have to recall that there's been a general increase in feature film animation recently, including non superhero stuff, from Wallace & Gromit to American Splendor (and comedy, including just about everything that Pixar's done, including The Incredibles, which pokes fun at the superhero action genre). I also wonder, if 9/11 spawned a new era of high patriotism, why hasn't Marvel's Captain America (pictured above left) not been greenlighted (at least not yet, though there's talk of making that movie). Captain America was the super-patriot superhero from WWII. He should have been first on the list!

So: Maybe I'm missing something (I'm sure I am!) but the direct connection isn't jumping out at me right away. Of course, that just means it requires more digging and thinking. Maybe the "post-9/11 psyche" is rooted in something very different to what I'm thinking about. Anyway, something to ponder.

Centripetal cartoons of Mohammed

2006-02-08T10:21:00.000-05:00

There has of course been a huge upsurge in coverage of the widespread controversy and unrest sparked off by the publication and republication of cartoon images of Mohammed. Of course this issue is interesting in terms of free speech and liberal marketplace of ideas in the "global public sphere"--if such a thing truly exists. (A good round-up is provided in Slate.com and a helpful timeline of developments is provided by the BBC.) But it's also fascinating in terms of the centrifugal-centripetal elements of global communications. And that's what I'd like to talk about here.

This is a distinction raised by Harold Innis, a Canadian economist and pioneer historian of economics and communication. Innis believed that the main thrust for societal change is determined by development in communication forms. Innis's idea is that the dominant form of communication determines societal structures (see also McLuhan and Walter Ong for more on this). He focuses on the biases of communication formed through technology determining social organization. As new forms of communication become dominant, the nature of society changes fundamentally to accommodate these developments. Thus, e.g., the nature of oral cultures changed dramatically with the development of writing. Writing-based cultures structured their societies fundamentally differently from their oral-based predecessors. Innis's two most famous works, Empire and Communications and Bias of Communication, were published in the early 1950s and tackled these issues head-on.

It's in Empire and Communications that Innis elaborates on the concepts of centrifugal and centripetal forces. Centripetal forces of communication tend to make a culture or society more integrated over a given area over time; they tend to bring us together in a common "ritual" on consuming and interacting with common media (this is what James Carey is talking about with his Ritual Model of communication).

Centrifugal forces, on the other hand, tend to divide humanity into sets of smaller, more narrowly defined peoples and cultures; they allow a broader array of independent, peripheral cultural entities not fully integrated into a unified, hegemonic or imperial core. Nation-states, empires and other dominating geopolitical entities have always tried to emphasize and reinforce the centripetal forces of communication (through enhancing tight physical and technological channels and networks within the geopolitical unit and controlling the interchange of ideas and ideological debates carried on these networks). But ideas and and ideological debates tend to have a life of their own, and can use these networks to tear apart and undermine the formal forces of integration and assimiliation. (Interestingly, Russian formalist literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin expressed similar ideas in terms of languages, which "do not coexist peacefully, but are rather in a permanent state of competition." He distinguished "centripetal linguistic forces, exerted by official forms backed by the cultural or administrative establishment, from centrifugal forces intent on preserving the existence of unofficial, dialectal forms; he identifies the former with the social processes of political, cultural and ideological centralization.”)

This brings us back to the offending cartoons of Mohammed. This continuing story is, unfortunately, an excellent example of centrifugal forces of modern global communications in action. The series of cartoons, some depicting the Prophet Mohammed as a terrorist, were first published in a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, back in September 2005. Then things died down a bit, but on January 10, a Norwegian newspaper reprinted the cartoons. At the end of January, the Danish paper apologised; but the following day newsapers in France, Germany, Italy and Spain reprinted the caricatures, in the face of Muslim outrage. By this point the information had been communicated and recommunicated not only through the traditional press but also hugely magnified by the play given the story by the web, cable and satellite news, and the blogosphere. This massive and integrated communication network, which many associate with the powerful integrationist forces of globalization, was now being used as the forum for a clash of ideas and cultures (if not a clash of civilizations). This network is spreading the information about the cartoons and the story of the Muslim outrage, but more fundamentally it's spreading the idea of the clash itself as a major news story in its own right--connoting the idea that, on the one hand, the West hates Islam; and on the other, that Muslims are all radical and resistant to logic and reason.

If there is a centripetal element to this (and this isn't a good thing), it could be in terms of defining and more radically distinguishing between cultural groups that define themselves in terms of being different from, and opposed to, a cultural "other." I'm not saying that this is happening in a permanent way or that it's irreversible. But we do have to take at the long game when trying to understand the big impact of globaization and global media. We always need to remember that all new global communications technologies and networks can act centrifugally as well as centripetally--yes, they can bring people together, but they can also emphasize differences, and pull apart and ultimately destroy political or cultural entities. European imperialism and its attendant institutions were brought down by the ideas of nationalism and independence spread on the imperial channels and networks of communication; Communism and the Soviet Union could not survive the spread of information and ideas carried on the communication networks of the late 20th century. How will communication tear us apart and redefine us in the future?

The State of the Union, by the numbers

2006-02-02T08:22:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post's coverage of the President's State of the Union address included a table of the number of times the president used selected key words in his address, and compared it with the number of times he used those words in past addresses. The table is reproduced below (comparing 2006 with '05 and '04). Note the shift in emphasis away from Iraq, Tax (Reform) and Social Security -- places where Bush is either mired in controversy or has seen to have failed -- and toward "The World," "The Economy,", and a wide array of issues that garnered between 2 and 7 mentions (below). This seems to reflect Bush's move away from Big Ideas to smaller-scale, (supposedly) more manageable policies. Terrorism remains a strong suit for Bush, so that word count remains high, while "glittering generalities" such as "Freedom" will never get old for an American president (guaranteed to force even reluctant Democrats to give a Standing O). Anyway, who said the State of the Union isn't a laundry list?

World..................... 26 ('06).. 15 ('05)... 14 ('04)
Economy/
economic................ 23........... 14.......... 17
Terrorism/-ist/
terror...................... 20.......... 27.......... 20
Freedom................. 17............ 21............ 8
Iraq........................ 16........... 27.......... 24
Government............ 11............ 14............ 7
Tax......................... 8........... 10.......... 20
Spending/spend....... 7............. 4............ 2
AIDS....................... 6............. 1............ 0
Iran........................ 6............. 3............. 1
Liberty.................... 4............. 7............. 1
Social Security......... 3............17............. 2
Surveillance............ 2............. 0............. 0
Medicare................. 2............ 0............. 8
Medicaid................. 2............ 0............. 0

Source: Washington Post
(Note: Where appropriate, singular, plural and possessive variations are also counted.)

Media roundup, Jan 23-29

2006-01-29T23:04:00.000-05:00

It's been a busy old week (both for me and the world of media). We've had two lesser networks, UPN and WB, announce that they're to merge to form a new network, CW (apparently the letters are from CBS and Warner). Then there's the news that Disney is buying former partner Pixar, in a $7.5 billion deal that puts it solidly back in the world of profitable digital feature film animation. And though Bob Iger's Disney is the one doing the buying, there's a strong sense that it's Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple and Pixar) who's the real power in this deal -- the new "King of all media". We've had Google announce it's setting up a new operation in China, even though that means allowing the Chinese government to censor its service. (Lots of coverage of that -- for a flavor of the latest coverage, and the competing issues involved, see here, from the Christian Science Monitor; here, from the Financial Times; and here; and for some pieces that argue that Google did the right thing see here, from Reuters, and here, from the LA Times). But otherwise, Google remains flavor of the month. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin seem to be, along with Jobs, the men of the moment.

So what's going on? Everybody in medialand is worried that their old media properties are decaying while they risk missing out on the upcoming digital bonanza. How bad is it? Well, of course everyone is still making money, but they're all worried about making less money sometime in the future. It seems it's time for the big boys to make some big moves. So while Disney is paying top dollar to stay hitched to Pixar's star, CBS Corporation (until recently known as Viacom) merges one of its networks with that of a competitor. And now, according to CNN Money, NBC owner General Electric seems to be thinking along the same lines. "With NBC's ratings suffering, Wall Street debates whether General Electric still needs a media unit, " notes the piece. One reason? NBC helps GE "control its image and present itself in a favorable light." Oh, and it’s still profitable. But how long can the network sustain these profits, especially when it’s losing the ratings war for that key 18-49 year-old demographic (where it’s been slipping for the past season and a half and is now well behind CBS and ABC)? Clearly there's a lot of maneuvering going on, and the people who can claim to be on the digital edge -- Page, Jobs, et al. -- seem to be pretty much in the driving seat.

Elsewhere, there are signs that more and more actual journalists are less impressed at the developments surrounding the digital revolution's cutting edge -- developments that mostly seem to revolve around entertainment rather than news. The Wall Street Journal notes that more and more TV journalists are looking to move from ailing network news to NPR. Notes the WSJ ("TB News Stars Move to NPR and Sound Off"), "Many television journalists say they are fed up with the move toward consumer-friendly news-you-can-use and away from weightier subjects like foreign affairs and government. And many also see news of any sort as an increasingly low priority for their employers. " The piece also notes NPR’s rapidly rising audience figures, up to 25.3 million for 2005, from just 22 million the year earlier. Seems there are still plenty of people who stil just want good, solid news and information, and never mind the digital bells and whistles!

Google in the government's sights

2006-01-23T10:30:00.000-05:00

In case you hadn't heard, Google is challenging the Justice Department's subpoena to turn over the search records of its millions of users -- records that federal attorneys are seeking to obtain in an attempt to defend the Child Online Protection Act, a controversial child pornography law being challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union. The government wants to trawl through Google's data to show how easy it might be for minors to "stumble" across porn.

Although the subpoenas were issued months ago it only became clear last week that (as the LA Times notes) "federal investigators had obtained potentially billions of Internet search requests made by users of major websites run by Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and America Online Inc" (see Joseph Menn & Chris Gaither, "U.S. Obtains Internet Users' Search Records"). The piece goes on:

(There's a good overview provided by NPR's Sunday evening All Things Considered.)

While Google’s stance seems to be smart business practice – presenting itself as a brave David standing up to the Goliath of Big Government makes it look cool – for the rest of us the issue is crucially important. Like so much else in this Brave New Digital World, the question is one of privacy – from both the government and big corporations and business organizations such as Google. All of this raises serious concerns not only about how this massive data trove will be used by these groups.

First, the government. the Justice Department's fishing expedition is part of a bigger picture involving the federal government's (and particularly the Bush administration's) belief that if has the right to gain pretty much untrammelled access to citizens' digital records if it feels the cause is just. Notes the LA Times, "Congress is debating an extension of the Patriot Act, which dramatically expanded the government's ability to obtain private data. And congressional hearings are expected soon on the legality of a National Security Agency program to track communications by U.S. citizens without prior court approval."

Citizens' privacy from government intrusion is a huge issue for our democracy -- and an issue that not enough attention is being paid to. Google co-founder Larry Page, speaking on ABC News Friday night, called the government's subpoena the virtual equivalent of sending the police around to search every home in the country for a week, just in case there might be any pornography in anyone's house that might (might) be found by a child and have an impact on that child's upbringing. Of course, any such attempt by the government would be inconcievable (and unconstitutional, thanks to the Fourth Amendment.

As for Google, it may not quite be the knight in shining armor it likes to present itself as. (Listen to this NPR piece that questions Google's true motives.) Google’s motto may be "Don’t be Evil, " but I wonder just how long that motto will hold in the face of potentially massive profits for this company that has perhaps as close an impression of how its users’ brains work as anyone possibly could have. How’s that? Well, as the Wall Street Journal notes,

Electronic Frontier Foundation

A printout of the contents of your brain. Now that's scary.

NSA wiretaps: Illegal or not?

2006-01-19T08:56:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post's David S. Broder writes a piece about former vice president Al Gore's return to the political fray earlier this week, when in a Washington, DC speech he damned President Bush's covert NSA wiretap policy (quickie wikipedia backgrounder here) as illegal and unconstitutional. Broder, who is widely regarded for his journalistic integrity, declared that Gore "has turned himself into a one-man grand jury" on this issue. But that is not necessarily a bad thing, he thinks, since Gore gave "as comprehensive a rundown of George W. Bush's ventures to the limits of executive authority as anyone could hope to find." Broder points to the obvious political perspective--Gore lost to Bush in the hugely controversial 2000 presidential election, and surely still nurtures a grudge against Bush.

But even after discounting for political motivations, it seems to me that Gore has done a service by laying out the case as clearly and copiously as he has done. His overall charge is that Bush has systematically broken the laws and bent the Constitution by his actions in the areas of national security and domestic anti-terrorism.
Many in the media, and the broader public sphere--on both left and right--have been complaining more and more bitterly about Bush's tendency to reach for too much executive power at the expense of the other two branches of government (see, e.g., an editorial from last Sunday's New York Times: "The Imperial Presidency at Work"). And law suits challenging the wiretaps, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights, have further raised the political temperature on this issue.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal comes to the defense of the Bush policy. In an editorial this week the powerful newspaper's editorial staff rejects the legitimacy of the aforementioned suits. The Benton CommPolicy listserv summarizes the editorial piece (which is blocked to view unless you have a subscription) defending the administration's position. The lawsuits are frivolous, they write,

because 1) the plaintiffs have no evidence they have been wronged and 2) the Totten doctrine which says a lawsuit can't proceed if it would inevitably lead to the disclosure of sensitive intelligence matters. The battle over the al Qaeda wiretaps isn't in fact a legal issue at all. It is basically a political battle between Congress and the White House over supremacy on matters of national security. President Bush has forthrightly defended the use of wiretaps as essential to fighting the war on terror. If the ACLU disapproves, it has every right to lobby Congress to exert political pressure on the White House to reverse its policy. But its charge of "illegality" is nothing but a political weapon designed to suggest something more nefarious.

Can we save newspapers?

2006-01-17T09:10:00.000-05:00

Back in November I began one blog post by quoting a Washington Post piece (by Frank Ahrens) as follows: "To the list of challenges faced by newspapers--declining circulation, rising newsprint costs and increased competition from more up-to-the-minute media--add another: rising pressure from investors to make more money and reverse sliding stock prices."

Ahrens was talking about the latest woes afflicting the troubled Knight Ridder group, owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Miami Herald.

Now Douglas McCollam follows up on this issue in a piece in the January/February edition of Columbia Journalism Review ("A Way Out?"). McCollam again recounts the sorry situation newspaper most newsapaper companies find themeselves in--of sustaining profit margins (around 20%) that would be fantastic in almost any other industry, but which are deemed sub-par by the shareholders who expect even higher profits from their media holdings. The impact of this on the newspapers themselves--and on our notion of a healthy Fourth Estate press functioning in a vibrant democracy--should be of great concern to all.

The November Washington Post article also outlined the scale of the problem. To review:

Knight Ridder

Gannett Co.

The Washington Post Co.

New York Times Co.

(I had noted in an earlier post the particular problems suffered by Tribune Media--owner of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune--which "recently secured a profit margin of 'only' 17.5 per cent (high by almost any other industry's measures, but low for the obscenely profitable mainstream media)."
CJR's McCollam points out that, by the end of 2005, Tribune's stock was down 29 percent. And the rest of McCollam's figures are even more depressing than those provide by Ahrens. This, then, is a serious problem. But McCollam gives us an insight into just how serious the problem is, pointing out that "In an effort to arrest the slide and appease shareholders, virtually every major newspaper in the country got busy slashing editorial positions and aggressively cutting costs." He goes on:

In response [to shareholder pressure], many newspapers are desperately trying to convince the market that they, too, are sexy, hi-tech companies. To please the market, companies like Knight Ridder have done almost everything their large shareholders have asked — slashing staff, making stories more “reader friendly,” searching for Internet strategies that might magically transform newspapers from dead-wood deadbeats into new-media darlings. To date, none of it has worked.
So what's the answer? Are newspapers--and the huge reservoir of journalistic expertise and professionalism (yes, really!) they provide--headed for the chopping block in a vain attempt to be "sexy"? Can they be saved before they're destroyed in the race for ever-higher profits? Well, yes they can, argues McCollam: By being taken back into private ownership (i.e., by ceasing to be publically traded companies on the stock exchange).

Ahrens also brought this up in his November Washington Post piece when he pointed out that "Some within the industry think newspapers are better suited to private rather than public ownership," he notes. "Private companies attempt to minimize earnings, which are taxable, and maximize cash flow, which can be used to pay down debts. Public companies, however, are pressured to maximize earnings to appease shareholders." McCollam elaborates on this point in his piece:

What newspapers really need, above all else, is ownership that values journalism and understands that the work of gathering, writing, and publishing the news is an inherently inefficient business that is in a period of profound transition. The private press baron of the past might have been a blowhard propagandist with the ethics of a wharf rat, but at least he loved the trade. Compared with the lineup of bloodless managers and mandarins currently squeezing the life out of journalism, Charles Foster Kane looks pretty damn good. So while there is no guarantee that the private ownership of today would recognize the value of journalism, it has already been established that Wall Street does not. Maybe it’s time we took our chances.
McCollam writes a well-considered piece that points out the potential pitfalls as well as the potential benefits of privates ownership. But he makes a convincing argument that the private route is better for newspapers--which are qualitatively different from entertainment companies--and ultimately better for a thriving democracy.

The Book of Daniel: Ignored by advertisers (and audiences)

2006-01-11T09:37:00.000-05:00

The New York Times reports that the controversial new NBC series "The Book of Daniel" was pretty much boycotted by many advertisers (and five network affiliates) for its two-hour season debut last Friday. This is an interesting piece because it gives some insight into what networks do when advertisers annd sponsors bale on a program. The religious subject matter--very touchy for Americans--resulted in low advertiser turnout,

despite lower prices for the spots, which reflected a week's worth of media attention devoted to complaints from the American Family Association about the contents of the program. The complaints led 5 of NBC's 232 affiliates to pre-empt the series last Friday; in one market, Little Rock, Ark., the local WB affiliate ran it instead. The series "touches on something that our society, and Madison Avenue, are not ready for," said Joe Mandese, editor of MediaPost, an online and print trade publication. "Religion is the ultimate taboo topic."
At a time when the network is losing more and more viewers to cable, NBC is hoping that the controversial drugs-and-alcohol story lines involving the Episcopal minister's dysfunctional family "will appeal to younger, educated and affluent viewers who prefer their TV programs with an edge." But advertisers still don't like these shows when they're on the big networks. And apparently ratings were low as well, with only 9 million viewers tuning in to "The Book of Daniel."

Overall, last week's ratings saw ABC on top for the first time this season, thanks to three big bowl games (the Orange Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, and the electrifying National championship Rose Bowl game, where Texas just edged out USC). Ballroom dancing also helped ABC, which broke CBS's season-long, 15-week winning streak.

Southwarth and Hawes: Daguerreotypes and Young America

2006-01-09T12:46:00.000-05:00

On a slightly different note from most of my postings: My wife and I finally went to see--on its closing day, January 8--the George Eastman House's display of early photographic daguerreotypes by Southwarth and Hawes, a pair of studio photographers who ran one of Boston's most prominent studios in the mid-19th century. Daguerreotypes were early types of photographs, first developed in 1839, that, in contrast to later chemical processes, left no negative:

Instead, it is an image exposed directly onto a mirror-polished surface of silver, which has first been exposed to iodine vapour, or in the later use of the process, bromine vapour, housed in a velvet-lined folding case. While the daguerreotype was not the first photographic process to be developed, images of earlier processes required hours of exposure. The daguerreotype photographic process was one of the first to permanently record and affix an image with exposure time compatible with portrait photography, and became the first commercially used photographic process.
So while the daguerreotype process was a key advance--perhaps the key advance--in early photography, they're pretty rare today, with most of these early examples lost to history. That's why this exhibition was so special. Titled Young America: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes, the exhibition, which debuted at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York City last June, shows how Southwarth and Hawes

took artistic portraiture to a new level beyond common commercial photography. In service of an elite and famous clientele, they worked with large 8x6-inch plate sizes, technically more challenging but aesthetically more beautiful. As their unique daguerreotypes attest, Southworth & Hawes focused lavish attention on national and international celebrities who traveled to their Boston studio, capturing likenesses in picturesque fashion.
The startling fact that Southworth & Hawes retained copies of most of their works, rather than wiping clean old images and reusing their silver plates, makes this collection even more exceptional. There were many fascinating portraits of major figures of the early American Republic, including "statesman Daniel Webster and literary figures Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Harriet Beecher Stowe;" but I found equally fascinating the images of ordinary men and women, boys and girls, most of whose names have been lost to history 150 years on. And the daguerreotype stereoviews were pretty amazing too! (See also the permanent exhibition website here.)

Public media on the media

2006-01-08T22:09:00.000-05:00

Two interesting sources for inside-baseball analysis on the media by the media are PBS's mediawatch (part of the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer) and NPR's On the Media. This week saw some pretty interesting analysis pieces on both programs. Friday's NewsHour included pieces on questions raised by media coverage of the trapped miners in West Virginia (how did the media come to report that 12 miners survived when in fact they had died?) and the Bush administration's domestic spying program (why did the New York Times wait more than a year to break the story?). Inevitably the issues of ethics and journalists' use of sources was front and center. The same can be said of the key items in this week's On the Media, which also deals with the West Virginia mining disaster as well as Bush's leak investigation (over the extralegal wiretap story) and a very interesting backgrounder--originally aired in 2001--about the key role of leaks and leakers in American democracy.

Jan. 6 roundup

2006-01-06T08:47:00.000-05:00

There's a lot of tech- and media-related news coming from the annual Consumer Electronics Show, currently underway in Las Vegas. The headline in the "Business Day" section of today's New York Times is "Google and Yahoo Aim at Another Screen", which focuses on how the two Internet search giants "intend to move aggressively beyond the Internet browser and onto the television screen." Notes the Times's Saul Hansell:

Sony's English-born Chief Executive Howard Stringer, also speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show, said that "the transition to high-definition television and video will be a watershed, surpassing even the move to color TV from black-and-white." Reuters reported Stringer as saying, "Content is no longer pushed at consumers, it's pulled when they want it and how they want it."

Elsewhere, the Benton Foundation notes that the House and Senate have "agreed on legislation to speed the nation’s transition to digital television while helping consumers to continue to use their analog televisions, recover spectrum for use by public safety officials and improve emergency communications, and auction off additional spectrum to reduce the national deficit"; Michael Copps and Deborah Taylor Tate were this week sworn in as FCC commissioners; the Washington Post and USA Today both discuss the big-news business separation of CBS and Viacom (though both firms will remain under the ultimate control of Sumner Redstone)

And finally, there's an invited piece in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that accuses big telephone firms such as AT&T, Verizon, BellSouth and Qwest of pushing "legislators to bless a dubious business plan to bring their new TV services only to wealthy neighborhoods." The Bells are arguing that they don't have the resources to comply non-discrimination provisions of universal service rules, "which would require a far more ambitious build-out of fiber networks than they seem prepared to undertake;" they'd rather be relieved of this burden. Of course, this is a load of rubbish, and if these companies were releived of their public interest obligations, this would inevitably expand the digital divide between rich and poor in the U.S.

The Guardian's Film Year in Review

2006-01-03T22:07:00.000-05:00

Here it is: The Guardian's Film Year in Review of 2005, and here are some of the high points related for you:

January saw Sundance, and the adulation of shiny new movies such as Hustle and Flow and The Squid and the Whale (which have only recently made their long journey from Colorado to Rochester screens).

February: The Oscars of course, "billed as a showdown between Clint Eastwood and Martin Scorsese. And in the end it was the [Million Dollar] baby that emerged victorious."

March, and the Weinstein brothers and Disney-Miramax part company.

April saw the release of the controversial Hitler's-final-days flick, Downfall; and Sir John Mills dies

May was Cannes, which "played host to everything from Sin City to Hidden and everyone from Emir Kusturica to Paris Hilton."

June saw Tom Cruise's pre-War of the Worlds meltdown.

August exacerbated Hollywood's year-long box office blues, from The Island to Stealth

October was a big month, with the London Film Festival (opening with The Constant Gardener); Daniel Craig as the new Bond; and Nick Park's Aardman Studios (creators of Wallace & Gromit) burned down.

And lots more fascinating film-buff info.

Hollywood reflects on 2005 woes

2006-01-03T15:58:00.000-05:00

USA Today today reminds us yet again that last year was a disappointing year for Hollywood, with domestic ticket sales dropping nearly $400 million. The shortfall mostly affected the summer season, which was down $400 million in sales. Only one movie-Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith-took in more than $300 million, the current standard for a B-i-i-i-I-I-G blockbuster. Theatre attendance overall dropped by 8.5%, from 1.53 billion tickets in 2004 to only 1.4 billion last year. The year 2005 was the fourth year in a row that has seen a drop in sales-from a high of 1.63 billion in 2002.

Round-up, Jan 3

2006-01-03T14:13:00.000-05:00

Here we are with the New Year-and the third year of operation for this blog!-and I thought one new thing I could introduce is a (fairly)regular round-up of news and information I find as I read around the media (though mostly from the Benton CommPolicy listserv, which is an excellent source of news and information about the media). Anyway, here we go:

Reports are coming in (e.g., on NPR's marketplace) that Viacom is separating the business activities of its CBS network television from Paramount and most everything else; MediaWeek's Year in Review gives some interesting predictions on digital/convergent media, cable a la carte, and the future of the 30-second ad spot; Broadcasting & Cable also looks to the digital future in 2006, with the focus on Video on Demand (VOD), either on cable or on iPods; B&C also proclaims that, with 12 million HDTV sets now in US homes, High Definition TV has finally "arrived".

Finally (for now), the Wall Street Journal today asks the question, As the 30-second ad disappears, what will advertisers do next? The paper points to some of the more obvious advertiser strategies that will be tried out in the 2006:

George Gerbner, RIP

2006-01-02T09:04:00.000-05:00

I didn't get a chance to put this up earlier, but it's worthy of note: veteran media scholar and Philadelphia resident George Gerbner is dead. He died on Christmas Eve at the age of 86. Here's his LA Times obituary. Gerbner was well known for his research into television effects, Cultivation Theory, his long-running Cultural Indicators Project, and his more recent Cultural Environment Movement (designed "to work for greater diversity in media ownership, employment and representation."). (Here are some useful Gerbner-related links.) Gerbner's wife of almost 60 years, Ilona, also passed away earlier last month (December 8) at the age of 87.

Top 10 movies of 2005

2005-12-30T14:38:00.000-05:00

OK, here's the problem I found when putting this list together: There have in fact been quite a lot of good movies I've seen over the past year. The trouble is, I'm finding it hard to place any of these movies in the Top Three slots. In other words, there are no movies that are slam dunk Number One candidates. Lots of B's and B+'s, but not too many solid A's or even A-'s (IMHO, of course). I suppose I got too spoiled in recent years by one brilliant Lord of the Rings movie after another. So into that vacuum I've decided to go for Joss Whedon's Serenity as number one, because a.) I'm a Joss Whedon/Buffy fan; b.) I need to make up for being so late getting into the whole Firefly thing (which I love); and c.) there will be no more Firefly or Serenity on either big or little screen; and d.) I had to put something in the top slot. As for no. 2: No-one in America's talking about the Brit gangster flick Layer Cake, but I loved it! And The Constant Gardener deserves a Top Three spot: Why not?

Anyway, here are 2005 films I've seen in the past year, and I've liked.

Serenity

Layer Cake

The Constant Gardener

The Sea Inside

Wedding Crashers

The 40-Year-Old Virgin

Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit

Good Night, and Good Luck

Hotel Rwanda

Million Dollar Baby

Honorable mentions:

House of Flying Daggers

The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou

Millions

Sin City

Downfall

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Crash

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe

Syriana

A History of Violence

King Kong

Rent

LA Times gets it right on digital handover; WSJ misses the point

2005-12-28T08:50:00.000-05:00

Two quick examples of where the press is getting it right and getting it wrong over the pending transfer from analog to digital television--now scheduled for Feb. 17, 2009 (the date that federal lawmakers have set for "the last broadcast of conventional television.") In other words, notes the LA Times, that's the date "when analog TV signals will be turned off in favor of digital broadcasts, which offer improved pictures and more programming choices". (See here for a wikipedia backgrounder.)

The LA Times gets it (more or less) right. Even though the Tribune-owned paper might be having some financial problems these days, the paper is still able to come up with some useful and insightful editorial comments from time to time. An LA Times editorial from just before Christmas focuses on the downside of the Feb. 2009 deadline for the transition, especially for poor people. It reminds readers--most of whom who probably still haven't completely grasped this--"that tuning in the new signals requires either a digital TV, which the vast majority of homes don't have, or a converter box (possibly from a cable or satellite TV service) to translate the digital broadcasts into analog pictures." What's more, "with an estimated 73 million TVs in more than 30 million homes tuning in analog signals through antennas today, a lot of viewers are likely to be caught unprepared when those signals vanish."

But the Times notes that, although Congress has enacted legislation granting vouchers to help with the purchase of set-top converters, lawmakers are generally less concerned with helping poorer, unprepared citizens than with raking in the $10 billion to $30 billion of revenue that the auction of the analog spectrum could provide the U.S. Treasury. The editorial goes on:

While the LA Times editorial staff makes some sensible points on digital handover, the Wall Street Journal, misses the point (at least in this case), choosing instead to carp about government handouts to the poor. The WSJ piece (which requires a subscription, so you can't read the original unless you pay), points out that

In the best government giveaway since cheese handouts from the Reagan Administration, Congress has voted to provide consumers $40 vouchers to buy digital-to-analog converter boxes. Essentially, Congress is budgeting $1.5 billion for millions of Americans who don't need the money -- so that they can keep using obsolete technology. Moreover, most people won't notice a change in 2009. They will already have digital TVs (all new sets sold after mid-2007 must be digital), or they will still be subscribing to cable or satellite services that can send digital signals even to analog TVs. One universally acknowledged truth -- even in Congress -- is that the people who gobble up many of those vouchers will not be needy. Millions of households with satellite dishes and new big-screen TVs also have at least one old analog set lying around, and each family is entitled to two $40 vouchers. As we learned when many of the non-poor joined long queues for Reagan cheese, Americans would stand in line for marmoset pelts if they were labeled "free." To encourage such grabbiness in 2009, Congress has earmarked $5 million for voucher advertising. Mark your calendars.
Nice one, Wall Street Journal editorial board! It's comments such as these that makes me want to put that lot in the stocks so that the poor people can throw rotten fruit at them all day.

Christmas 2005, or, What Would Mr. Blobby Do?

2005-12-25T21:01:00.000-05:00

Well, it's another Christmas over at the rellies in Levittown, PA. A pleasant day of opening pressies, watching football, and eating and drinking too much. Last night my good woman and I got to watch once again--our little Xmas tradition--the Christmas Eve broadcast, on WHYY, of the Alastair Sim version of Scrooge/A Christmas Carol (though, to be honest, we fell asleep before it finished. But that's OK--we know how it ends).

As I wrote last year, Christmas bugs me rotten--at least up till Christmas Eve. Before that, I can't be bothered. There I am, all through late November and December, trying to be (ahem!) a serious media scholar, grading papers and getting my manuscripts published so they can be read by six or seven like-minded scholars who give a damn . . . and Christmas keeps butting in with its lights and ads and jingles and shiny baubles . . . you just can't ignore it! I'm forced to align myself with comedian Lewis Black's exasperation. Black, as a very lapsed Jew (I'm a very lapsed Presbyterian), has been heard to exclaim, in one of his Comedy Central specials: "How long does it take you people to shop!?"

This past year has seen some pretty significant media developments. There's been the developments over the media coverage of the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, and the Valerie Plame leak case, among others. Media consolidation continued, with moves by Sony to take over MGM and Viacom's year-end acquisition of Dreamworks. NPR chair Ken Tomlinson tried to interfere in the CPB's activities and overreached. The Bush administration made ever more pernicious efforts to undermine the country's independent media. I'll do the end-of-year wrap-up properly sometime later, but suffice to say for now it's been an interesting (and excruciating!) year.

Last year I was pontificating on the general tackiness of Christmas--both in the States and especially in Britain (and we must never forget how mystifying it is that Americans associate Christmas in England with Dickensian snow, frosted windows, happy carollers, cherubic children, chestnuts on an open fire, all that. But of course it's not like that at all! That's all bollocks, really! Brits open their pressies, eat Christmas Dinner, maybe watch the Queen, then sit round the telly and drink till they pass out. Then it's Boxing Day and no-one knows what the hell to do with that day . . . well OK, they eat Christmas leftovers, sit round the telly and drink till they pass out. Maybe there's football on). Anyway, where was I . . . oh yes, this year I'm just resigned to wallowing in the tackiness. Too tired to do otherwise.

If I had more energy I'd go off on all the rubbish I've been reading by those on the right complaining about how "Merry Christmas" is being squashed by those evildoers proclaiming "Happy Holidays" to all. But as I say, right now I can't be arsed. Merry Christmas, all--let's just leave it at that, shall we? That's what Mr. Blobby would do.

Cable indecency, Indian style

2005-12-21T13:08:00.000-05:00

The United States is not the only country whose cable industry is under fire for allowing "indecency". India is taking its own action to ban "adult" shows on its domestic cable system. Alcohol and tobacco ads are also to be purged under amendments to the Indian government's Cable Network Act, which comes into force in the next few days. "All programmes will now have to be in conformity with the code prescribing norms of decency, morality and national security," according to a government spokesman quoted by the BBC. The BBC also notes that the changes come only two months after the Indian government "allowed foreign television countries to broadcast to India via cable for the first time." The changes seem to be part of a raft of measures to tighten up regulation of India's famously ramshackle cable industry, as foreign cable and satellite broadcasters are allowed into India for the first time. Copyright enforcement is also being pushed by the the central government. It seems to be that, from India's point of view, trade liberalization, copyright enforcement and regulation of morality go hand in hand!

A dangerous culture at the Bush White House

2005-12-20T08:19:00.000-05:00

Warning! This blog post is uncommonly partisan in nature.

I have of course been following with great interest the latest developments in President Bush's attempts to maintain absolute control over his War on Terror. His shenanigans over torture and domestic spying are, I believe, part of a pattern of extra-legal activities that shows Bush's imperial and unConstitutional instincts clearly on display. And now a number of conservatives are saying the same thing, or at least exhibiting grave concerns at the President's actions. Their number includes Sen. Arlen Spector and Sen. John McCain; and, in media-land, David Brooks and George Will. And I was stunned to hear three prominent conservatives on NPR's Diane Rehm Show all excoriate Bush for his recent activities. I'm glad to hear this, because it shows that the rising tide of criticism against this warped presidency isn't simply a matter of whinging lefties.

Thank God for that. It's about time. I hope that a critical mass of all Americans are starting to realize just how dangerous to democracy this presidency - and this president - has become. And this danger manifested itself first in Bush's clear disregard for the media and its proper function in a democracy. And that's what the rest of this post is about. Ever since September 11, 2001, I've been increasingly concerned by the attempts by the Bush administration to control what passes for "news" in the American media. Of course, presidents have attempted to "spin" the press for generations. Theodore Roosevelt famously used his "bully pullpit" to cajole the press. (He also sought to gain favor among journalists in other ways; it was Roosevelt who set up the first White House press room, to give reporters a warm place to work, shielded from the elements, while interviewing officials and writing up their articles.) Other presidents have tried to go over the heads of the White House Press Corps to appeal directly to the American people. TR's later namesake, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, inaugurated his radio "fireside chats" to achieve just such a goal. All 20th century presidents have tried to some extent to set the agenda and spin the news in ways that are favorable to them. Especially in recent years, all administrations have engaged ever more heavily in what Penn Annenberg professor Oscar Gandy called an information subsidy. (As I've written before, massive information subsidies allow journalists to look like they're doing a whole lot of work while in reality much of the content they present under their byline is actually "borrowed" from spin doctors and PR professionals pushing a particular point of view.)

But George W. Bush's presidency is qualitatively different from most that have preceded him. A recent piece in Slate.com ("Beyond Spin: The propaganda presidency of George W. Bush") by Jacob Weisberg points to the "familiar litany" of the Bush administration's disinformation campaigns within the United States. In the past year-plus there has plenty of evidence of wrongdoing. The adminstration's use of VNRs (Video News Releases) to promote Medicare "reform," first reported by the New York Times, was bad. Then there was the Department of Education's dodgy relationship with Armstrong Williams. USA Today early in 2005 reported that the Education Department, through a contract with the Ketchum public relations firm, apparently paid $240,000 to Williams, a conservative African-American print, radio and television pundit, to help promote Bush's No Child Left Behind program to minority audiences on his news radio show. USA Today also noted back in Jaunary that, as of early 2005, the Bush administration had paid PR firms $250 million to help push their ideas and proposals. That's double what the Clinton administration spent on all P.R. from 1997 to 2000.

Just weeks after the Williams revelation earlier this year, Eric Boehlert in Salon uncovered government-funded activities by Michael McManus, "a marriage advocate whose syndicated column, Ethics & Religion,' appears in 50 newspapers. Briefly, McManus "was hired as a subcontractor by the Department of Health and Human Services (the same agency that had paid for and distributed the prepackaged VNRs) to foster a Bush-approved marriage initiative. McManus championed the plan in his columns without disclosing to readers he was being paid to help it succeed." Horn's move came on the heels of a contemporary report in the Washington Post that HHS had paid syndicated columnist and marriage advocate Maggie Gallagher $21,000 to write brochures and essays and to brief government employees on the president's marriage initiative.

Noted Boehlert a couple of weeks ago: "Any of of these incidents might be excused as an episode of poor judgment by an underling. In combination and accompanied by various presidential comments about not reading the newspaper, preferring to get his news from aides, and so on, they suggest a propaganda ethic."

More recent developments, both at home and abroad, suggest that this might be an understatement - don't forget the Valerie Plame/Scooter Libby/Dick Cheney revelations, and the recent news that the U.S. government paid for planted propaganda in the free Iraq media (here's the original piece that broke the story in the Los Angeles Times). The latest New York Times revelations about the administration's covert, extralegal spying on the American people, and Bush's reaction to that story, leaves no doubt: There is a something serious going on here, and it is very dangerous and deeply corrosive to democracy.

Yes indeedy.

a la carte and family values (cont.)

2005-12-14T08:20:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned the other day, the cable industry suddenly finds itself under government pressure to offer some kind of a la carte basic cable service, all in the name of "family values". And big cable MSOs (Multiple System Operators) such as Time Warner and Comcast find themselves having to scramble to head off any possible regulatory moves. Maybe they are so quick to cave because they know their business model exploits consumers. Suddenly the MSOs are talking about "family tiers" that subscribers can add to their basic cable package -- not exactly what consumers have in mind. And any moves of this kind almost certainly wouldn't save subscribers any money, and may even end up costing them more. But then again, nothing in this so-called debate really addresses the needs and concerns of the average consumer. Some evidence for this comes from Broadcasting & Cable, which notes another interesting twist in this debate: It's been done before, with negligible impact.

DirectTV

It makes you wonder just who's pushing this agenda, and why. It's certainly not the broad mainstream of consumers. In fact, it seems, there are no "good guys" out there, looking out for the regular guy/gal who just wants to save some money and avoid having to pay for all these channels s/he never watches.

Lastly, it's interesting to see how this debate mixes up the ideological debate over free choice, consumer rights, regulation/deregulation, and the public interest. Those on both the left and the right seem to be divided over whether a la carte - and government moves to mandate and regulate a move to a la carte - would be a good thing. The more interesting debate, if only because it involves the people who are actually in charge of everything these days, is within the right - between, on the one hand, social-cultural conservatives operating from an indeceny-morality frame, and on the other, economic conservatives who favor leaving the market alone. The latter position is summed up by the Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins (thanks to a faculty colleague for pointing me to this), who notes in a WSJ commentary piece (taken from the Benton Foundation Comm Policy listserv - original requires subscription):

What about this "à la carte" debate? Supporters prattle about consumer rights, but consumers don't have a right to anything except that which somebody is willing to sell to them (without force or fraud). And everything we buy is really a package deal. Buy a garden hose at Wal-Mart and you're purchasing both a manufactured good and a service (Wal-Mart's logistics chain). Don't listen to any ninny who tells you that, because you're entitled to buy ketchup without buying mayonnaise, you should be entitled to buy ESPN without buying CNN. You can buy ketchup without mayonnaise because somebody is willing to sell it to you. In turn, you've demonstrated a willingness to make it worth his while. Today's basic cable package represents a complex set of bargains involving not just cable providers and subscribers, but two other parties: advertisers (who help pay your cable bill) and programming suppliers (who use the bargaining clout of their popular networks to get their niche networks on the air too). It's a solution that works: Everybody pays the same basic rate for channels they mostly don't watch, which is no different from saying they pay the same basic rate for the few channels they do watch -- but a lot more tastes are satisfied.
As I say, this is an interesting wrinkle on the traditional left-right bun fight over free choice, consumer rights, etc. The "solution that works" referred to above sounds surprisingly communitarian to me (at least insofar as it dovetails with commercial interests). But it doesn't help individual consumers who are paying over the odds for basic cable. In any contest between what individual consumers and groups want and need, and what big business wants, it's clear where Jenkins' loyalties lie. But there is one thing that Jenkins says that is likely to find more general agreement: "Technology is likely to render the whole issue moot. The concept of a 'channel' is an eroding one. Internet TV will be more akin to a library, in which you order up for instant viewing the fare you care to receive."

And wait till you see how much the MSOs want to charge you for that!

Viacom-Paramount snaps up Dreamworks

2005-12-13T09:28:00.000-05:00

Well, it's happened - and it came out of the blue. U.S. media giant Viacom is buying Dreamworks SKG. The deal, according to the Wall Street Journal is worth a total of $1.6 billion. Viacom outbid competitor GE-NBC-Universal for the studio, which was set up 11 years ago by Steven Spielberg, former Disney exec Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen (hence the "SKG" in the company's name). Although the deal does not apparently include the animation component of the company, Dreamworks Animation SKG, it will give Viacom-Paramount the rights to distributing that company's products. Over the years Dreamworks has produced hit movies such as "The Peacemaker" (its first release, in 1997), "Saving Private Ryan," and "American Beauty" and "Gladiator" (which, consecutively, won DreamWorks two best picture Oscars, in 1999 and 2000). But recent years have been more problematic, and the last year in particular has seen Dreamworks bomb with products such as "The Island" and "Just Like Heaven."

The development shows - again - how hard it is for movie studios to operate independently of the big TransNational Corporations that dominate global media today. The move follows on from Sony's deal earlier this year to buy up MGM for $5 billion.

Addressing what ails the press

2005-12-08T21:57:00.000-05:00

Here's a post I've had sitting around in draft form for more than a week, waiting for a moment to write it up. It's about the problems that have been assailing the newspaper business. I spotted this intruiging piece in The New York Review of Books ("The Press: The Enemy Within" by Michael Massing). It's a lengthy piece, and I only have time to give the briefest plug for it, but it does a good job of summing up many of the points I've raised in this blog about the inadequacies of the press in its coverage of many of the biggest stories of recent years - from the 2004 election to Iraq War to the Plame Affair to Hurricane Katrina. It includes some serious criticism of the country's most prestigious news organizations, from journalists who worked on the inside, such as Nancy Cleeland and Ken Silverstein of the Los Angeles Times, and Tom Fenton at CBS (who has also written his own damning indictment of that network: Bad News).

Although Massing concedes that, since Katrina, "journalists have been asking more pointed questions at press conferences, attempting to investigate cronyism and corruption in the White House and Congress, and doing more to document the plight of people without jobs or a place to live," he wonders:

Will such changes prove lasting? In a previous article, I described many of the external pressures besetting journalists today, including a hostile White House, aggressive conservative critics, and greedy corporate owners. [2] Here, I will concentrate on the press's internal problems - not on its many ethical and professional lapses, which have been extensively discussed elsewhere, but rather on the structural problems that keep the press from fulfilling its responsibilities to serve as a witness to injustice and a watchdog over the powerful. To some extent, these problems consist of professional practices and proclivities that inhibit reporting - a reliance on "access," an excessive striving for "balance," an uncritical fascination with celebrities. Equally important is the increasing isolation of much of the profession from disadvantaged Americans and the difficulties they face. Finally, and most significantly, there's the political climate in which journalists work. Today's political pressures too often breed in journalists a tendency toward self-censorship, toward shying away from the pursuit of truths that might prove unpopular, whether with official authorities or the public.
This is a busy time for everyone in higher education. But I'd definitely recommend this article to those of you interested in trying to understand why the press is at an all-time low in terms of public trust and confidence.

Fair use in the digital era

2005-12-07T08:22:00.000-05:00

I spotted an interesting piece in the Benton Foundation Comm Policy news service this week, concerning issues of copyright and intellectual property rights. It relates to a recent report by the Brennan Center for Justice ("Will Fair Use Survive?", authored by Marjorie Heins and Tricia Beckles and available in downloadable PDF format.).

The report was "the product of more than a year of research - including many firsthand stories from artists, scholars, bloggers, and others," and "paints a striking picture of an intellectual property system that is perilously out of balance." The core of the report is a call for the legal doctrine of fair use to be reaffirmed and strengthened in the digital age "so that it can be an effective tool for anyone who contributes to culture and democratic discourse."

Fair use is a long-standing concept in American law that allows people to use copyrighted material, in certain limited circumstances, without the permission of the copyright holder. As the Stanford University Libraries website notes, "Most fair use analysis falls into two categories: commentary and criticism; or parody." Traditionally, there has been a fair amount of flexibility granted under the umbrella of fair use. But, the Brennan report holds, this flexibility is fast disappearing. The Benton service notes the report's following key findings:

1) Artists, writers, historians, and filmmakers are burdened by a "clearance culture" that ignores fair use and forces them to seek permission (which may be denied) and pay high license fees in order to use even small amounts of copyrighted or trademarked material.
2) The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the DMCA) is being used by copyright owners to pressure Internet service providers to take down material from their servers on the mere assertion that it is infringing, with no legal judgment and no consideration of fair use.
3) An analysis of 320 letters on the Chilling Effects website, an online repository of threatening cease and desist and "take down" letters, showed that nearly 50% of the letters had the potential to stifle protected speech.

In response to these challenges to fair use,

The report recommends: A) creating a clearinghouse for information, including sample replies to cease and desist and "take down" letters; B) outreach to Internet service providers who are instructed by companies to take down sites with material they claim as copyright-protected; C) changes in the law to reduce the penalty for guessing wrong about fair use; and D) the creation of a national pro bono legal support network.
Certainly something needs to be done to protect fair use. Otherwise, it will become very difficlut or even impossible for people to use any digital matrial for any purpose without having to ask permission and/or pay someone for the privilege. And that would be deleterious to robust democratic debate. Remember, copyright law is supposed to find a balance between, on the one hand, enabling creators of original material to make a reasonable profit from their works for a fixed period of time, and on the other, enabling creative works to enter the public realm in order to spark new creative and democratic output.

The balance is shifting very much against the public realm. Another major strike in favor of the copyright holders came last June, when the Supreme Court, in MGM v. Grokster, ruled that Internet file-sharing services, such as Grokster (a service run by StreamCast Networks Inc) and Morpheus can "be held responsible if they intend for their customers to use software primarily to swap songs and movies illegally." In a surprise move, the justices also unanimously rejected "warnings that the lawsuits will stunt growth of cool tech gadgets such as the next iPod." The BBC characterized the ruling as making clear that the "file-sharing companies are to blame for what users do with their software." It seems clear from the ruling that the Court believed Grokster could be facilitating illegal activity, i.e., copyright infringement.

The case had been "brought by 28 movie and music makers who claimed that rampant piracy was denting profits." Even though the Supreme Court justices had been expected to rule in favor of the file-sharers - because of legal precedents such as a 1984 case involving Sony's Betamax VCR (Sony Corp v. Universal City Studios), they didn't do that. Instead the Court has set aside the precedent (and lower court decisions) because they determined that "the makers of a technology have to answer for what people do with it if they use it to break the law." Notes the BBC:

The BBC also noted at the time that the decision could "have an impact on any technology firm developing gadgets or devices that let people enjoy media on the move. If strictly interpreted the ruling means that these hi-tech firms will have to try to predict the ways people can use these devices to pirate copyrighted media and install controls to stop this infringement." And indeed, this does seem to have happened. According to Wikipedia, Grokster - which "was forced to pay $50 million to the music and recording industries" - announced in November that it would cease its P2P (peer-to-peer) file-sharing service. Furthermore:

MGM v. Grokster

"Some people are saying that as long as I don't actively induce infringement, I'm O.K. I don't think it will work out that way...[the Court] has handed a tool to judges that they can declare inducement whenever they want to."

Philly gets closer to wireless

2005-12-02T09:30:00.000-05:00

Just before Thanksgiving, PBS's News Hour with Jim Lehrer included a segment (by media correspondent Terence Smith) on Philadelphia's ambitious (for the U.S.) plans to connect up the entire city for wi-fi, or wireless internet access. Since I was staying with my wife's family in the Philly suburbs over Turkey Day--and I sort of consider Philadelphia to be my "home" city in the U.S.--I'm particularly interested in seeing how this pans out.

"Wireless Philadelphia" is the name of a project to build a wi-fi (wireless) system for the entire city "within a year". The system follows a universal access model, based on 3,000 small antennae distributed throughout 135 square miles of the city. When complete, you'll be able to get stable wireless access anywhere in the city, indoors or out. The project, which is being pushed hard by Mayor John Street, would make Philly the first "city of its size in the nation to have wireless broadband access available to everyone, regardless of income, at below- market prices." Mayor Street sees wi-fi as an essential utility that needs to be available at affordable rates--like water or electricity. The PBS piece notes that the plan is to offer the service to all of Philadelphia's 560,000 homes and 1.5 million inhabitants, at rates between $10 and $20 per month. The goal is to erase the so-called "digital divide," which separates poor Philadelphians from their richer and middle-class counterparts, the majority of whom now have wireless internet access at home. The city took a major step forward back in early October when it tapped Earthlink to complete the network. Wireless Philadelphia is thus a public-private partnership.

Of course, other private internet providers such as Comcast and Verizon are not happy about this. These companies (and Time Warner Cable, which provides my home wi fi access in Rochester) prefer to hook people up home by home rather than provide a broad-based, public system. These companies also prefer to charge $40-50 per month rather than $10-20 per month.

A battle is shaping up between these ISPs, who see a huge revenue generator being removed from them, and cities, who see cheap and universal wireless internet access to all citizens as an essential precondition for economic growth. A recent Washington Post piece quoted Ben Scott, a policy director of Free Press, "a nonprofit group that favors the development of municipal wireless," as follows:

Increasingly, city officials view broadband in the 21st century the same way they viewed electricity 100 years ago and telephone service 50 years ago. It's falling into the category of a necessary and essential social service. . . . Cities see this as a way to spur economic growth: on the one hand to put tools in the hands of the underprivileged and give them a leg up, and on the other to provide incentives to small businesses to locate in these cities and to expand their operations.
Meanwhile, other countries, especially in Asia, push ahead with much more ambitious national wireless access plans. The U.S. strategy of leaving braodband access in the sole hands of private commercial interests has already seriously impeded growth in this sector. The result, according to a recent study reported in Slate.com ("The Fight Over Wireless"), is that "the United States has dropped to 16th in the percentage of citizens with access to broadband, trailing South Korea, Canada, Israel, and Japan, among others. There is consensus across the political spectrum that we need to go wireless—and fast." The trouble is, the federal government isn't doing much to push universal access. Most of the government impetus is coming from cities and states.

"Wireless Philadelphia" is a good start. But it's only a start. Let's hope it and programs like it don't get stymied by big cable companies and their friends in state legislatures and in Congress.

One Year On!

2005-12-01T10:50:00.000-05:00

I've been so busy this past week that I let pass the one-year anniversary of this blog. So to celebrate(?) I'm reprinting my first substantive post, from Nov. 29, 2004.

Election advertising boondoggle

Alliance for Better Campaigns

$1.6 billion

MoveOn.org

“527s”

TVWeek

Lear Center Local News Archive

Nielsen Monitor Plus

University of Wisconsin Advertising Project

two million political spots

677 full days of advertising

NOW with Bill Moyers

The battle for a la carte cable is resumed

2005-12-01T09:53:00.000-05:00

Perhaps the most interesting media development this week is the resumption of the debate over cable pricing. FCC chair Kevin J. Martin has come out in favor of a la carte pricing on cable systems. In other words, cable subscribers would be allowed to pick and choose which individual channels they would like to pay for (beyond a basic tier of broadcast and cable networks). This is a sharp reversal of the FCC's previous position, which was to support the cable industry's desire to retain the current system of bundling channels into ever larger cable packages (this is of course very profitable for the cable operators). The motive for this new initiative is, as ever with the federal government, a desire to protect children from indecency and violence on television. It seems that many viewers would prefer to block--and not have to pay for--"edgier" basic cable offerings such as Comedy Central and MTV. Martin now seems to have concluded that the best way to protect the children is to allow subscribers to pick and choose their own channels. Cable operators argue that if this was mandated by the government, consumers would end up paying more for fewer channels.

The FCC has no power to mandate a switch to a la carte pricing--that power is left to Congress. But Martin is certainly in an influential position to get the debate moving. As for the cable industry, it has little public support for its current strategy, that could be construed as price-gouging unhappy cable consumers. For years the cable industry has been adding more and more channels to their cable lineups. Most viewers only watch a fraction of these channels--typically 17 channels out of an averagge of 88 available to subscribers, according to a 2004 FCC report (cited in USA Today on Nov 30). Yet since cable was deregulated in the mid-1990s, cable subscription rates have increased at well in excess of the rate of inflation. Many subscribers wonder why they're paying so much for scores of channels they never watch.

And now AT&T is backing the move to a la carte pricing. AT&T was for a while one of the biggest MSOs (Multiple System Operators); it got out of the business in 2001 when its cable operations were bought up by rival Comcast; but the company is now looking to get back into the game through promoting its own a la carte programming services.

(For a fuller insight into both sides of the argument, USA Today runs a pro- and con debate over a la carte pricing in its Dec 1 edition -- see here for the pro-pick and choose position and here for the leave-things-as-they-are argument.)

Media teaching versus media research

2005-11-27T19:35:00.000-05:00

The weekend prior to Thanksgiving I attended the annual Lilly Conference on Higher Education, at Miami University of Ohio. This was a long weekend full of interesting and engaging (well, most of the time) presentations on how to make teaching and learning more effective. Right after I got back I read a piece by Scott McLemee ("Meet the Press") in Inside Higher Ed. McLemee argues that, in the broader public debate about journalism's role in society, academic media analysis "plays no part at all, at least in its theoretically articulated variants" in influencing that debate. In other words, most of the academic research in the field of communication and media studies has little direct impact on journalists and their bosses as they go about their work. The problem is that even the best academic analyses in the field of media studies don't have "traction" within newsrooms. Or, as McLemee puts it: "The most subtle and cogent analysis by a rhetorician of how The Times or CNN frames its stories has all the pertinence to a reporter or editor that a spectrographic analysis of jalapeno powder would to someone cooking chili."

I'd agree with that, up to a point, though I'd argue that academic media studies do have a palpable influence on journalism, though it's slow, indirect and often hard to find--apart from anything else, working journalists hate to admit to being directly influenced by academic studies once they've entered the field. And that brings me to teaching and learning in higher ed. Because I think that professors in communication are best served by striving to show comm students how to be more critically aware media producers and media consumers while they're still at college. This is especially important in the U.S., which has a woefully inadequate record of teaching media literacy in high school (in sharp contrast to countries such as Canada, Australia, and England). I could write a dozen peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles analyzing the media's role in society. Yes, I believe that sort of scholarly activity still has worth (for one thing, it shows that published professors do have real expertise in their field of inquiry; and some of the ideas and findings from all this research does eventually seep through into the professional press and even into the newsrooms). But ultimately, for me, it's more important to try and have some direct impact on my students -- to help them become better critical thinkers. And one of the best ways for them to do that is to conduct some original analysis and research of their own. The extent to which I can facilitate that is the extent to which I'll be an effective educator.

In that spirit, McLemee concludes his piece as follows:

So research does have an important and ongoing role to play--as long as it stays closely connected to student learning. That applies whether it's me doing the research or the students.

Hope you all had a happy--and safe--Thanksgiving.

Clear Channel's profits not so clear anymore

2005-11-22T10:16:00.000-05:00

It seems that newspapers are not the only media that are hurting (relatively speaking) these days. Big radio, billboard, and live entertainment operation Clear Channel has also seen its profits take a hit of late. The company's third-quarter profits dropped 21 percent. Of course, they're still making big profits, but not as big as before. As NPR's Morning Edition notes, Clear Channel is even trying to tinker with its bland, homogenized, boring, corporate-friendly image. They'd like to make their product more lively and appealing. But the company can't do more than tinker, since any serious change in strategy risks driving its profits down much further.

The NPR piece, by Neda Ulaby, also notes the grassroots drive for more lively "Free Radio," i.e., over-the-air broadcast radio that isn't as stagnant and boring as it usually is in this day and age (thanks in large part to Clear Channel and its clones). The threat from satellite subscription services such as XM and Sirius Satellite Radio is only going to grow, and these services could end up consigning over-the-air broadcast services to a desolate wasteland. It's clear that if "free" radio is to stay relevant and innovative, it'll have to shake off overlarge corporate owners like Clear Channel. The NPR piece also refers to a speech by Clear Channel president Mark Mays, who'd like to do away with the last vestiges of FCC ownership and public interest regulations, so it could grow even bigger (the company already own more than 1250 stations, including many of the biggest stations in numerous media markets, and it is by far the biggest owner of radio stations in the U.S.). If Clear Channel were allowed to buy up essentially everything else, it would simply ramp up its corporate strategy--of promoting bland, boring, standardized music--to an even greater degree. Clear Channel's part of the problem, not part of the solution. Its continued dominance will only facilitate broadcast radio's death spiral.

Good Night, and Good Luck

2005-11-16T22:55:00.000-05:00

Last week I got a chance to see Good Night, and Good Luck, the George Clooney-directed film that deals with the events surrounding the clash between CBS news legend Edward R. Murrow and anti-Communist nutter Senator Joseph McCarthy. The film focuses narrowly on Murrow and his friend and news producer at CBS, Fred Friendly, both of whom worked on the CBS news special program See it Now in the early '50s. Murrow and McCarthy used this news vehicle in late 1953 and early 1954 to take a sharp editorial jab at McCarthy, who was at the time using his Senatorial position to pursue a rabidly anti-Communist witchhunt that served to reinforce his own personal power and megalomania. (For some more historical background, see this piece in Wikipedia.)

As for the film: I liked it, as did many serious film reviewers, including Roger Ebert and my wife. Actually, I have to take a cue from my wife, who thought the depiction of Murrow's crusading journalism was well acted, unexpectedly funny, and gave some fascinating insights into how network television operated in its infancy. And I have to agree with Slate.com's David Edelstein, who proclaims it "a damn good movie!"

I also have to agree with my wife in concluding that the film was less preachy than I expected. Although it does come across as being very righteous (as American journalists do sometimes), I don't find that particularly irritating in this case. But some people did, it seems. And this brings me to Edelstein's colleague at Slate, Jack Shafer, who remains critical of what he calls the film's oversimplistic approach to history. Unfortunately, the media historian in me is compelled to pay attention to what appears to be a critique based on historical fact rather than the formal qualities of the film, which Shafer readily admits are quite superior. All the same, he takes the following position:

Good Night, and Good Luck

I suppose I'm a little ambivalent about Shafer's take. Yes, he's right in registering his disapproval of the oversimplification of the events surrounding the Murrow-McCarthy showdown. This is often a criticism levelled at historical dramas. But the thing is, it's a movie. And yes, Murrow's personal role in the "takedown" of McCarthy is overplayed (McCarthy's reputation and ability to instill fear was already waning by the time Murrow got involved). But movies typically have to simplify the always-complex world of material facts and interpretations down to one or two core themes that drive the narrative along. And movies have to have a strong central character/protagonist/hero to act as the focus for the narrative. You can always argue for packing in more facts, but the danger is that we get too bogged down in the minutiae, and lose sight of the overall story, the "big picture." Film does the big-picture, dominant narrative stuff very well. This film goes farther than most in presenting the details of the clash in near-documentary form (if anything, the film has the feel of a '50s teleplay or anthology drama, and fittingly so). But it can't convey the true complexity of the situation. For that we have books, and thank God for that!

Traditional newspapers are hurting

2005-11-10T20:13:00.000-05:00

To the list of challenges faced by newspapers -- declining circulation, rising newsprint costs and increased competition from more up-to-the-minute media -- add another: rising pressure from investors to make more money and reverse sliding stock prices.
So begins a Washington Post piece (by Frank Ahrens) on the continuing woes besetting media comapnies that are still concentrated in the traditional newspaper business.

The news peg is the latest development involving the troubled Knight Ridder group, which owns 32 titles, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Miami Herald.

Of course Knight Ridder isn't the only newspaper company having problems. Notes the Post:

Gannett

Washington Post

New York Times

This development also adds context to Tribune Media's own newspaper woes, recounted in a previous mediaville post. Tribune "recently secured a profit margin of 'only' 17.5 per cent (high by almost any other industry's measures, but low for the obscenely profitable mainstream media)." And as I noted then, "Tribune's making bags of money but not enough, because Wall Street expects it to make even more." (And of course this means that Tribune's managers and its shareholders are willing to see deep cuts to get their profit margins up.)

Ahrens does raise an interesting point: "Some within the industry think newspapers are better suited to private rather than public ownership," he notes. "Private companies attempt to minimize earnings, which are taxable, and maximize cash flow, which can be used to pay down debts. Public companies, however, are pressured to maximize earnings to appease shareholders."

Does Al Gore really hold the future of TV?

2005-11-07T15:20:00.000-05:00

Remember Al Gore? You know, the guy who was supposed to win (well, probably did win) the 2000 Presidential race but somehow never made it to the White House? We haven't heard much from him since those dark days. Following his defeat in the Supreme Court, he famously grew a beard, briefly taught graduate journalists at Columbia, and has been spending more time back in his native Tennessee, where he is steadily rebuilding bridges in his home state (which notoriously failed to vote for him in 2000) as rumors persist that he'll make another presidential run in 2008. Wikipedia also lists his current activities as chairing a company called Generation Investment Management, sitting on Apple Computer's board of directors, and serving "as an unofficial advisor to Google's senior management."

The role that has recently drawn the most attention to Gore - certainly in media circles - is his partnership in the new cable and web TV enterprise, Current TV, which went on air on August 1 this year. Gore and partner Joel Hyatt have set up the new network - based in San Francisco - in an effort to do something radically different with television. It seems like he might be on to something. Here's how a recent USA Today article ("Akimbo, Current Media could embody TV's next generation") introduces us to the operation.

Two decades ago, if you wanted to see how cable would change TV, you might've visited Turner Broadcasting and MTV, just to soak up what was going on. Today, there's no question the Internet is going to alter television — not make TV go away, but make it different. So whom do you visit to check out where this is heading? Could be a lot of contenders, but while I'm in San Francisco, I can hit two on the same day: Current and Akimbo.
Akimbo, btw, is another nascent TV hybrid operation that seems to act like a "super-TiVO" for "niche video-almost-on-demand". Its main claim to fame seems to be that it's being run by a chap called Will Hearst, who apparently is a grandson of 19th Century newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. But the Current TV operation sounds like it's the more interesting venture of the two. As USA Today notes, Gore and Hyatt are thinking about television in a very different way," as they attempt to integrate TV and web operations more symbiotically than ever before. "Current is using the Internet to make its viewers a meaningful part of the TV channel. More than 30% of the segments on Current are produced by amateurs and are sent in through the website." (I haven't got to see the TV version yet, but I have dug around on the web site to see the type of material being submitted and aired.)

Back in early August, right after the station started operations, NPR ran a piece that noted how the station was designed to "snag the short attention span of young people who don't normally watch the news." Clearly, though, no-one back then had a clear idea whether this exercise in truly interactive TV would take off. NPR quoted commentator (and USC professor) Todd Boyd, who refelected that the programming looked a little like "a cross between an earlier version of MTV, CNN, and the Internet." Boyd focused on how it was hard to imagine Al Gore being associated with anything "hip." Yet three months later, it seems as if Gore has hit upon something that connects to "the kids."

USA Today concludes: "For the past decade, the Internet has opened the door for people and subjects that wouldn't otherwise make it into mainstream media. Current is now using that opening to change mainstream media. And the industry is paying attention."

NPR goes from strength to strength

2005-11-06T22:07:00.000-05:00

National Public Radio--by far the most important source of noncommercial radio in the United States--continues to prosper and grow. In a recent Chicago Tribune piece (registration required), Phil Rosenthal noted how the loose national network of public radio stations has doubled its national audience, from 13 to 26 million, in just the past six years. And they've done it without having to worry too much about impressing Wall Street and corporate investors.

Rosenthal also states that "listen to an NPR program for 30 seconds and you know you're listening to NPR." Actually I'd say it's more like five seconds. To me, NPR sounds so different to just about everything else on the dial--whenever I'm driving long distances and searching for the local NPR station, I find I can recognize it almost instantly. The measured tones of the presenters are streets away from the exhortations of commercial DJs and talk radio hosts, who often seem to prefer just ranting at their audiences.

Yes, some might complain that NPR is still compromised by having to raise revenue from sponsorships, foundation support, and of course support "from listeners like you." Even so, and perhaps because the rest of American radio is so bad, NPR sounds so good. And public radio is going from strength to strength: Rosenthal notes that, while other news operations are cutting back, NPR's "in the midst of a $15 million, three-year plan to add 45 staffers and open new bureaus, including one in West Africa."

What future for network news?

2005-11-02T08:16:00.000-05:00

What is network news going to look like five years from now? Twenty years ago, or even ten years ago, a pretty confident answer would have been "Pretty much the same as it looks now." Now, with the networks under ever greater pressure from cable, satellite and Internet, and the old troika of Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings gone, the answer is much less certain. In fact, no-one has a clue what network news will be like five years from now -- or even six months from now.

In a piece in the New York Times Business section, Bill Carter asks five key questions that need to be resolved in the near future:

"Who will anchor the ABC evening news after the death of Peter Jennings?
"Who will eventually take over the CBS evening newscast, if CBS will even have a traditional anchor format on the program?
"Who will lead NBC News, which is still without a permanent president?
"Will the long-running ABC News program 'Nightline' be able to survive with an ensemble anchor team replacing the program's highly regarded anchor/patriarch, Ted Koppel?
"Will the evening newscasts at each network be regarded as lesser programs in comparison with the far more profitable morning news programs like 'Today' and 'Good Morning.'"

These questions all cut to the core of what we think "network news" should be all about. Are we still talking about the dominant construct, which has remained that of an the all-powerful nightly network news, headed by the all-powerful network news anchor defining America's universe for all its people. This construct, which crystalized in the 1960s, has been steadily undermined in recent years as total network news audiences have slipped, and those audiences that remain skew older (advertisers don't like older audiences). But the core idea of an early evening, 30-minute national network news broadcast has remained scarosanct - up till now. Will that remain the case? Recalling the era of Edward R. Murrow, Huntley and Brinkley and Walter Cronkite, we might regret that today's network news divisions are mere shadows of their former selves, but we can still recognize today's entities as direct line descendants of these paragons of the (so-called) "golden age of television". With the passing of the "old guard", will we be able to say this in five years? What kind of people will take the place of Brokaw, Rather, Jennings, Koppel et al.?

Certainly the network news shows are still pulling in national audiences - between 22 and 25 million per night, according to Carter - that dwarf those of the cable networks. But is that enough? And these numbers diminish with each passing year. The morning news shows still remain profitable and healthy, but these are increasingly turning to entertainment news. What's to be done? Everything is up in the air for the network planners. Maybe it should be. Maybe the old network news construct, built in an era when 95% of Americans watched the same three TV stations, is simply no longer tenable. If that's the case, what's going to replace it?

A vote for product placement

2005-11-01T20:01:00.000-05:00

The Economist magazine has come out in favor of product placement - something I've drawn attention to in the past (see, e.g., Can we avoid the ads any more?). The news peg is that the European Union is planning to legalize product placement, which has not surprisingly led to some stiff opposition in a continent that is often less friendly toward commercial interests than is the case in the U.S. My natural inclination is with the European critics - to say "No more ads, please!"; but the economically libertarian Economist demurs, and bases its argument for allowing product placement precisely on the point that annoys so many about so much modern advertising: its ubiquity and the relentlessness of its commercial message, both at the conscious and subconscious levels. In a commentary piece, "Ride and Prejudice" (paid registration required), the journal reminds us that

if advertising that slips imperceptably into people's brains were to be banned, a great deal of what goes on would be outlawed. After all, drivers spinning past hoardings don't necessarily consciously clock the message they've seen; often they file it unconsciously -- as you, flicking through these pages [of the magazine], may well absorb the notion that an expensive watch or a new phone will change your life in some vague but enticing way.
So the argument for allowing product placement is that product placement is already all around us, in every sphere of our lives, thanks to ever-increasing advertising "clutter" in all walks of life in our society; deal with it! European TV producers should at least be able to make some money under the circumstances. Unfortunately, it's an argument as compelling as it is sad.

Just how much trouble is the NY Times in?

2005-10-28T08:44:00.000-04:00

The "Plamegate" issue has also brought a great deal of criticism on the heads of those who run the New York Times - including its executive editor, Bill Keller and its publisher, Arthur Salzberger. In particular, Judith Miller's actions have been the subject of much controversy. The Times's own public editor or ombudsman, Byron Calame, has opened up on his web site a public comments section that has been inundated with submissions; he did this after penning a stinging rebuke to Miller and the Times ("The Miller Mess: Lingering Issues Among the Answers") in last Sunday's paper - a rebuke that basically called for Miller to lose her job. Maureen Dowd, another Times columnist, also more-or-less called on Miller not to come back in a separate column last week.

Elsewhere, the Times has had criticism heaped upon it from all sides. Editor & Publisher editor Greg Mitchell has called for Miller's head. NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen has stated in his influential Pressthink site that the paper is now only the second best paper in the country, after the Washington Post (and only just in front of the Wall Street Journal). In an interview with Howard Kurtz on CNN's Reliable Sources on Oct. 9, Rosen said that the Times

has lost the capacity to tell the truth about itself in this story. It’s completely overidentified itself and the majesty of the institution with Judy Miller and what its own people describe as her personal decision making… It isn’t the First Amendment drama that they think it is. It’s a much more complicated, darker and ultimately dubious tale.
Glenn Reynolds and Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, also appearing on that show, seemed to agree.

So just how much trouble is the Times really in? Well, the paper's probably ready to let Judy Miller go (as quietly as possible), though that won't stop the criticism. Still, the paper's not about to shut up shop and shuffle off into history - it's still far too important for that. The Times remains financially healthy, both on its own terms and as the core of a significant media mini-empire that includes nineteen newspapers (including the Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune), as well as eight TV stations and the widely syndicated New York Times News Service. Certainly it's true, as Slate's Jack Shafer points out, that this latest scandal - "like Jayson Blair's journalistic malfeasance and the embarrassments of the Wen Ho Lee episode before it - has sent the old gray palooka down to the mat once again, where we find it wheezing, bleeding, and struggling to find its feet." (The Jayson Blair incident, btw, also led to the resignation in 2003 of the Times' previous editor, Howell Raines in a cloud of uncertainty that seemed to infect all journalism for a while.) But the paper will get back up again, shake itself off, and keep going. Still, I note Rosen's position that the Times is no longer America's number one paper. I'm still pondering that one; but I am sure that the paper is in a continuing downward spiral, so if it's not number two - or three - yet, it could well slip down there before much longer. The New York Times has almost 110 years of accrued status, respectability and economic success - going all the way back to Adolph Ochs in 1896 - that keeps its stock high. But it can't keep taking hits like this forever.

One thing is for sure: Those liberals who hope that the Plame affair turns into another Watergate won't find their Woodward and Bernstein anywhere near Ms Miller. (Nor, for that matter with Time magazine's Matt Cooper, who caved in to the special prosecutor and whose bosses at Time willingly handed over his journalist notes to the grand jury investigation.) In fact, it's going to be tough to find any knight in shining armor in the media.

Trying to frame the Plame Affair investigation

2005-10-26T11:23:00.000-04:00

As we're all waiting to find out what Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is going to do as his grand jury investigation into the "Plame Affair" wraps up, the Republicans are trying to get in front of an issue that has the White House deeply concerned.

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow, who pens the "This Modern World" satirical cartoon strip, is one of many who has commented on the new attempt by Republicans to frame the whole issue in a novel way by describing the whole process as a "criminalization of politics." This is something that's also now been spotted by a number of bloggers as well as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Real Time with Bill Maher. The Republican strategy is this: By repeatedly describing the whole issue in strictly partisan terms, and rubbishing the prosecutor as a partisan hack, the administration hopes to neutralize the political impact of any indictments (e.g., of Lewis Libby or Karl Rove) by presenting themselves as the victims of a vicious new development in American politics. It hardly needs pointing out that nobody on the right was talking about a "criminalization of politics" when special prosecutor Kenneth Starr was going after the Clintons in the '90s. But then the Clinton White House never had anything like the discipline and message control that the Bush administration maintained for four years. We'll see how effective this new strategy will be. But in any case, from a media analysis perspective, it's fascinating to see how a political party - especially one that's had this much success - responds when, really for the first time, it is actually losing control of the message and the agenda.

Race, class, poverty, and Katrina

2005-10-21T09:44:00.000-04:00

On Thursday night I was a participant on a panel, organized by the SUNY Geneseo Philosophy Club, discussing "Race, Class & Poverty: Reflections on Katrina". I've reproduced my opening statement below, since it pretty effectively sums up my ideas and insights - such as they are - on how Katrina and its aftermath have impacted the media and the mediated national debate in America.

(Btw: The debate is also available on the web (or as a podcast) at the SUNY Geneseo American Democracy Project web site, at http://democracy.geneseo.edu/?pg=podcasts/index.html.)

First, the short-term answer: That’s the easiest.

President Bush’s extraordinary prime-time speech

already

But this is bad

this is the only kind of debate we the public, are privy to, might even have a say in

In the medium term, I’m afraid, the answer is probably no.

the extent to which we had a “real” media debate during and after Katrina is the extent to which the whole structure of news norms and media-source relations was temporarily torn down, forced into an ad hoc, seat-of-the-pants posture.

That brings me to the long term.

any

outside

the media approve of

two things

entertain consumers

inform citizens

9/11

really do not want

won’t

Serving the public interest, convenience and necessity

2005-10-19T16:13:00.000-04:00

An interesting Op-Ed piece in The Hill, a "newspaper for and about the U.S. Congress" reminds us about something that most broadcasters would rather forget about: their supposed public interest obligations under the Communications Act of 1934 and the Telecommunications Act of 1996. These obligations - which are supposed to be enforced by the FCC - demand that broadcasters continue to serve the “public interest, convenience and necessity."

Gloria Tristani, who served on the FCC from 1997 to 2001; and Meredith McGehee, director of the Media Policy Program at a nonpartisan government watchdog group, outline what these obligations are supposed to include: they should be about whether:

"Our televisions can keep us alert and informed in national and local emergencies.
"Our children can turn on a television and find truly educational content.
"The voices and views on our airwaves reflect the diversity of our country.
"People who are sight- or hearing-impaired can access all of TV’s educational, informational and entertainment programming.
"We can be active and intelligent participants in our democracy with sufficient civic programming before elections."

However, they argue, in the current shift toward digital television - supposed to be completed by 2009 - broadcasters might be allowed to finally slip out from under these obligations, unless srong action is taken by Congress and the FCC, who "need to address how the transition to digital television will benefit citizens’ local, civic and electoral needs." Then, basing their position on the recommendations of a 7-year-old presidential commission on the matter, Tristiani and McGehee list a set of criteria that, they argue, "should define meaningful public-interest obligations that ensure broadcasters:

"Air a minimum of three hours per week of local, civic or electoral-affairs programming on the most-watched channel they operate and a comparable minimum number of hours across other streams of programming they may provide.
"Promote the FCC’s often-stated goal of diverse viewpoints and voices on television by ensuring that independent producers provide a minimum of 25 percent of broadcasters’ most-watched channel’s prime-time schedule.
"Tell the public how they are serving the interests of their audiences by making this information available in a standardized, searchable format, not only at the station, but posted on the station’s own web site."

Seeing through the spin?

2005-10-15T16:32:00.000-04:00

Is the Bush administration losing its deft touch in terms of media manipulation? It was notable (to me, at any rate) that, as I mentioned the other day, President Bush's photo-op at the NBC "Today"/Habitat for Humanity house build was drawing some criticism against both the show and the president. And some of the criticism (e.g., on NPR) also drew attention to how stage-managed Bush's "photo-op" seemed to be. Then. later last week, the President was criticized over a teleconference he gave to a very small and select group of US troops in Iraq. According to Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, the pool report (i.e., from the designated reporter on the scene) described the event as follows:

The soldiers, nine U.S. men and one U.S. woman, plus an Iraqi, had been tipped off in advance about the questions in the highly scripted event. Allison Barber, deputy assistant to the Secretary of Defense for internal communication, could be heard asking one soldier before the start of the event, "Who are we going to give that [question] to?"
Now of course the Bush administration can argue (with some justification) that some sort of "scripting" or "choreographing" is necessary to make the whole thing run smoothly. But the more fundamental question is why the president bothered to do this in the first place? Was there any pressing national security need to talk to just these 11 soldiers? Of course not: it was simply another stagemanaged event to try to spin a news story in the president's direction. This is thus another example of what media historian Daniel Boorstin (who sadly passed away last year) famously called "pseudo events", i.e., stagemanaged events held only for the media and (usually) its television cameras. Boorstin’s groundbreaking 1964 book The Image: A guide to Pseudo-events in America, charted how the rise of the "pesudo-event" was displacing consideration (and coverage) by the media of "real" news (i.e., news that's not laid out on a plate for reporters to lap up.)

But what is different and interesting is to see some media outlets comment on the articiality of this event - interesting because typically most of the MSM like to remain silent about all the artifice and prepackaged "spin" that goes into the news they present; after all, they benefit from the massive "information subsidy" that PR and political "spinners" provide them with to make their job easier. (This information subsidy - a term associated with the work of Penn Annenberg professor Oscar Gandy - allows journalists to look like they're doing a whole lot of work while in reality much of the content they present under their byline is actually "borrowed" from spin doctors and PR professionals pushing a particular point of view.) This time, though, as with the house-building photo-op, a number of media outlets did tentatively point out, in the course of their reporting, the profoudly artificial nature of the teleconference (including the Associated Press, Newsday, Editor & Publisher, and CNN).

So what's going on? Certainly we have consider that, with President Bush's senior advisor and media guru Karl Rove otherwise engaged in giving testimony to the grand jury investigating the Plame Affair, the administration might have lost some of its touch. But other bigger factors might help to explain why the Bush White House might finally be losing its seemingly natural ability to frame the news through skilled news management.

This is hardly to suggest that the pseudo-event's day is passing. Bush's entourage has up till recently been stunningly successful at manipulating the media, setting the political agenda, and framing issues in the way it likes. Notwithstanding Rove's preoccupation elsewhere, the main reason that these tactics are starting to wear thin in this case are strategic, not tactical: the President's public ratings are at all-time lows following Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq War, soaring energy prices, and a prevailing sense of "malaise" and loss of direction in the country. More and more conservatives are openly questioning the President's handling of the war, the Harriet Miers nomination, and so on. At some point, even today, even the slickest spin machine starts to break down in the face of cold, harsh reality, and the news media (finally) feel emboldened (even if only tentatively) to tackle the administration and comment on issues that previously they had pointedly ignored (much to their discredit). This is a process that is only just beginning to be felt now. It's got a long way to go.

Can we avoid the ads? part 2

2005-10-15T08:35:00.000-04:00

Gary Levin in USA Today brings us up to speed on the glut of ads and promos now overwhelming network primetime television. In the absence of any federal agency to regulate commercial time on television - neither the FCC nor the FTC regulate this - networks are free to put on as many ads as they like. The National Association of Broadcasters, the industry's lobby group, ran a voluntary code up till 1982, whereby commercials were limited "to 9.5 minutes per hour in prime time. But since the code was dropped, the number of commercials on prime-time TV has crept steadily higher." How high? Just about doubled, that's how high.

Across prime-time TV, the number of ads and promos has increased sharply over the years. A typical “one-hour” prime-time series clocks in at less than 42 minutes, down from 44 minutes several years ago and nearly 48 minutes in the 1980s. And shaving off the “previously on …” recap, opening credits and a teaser for next week's episode, Sunday's [Desperate] Housewives ran 40 minutes and 30 seconds, meaning for every two minutes of programming, there's a minute of commercials or promos for other network shows.
This problem runs across the board (or spectrum) and into cable TV as well, where "clutter" on channels such as MTV, USA and Lifetime is even worse. But Levin focuses attention on two of ABC's top shows - Lost and Desperate Housewives. ABC is the worst offender in terms of overloading its shows with ads, studies show - and this is further exacerbated by a recent change in how that network formats its primetime shows.

Until recently, dramas unfolded in four segments, or “acts,” often preceded by an introductory teaser that aired before the opening credits. Starting this fall, ABC required all drama producers to carve up each episode into six portions. For some shows, including Housewives, the first segment runs for nine to 11 minutes before the first break. Once viewers are hooked, they're confronted with four more commercial breaks, each about 3½ minutes long, over the next 45 minutes. To prevent channel surfing, networks increasingly avoid airing commercials between shows. Instead, they save several minutes of more substantial scenes for a show's ending and then move “seamlessly” into the next program.
The last tactic of "seamless" transitions between shows has been adopted by all the networks for some years now. But ABC's strategy overall takes it to a new low. The first time I noticed this new strategy, while watching Lost - one of the very few shows on network TV I try to watch - I was quite annoyed, to say the least. Yet it is surely set to become the norm.

Stepping back for a moment: It is amazing how quickly this problem is manifesting itself. As recently as April 2004, Television Week was excoriating three of the "Big Four" networks for broadcasting more than 15 minutes of "nonprogram'' material every hour during prime time in 2003. It noted then that one network, ABC, had breached 15 minutes per hour. Now ABC is close to breaching 20 minutes per hour of nonprogram material. Just how much more can viewers stand?

I know I'm ready to switch off, even though my wife loves Lost. One friend of ours now refuses to watch the show and has a simple alternative: He's waiting for the DVD to come out.

Katrina's Media Babel?

2005-10-13T08:13:00.000-04:00

So, six weeks on (more or less), how do things stand with the media coverage of Hurricane Katrina?

The dominant discourse remains that of a media success story, with combative journalists going after the story aggressively (though sometimes too aggressively, some wonder?). Marc Fisher, a Washington Post columnist, argues in the latest American Journalism Review ("Essential Again") that Katrina reminded us just how crucial the MSM are at times of national crisis, illumating the scale of the tragedy, bringing government officials to book, and all that. He writes:

So as the summer of 2005 came to a violent end, journalism journeyed back, setting aside for a few days the allure of the Internet and the promise of a nation of citizen reporters. Once again, we understood the power of mass media, the shared experience of a nation gathering in its living rooms to see momentous events on television, to feel the satisfaction of reading a newspaper's first shot at making sense of difficult and complex times.
(This, btw, could be read an example of what prominent media scholar and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism professor James Carey would describe as the news media's centripetal "ritual" function, bringing people together in the national conversation surrounding the "drama" that was and is Hurricane Katrina.)

Anyway, Fisher certainly makes a powerful argument for a news media thumbs up - and much of it I agree with. But against this there is also a current of criticism against the MSM that has to be taken into consideration. Of course, at one level, we have to recognize that the more recent coverage has lost some of the edge that was so clear in the immediate aftermath of Katrina. All the networks are trying to figure out how to use the tragedy to boost their ratings. President Bush's photo-op at the NBC "Today"/Habitat for Humanity house build invited some easy (yet valid) criticism against that show as well as the president. But one strain of criticism goes deeper - and charges the media with making the rescue effort more difficult.

The basic argument is actually a familiar one to students of the media: It is that the news media, in reporting relentlessly, around the clock on a major issue, also ended up magnifying what USA Today describes as a "a plague of misinformation".

Robert E. Pierre and Ann Gerhart of the Washington Post, writing on Oct. 5 ("News of Pandemonium May Have Slowed Aid") summed their perspective up this way:

Behold the power of the media. Five weeks after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to New Orleans, some local, state and federal officials have come to believe that exaggerations of mayhem by officials and rumors repeated uncritically in the news media helped slow the response to the disaster and tarnish the image of many of its victims. With nearly all communications systems with people on the ground crippled, live television became a primary information source. "The television stations were reporting that people were literally stepping over bodies and violence was out of control," said Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco's press secretary Denise Bottcher, who was at the governor's side. "But the National Guardsmen were saying that what we were seeing on CNN was contradictory to what they were seeing. It didn't match up." "Rumor control was a beast for us," said Maj. Ed Bush of the Louisiana National Guard, who was stationed at the Superdome. "People would hear something on the radio and come and say that people were getting raped in the bathroom or someone had been murdered. I would say, 'Ma'am, where?' I would tell them if there were bodies, my guys would find it. Everybody heard, nobody saw. Logic was out the window because the situation was illogical."
USA Today focuses on the news media's strong tendency to report uncritically - at least initially - on comments made by government officials. With most other communication networks not functioning, most people - including rescue workers - were getting their news from CNN and Fox. And much of that news was just plain wrong. As USA Today 's Mark Memmott points out: "Much of what was reported as fact by government officials and the media during the chaotic first week after Hurricane Katrina turned out to be fiction." The paper goes on to quote John Hinderaker, "co-author of the widely read conservative weblog Power Line, who argues along with others that "the media need to take a hard look at their behavior." Notes Memmott:

“When the mayor said there might be 10,000 bodies, he was distraught, he was in the midst of a crisis,” says Hinderaker. “What was shocking was that news organizations would just pick it up and keep repeating it when there'd really been no basis for it.”
So there we have it: The downside of the media's megaphone (or the media's spotlight, if you prefer the metaphor first used by Walter Lippmann). Once again, we have to recognize how the news media can use its communicative power for ill as well as for good. It can draw attention to misinformation just as easily - at times, more easily - as "good" information.

Americans using new media

2005-10-12T08:46:00.000-04:00

So begins an AFP piece (reproduced on Yahoo! News) that takes another look at that study I brought up again a few days ago on American media use trends. Scholars at Ball State U in Indiana pretty much confirm the findings of a Pew Internet and American Life study on US internet use, published in January. The AFP piece notes that, typically, 70 million Americans go online every day (as of December 2004), up 37 percent over the previous year. "That figure looks set to grow, as new low cost technologies spread the benefits of the world wide web to social groups so far cut out of the information revolution."

Never mind Tribune ... What about the really big boys?

2005-10-05T19:32:00.000-04:00

It seems that Tribune isn't the only big media company to be suffering some stock market blues these days. The really big boys - the "first-tier" TransNational Corporations that we hear so much about - are also hurting. CNNMoney reports that stock prices for the four biggest corporations – Walt Disney, Viacom, News Corp and Time Warner - "are down an average of 11.2 percent through the first three quarters of 2005." The article also notes that the S&P 500 was up 1.3 percent over the same period, so the media companies can't blame their lousy performance on a sluggish market.

In effect, there's been a major selloff of big media stocks going on. CNNMoney notes a number of reasons for this. Investors are worried about a weak advertising market, slow Hollywood box office sales this summer, and (even more worrying), flattening DVD sales. "What's more," notes the article, "many investors appear to be more attracted to the supercharged growth prospects of pure play Internet media companies like Google and Yahoo!."

Of course, we have to remember that this is only a relative downturn: Big media are still immensely profitable overall. And CNNMoney suggests that the selloff might have been overdone. But clearly the bloom is off the Big Media rose . . . at least for the moment.

Tribune Media's ailments

2005-10-02T10:20:00.000-04:00

NPR's David Folkenflik (on Morning Edition) had an update Friday morning on the woes surrounding Tribune Media, which "is facing an eroding financial situation compounded by circulation scandals that have left the company in crisis." In some ways Tribune's problems are emblematic of what happens when a relentless drive for ever-higher profits eats into a media corporation's (supposed) public service mission and a broader societal drive to maintain diversity through regulation.

Tribune is one of the country's larger media entities - media scholar Robert McChesney (author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy) would describe it as a "second-tier" media company, right behind the Big 5 (or 6 or 7, depending on what you count) TNCs such as Time Warner, Viacom, Disney, News Corp, and so on. (Other powerful "second-tier" companies include Liberty Media, Knight Ridder, and Sinclair Broadcasting.) Tribune owns some pretty major assets nationwide: nearly 30 broadcast TV stations, "superstation" WGN, the Chicago Cubs, and - most significantly for concerned newsies - some major newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, the Baltimore Sun, and the Los Angeles Times. And the company's in trouble.

The company's problems seem to lie primarily with their newspapers, which have seen falling circulation and loss of advertising revenues. According to the Folkenflik, the company's newspapers recently secured a profit margin of "only" 17.5 per cent (high by almost any other industry's measures, but low for the obscenely profitable mainstream media). In other words, Tribune's making bags of money but not enough, because Wall Street expects it to make even more. So the company's managers (and its shareholders) are willing to see deep cuts to get their profit margins up. However, Tribune's "focus on the bottom line" has seen many of its brightest news editorial talent defect to other publications. Cost-cutting at Tribune's most prestigious paper, the Los Angeles Times has, according to some, compromised the quality of one of the country's top papers. But Tribune's bean-counters seem to think that higher profits can only be regained by focusing more on entertainment and local news (of the "fluff" variety) and less on "hard" news.

The company's financial problems go deeper, however. The January 2005 decision by the Justice Department not to contest a federal court ruling that blocked a relaxation of media cross-ownership rules also hurt Tribune. When it recently acquired most of its big newspaper holdings from Times Mirror, Tribune was hoping to be able to keep both newspapers and broadcast properties in rich markets such as New York. (This reduces competition, enables greater "synergy," and allows media companies to pool newsgathering resources, e.g., between the newspaper and local TV news staffs, thus allowing the company to lay off a good chunk of its workforce; shareholders love that!). But with the old cross-ownership rules either still standing, or in some flux, the company doesn't know whether it'll be allowed to continue owning both.

(This state of affairs, frankly, is very confusing at the moment. As CJR Daily explains, back in June 2004, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia rejected the FCC's sweeping recommendations to relax most ownership regulations. "The three-judge panel did, however, uphold the FCC's decision to lift the ban on owning a daily newspaper and television station in the same market. But the appeals court sought further clarification of this rule and other regulations" [My emphasis.] So the cross-ownership ban probably will finally go. But the FCC clearly is influenced by public opion and shifts in the political winds, which right now tend to oppose further deregulation in general. There's a new FCC commissioner, Kevin Martin, who's replaced the hapless Michael Powell; people are unclear about how Martin will act. So no-one can be certain that the FCC will, at the end of the day, actually lift the newspaper-TV cross-ownership ban. Markets hate uncertainty, so Tribune's stock price is suffering. Clear? No, not really, I know . . . )

Anyway, if the stock price keeps going down, and profits are less than the 20-30 percent "expected" by shareholders, it seems that the main thing to do is to make more cuts, especially in the newspaper division. And inevitably the thing that gets cut is hard news - the sort of thing news is supposed to help us be engaged citizens in a thriving democracy.

Makes you wonder if this is the best way to run a newspaper.

Judith Miller goes free--and why there's still a problem

2005-09-30T08:58:00.000-04:00

New York Times reporter Judith Miller has been freed from jail, having agreed to testify to the grand jury investigating the events surrounding the leaking of CIA operative Valerie Plame's name to the press. Miller had been jailed for contempt of court after refusing to identify a confidential source. But she's been freed after a source - apparently it's Lewis "Scooter" Libby, VP Dick Cheney's chief of staff - lifted his confidentiality arrangement and agreed that she could discuss their conversations. So, a reporter gets out of jail-that's great, right?

Well, not so much.

It was back in early July that Miller was jailed by a US court for refusing to testify in an investigation into the unmasking of CIA agent Valerie Plame in 2003. As part of the grand jury hearings, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald successfully pressed the issue and got his way. Fitzgerald has been aggressively "investigating who in the Bush administration told the press Plame - the wife of former US ambassador who had criticised the president - was a CIA agent. Ms Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, had earlier criticized President Bush over evidence he had presented to justify the assault on Iraq. Mr Wilson later alleged that his wife's name was deliberately leaked in order to discredit him." (It turned out that the source was none other than Karl Rove himself.)

While Cooper went to jail, Time's Matt Cooper was let off the hook - supposedly - after he apparently "received a 'somewhat dramatic' message from his source telling him he was free to testify." In a disturbing move at the time, Cooper's bosses at Time had even given up Cooper's notes to the special prosecutor by that point.

(Here, by the way, is a useful overview and timeline of the affair, courtesy of the BBC. Also, see here for an AP report that also includes information on Robert Novak's shady role in all this.)

The consequences of these developments could be serious for American journalism. The pursuit of journalists to reveal confidential sources - combined with the lack of a federal shield law to protect journalists - is likely to place a "chilling effect" on robust media debate of contentious issues in the United States. The BBC quotes Bill Kovach of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, who "alleges that the case is part of a trend in which the government has sought to control the press's ability to cover its behaviour." States Kovach: "'There have been concerted efforts, especially by the Bush administration, to reduce the availability of information and to tone down the aggressiveness with which the press pursues it. . . . This is not just attributable to 9/11, but it appears to be a continuation of three decades of efforts.'"

Still, as I noted back in April, although part of the problem lies with the current administration, the press itself has to shoulder some of the blame. The New York Times's Nicholas Kristof reminded us about the pressures on many journalists to reveal their sources - not only Matt Cooper and Judith Miller, but also Jim Taricani, a less-well-know NBC television journalist, who was finally freed in April "after four months of house arrest for refusing to reveal his sources."

As Kristof pointed out, "the climate for freedom of the press in the U.S. feels more ominous than it has for decades." Now it would be great if there was some outpouring of public support for an embattled press - something like the groundswell of public outrage that greeted the FCC's 2003-2004 attempts to roll back media cross-ownership rules. But that hasn't happened. In fact, much of the public thinks the press a.) has too much freedom, and b.) abuses that freedom. Kristof noted some stunning poll results that I have commented on many times. E.g., the Pew Research Center's "Trends 2005" report, which shows "that 45 percent of Americans believe little or nothing in their daily newspapers, up from 16 percent two decades ago." Then there's the study by the National Opinion Research Center that has "measured public confidence in 13 institutions, including the press. All of the other institutions have generally retained a good measure of public respect, but confidence in the press has fallen sharply since 1990." And then there's the USA Today survey of 112,000 American high school students, which showed "that 32% of them believe that there is too much freedom of the press, versus 10% only who believe that there is not enough. Even worse, "no less than 36% would prefer that the media be subject to government authorization beforehand." And the results of that poll seemed in line with other recent studies of adult attitudes.

Of course, the press itself has to take much of blame for its dwindling credibility. But at the same time, that doesn't help. No matter how messed up our major media institutions are, and how poorly they serve the citizens, it's still much more dangerous when people give up on the media and accede to the principle of greater press restriction. And as for the First Amendment and the protection of the courts? Kristof correctly identifies just how flimsy these protections really are. He notes that while "Judges don't exactly decide cases based on public sentiment, . . . their decisions do reflect the values of their society. And in our society, public support for the news media has all but evaporated." And he reminds us: "The safety net for American journalism throughout history has been not so much the First Amendment - rather, it's been public approval of the role of the free press. Public approval is our life-support system, and it is now at risk."

It's not just Murdoch investing in the Internet ...

2005-09-28T13:17:00.000-04:00

While News Corporation boss Rupert Murdoch has been prominently investing in internet media firms, he's certainly not the only one. Other big media corporations, including Viacom and Time Warner, are also pursuing aggresive interent acquisition strategies. The Benton Comm Policy listserv notes a Wall Street Journal piece (Story here but requires registration) that highlights how all these corporations "are spending billions in a spate of acquisitions and aggressive Internet initiatives, and are likely to keep on spending." Why are they doing this? In a nutshell, it's the fear of being left behind by new media as audiences migrate to the internet--potentially prompting advertisers to jump ship. The piece goes on:

Yahoo

Google

How worried should the media corporations be? Quite worried, if a new report from the Center for Media Design at Ball State University is to be believed. The study, reported by the Christian Science Monitor, tracked "the behavior of 394 ordinary Midwesterners for more than 5,000 hours, following them 12 hours a day and recording their use of media every 15 seconds on a hand-held device." It found that people were involved in some kind of media interaction for more than two-thirds of their waking hours. About 30 percent of this time "was spent using media exclusively, while another 39 percent involved using media while also doing another activity, such as watching TV while preparing food or listening to the radio while at work." TV watching remained the most popular media activity, taking up about four hours of every day for about 90 percent of those studied.

But what about the interent? Well, three-quarters of the subjects used a computer--typically for more than two hours per day--and most of that time was spent on the internet. The report notes: "As, over time, the computer becomes a vehicle for more rich media content (often related to TV programming), the line between the two media is likely to blur further, calling into question the TV-centric mindset."

And the lesson for advertisers:

So the big media corporations are right to be worried. Keep on investing, guys!

BBC pushes internet TV

2005-09-25T22:19:00.000-04:00

While U.S. TV networks still shy away from the internet, the BBC, Britain's public service broadcaster, is embracing it with open arms.

The Wall Street Journal took note last week of the BBC's moves to mainstream the Internet and integrate it with its broadcast activities. Aaron Patrick of the WSJ points out the Beeb's trial, beginning later this month, to issue its iMP (interactive media player) to about 5,000 selected UK viewers to allow them to download and watch most of the BBC's television content for up to seven days. "No other broadcaster has made so many shows available for download to computers," notes Patrick. He goes on: "The BBC hopes its iMP software will become the iTunes of Internet television, allowing viewers to customize their TV schedules over the course of a week."

Amazingly, the iMP uses peer-to-peer file-sharing/networking software similar to that designed for Napster and Kazaa (software that triggered a "music-sharing free-for-all" on the Internet). In this form of peer-to-peer networking,

iMP users will be required to share the downloads with each other. As programs spread from computer to computer, most iMP users will actually download them from other people instead of the BBC. That means the broadcaster won't have to buy Internet capacity to transmit large computer files to millions of people.
The BBC's move shows how far ahead it has moved from its U.S. counterparts in this regard. U.S. networks, fearful of what they've seen happen with musical downloads, have so far only toyed with internet television, and refused to make complete shows available for download (although of course countless TV shows are in any case illegally obtained off the Internet thanks to software such as BitTorrent). The BBC is trying to make the whole process legal and above board. Patrick quotes Nancy Cassutt, vice president of content at Internet Broadcasting Systems Inc.: "What the BBC is doing is what every network Web site here in America is trying to do -- discover what works online." It helps of course that the BBC, funded by the license fee (a form of taxation), doesn't have to worry about shareholders and making profits as it tries out this bold new experiment.

The trial should last for three months, and if it's successful (and why wouldn't it be!), Auntie "plans to make the iMP freely available in the U.K. next year, becoming the first TV network to show its entire schedule over the Internet."

But remember, you'll have to live in the UK to get this.

Can we avoid the ads any more?

2005-09-21T09:21:00.000-04:00

Here's a piece of news I caught over the summer but never added to the blog: the rise of product placement on television. Product placement, or the practice of inserting advertising messages directly into a TV program, has been expanding massively over the past year or two. CNN Money notes that in 2004, the value of product placement on television increased by 46.4 percent over 2003, to $1.88 billion. Although product placement has always been around to some small extent on television, and the movie industry has been using it at least since the late 1970s, the current scale of product placement is something completely new. And it's being driven by TV producers desperate to squeeze out another revenue stream. The classic TV advertising model--of sets of 30-second ads interspersed between program segments--is quite simply maxed out: an hour of prime time already consists of 18-19 minutes of ads and promos, and you simply can't fit any more in without finally alienating the viewer. And in a world where TiVo users can just zap these ads at will (and most of them do), TV executives are worried. So they're responding by rushing to build ads in to the programming itself.

The CNN piece also notes that "advertainment" is not limited to television. "Video games, novels, movies, pop songs, music videos, Broadway plays -- every nook and cranny of the culture, it seems, comes preinstalled with product plugs. Or soon will." This is a process that's been going on for decades, but it has been getting steadily worse, as more and more of our cultural space--our public space--gets plastered with commercial messages. There are fewer and fewer places you can turn these days, without seeing an advertising message--and more and more of them are covert or hidden. But, notes CNN:

Federal Communications Commission

embedded advertising

FCC Commissioner Jonathan S. Adelstein

The Incredible Shrinking Box Office, part II

2005-09-18T22:23:00.000-04:00

Here's a topic I've been meaning to return to for some time: Hollywood's penchant for bad summer movies. It seems that more and more people are getting a little sick of it and avoiding movie theaters; and since I last brought this up, the summer slump has continued. With the summer season officially over after Labor Day, things look bad: box office receipts are down about 8-9 percent from the same period last year, and the number of tickets sold down about 11-13 percent (figures according to either CNN or Media Guardian, take your pick). In fact, U.S. summer movie attendance was at the lowest level since 1997.

Some films did alright. Top summer performer was George Lucas's final instalment: Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, which grossed $379.8m. Among the runners-up were Paramount Pictures' War of the Worlds and Warner Bros Pictures' Batman Begins. But at the same time, big planned summer blockbusters such as Michael Bay's The Island, Ron Howard's Cinnderella Man and Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven flopped.

So why the slump? Notes Media Guardian:

The box office slump has been blamed on everything from the narrowing window between a film's cinematic and video/DVD release to improvements in home cinema systems to high ticket prices. Or, if you take the word of John Fithian, who heads the US association of cinema owners, it's just because the films simply aren't good enough.
I have my own ideas. Earlier in the summer I wrote about the time my partner and I went to the movies (specifically Pittsford Plaza) to see the aforementioned Kingdom of Heaven (she's a big Orlando Bloom fan), and I was once again struck by how noisy some of the theater patrons were. As is often the case, too many theater patrons just can't shut up during a movie! This is especially true of the very young. Sometimes I shush people - and repeatedly - but as often as not that just doesn't work. So during this particular movie we took early evasive action by moving to the back of the theater just before the film started, so as to get some peace to watch the movie. Fortunately the noisiest ones were all toward the front, and it was a fairly big theater. Calm was restored, though at a price.

But things are undoubtedly getting worse with noisy, rude, and ignorant movie audiences. And Pittsford Plaza is in fact one of the less distracting places in this regard. (FYI: If you value audience silence during a movie, and live in the Rochester, NY area, then do not go anywhere near Regal Cinemas Culver Ridge, in Irondequoit. You will go mad.) But it's not just the kids: the previous month I had had to shush a older couple during a screening of Downfall (about the last days of Hitler). Now they were German, but that's still no excuse. National guilt about your embarrassing past is all very well, but that doesn't give you leave to blabber about it during a movie. I can watch Gandhi and squirm at the Amritsar massacre scene, but I don't need to announce to the audience, "That's terrible; on behalf of the British state of which I am uncomfortably a subject, I'd just like to say I feel really bad about that." It's not required. I think it's better to keep that to myself. So should you all. No matter how much you feel you have to say something during a screening - unless it's "My husband's having a heart attack, help!" - you really, really don't!

Anyway, as my exasperation increased I noted that summer cinema audiences were consistently down from the previous year, and many in the industry were (and are) worried that the future of big cinematic releases (the whole summer blockbuster "tentpole"/3,000-cinema big release thing) could be in jeopardy. Now there are lots of reasons for why this is happening, and EW helpfully gave us the results of an online poll asking respondents "What keeps you away from seeing a movie in theaters?" Here were their results:

28%

22%

11%

26%

I think you can guess which of the above options I would respond to (though "All of the above" is also worth seriously considering.)

The fact is, that for people like me, the big suburban multiplexes have become almost uninhabitable - populated with hordes of noisy kids who can't differentiate between watching a DVD at home (when some discussion is allowed) and watching it in a theater (when it manifestly is not!) Yet these are the very people that the studios chase after with their blockbuster movies. Now I like to see the odd Big Dumb Movie myself - but increasingly, I have to avoid them by retreating to the boutique alternative theaters (the Little, the Dryden), or else reconsider the financial necessity of that 42" plasma screen HDTV for the DVDs!

What's an ageing prof to do!?

(PS If you want to read the inside scoop on how the movie studios are still able to make boatloads of money, in spite of the theater slump. read this piece by Edward Jay Epstein in Slate.com.

Murdoch hedging his political bets in US?

2005-09-18T18:01:00.000-04:00

Tina Brown, the British-born American magazine editor, columnist, and talk-show host, is not one to shrink from off-the-wall statements. Late last week she was at it again. Writing in the Washington Post, Brown made a bold claim that to most Americans would seem really incredible: that conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch could switch his allegiance to the Democrats if he felt it was in his business interests to do so. In a piece titled "Rupert Murdoch, Bending With the Wind," Brown notes Bush's sinking poll numbers and the unexpectedly strong performance by "liberal" CNN in its coverage of Hurricane Katrina. She also notes "Recent friendly meetings between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Murdoch, recorded in the New York Observer" that just could "be early signs of embryonic bet-hedging" by the media veteran.

Really? How far can we take this? Can we really countenance the possibility that, come the next Presidential election, Murdoch's empire might turn from the Republicans and toward a Democrat--even Hillary?

To address that question, Brown tries to illuminate something about the basic instincts of this enigmatic man who has proved to be perhaps the globe's greatest media buccaneer . . . and survivor. She points out: "Less publicized than Murdoch's fierce political conservatism--undoubtedly his private conviction--is his readiness to turn on a dime when it's commercially expedient. That suppleness is one of the things that make him such a formidable opponent. Nothing distracts him from his business goals--not ideology, not friendship, not some inconvenient promise, not even family."

Need a historical exemplar? There's a good one back in Brown's native Britain. Tina reminds American readers of Murdoch's volte-face in 1997, when he shifted his media empire's support from John Major's hapless conservative government to "New" Labour's up-and-coming Tony Blair. Could he be planning a similar shift in the US--taking a leaf out of his UK playbook? Perhaps.

Sun

Piers Morgan

Brown goes on to cite the comparisons frequently made between Murdoch and William Randolph Hearst, which she characterizes as often "misleading." Why?

Bruce Page

Add in a possible change-of-heart by Murdoch's right-hand man at Fox News, Roger Ailes, and you have a script that could--just possibly--lead to a shift in direction for Murdoch's empire. Remember, it happened in the UK eight years ago, and it happened overnight. The only question--at least for Brown--is whether the Republicans, like the British Conservatives, have really "started to look like dying elephants." Remember, Rupert doesn't back losers.

What to make of the MSM's "angry" response to Katrina

2005-09-15T09:12:00.001-04:00

MSM news reporters are still showing high levels of concern and even anger in their coverage of the Katrina aftermath in New Orleans, as NYU professor and media critic Jay Rosen points out in his PressThink weblog (where he points to key pieces by Matt Wells of the BBC, Alessandra Stanley of the NYT, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, and Gal Beckerman at CJR Daily). But, he wonders, is it right for journalists to "get angry" and show their anger and frustration so clearly on air. Rosen thinks not--at least not all the time. As Rosen argues in his opening:

Spine is always good, rage is sometimes needed, and empathy can often reveal the story. But there's no substitute for being able to think. What is the difference between a “blame game” and real accountability? If you’ve never really thought it about it, your outrage can easily misfire.
This continuing anger is something that is causing concern in some quarters of the media. Although right and left were initially unified in their criticism of the federal government's response to Katrina, there are signs that conservative media commentators are growing restless over the media's emboldened (and angry?) stance. President Bush's statement that he will "take responsibility" for errors by the federal government seems to have caused more heartache among at least some of those on the right of the media spectrum. Stephen Spruiell, media correspondent for the conservative National Review, points to examples of what he calls bias by CBSNews and CNN in that journal's Media Blog. Sprueill seems to be particularly concerned with CNN president Jon Klein's statement that CNN will take a "more muscular" approach to covering political news. Perhaps Klein is emboldened by the apparently widespread public support for CNN's Katrina coverage. Anyway, here's Sprueill's response:

There's nothing wrong with being aggressive — or even "muscular", whatever that means — about getting answers from both sides, which Klein says will continue to characterize CNN reporting. Last week I noted several instances in which CNN anchors were tough on Democrats. But I also noted a few in which CNN went beyond the boundaries in order to make their coverage more "accusatory" than "aggressive". For one, Aaron Brown really twisted a Bush quote to make him sound out-of-touch. For another, CNN apparently coached a guest to "get angry" (although CNN denied it).
Sprueill then refers Klein (if he's reading this) to the Jay Rosen piece mentioned above. Sprueill argues that "News organizations don't need to be 'more aggressive' — especially when there's a state of confusion and no one has all the facts. Then you just get a bunch of people yelling at each other. They need to be more intelligent — putting the accusations aside and patiently but relentlessly gathering facts."

This is an interesting debate, and one that'll surely go on and on, given the scale of the Katrina story (not to mention the ongoing war in Iraq). If you follow the contention that the news media are finally doing their job and showing some backbone in critically covering the actions of those in power, and that this represents some sort of paradigm shift in media-government relations, can that new emboldened stance be articulated consistently to the public through professional journalistic values, or is it only to be expressed through anger? Can you have some appropriate balance between the two? What is that balance anyway, and can the news media maintain it over time . . . or not?

Thumbs up for news media

2005-09-14T17:15:00.000-04:00

USA Today reports that Americans have generally given the news media a "thumbs up" for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina. The paper cites a study by the highly regarded Pew Research Center. The study surveyed 1,000 Americans between Sept. 6 and 7, and found that 65% of respondents rated news coverage of the hurricane good or excellent (this compares with the 54% approval rating the news media received for its 2004 presidential election coverage). Not surprisingly, television-- and particularly cable television--was the main source of information. CNN was the most popular source, cited by 31% of respondents, compared with Fox (22%); local news stations (19%); ABC (14%); NBC (12%); MSNBC (9%) and CBS (8%). CNN also boasted of its lead in a full-page ad placed in today's (Wednesday's) New York Times. It still seems the case that CNN is the go-to news network at times of crisis, even though it is normally beat into second place by Fox.

The show of public support might explain the news media's increased willingness to challenge government authorities, both on the air and in the courts (the same article notes that CNN successfully "filed suit against FEMA in U.S. District Court in Houston Friday after government officials said the news media had no right to show pictures of Katrina victims. FEMA and the army later backed off that demand).

USA Today quotes Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, who expresses his hope that most or all news organizations continue to emphasize the story, with “each one synthesizing and adding to what others are learning. If only one or two news organizations do it, it won't have the same effect.” The question is “how many news organizations have the investigative muscle to handle a story this complex, and how many can afford to lose a team for the time it will take to do that, especially in TV,” argues Rosenstiel. “I fear the list of news organizations that can do that today is not very long. And sadly, it gets shorter if ad sales go down and other news pushes Katrina off our radar screens.”

One year ago . . .

2005-09-12T23:32:00.000-04:00

With the media-related news dominated by Katrina coverage, I thought I'd turn to something I do from time to time just for variety: look at what was happening in the media world one year ago. With that in mind, here are some interesting studies and statistics (from Benton's Communication Policy online service) that were surfacing around September 13 last year:

Intruigingly, USA Today was noting that Wall Street may be tiring of corporate media mega-deals. It quoted one portfolio manager as saying "Enough is enough. . . . We keep waiting for the cash to come in. When it does, it seems they always have to make new growth acquisitions. And the real return to investors hasn't been that great.” Big media companies are largely mature, like utilities, so the argument goes. If mega-deals aren't paying off, it makes no sense for companies to keep using their cash to build even grander empires. There's also a realization that: a.) There's a media glut, and companies are saturating the market with so many movies, TV shows and music albums that it's hard to justify making many more; b.) New technologies make many investments risky. Noted Benton's Communication Policy Listserv:
Broadcasting & Cable was discussing a little-known segment of the media market called "Nevers": 20 million people who don't subscribe to cable or Pay-TV. Most of these people can afford to pay for TV, but either choose not to, or just don't watch TV at all. A recent survey of 385 TV-free families by Eastern Washington University professor Barbara Brock "found that more than two-thirds of them are headed by adults between 31 and 50 years old with two or more kids. More than half the parents had college degrees and earned a combined annual income greater than $60,000."
With the Presidential election season in full swing, a Media Tenor/Media Channel study of the big three networks' nightly news over the first 6 months of 2004 found that less than 5% of campaign coverage was devoted to candidates' positions on the issues. According to one commentator on the study, "The bulk of the coverage focused instead on horse race politics, candidate sparring and campaign strategy, depriving Americans of meaningful information on important election-year issues." This study joined many others that showed news media coverage of the political races to be seriously lacking--especially by local television.
Forrester Research released a study on the behavior of TV viewers using digital-video recorders (DVRs). DVR users apparently spend 60% of their TV time watching shows they've delayed or recorded. More worryingly for advertisers, they skip 92% of the ads under those conditions. Overall, ad exposure drops 54% among DVR users. Although the research did find that 75% of DVR users watch some ads at least sometimes (with movie ads and promotions for upcoming TV shows scoring highest) they watched fewer than 10% of ads about credit cards, long-distance carriers, car dealers or banks. DVRs were as of a year ago in about 5% of US homes; Forrester expects penetration to reach 41% by about 2009.

Murdoch plans his assault on the Internet

2005-09-11T22:35:00.000-04:00

News Corporation's Rupert Murdoch has been gathering his forces for the next step of his assault on the Internet. The Guardian's David Teather and Jane Martinson note that up to 45 of Murdoch's chief executives met this weekend near Carmel, California "for two days of private discussions on what he [Murdoch] has described as the company's highest priority: how to grapple with the threat and opportunity of the internet to the media empire he has spent a lifetime building."

Until this year, Murdoch's News Corp has been largely missing from cyberspace, in spite of owning an array of global media assets, from BSkyB, the Times of London and the Sun to the New York Post, Twentieth Century Fox and Fox Broadcasting. Yet from almost a standing start, Murdoch has built a significant web presence in less than a year. News Corp has formed an internet unit, Fox Interactive Media, that oversees its web activities. And with big-budget purchses of Intermix Media (including MySpace.com, a popular social networking site), IGN Entertainment (a gaming and lifestyle portal for young men), and Scout.com (which will be integrated into News Corp's Fox Sports enterprises), NewsCorp has made a splash on the Internet. Murdoch now also apparently wishes to buy Blinkx, a search engine.

The Guardian article reports that these recent purchases now "gives News Corp 70 million unique users and 12bn monthly page views. That catapults it into the fourth-largest internet firm in the world by page impressions, behind Yahoo, Time Warner and MSN, according to the investment bank Merrill Lynch." That's a pretty scary statistic, considering that News Corp hasn't been on most people's Internet radar screens up till now.

Apparently the agenda at the Carmel meeting was dominated by "how to turn News Corp's web properties into a hub for entertainment-related content. One News Corp insider called the strategy an attempt to create an 'entertainment Google' -- a one-stop shop for all those looking for computer games, movies, music or chat online."

US journalism gets tough after Katrina

2005-09-09T08:48:00.000-04:00

The news media have been talking about how aggressive and outraged they've become since Hurricane Katrina made itself felt. Reporters suddenly feel at ease sticking it to government officials over their apparently inept handling of the initial response. This, some suggest, is in marked contrast to the quiescent attitude that U.S. journalism has up to nowdisplayed in the face of the current administration. Supposedly, the gloves are now off, and everyone from NBC's Brian Williams and Tim Russert to ABC's Ted Koppel to CNN's Anderson Cooper now feel it's OK to get stuck into the government. Even FOX's Bill O'Reilly has been turning up the heat. Actually, it may well be Anderson Cooper himself (the "boy reporter" who used to work for Channel One and spent two seasons hosting ABC's reality show "The Mole") who showed the way last week when he stopped playing nice guy and verbally attacked Louisiana Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu, in a live interview. Jack Shafer in Slate used Cooper's attack as evidence for the emergence of a news media that, at least for the moment, "have stopped playing the role of wind-swept wet men facing down a big storm to become public advocates for the poor, the displaced, the starving, the dying, and the dead." (Note: The online journal Salon has a highlight reel now available for viewing, that includes Cooper's interview among others (requires free daypass) that shows some of the most prominent examples of media reporters "getting tough.")

Meanwhile, the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, never a friend of this administration at the best of times, has this week gone into overdrive with its satirical evisceration of the government response (see, e.g., recent online video clips such as "Inarguable Failure," "Beleaguered Bush" and "Meet the F**kers," available here). Hard to believe, Stewart in his Monday night show actually praised the TV news media that he so regularly slags off, likening them to an old drunk fat guy in a bar who can "really move" if the occasion demands it.

So what's going on? A Viewpoint piece by BBC correspondent Matt Wells ("Has Katrina saved US media?") posits that "Amidst the horror, American broadcast journalism just might have grown its spine back, thanks to Katrina." Wells goes on:

So are the news media finally doing their job, returning to the principle of Fourth Estate watchdog journalism, a la Watergate and Woodward and Bernstein? Salon's Eric Boehlert cautions us not to get too excited. He reminds us of the media's early timidity in its coverage of the tragedy,and argues that "The fact that this kind of aggressive questioning of people in power during times of crisis now passes as news itself only highlights just how timid the mainstream press corps has been during the Bush years."

Certainly one reason why the news media have felt strangely emboldened in the past week or so is because there has been some measure of partisan, cross-party agreement that the government was too slow and inept in its response. Conservative commentators have joined the chorus of criticism. Republicans as well as Democrats have been critical of agencies such as FEMA. And Democrats share a good deal of the blame for the current mess. But soon, more than likely, cries of "liberal media bias" will be heard from the right, and it'll be interesting to see whether the news media returns to normal, or whether Katrina marks a real sea change in the way the MSM operate.

Those who hate cable news . . .

2005-09-05T20:24:00.000-04:00

Slate.com's Jack Shafer has just posted a follow-up piece called "News You Can Lose, Part 2", which is basically a collection of emails from readers who are griping about cable news. The comments expressed by Slate readers in this piece and its predecessor ("News You Can Lose: What I hate about cable TV journalism") make pretty sobering reading. These people really do not like cable news.

Thing is, I would agree with most of their comments most of the time--except that right now, I'm cutting the cable channels a tiny bit of slack. Yes, most of the time CNN, Fox, and MSNBC are simply awful, but when a natural disaster like Katrina occurs, cable news can and often does provide a valuable public service in bringing substational resources to cover the event as widely as possible, communicating to the wider world the scale of what's going on. It's certainly not perfect, but it is helpful to many people, and even to the country as a whole. My rule of thumb is that cable news can be useful and even enlightening up until the point when "packaging" takes over, and instead of real news we get back into reheated information about the missing Aruba teenager, the latest celebrity trial, or whatever. And yes, the cable news channels are already starting to fall back into their normal mode of operations, this time with packaged shows around the hurricane. So I suppose the time to cut them some slack is coming to an end.

Until the next major disaster.

Framing the disaster response: some thoughts

2005-09-03T10:32:00.000-04:00

Yesterday--Friday--was the day where the crazy morass of reports and impressions about the Gulf Coast disaster, and the government's response to it, finally began to coalesce into a dominant construct, and the result was not pleasing to the federal government. CNN placed a piece on its web site yesterday morning, the question being "The disaster response: 'Magnificent' or 'embarrassment'?". It was clear from the report that the writer was tending toward the latter.

As the day progressed, and the news became more and more awful, most news organizations seemed to be turning--at least for the moment--toward an initial "national embarrassment" frame for the tragedy. That was the opinion on Fox News (and on Friday morning the web site's home page was headlined 'This Is a National Disgrace'). The same was true of the New York Times and numerous other major papers (and a Times editorial was typical of many that excoriated the slow response while we saw constant TV pictures of the breakdown of law and order in New Orleans.) The Washington Post's page one story on Friday was describing New Orleans as "A City of Despair and Lawlessness". Two BBC headlines say it all: "Rescue effort falls short" and "New Orleans crisis shames Americans".

At times like this, when our thoughts and impressions about something as "big" as this are unformed and malleable, Friday's news can be particularly important because Friday is a key "News Round-up" day, when many broadcast media organizations have special shows devoted to journalists getting together and talking about the week's events and trying to make sense of what's been happening over the past few days. Shows such as PBS's Washington Week in Review and Diane Rehm on NPR provide a forum for journos to interact--and often come to some sort of consensus over interpreting the news. (As with the Sunday morning talk shows, relatively few people actually watch or listen to these shows, but the people who do watch/listen to it tend to be important opinion leaders--so such shows are important.)

This Friday--yesterday--the news was mostly bad--and certainly bad for the Bush administration. Whereas on previous days the news media had been focusing on the scale of the tragedy and the devastation, by Thursday more and more time was being spent on the horrible scenes at the Superdome and the Convention Center. Awful TV pictures merged with more and more reports of lawlessness, shootings, rapes throughout the city--including even at these aforementioned shelters (supposedly "refuges"). The U.S. media began using the new and loaded term "refugee" (a term normally limited to people in the "third world", and one I first heard applied to these Americans on the BBC on Tuesday night) to describe the displaced people of the region. And more and more voices by Thursday were raised with the question "Where is the federal government"? More and more people on all sides of the national debate were expressing their revulsion at what they were seeing. And President Bush's interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC's "Good Morning America" had not gone down well with anyone, it seems.

After another horrific night, by Friday the "rescue" story had shifted emphatically from being "magnificent" to being a "national embarrassment". And that was the day--the last day of the working week--that most journalists on all these round-up shows crystalized their opinions about what was happening and presented their theses to the viewing/listening public. A dominant frame for the events was solidifying--and the frame was defined by the failure of President Bush and the government to act quickly and decisively enough. What's more, this frame, or media construct, was being joined by commentators on the right as well as the left. Influential conservatives such as Tony Blankley of the Washington Times and David Brooks of the New York Times joined their liberal-progressive counterparts to use their news round-up soap-boxes to excoriate the federal response. Brooks, for example, was extraopolating his Thursday Times column ("The Storm After the Storm") to argue for a sea change in our national conversation following this latest disaster. And when I saw the normally amiable Brooks on Friday's News Hour with Jim Lehrer, he was clearly seething mad about the lacklustre response of the Bush administration, which he saw as emblematic of many deep failings in our system of government (and remember, he's a conservative.)

By late Friday and Saturday the news from the Gulf region was starting to improve--marginally--as arriving federal relief finally started to make itself felt. But in a serious and enduring way, it was already too late for the Bush administration. The damage has been done (and not just on the Gulf Coast). The media have made at least a preliminary decision that what has happened in the past 3-5 days has been a "national disgrace", and something really fundamental about the way we as a society do business must change. The Bush administartion, usually so adept at managing the news media, has been overwhelmed by events as surely as have the people of the region. There are many, many reasons for this, most of them bad for the administration's public image (and not much better for the image of the Democrats, it must be said).

All the same, the buck must stop at the Oval Office. This is going to be a very difficult piece for the administration to "manage". The disaster is an event that brings into excrutiatingly sharp focus America's positions on race, class, the economy, Iraq, the environment, the role of government . . . everything is up for grabs in the ongoing national debate. There is a good chance that the massive scale of this event and its consequences will change the very ground under which everyone in America--conservatives, liberals, and everyone else--stands. This "frame" which began to crystyalize yesterday could, just possibly, become as important as the "war on terror" frame that followed 9/11--a frame through which every other piece of major domestic news is refracted. It could be that important.

Now we have to watch carefully.

Covering the flood

2005-08-31T23:46:00.000-04:00

Hurricane Katrina and the New Orleans/Gulf coast flooding disaster has been going on while I'm up to my eyes preparing for classes. But I've tried to drag myself away from preps from time to time and keep an eye on what's going on. And while the mainstream media are still focusing on the scale-of-tragedy angle--not surprising for the moment--there is some more critical and in-depth reporting starting to emerge fromm braver elements of the media (see, e.g., a Washington Post column on the planned downgrading or dismantling of FEMA and an Editor & Publisher piece, drawing on New Orleans Times-Picayune coverage, that focuses on the Army Corps of Engineers' charge that it's been starved of federal funds for flood defense.) I hope that before too much longer, and once things settle down, the press will do its job and we'll see more of this sort of critical reporting.

In the meantime, the online journals Slate and Salon are, as ever, providing interesting and engaging coverage of the tragedy and the issues behind the tragedy. One piece in particular I'm glad I found was by Slate's Jack Shafer. Titled "Lost in the Flood," it tackles the awkward issue of race and class that has largely been ignored by the US MSM--in particular, the stark point that most of the people we're seeing in dire straits in New Orleans are poor and black. This has bothered me because this point is achingly clear, at least in terms of the people we're seeing on TV, but no-one really draws attention to it. So even as the media focus relentlessly on the tragedy and of the people who are suffering--people who had very little and now have nothing--they rarely elaborate on the key contextual factor that most of the people trapped in New Orleans didn't get out because they had no personal transport or they were living "paycheck to paycheck" and couldn't afford to up and leave. Shafer draws an interesting conclusion, even drawing on a well-known disater movie from the late 1990s:

Volcano

Media spending & relative constancy

2005-08-28T18:00:00.000-04:00

That recent study conducted by Veronis Suhler Stevenson I mentioned earlier estimates that, on current trends, total spending on the media in the U.S. will reach $1 trillion by 2008--assuming a continued annual growth rate of 6.7% per annum. That's a lot of money and a lot of growth--twice the rate of inflation.

The figures for growth in media spending suggests (though I'm not so sure about this) that we're still some way off from reestablishing the principle of relative constancy in terms of media spending. For years--in fact, for most of the twentieth century, roughly from the birth of the film industry through to the late 1970s, economic and media scholars argued that relative constancy was operating in society. Quite simply, this means that, when adjusted for inflation, "individuals spend a constant portion of their disposable income (income left over after taxes and essential--food, clothing, shelter, and taxes) on the media" (Grossberg, Wartella & Whitney, MediaMaking, 1998). So if a typical consumer spends more on one type of media--say, by buying a television--he or she will spend less on another type of media--like the movies.

The term overessentializes the economic aspects of the public's media uses--focusing what major shifts are taking place in public consumption of media, without suggesting why--and it can't fully interpret these shifts. But it does give a basis for describing media use patterns over the long term.

And one thing that is indisputable is that people are spending more and more time and money on the media (in all its forms), and have been for some time. For decades, the proportion of income spent on entertainment and information media stayed stuck at about 3% of income; so any/all spending on new types of media had to come out of that 3%, i.e., out of the amount previously budgeted for old media. In other words, the media pie stayed the same size. From the perspective of media providers, the only overall growth in the media indistry came through natural increases in population as well as inflationary pressures in the economy.

After about 1979, though, the proportion of consumers' total incomes spent on media started to rise significantly--in fact, it has by some estimates almost doubled, to some 5% or 6% of total income. This has meant that new media have been added to older media without necessarily displacing them (e.g., the Internet has not displaced television, just as the television did not displace movie theaters). And the media pie has got much much bigger, and Wall Street, recognizing this, has rushed in to invest on the big media industries. This simple fact helps to explain much of the massive investments and corporate mergers and acquisitions that have taken place in the media since the 1980s.

Now some scholars have been arguing for a while that the principle of relative constancy simply has to reassert itself in the near future. In other words, people can't go on spending an ever larger proportion of their limited incomes on media products--especially if costs of other essentials, like health care and gasoline, keep going up much faster than inflation.

We'll see how this turns out.

On BTK, Aruba teenager coverage

2005-08-25T11:01:00.000-04:00

This news is from last week (August 19), but I'm trying to get caught up.

Temple University's MMC "studio briefing" listserv notes the latest cable news embarrassments over coverage of the BTK (Bind-Torture-Kill) killer Dennis Rader (left). CNN for one gave extensive coverage to Rader's sentencing last week, and even carried Rader's "long, rambling court statement" in full (and posted the video on its web site). This brought a slam from one of CNN's own, crusty anchor Jack Cafferty. "Appearing on CNN's Situation Room, hosted by Wolf Blitzer, Cafferty remarked, 'We ... played right into his hands. ... We ought to be ashamed of ourselves. Publicity is this monster's gasoline.'" What's more:

Cafferty called CNN's coverage "nonsense," and commented that "it doesn't belong on television." He warned that it might "inspire other nut cases out there that maybe they can get themselves famous by doing this." Cafferty confessed that he was "a little embarrassed to be a part of the media on a day like this."
Apparently Rader likes publicity. He noted in court on Thursday: "I seem to crave the attention of the media." MMC also quotes Rader as stating "I feel like I'm a star right now." He said this "during a two-hour Dateline [on NBC] devoted entirely to him last Friday."

Meanwhile, with CNN's Larry King on vacation, King's fill-in guest hosts have been pulling out all the stops to boost ratings with low-ball "news." Bob Costas devoted his entire show on Wednesday night (August 17) to the BTK killer. As a result he "saw his ratings more than double." According to MMC, on Monday and Tuesday nights (pre-BTK) "Costas, who has been designated King's 'permanent substitute,' had averaged only 516,000 viewers. That figure improved to 1,049,000 on Wednesday [BTK night]". Even so, that "was still below King's average of 1,140,000."

On Thursday night another host took over King's show, and what better way to boost sagging ratings but to eturn to the well of the missing Aruba teenager story . . . again.

Scott Peterson

British news and entertainment in USA

2005-08-25T10:22:00.000-04:00

One of my major areas of research interest is the large and growing (and largely unnoticed) impact of the UK on America's media landscape. For a while over the summer this quiet drumbeat was magnified by a stream of British news events being reported on in the US. However, things have died down a tad - at least for the moment, and at least in terms of the big news stories. We've stopped hearing so much about the London terrorist bombings. Gleneagles and Live8 are already distant, all-but-forgotten memories. No-one seems to be talking about Making Poverty History anymore. All is silent on the 2012 London Olympics front. Americans are now consumed by the missing Aruba teenager and the BTK killer and (maybe if they're looking for more serious news) Cindy Sheehan's anti-war protest and the Israeli evacuation of Gaza. Britain's salience seems to be drifting away.

But hang on, not so fast! While the U.S. news world takes a break from "Blighty" (i.e., Britian), that steady drumbeat of the UK's hidden and not-so-hidden influence on U.S. news and entertainment continues relentlessly, even during the dog days of summer. Just think of all the British institutions and people who are having an impact on the U.S. media landscape right now.

Of course there's the BBC, and many Americans now get their news from The Independent and The Guardian newspapers as well. But what about Granada International and Celador Productions? What about the WPP advertising agency? Pearson (owner of the FT)? Conde Nast? News International (the UK arm of News Corporation, and home of The Sun and BSkyB)? And don't forget Richard Branson's Virgin.

Of course, the Brits people are most likely to have heard of are mostly in Hollywood. But there are many many others who are having more of a behind-the-scenes impact. There's Tina Brown and her husband Harold Evans; Christopher Hitchens and Richard Curtis; Martin Walker; we have to consider the defection of any number of tabloid journalists from London to the US, not to mention the many serious journalists heading to the US for the big bucks. Let's not forget Daniel Battsek (of Miramax) and Howard Stringer (of Sony); then there's dodgy Richard Desmond of OK! fame. And now there's James Goldston at ABC's Nightline.

In hard news and TV entertainment, in magazine and book publishing, in the big city tabloids, the British influence is palpable and incessant. And yes, the list really does go on.

And things aren't as quiet as they seem. All that's happened is that the temporary blip of Big British News Events has settled back down to the constant background noise - yes, a steady drumbeat - of the UK's continuing (and expanding) media presence in the United States. So even if we hear less about London's war on terrorism or Blair's electoral capital or the London Olympics or Britain's EU Presidency or its war of African poverty, don't be fooled.

There's still a lot going on.

The $1 trillion consumer market approaches

2005-08-16T11:41:00.000-04:00

media statistics

The Hollyood Reporter notes that consumer spending on the media is advancing at a 6.7% annual growth rate, so at that rate total spending will exceed $1 trillion in 2008. "The data comes from the Communications Industry Forecast by Veronis Suhler Stevenson, and the group also says that in 2009, the average consumer will spend 10 hours per day with media, much of it DVDs and the Internet." Advertising isn't hurting either. It's predicted to grow "at a steady 6.1% this year and 6.8% through 2009 to $260.9 billion, 'driven primarily by the migration of advertising dollars from traditional to new media,' according to the study."

Young white damsels in distress in cable-land

2005-08-15T10:12:00.000-04:00

Eugene Robinson, writing in the Washington Post, tackles a subject that most in the news media would prefer to avoid: the "pathological cable news obsession with young, attractive white women who unfortunately vanish". This is something that really bugs me (I last touched on the subject in late July--see "In the news: What's in a face?"), so I'm glad someone's airing it in a major newspaper.

All the cable networks get slammed by Robinson, though Fox News' Greta Van Susteren gets singled out. To show up the cringe-inducing nature of this obsession, Robinson points to the case of Latoyia Figueroa (right), "a pregnant 24-year-old woman of color missing in Philadelphia" who initially received no TV news coverage whatsoever. Then , apparently "nagged by a persistent blogger, the cable networks grudgingly devoted a couple of days to Figueroa. Then they dashed back to Aruba and breathlessly reported the latest 'developments' in the Holloway case." Even though there were no developments in Aruba.

At least, Robinson argues, Van Susteren is "upfront" about why she doggedly pursues the story--because it's what the viewers want.

On the other hand, fellow passengers on the Damsels bandwagon -- CNN, MSNBC, and, to a lesser extent, the broadcast networks and the major newspapers -- are so eager to display their high-minded earnestness that they've been running stories about "the phenomenon" of missing-white-woman coverage. They act as if said coverage were a natural disaster, like an earthquake or a tornado, rather than a series of deliberate decisions made by executive producers and editors in chief.
Not surprisingly, the focus on missing women in any form at the expense of "proper" news is galling to Robinson, as it is to me; the focus on pretty young white women serves to provide some pretty vile icing to a very unappetizing cake--especially as the USA becomes increasingly non-white. He concludes:

Interesting final point. It reminds me of a point made in the chapter on baby names in Steven D. Levitt's fascinating book Freaknomics, that I read over the summer: that there's a strong statistical correlation (though not a clear causality) between the giving of a distinctively "black" name to a child, and that child's sharply reduced life chances. (See this slate.com piece for more about the book and this topic.)

The New Media Monopoly?

2005-08-09T15:25:00.000-04:00

Also last August: With the publication of the 7th edition of Ben Bagdikian’s The New Media Monopoly, Slate.com’s Jack Shafer composed a counterpoint to the media monopoly thesis. Basically Shafer contests the notion that our media are being monopolized by the "Big Five:" Viacom, Time Warner, News Corp, Disney, and Bertelsmann. (This was being written in the face of recent corporate mergers, including GE/NBC’s purchase of Universal, and the merger of Sony and Bertelsmann music to form SonyBMG). Shafer noted that the hold of these "top flight" media corporations is much more tenuous than we might imagine. He goes on:

CBS Inc.

Shafer also pointed out something that many others have commentated on: the so-called "synergies" media companies had hoped to reap from their mergers and acquisitions in fact rarely materialize - or at least not to the extent originally envisioned. Disney is often held up as the synergy company par excellence, but Shafer cited Disney's absorption of ABC as a "business failure." Time Inc. never really warmed to its union with Warner Bros.; and in the wake of the stock market's tech bubble bursting in 2001, it became painfully clear that AOL's merger with Time Warner was a huge millstone around the latter's neck.

Of course, any political economist and critical structuralist of the Robert McChesney variety would argue that it matters little which TNC (media TransNational Corporation) is on top at any given time - democracy and the mediated public arena are at risk as long as the TNC-based corporate-capitalist system is out of control and growing ever-bigger, gaming the system in favor of the super-rich and leaving the necessary alternative of public service broadcasting grossly underfunded and stymied. But Shafer rejects this notion, prefering instead to see competitive commercial media as a liberating force for good in the world. As evidence, he points to the critical structuralists' bete noir as evidence: Rupert Murdoch himself!

"The only Big Fiver whose center seems to hold," argues Shafer, "is News Corp. In my view, News Corp. leader Murdoch is a bit of hero, terraforming the media world by creating a fourth TV network when everybody said that was impossible. You don't have to like Fox News Channel to acknowledge that he's added ideological diversity to TV news and talk shows. His risky gambles on satellite broadcasting may make his company even more dominant." However, Shafer contends, not unreasonably, that "the 73-year-old Murdoch periodically drives his News Corp.'s finances off the cliff," and as a result, "if he doesn't total the company before he dies, we can confidently predict that his heirs apparent, Princes Lachlan and James, will." Market forces at work!

In the long run, argues Shafer:

competition and the dynamism of markets keep any five media conglomerates from dictating "what most citizens will learn." But corporate ownership of media so rankles Bagdikian that I doubt the variations of who's on top and who's slid into corporate oblivion make much difference to him. I'm sure my testament that for all the news media's faults, its quality and variety have never been greater, sounds Panglossian to Bagdikian. But I challenge him to name a time in America's history when the news media did a better job than it does today. Who longs for the days of William Randolph Hearst? Of three broadcast networks? Of the days before the Internet?
I have problems with Shafer's piece - especially the last part, which I think sets up a false choice - but I'll return to this later. I'll finish this up for now by noting the one area of agreement between Shafer and Bagdikian. As Shafer puts it: "As misguided as Bagdikian is about the perils of media conglomeration, he makes excellent sense when barking about the political games the corporate owners of radio and broadcast TV stations play. If only he'd continued that line of thought in the seventh edition."

I've a funny feeling that Bagdikian will have something to say about Sinclair Broadcasting, Liberty Media, etc., and their role in the Bush-Kerry 2004 presidential race, when he comes to write his eighth edition.

Ted Turner, from one year ago . . .

2005-08-09T08:30:00.000-04:00

Back in the first week of August 2004, the Wall Street Journal was paying attention to Ted Turner’s latest slam against media conglomeration. Turner argued in July/August's Washington Monthly magazine (titled "My Beef With Big Media") that we have to "bust up the big conglomerates. We've done this before: to railroad trusts in the first part of the 20th century, to Ma Bell more recently." Turner continued: "Politically, big media may be on the wrong side of history." Also in May 2004, Turner published an opinion piece in the Washington Post that protested then-current FCC proposals to raise the limit on the number of TV stations in a single market that can be owned by a single corporation. In that article, he was careful to say he was "speaking only for myself, not for AOL Time Warner." The Washington Monthly piece goes further. Media consolidation, he argued this time, was contributing to a reduction in quality, hastening the decline in local news and encouraging the suppression of divergent views. "In the current climate of consolidation, independent broadcasters simply don't survive for long," he wrote. "At this late stage, media companies have grown so large and powerful, and their dominance has become so detrimental to the survival of small, emerging companies, that there remains only one alternative: bust up the big conglomerates."

"Turner founded Turner Broadcasting System in 1970, eventually launching several successful cable networks including TBS, Cartoon Network and CNN. In 1996 he sold the company to Time Warner, becoming the media conglomerate's largest shareholder and joining its board of directors. Now, Time Warner has $40 billion in annual sales. It owns the second biggest collection of cable systems in the U.S., one of the biggest film studios, the biggest magazine publisher as well as several leading cable-TV networks. But Mr. Turner is now suggesting that media companies are too big and should be broken up by the government."

John Simpson on Peter Jennings

2005-08-08T14:09:00.000-04:00

With the sad death of former ABC anchor Peter Jennings, I've been looking around for good eulogies from the media. One of the best I've found so far comes from the BBC's John Simpson. He has a lot to say about America's best news anchor by far - in fact Simpson describes Jennings as "probably the best in the world at his trade." But crucially, Jennings "always maintained a wry awareness that reporting, and fronting other people's reporting, for television was something pretty slight in the grand scale of things." Simpson says a good deal about Jennings' personal and professional talents, but the most saddening passage is this:

downward spiral of television news

Fox

I really like that last bit. Poor old Peter Jennings. To this day, if I watch any network news broadcast, it'll be ABC - that is completely because of Jennings. I watched him for hours at the dawn of the new millennium and after 9/11, and many other times, and you could only respect the hell out of the fact that, somehow, he managed to stay above the mundance idiocy that increasingly surrounded him. Maybe his Canadian background helped; he maintained a small yet essential distance from America, even as middle America embraced him. I've said before that the people coming through America's news system are in no way comparable to the anchors of a generation ago. That's never more true when you consider the stature of Jennings against the pygmies and puffed-up, opinionated idiots that dominate news today. I don't care how many times you put Anderson Cooper or Brian Williams in a flak suit or on location overseas - these guys will never match up. Simpson puts it best:

Martha Gellhorn

Ed Murrow

Walter Cronkite

CRTC versus the trash talkers

2005-08-08T09:08:00.000-04:00

It seems that the coming appointment of a black female French-speaking woman to be governer general has encouraged at least one of Canada's trashy radio talk show hosts to rear his ugly head - and in the heart of La Francophonie, no less. The CBC reports that the CRTC (the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) "is investigating three complaints against a Quebec City radio host who made lewd comments about Michaëlle Jean, the 48-year-old journalist who will become Canada's next governor general." Three listeners accused Sylvain Bouchard, a talk show host on FM-93 "of making sexist and inappropriate comments about Jean while talking about her appointment Thursday."

The CBC report quotes Bouchard as saying in French: "'Michaëlle Jean has always been one of my fantasies,' . . . before going on to elaborate in a graphic way. He followed up by saying he hopes a white, heterosexual man will be named governor-general someday soon."

This incident recalls the controversy over another Quebec City radio station, CHOI, which received numerous complaints for inappropriate sexist and racist talk by its hosts, especially one Jean-Francois Fillion. A quick overview of that situation is provided by the CBC here (scroll down three or four paragraphs).

I wonder what the French idiom is for "white trash"?

Gadgets, gadgets everywhere

2005-08-08T08:55:00.000-04:00

media statistics

Today's NYT business section also includes a short piece showing the rapid expansion of electronic gadgets in our lives, comparing 2001 and 2004 figures (see "It's a Gadget, Gadget, Gadget World", p. C5). It highlights media statistics from Forrester Research, showing how gadget penetration has spread in just the past three years:

DVD player: . . . . . . . . . 27% (2001); 71% (2004)
Mobile phone: . . . . . . . 53% (2001); 71% (2004)
Desktop computer: . . 65% (2001); 70% (2004)
Laptop computer: . . . . 13% (2001); 23% (2004)
Digital camera: . . . . . . 16% (2001); 40% (2004)
Video game console: . . 32% (2001); 37% (2004)
PDA: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6% (2001); 11% (2004)
Digital music player: . . 3% (2001); 10% (2004)

Nielsen learns to lobby

2005-08-08T08:35:00.000-04:00

Nielsen Media Research, a company used to staying out of the spotlight, has learned the hard way the sad necessity of lobbying hard in Washington in order to defends its turf. Notes a piece in today's NYT business section:

Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation

What caused all this ruckus in the world of TV ratings? It's all about the local people meters:

local markets

$22.5 billion

All of this underlines an ongoing basic problem with ratings; the fact that increasingly, no-one in the industry has any faith in them. Or, even worse, that more accurate ratings measurements will show that audience figures are much lower than what everyone thought they were. Or, even worse, that no-one really knows if all that advertising money is wisely spent. That's perhaps why, back in early June, "Seventeen major media companies want Nielsen to postpone expansion of its Local People Meter ratings system until an independent group appraises the system in markets where it's already being used. In particular, the companies indicated that they want to know whether the system underreports the viewing preferences of the black and Hispanic audience, as some minority groups have claimed."

I last looked at this back in April (see What future for mass media? and Media chaos ahead?). As I noted back then, there's a general feeling abroad that the mass media are approaching a tipping point, where the whole advertising-funded model that has supported the U.S. media in the modern era might be getting closer to complete collapse.

Canada's G-G: a(nother) journalist?

2005-08-06T08:36:00.000-04:00

It's probably no surprise to Canada-watchers that the next person likely to rise to one of the country's highest constitutional posts - the governer-general, the queen's official representative in Canada - is a woman. Or that she's francophone. Or that she was born outside Canada. Or even that she is non-white. (Some of you might still think that governers-general still come from the ranks of corpulent colonial ex-generals with big white ceremonial uniforms, swords and funny hats, but that really isn't the case any more.) Still, it might still surprise some (like me, for example) to know that Canada's next G-G is a journalist by trade, and a television journalist to boot! It might be even more surprising to learn that this person will be the third governer-general in recent times to come from a broadcast journalism background. In the United States, where journalism is held in pretty low esteem these days, and where journalists who aspire to high public office don't always meet with universal admiration (Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, anyone?), this is all a bit of a (pleasant) shock to the system.

Anyhoo . . . the G-G aspirant in question is Michaëlle Jean (see right), who will be the first black governer-general. She was born in Haiti, grew up in Montreal, speaks five languages, and became a reporter on Radio-Canada's French language services, moving on to CBC Newsworld as well as documentary filmmaking (a fuller CBC bio is here).

The previous two G-G's are also female and journalists. The current post-holder is Adrienne Clarkson, who is of East Asian heritage and who was born in Hong Kong. Before that it was Jeanne Sauvé, a French-Canadian and also a successful journalist.

So what is it with Canadian journalism and the highest ceremonial-constitutional position in Canada? Well, Stephen Thorne in Macleans likes to think that media know-how and communication skills are now "modern-day prerequisites for the job of governor general in an age when Canadian unity is threatened and the public demands accountability." In a background piece on the announcement ("Recent appointments suggest GG's role evolving with the times, say experts"), he quotes communication industry insiders and "corporate head-hunters" as follows:

Now one could be cynical for a moment and note that the fact that this particular journalist is a woman and black and francophone just might be a ploy by Prime Minister Paul Martin's government to court both Quebec and progressive support as Quebec separatist sentiment is seeing a resurgence. And the announcement of Jean's appointment has raised some eyebrows, caused some controversy (see, e.g., some readers' comments from the Globe & Mail web site), and apparently met with little interest in Quebec. But, as with Canada's legalization of gay marriage, the fact that a move like this could even be contemplated at the highest reaches of government reminds us what it's like to see a government system in action that's still essentially progressive rather than deeply conservative. Good show!

Payola pays!

2005-08-05T09:03:00.000-04:00

Lorne Manly in the New York Times' Week in Review section writes about the latest version of Payola - the practice of record companies paying money for the broadcast of records on music - infecting the music industry. This is a topic that has finally received renewed attention in the wake of Sony's admission of wrongdoing, which includes a $10 million fine levied by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. "How Payola Went Corporate". I like the opening:

Then there's a useful mini-history lesson:

Congress tried to legislate the practice out of existence, but, as with campaign finance, it's very difficult to switch off the flow of dodgy money. As Wikipedia reminds us, "Currently a different form of payola is used by the record industry through the loophole of being able to pay a third party or independent record promoters . . .Because of this, a very large majority of DJs are cut out of the song-picking decisions and are instead told what to play and when (for the most part) by music directors and/or "higher ups" at their radio stations."

This new type of payola sidesteps current FCC regulations requiring that, if a song is paid for by the record company, the radio station must state that it was paid for. Using indies allows for the record company to not directly pay the radio station, thus the radio station doesn't have to report it as the FCC regulations mandate.
And, as Manly concludes, as long as commercial radio retains by far the biggest audience, this money will not easily be stemmed.

Dreamworks suffers; now Sony does too

2005-08-05T08:40:00.000-04:00

You've doubtless heard about Dreamworks' summer woes at the box office, with films such as "The Island" and even "Madagascar" performing below expectations (and before that "Shrek 2" and "Shark tale" also underperformed). Well, the same is true over at Sony, which has had a really crappy summer so far. As the WSJ notes ("Stealth Leaves Sony Grounded at the Summer Box Office," Aug. 2, p. B1), its latest slew of summer blockbusters has failed to draw in the punters. After disappointing numbers for "XXX: State of the Union" and "Bewitched," Jamie Foxx's "Stealth" has really tanked. Like "The Island", "Stealth" cost about $120 million to make, but only took in a few million in its opening week. (You can find the latest box office totals here.)

The problem for Sony is that it doesn't have a big franchise film opening this summer - i.e., there's no "Spider Man" film coming out this year or next, so they could be in for a lean time. Next summer might be better - Sony is producing a movie version of "The Da Vinci Code," and they will have a franchise film next summer - the next James Bond outing, thanks to Sony's recent purchase of MGM.

Ructions in Rupert's camp

2005-08-02T08:39:00.000-04:00

You might have heard that Rupert Murdoch's eldest son Lachlan quit as NewsCorp's deputy chief operating officer (though he'll retain a seat on the board). Rupert, 74, is said to be "saddened" by his son's decision. Yeah fine, but what's really going on? Now the media (well, those media not controlled by Murdoch at any rate) are buzzing about serious rifts between the leading members of the Murdoch clan; Lachlan is said to have "chafed" under his father's domineering style. And there are apparent rifts over the potential divvying up of family spoils, which would include Rupert's third wife and their two toddler children. Many might think that this leaves the door open for Rupe's second son, James (head of BSkyB), to take over, though the Wall Street Journal notes that, at least for the short term, News Corp. President and Chief Operating Officer Peter Chernin might be best placed to take the top spot should the elder Mr. Murdoch step down. And rumors continue that News Corp could become the target of a takeover bid by Liberty Media Corp., controlled by "media titan" John Malone.

Comcast-Time Warner hit choppy waters

2005-08-01T09:26:00.000-04:00

The dreaded Comcast-Time Warner merger has been hitting some regulatory speed bumps, thanks to actiuon by both public interest groups and competitors. "Whenever a big cable merger needs to get through the regulatory gauntlet, marketplace disputes have a way of rising up and becoming matters that, at least to cable critics, must be resolved before the deal can be approved. The Comcast-Time Warner deal to buy Adelphia is no different as The America Channel (TAC), DirecTV, EchoStar Communications and an array of public-interest groups have asked the Federal Communications Commission to apply conditions to the deal. Federal Trade Commission approval is also required. The Media Access Project, a public-interest law firm, has filed on behalf of public interest group. "MAP's clients are: Free Press, Center for Creative Voices in Media, Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ Inc., U.S. Public Interest Research Group, Center for Digital Democracy, CCTV, Center for Media & Democracy, Media Alliance, National Hispanic Media Coalition, the Benton Foundation and Reclaim the Media."

Dems' Convention, one year ago . . .

2005-07-30T13:02:00.000-04:00

Here's what was going on in media-land in the last week of July 2004. Much of the news focused on the Democratic National Convention, held in Boston last July 26-29. (Remember those days, they seem so long ago now . . .). Anyway:

1.)
USA Today reported on the incomplete and frankly crap performance of the networks on convention coverage – and the surprisingly good performance of PBS. (Here’s something where PBS really can say, “If PBS doesn’t do it, who will?”) Here’s why. Says USA Today, It was "well known before the convention started that the three old-line broadcast networks - ABC, CBS and NBC - would air just three hours of the proceedings during prime evening hours" of the convention weeks (and none of it on Tuesday). "The cable news networks promised they would fill the void in coverage." And indeed, the three most-watched cable news networks - CNN, Fox News and MSNBC - did devote "a lot of airtime to reports from inside and outside the FleetCenter.” But “there's been too much talk and commentary from pundits and celebrities, too much promotion of the cable networks' stars and too little coverage of the speeches, delegates and issues before the nation. The only network with "true convention coverage" is PBS, said Tom Rosenstiel, director of Columbia University's Project for Excellence in Journalism. PBS, expanding on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, had three hours of the convention each night and ratings "jumped significantly compared with the 2000 conventions." Especially on the Tuesday night, PBS says, an estimated 7.7 million viewers tuned in to some or all of its coverage. Its rating was up 32% from the second night of the 2000 Democratic convention. PBS says its number of viewers surpassed those watching CNN, Fox News and MSNBC combined. Those cable networks together drew 6 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research. (From Benton's Communications-related Headlines).

2.)
A Center for Digital Democracy report, coming out at the same time as networks are being slammed for their minimal Convention coverage, notes that “the three major broadcast TV networks are merely spinning lame excuses for why they will not be covering the national political conventions for more than a few hours this summer. It’s all 'tightly scripted,' 'it’s not interesting,' or there’s 'no news,' they suggest. Yet TV broadcasting will largely reap an unprecedented $1 billion or more from political ads sold this election season."

3.)
Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, meanwhile, also had a go at cable’s convention coverage – especially that of Fox News. In Fox-land, noted Kurtz, former Vice President Al Gore's speech was allowed to run for all of 40 seconds before host Bill O'Reilly "broke in with his own commentary." Speeches by Sen Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Rev Al Sharpton (D-NY) were also on Fox for just a couple of minutes. "Some Fox executives see their approach as counterprogramming[!], since the speeches are widely available elsewhere. 'You could make a very good case for not being here until Thursday - even for the cable channels,' said Brit Hume, Fox's Washington managing editor. 'If we were inventing this from scratch and there was no history here, no tradition, no custom, we wouldn't design it this way. You wouldn't anchor from here, you just wouldn't. Nobody has quite had the stones to say let's call a halt here.'" (I wish someone at Fox had the stones to fire Brit Hume annd the rest of that group of propagandists.)

4.)
Bad news on the "Rock-the-Vote" front: A Reuters report noted that, "while about half of college-age students are registered to vote, only one in five actually does. (By comparison, three out of five people over the age of 55 vote, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.)" In the November election, early indications that the young adult vote had increased substantially proved to be mostly illusory.

5.)
DBS Satellite versus cable news (i.e., not about the election): Communications Daily quotes media statistics showing that between 1995 to 2004, cable's 91% share of the pay TV market had shrunk to 73%. As a result, "the cable industry would like the FCC to acknowledge that that means there is "vigorous rivalry" between cable and DBS. A declaration by the FCC that the market is highly competitive could have an impact on how cable is regulated."

In the news: What's in a face?

2005-07-28T08:41:00.000-04:00

Laurence W. Britt in Rochester's City Paper asks a serious question about the MSM news: "Do you ever wonder how some stories in the news get covered extensively; others, seemingly more important, get little coverage, and still others get no coverage at all?"

Britt contrasts what he calls "Cold News" with"Hot News" (and, no, this has nothing to do with Marshall McLuhan's notion, or probes, of Hot Media and Cold Media from Understanding Media). Instead, he gives a few examples of so-called "Cold News" stories, including:

The "lost" $8.8 billion allocated to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.
The attacks on Iraqi oil pipelines
The "huge deficits in our trade balance, the weakening dollar, the federal budget deficit (now at record levels, with no end in sight), continual records in personal bankruptcies, an almost non-existent savings rate."
"How unpopular America has become around the world"

All of these stories are, of course, undercovered by the MSM. Contrast this with the following "Hot News" stories which, as Britt points, are tremedously overcovered.

The Laci Petersen trial;
The Robert Blake trial;
The Michael Jackson trial;
The Terri Schaivo story;
The runaway bride story [Jennifer Wilbanks];
The missing teenager in Aruba story [Natalee Holloway];
The new Harry Potter book story;
The Carl Rove story

So why is the first group of "Cold Media" stories given short shrift while the second "Hot Media" group receives saturation coverage. Well, unfortunately it's not that hard to figure out, Laurence. The first group contains stories that are arcane, diffuse, multidimensional, require more in-depth knowledge of context, and are much harder to place within a TV news format (especially in a US TV news format, which just doesn't do "news" very well.) The second group is simple, one-dimensional, requiring only a simple manichean determination among audience members of right and wrong, good-versus-bad. The first group ("Cold News") raises issues of political controversy, and very effective spin machines and attack dogs in political circles (especially on the Republican side) make it uncomfortable for news organizations to pursue such stories, for fear of being labeled "liberal media" or some such thing. The "Hot News" stories (mostly) don't have to worry about that aspect, so these stories are usually pretty "safe" - news organizations can speculate endlessly and screw up royally on aspects of these stories and get away with it. Screw up on a "Cold News" story in this era of the blogosphere - or show incompetence in trying to turn a Cold story into a Hot one - and all hell will break loose tout suite (Dan Rather and "memogate," anyone?).

But the most important difference between Britt's "Cold News"/"Hot News" stories - at least for the cable news stations, is that the "Hot" stories all have a "face" attached to them. And usually a pretty female face. I've talked about this before, when I reminded anyone paying attention (all three of you) that Natalee Holloway (see right), the missing teenager in Aruba, was simply joining "a class of news figures anointed by the media (albeit fleetingly) as instant news 'celebrities.'" Their number includes Chandra Levy, Pvt. Jessica Lynch, "runaway bride" Wilbanks, etc. Still, it's not essential to have a pretty female face (though it really helps). If the face is famous enough (or can quickly be made so by a willing media), and the story is simple enough, then that story will have legs. Once you have your "face" all you do is slap it all over a news network, and attach a simple storyline to it, and voila - it's one for the water cooler! Court trials are great for this, providing the point of law at issue is simple (i.e., "Did Michael Jackson have sex with a small boy?" works really well; but "Did Worldcom's Bernard Ebbers commit serious fraud?" is less good, because i.) the face doesn't have much celebrity value and ii.) the issues are complex and multidimensional).

Media scholars have tackled this issue from multiple perspectives, among them semiotics and framing. Semioticians and their descendants in visual communication analyze the power of a face as a sign that connotes various (polysemic) meanings within dominant sign systems. Media ecology scholars from Neil Postman on note the tendency for television to emphasize the visual and affective over the rational. Cultural studies scholars, drawing on social constructionism and narrative analysis, note that the "story" that we're presented with, wrapped around a prominent media "face," is a complete media construct, very different from the "real" person living in the real world. Others, investigating this area from a framing effects perspective, posit that news, and the framing of news, can be considered along two different dimensions: the thematic and the episodic.

The difference between the two is this: Long-form journalism (mostly print news but also including some in-depth documentaries) tends to be thematic, emphasizing more background and contextual information (e.g., "What were the multiple interacting causes that led to the Iraq War?"; "What causes poverty in the United States?"). Television news, on the other hand, is overwhelmingly episodic, reducing issues to a sequence of isolated, disconnected episodes (e.g., "another three soldiers die in Iraq;" "Pvt. Jessica Lynch is a hero tonight;" "Here's a story of a young woman who fought her way out of poverty," that sort of thing). Episodic frames tend to emphasize individual agency and simple solutions. Whether talking about the Iraq war, the "war on terror", poverty, crime, corporate scandals, or whatever, episodic frames attribute social problems, and their solutions, to individuals rather than the system at large or the institutions that make up that system. In fact, a medium (such as television) dominated by episodic frames will tend to ignore the more complex issues altogether, shifting attention instead to "news" episodes that facilitate simple, manichean situations involving individuals, such as murders, celebrity scandals, and trials (especially celebrity trials). In such a system, dominated by visuals, the human "face" invariably becomes the main signifier around which an episodic story is wrapped. That's why editors today nearly always encourage their newsworkers to try and "personalize" a story. That's why you end up learning (or think you're learning) a lot about one person or one family or one soldier or one victim in a story, and very little about the deeper (thematic) causes of whatever it is the news is supposed to be reporting on. It's also why most people who watch a TV news bulletin can recall very little detail about what they watched 24 hours after watching it - because news bulletins typically fail to provide the "connective tissue" of meaning and context to the isolated news fragments they present. (One of the most prominent scholars doing work in this area of framing, btw, is Stanford Political Communication Professor Shanto Iyengar (see, e.g., Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues.)

Of course, spin doctors know all this instinctively - have done since they were about 10 years old, I think - but annoyingly, it always seems to be Republican spin doctors that make more hay from it. If you want a simple explanation for why John Kerry lost the election to George Bush last November, it's because Karl Rove et. al. put Kerry's face on a simple, manichean, negative story - well alright, two stories: Kerry the flip-flopper and Kerry the medal-hog with a dodgy military record. Forget all that stuff about ideology and policy differences. The Republicans beat the Dems to the punch in the "face" race, and that was that.

So that's where we are: news stories that have "legs" in our cable-drenched environment are those that are simple and easy-to-understand tales of right and wrong with a prominent "face" on them. And that's why Republicans are worried about the whole Karl Rove-Valerie Plame incident (here's some background and latest developments). Because it deals with a subject and person - Rove - that would normally be relegated to "Cold" news, and is pushing him uncomfortably to a "Hot" News zone. The thing Rove fears most is that his "face" will become solidly identified with "dirty tricks" and "liar." Of course, the "Plame Affair" is utterly inconseuqential compared with the epic tales of deceit and subterfuge associated with this administration's Iraq War policies. But that doesn't matter - well not to Bush and his cabinet anyway. All the stuff about illegal wars and WMD's and reconstruction corruption and Halliburton and Bechtel and 2,000 dead coalition soldiers and 25,000+ dead Iraqis matter not a jot - because these are "Cold" news stories and have all been safely neutralized. Nobody but nobody has had to resign or be impeached because of this stuff. But the "Rove-Plame" stuff could be much more important, could be ... it depends. Yes, the John Roberts nomination has attempted to bury the Rove story. But it might not. After all, Karl Rove now has a "face", and it's increasingly well-recognized.

More Lakoff

2005-07-22T17:25:00.000-04:00

Funnily enough, it's almost exactly a year since I first wrote about George Lakoff in my (pre-blog) journal. The Friday, July 23 edition of NOW – With Bill Moyers had an excellent piece on language in politics – including an interview with Lakoff, who was arguing, more than three months prior to the election, that the Republicans had already clearly won the battle of framing public issues with terms such as “tax relief”, "clear skies", “common sense forest management” etc. – plus of course classics such as “death tax” and “pro-life”. (Lakoff's Berkeley web page is here).

That “NOW” edition - which lasted a whole hour a year ago, before Tomlinson got to it - also had an excellent segment on local TV news and its failure to cover politics and public affairs properly. As David Brancaccio made clear: If voters were "relying on local television news to help them make decisions in this important election year, recent studies show that they may be left in the dark. By some estimates, more than half of local news broadcasts may not cover politics at all in the weeks before the election, and important local races and issues are often completely ignored. In a nation where the public owns the airwaves, are local stations driving corporate profits at the expense of the communities they are supposed to serve? Absolutely!"

Framing is as framing does

2005-07-22T16:56:00.000-04:00

It's taken me a few days to get round to writing about this, but I can't ignore or let pass last week's New York Times Magazine cover story, by Matt Bai: "The Framing Wars" (published July 17). The article focuses on George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at Berkeley, whom the author calls (inaccurately) "the father of framing." Anyway, Lakoff's how-to book on the subject, Don't Think of an Elephant!, has taken the Democrats by storm. And it's got everyone thinking about framing (a term I've brought up many times in this blog). After their shattering defeat in last November's presidential election, Democrats were desperate for an answer to what went wrong. It seems they've found their answer. Notes Bai, "Even before the election, a new political word had begun to take hold of the party, beginning on the West Coast and spreading like a virus all the way to the inner offices of the Capitol. That word was 'framing.'" So what is framing? Well, it can mean lots of things, but the article tries to define the term in the context of the current acrimonious political climate.

choosing the language to define a debate

fitting individual issues into the contexts of broader story lines

"tax relief"

"partial-birth abortion"

Well, about flippin' time! There's a lot more I'd like to say about this piece, but I'll have to save the rest for another day.

A Visual Comm take on the news

2005-07-21T08:30:00.000-04:00

BAGnewsNotes ("Where The Analysis Of News Photos Is A New Art") is an interesting site I came across that studies news developments through its visual communication elements. It's slightly tongue-in-cheek but also pretty smart. Recent visual analyses have been done of Karl Rove on the cover of Time and Supreme Court nominee Judge John Roberts. Here's what the site had to say about yesterday's page 1 story on the New York Times:

memes

Very interesting. Will be added to my bookmarks list.

Disneyland at 50

2005-07-17T10:01:00.000-04:00

Thye LA Times runs a fascinating piece on the history of Disneyland, now celebrating its 50th birthday. Anyone studying modern American culture has to deal with Disney and Disneyland, so this is a useful piece.

Some appropriate commenst on Disney's cultural significance from scholars and cultural critics quoted in the article:

"'There's still nothing to compare it to,' said Jamie O'Boyle, senior analyst for the Philadelphia-based Center for Cultural Studies and Analysis. 'It is a cultural magnet for people…. Walt didn't build an amusement park. He really built the first virtual reality.'"
"Others are less flattering, saying the park is too artificially controlled and idealized. Italian author Umberto Eco suggested that Disneyland is 'the Absolute Fake.' After facing tooth-baring alligators on Disneyland's Jungle Cruise, Eco was disappointed at seeing none while taking a paddle-wheel steamer down the Mississippi. 'You risk feeling homesick for Disneyland, where the wild animals don't have to be coaxed,' Eco wrote in the 1975 essay, 'The City of Robots.'"
Among other American cultural developments, "The modern museum, . . . reflects the Disneyland experience by featuring special lighting, music and full-immersion exhibits. At banks and airports, people wait in 'switch-back' lines pioneered by Disney. And Disneyland brought the word 'guest' into the lexicon of customer service. Disneyland has influenced Madison Avenue too, giving lessons in corporate synergy, branding and cross-promotions. Think Happy Meals, Kodak Moments, The Lion King on Broadway. Margaret King, who studies Disney and wrote the entry on theme parks for the Guide to United States Popular Culture, said it's all part of the 'Disney effect.' 'It's huge. Disney has just permeated our culture. It's almost easier to look for something that has not been affected,' she said."
"Disneyland's Main Street inspired cities to inject downtown revivals with old-town ambience. It contributed to the design of the modern-day shopping mall by linking stores so shoppers can meander from one to the next without stepping outside. And mimicking Disneyland, today's malls grew into entertainment complexes with movie theaters, restaurants, and, in some cases, amusement park rides. Architects and urban planners greeted Disneyland with rave reviews in journals and at professional conferences. One called Disneyland 'a symbolic American Utopia.'"
"Some critics say . . . 'Disney Realism' is actually 'Disney-fication' - a veneer that gives everything a more positive glow at the expense of history or reality. In the 1950s, one of the few representations of blacks was an Aunt Jemima greeting diners at her Pancake House. Attractions such as 'Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln' gloss over weighty subjects like slavery; in 'It's a Small World,' Chinese children are represented wearing coolie hats. As a result, political protesters found Disneyland the perfect stage because its Utopian backdrop contrasted starkly with such social problems as war and discrimination."