After a decade-long slide into semi-irrelevance, it's now being announced that the major television broadcast networks are considering leaving behind the "free TV/advertiser supported" business model in order to turn themselves into something more closely resembling a cable operation; the idea being that they could create a second revenue stream from the same "subscriber fees" that are paid by cable and satellite operators to all the other channels those operators carry.
This has become necessary, according to the networks, partly because the market has become so fragmented...which, naturally, is cable's fault-and presumably the fault of the disloyal viewer, as well.
Another reason driving the change is related to the desire of the networks to have a source of revenue that's more reliable in times of economic downturn, when advertisers often try to husband scarce resources by cutting back on all their expenses, particularly advertising dollars.
Will this new change in the business model reverse the fortunes of the networks?
Is it possible that the networks are simply poor business managers?
And what about...Krystal Carey?
Tune in for the rest of the story-and we'll find out.
It's incredible. Just as 20,000 viewers signed an open letter to CNBC telling them to listen to Jon Stewart and hold Wall Street accountable instead of mindlessly repeating Wall Street talking points, NBC doubled down.
This morning, Meet The Press host David Gregory repeated what CNBC's Erin Burnett has been saying all along: The public is ignorant. If only the simpleton public understood what the Wall Street "experts" understand, we wouldn't be so populist and angry. See for yourself:
In these economic times, NBC needs to stop blaming the public and instead focus like a laser on holding Wall Street accountable. David Gregory, instead of calling the public stupid, how about saying on the air that there are, in fact, no "best and brightest" at AIG worth giving bonuses to if they threaten to leave?
That being said, CNBC is still the center of the fight to get the media to do their job. If we can get CNBC to truly start holding Wall Street's feet to the fire, that will have ripple effects throughout NBC and the entire financial news industry.
You can join leading economists, journalists, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and over 20,000 members of the public in signing the open letter to CNBC here.
One of the big journalistic lessons of the Iraq War was that "embedded" reporters who get one side of the story are not well suited to give accurate information to the public.
Americans now depend on the media for accurate information about the financial crisis. This Sunday's Meet The Press made something absolutely clear: Journalists who are "embedded" on Wall Street and depend on Wall Street execs for access on a day-to-day basis are ridiculously unqualified to give the public good information about the economic crisis.
Indeed, NBC has an Erin Burnett problem. Watch and see for yourself how Burnett consistently serves an an apologist for Wall Street's worst practices:
NBC even (accidentally?) admitted Burnett's pro-Wall Street bias. Just look at the headline they put up after the show, summarizing her main message: "Erin Burnett: We must help banks." Really?
At the end of this post, I'm going to ask you to email Erin Burnett (erin.burnett@nbcuni.com) and ask her to reform her ways.
Palin calls Obama 'naive,' 'dangerous' In the first part of the interview, which is airing Wednesday and Thursday on "NBC Nightly News," Palin also sharply criticized Obama for having said he would be open to direct talks with leaders of Iran and North Korea.
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"It is so naive and so dangerous for a presidential candidate to just proclaim that they would be willing to sit down with a leader like [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadenijad and just talk about the problems, the issues that are facing them," Palin said.
"You have to have some diplomatic strategy going into a meeting with someone like Ahmadinejad or [North Korean leader] Kim Jong-il, one of these dictators that would seek to destroy America or her allies," she said, adding that Obama's position was evidence of "ill-preparedness."
That is a very generous rearranging of the interview. It really went like this:
Brian Williams: What in your mind is a pre-condition?
Sarah Palin: You have to have some diplomatic strategy going into a meeting with someone like Ahmadinejad...
It's clear from the video that she doesn't know what she's saying. She thinks "no pre-conditions" = "no strategy."
Seriously, people, she thinks that "preconditions" are "strategies" one uses in a meeting.
And McCain just sits there. And the MSNBC write-up lets it slide. This attack line on Obama has been in her stump for months.
She has no clue that "preconditions" are concessions that one demands from one's counterpart as the price of your willingness to sit down at the table in the first place.
"You know, Obama, golly-willikers, he just wants to have meetings with Ahmadinejad without any plan, you know, beforehand, pre-"
That seems to be what she thinks she means when she gives the talking point.
It makes Dan Quale look like James Monroe. It's embarrassing.
Her ignorance firmly established, why didn't NBC mention in the story of the interview the actual definition of the words "pre-condition" and "ill-preparedness?"
According to about a dozen Wal-Mart employees who attended such meetings in seven states, Wal-Mart executives claim that employees at unionized stores would have to pay hefty union dues while getting nothing in return, and may have to go on strike without compensation. Also, unionization could mean fewer jobs as labor costs rise.
Chuck Todd calls Moveon's latest ad, featuring a mother asking McCain not to kill her child with irresponsible warmongering in Iraq, 'shameless'.
I didn't notice any outcry from NBC when Progress for America aired this ad - one of the largest political TV ad purchases in 2004 - exploiting American deaths on 9/11 to promote Bush's reelection.
I get why discussing McCain's Iraq-related policy ideas and acknowledging that they will lots of people is impolite. But not discussing them, and worse still, a journalist on a TV channel that has access to the public airwaves in return for looking out for the public good actually suggesting that others should not discuss them, is, well shameless.
"It's fascinating: Nobody's been a bigger victim of the so-called YouTube moments than Bill Clinton," Todd said. "I think Bill Clinton was woefully unprepared for 21st Century media."
Although Clinton caught a glimpse of the digital future when he was president and a little-known Internet gadfly named Matt Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky story, he was never subjected to the kind of unblinking scrutiny of today's media environment.
Ah, remember the 1990s, those glorious days when Clinton could speak unmolested by a restrained media environment. It's not like ABC News producers were pretty much advising the Starr investigators, that accusations that Clinton was a murderer were regularly thrown around with impunity, or that advisors of Clinton were accused of domestic violence with no evidence by Matt Drudge.
Bill Clinton is hated by the media in DC, he always has been. By pretending like this is new, like Clinton is just unprepared for technology, Todd exculpates his industry's role in 1990s and 2000s of undermining democracy through dramatic bouts of misinformation culminating of course in the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the remarkable deception around the war.
John McCain gets basically no scrutiny, Obama and Hillary are subjected to immense amounts of it. None of this justifies Bill, Hillary, or Obama's behavior, such as it is, but it is useful to notice how technological changes somehow allow people like Chuck Todd to maintain the illusion of their own lack of agency in politics.
The Jena 6 case, in which six black students in Louisiana were put up on basically fraudulent charges of attempted murder, has come up on the blogs from time to time as a good example of the flourishing racism still happening openly in America. The story, pushed early by black bloggers and Color of Change, and then by civil rights leaders and the NAACP, is now being covered by the traditional corporate media. How it's being covered is instructive.
Watch both of these reports, one from Brian Williams and one from an independent outfit, and note the difference in narration and the use of facts. It's really, well, stunning.
This is amazing to watch. As good as some journalists are in the corporate media system, obfuscatory reports like this from wingnuts (yes, Williams is well-known to be a dittohead) are counterproductive and dishonest. There is just no value in American corporate journalism as a system anymore.
A handful of sports leagues and media companies are trying to intimidate the public when issuing inaccurate warnings about making "unauthorized" copies of their work, according to a complaint expected to be filed with the Federal Trade Commission.
The complaint, expected to be submitted Wednesday by the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), a trade group that represents such tech giants as Microsoft, Google and Yahoo, names the National Football League, Major League Baseball, NBC-Universal, Morgan Creek Productions, DreamWorks, Harcourt and Penguin.
An example of what CCIA is referring to is the little speech TV or radio announcers make during breaks in games. Most sports fans can recite at least a smidgen of the boilerplate.
"Any rebroadcast, reproduction or other use of the pictures and accounts of this game without the express written consent of Major League Baseball is prohibited," is the MLB's copyright warning.
While the statements have become a tradition during professional football and baseball broadcasts, the CCIA claims such statements are false and are harmful to consumers and technology companies. Similar warnings can be found in books, CDs and DVDS, according to the CCIA.
"These warnings intimidate average people and hinder free expression," the CCIA in a statement. "They depict as illegal many legitimate and beneficial uses made possible by the high-tech industry, and cast a pall over the high-tech marketplace...These ubiquitous statements often include gross misrepresentations of federal law and characterize as unlawful acts that are explicitly permitted by law."
The site they've set up is DefendFairUse.org. The new economy is coming, and tech companies are getting a whole lot smarter about advocating for it.
So I'm reading Jamison Foser's usual excellent column at Media Matters discussing why John Edwards' $400 haircut is always in the news, and I come upon this really interesting nugget. According to the Providence Journal's Tom Mooney, apparently, NBC Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski was paid $30,000 to give a speech for the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce, a speech in which he bashed Edwards for the haircut incident. Let's leave aside Miklaszewski's Bushnik 'the enemy is patient and America has a short attention span' wingnut rhetoric, and focus on a very specific practice going on here known in the industry as 'buckraking'.
So I'm reading Jamison Foser's 