Here’s what Chief Operating Officer Peter Chernin said in Phoenix on Wednesday about the close race between Clinton and Obama:

Putting my personal feelings aside, I believe it’s a horse race and I believe it’s a tremendous positive for the local television business.

And it’s about to get better. Twenty-two states hold contests on Feb. 5, otherwise known as Super Tuesday, and some of those states house News Corp’s local television affiliates that are just dying to run some hardball political advertising, Chernin said.

They (the candidates) both have, give or take, $100 million. … It’s a fight to the death between them, and it’s hopefully a real positive for the local television stations.

Fight to the death; it’s a good thing.

That AT&T’s troubles would worry investors comes as no surprise, particularly when those troubles are related to consumers. It’s the consumer, after all, who has propped up the economy, and many believed that telecoms would be sheltered from a U.S. economic slowdown.

If Americans aren’t paying there phone bills, they aren’t likely to be forking over as much for the great gadgets being rolled out this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.  Evidence isn’t hard to find: Just two days ago Circuit City Stores said its December same store sales fell 11.4 percent,  pointing to declining sales of both projection and tube TVs and desk top computers.

Steve Eastman, vice president of consumer electronics at Target Corp, put it this way at CES.  “The big items, the items that people want, they’re still buying in droves,” he said. But consumers are “going to be more selective.”

The Consumer Electronics Association isn’t ready to throw in the towel yet. It’s forecasting U.S. consumer electronics sales this year will rise to $171 billion, up from an estimated $161 billion in 2007, which was an 8.2 percent rise from 2006.

And retailers at the show said consumers are still hot to buy flat panel televisions, video games, digital picture frames and global positioning systems.

Heck, who needs telephone service when they’ve got the Wii?

(Reuters) 

 (The Wall Street Journal)

Keep an eye on:  

• McGraw-Hill, the publisher of educational books and magazines and owner of Standard & Poor’s, is eliminating 611 jobs, impacting every unit of the company. More cuts may be ahead, it said. (Reuters)
• British music fans will be getting a better deal on songs from iTunes. Within six month, they will pay 10 percent less to download songs from the Apple online service. (Reuters)
• NBC is offering money back to some Golden Globe advertisers after the awards show was scrapped due to the Hollywood writers strike, but ABC says it’s confident that its Academy Awards telecast on February 24 will go ahead as planned (Reuters)  

Top executives from many of the world’s biggest consumer electronics retailers took the stage at the Consumer Electronics Show on Tuesday to hash out tough topics like the troubled U.S. economy, the Blu-ray - HD DVD format war, and the coming U.S. analog TV cut-off. The lineup ranged from stoned-faced Circuit City CEO, still smarting from a December shortfall, to Chen Xiao of China’s Gome, who looked relaxed as he forecast double-digit growth.

Here is a sample of their comments:

Gary Shapiro, CEO of CEA:
How important is the economy for consumer electronics sales?

Phil Scoonover, Circuit City CEO :
We are concerned about the economy. People that are getting their first oil bill at $3 a gallon…are just realizing the implications of the energy costs. Of course the subprime issues have haunted us for some number of months, and the share of mind that the “r” word is getting in the media today has us concerned. At least in the first half of the year we are going to take a cautious approach to expenses and try to make sure that we are being prudent given what we believe to be more difficult economic headwinds.

Steve Eastman, VP/GMM, consumer electronics, Target:
Big items that people really want they are still buying in droves. We had several gadgets through the holiday that we had people lining up at the stores to come in and buy. I think the consumer is a little more empowered, in a tougher economy they are going to be more selective.

Chen Xiao, CEO, Gome (China’s top electronic retailer):
Our growth is many times faster than the overall economic growth.

Shapiro: Will the next-gen DVD war go on now that Warner Bros. has sided with Blu Ray?

Schoonover: We are very excited to see progress of any type and we see this as significant progress.

Brad Anderson, Best Buy CEO: It makes it a lot easier to see the likelihood that we get to one format, and it makes it easier for us as retailers to help push it to that one format. It’s time to get that (problem of movies not being on one format or another) solved.

Shapiro: The transition to digital television comes in 2009. How do you see that playing out?

Anderson: This is one of the biggest risks our industry has. The number of converter boxes that are going to be required, the potential impact on television manufacturing in such a brief window of time could put tremendous pressure on all of us trying to solve those problems for our customers.

We are very nervous about the potential risk. the more we can handle this up front for customers, the better, because once it gets turned off it could be interesting. For all of us in the industry, we have a vested interest that this be a smooth transition for the customer. This industry would be damaged if we don’t do a really good job.

Vishesh Bhatia, Group Director, Electronics, Engineering & Technologies Division, Al Futtaim:
The learnings that we will see from you gentlemen here, we will bring to the Middle East when it happens there.

Q: What about the threat of a Murdoch-led Wall Street Journal?

A: This idea of kind of a zero-sum game showdown between two kinds of publications, I think, frankly, that that’s a bit anachronistic these days, given the way the media has evolved. There’s a lot more different kinds of competition than five years ago or 10 years ago. In the last five to 10 years, The Wall Street Journal has been following a slightly different path from us. We have been very focused on our global mission. Over recent years, I think the Journal has been more focused on the US. They’re kind of circling the wagons a bit around the US.

Q: Who is your ideal reader?

A: In a time of fragmenting media and lots more competition and different kinds of competition, I think it’s very, very important to be ruthlessly focused on what makes you different and special. And we are very focused on that senior, international decision-making-level CEO, the C-suite.

Q: How much does the journalism matter when so many newspapers are cutting newsroom budgets to make the numbers?

A: Newspaper groups and publishers should have confidence in the value of quality journalism. I think it’s a slightly bizarre notion sometimes, this idea that news should be free. I mean, it’s quality stuff that’s done right, and it requires investment, and people are prepared to pay in the information age where particularly in the business media where people are making big decisions on the basis of the information they receive.

Q: So is Pearson devoting more money to the FT?

A: We have been increasing our investment. Absolutely. Yup. (Ridding declined to give specific numbers.)

Q: Will the number of editorial staffers rise?

A: If you include online, yeah.

Q: Are you worried that circulation will fall now that you’ve raised the newsstand price in the UK?

A: We increased the prices of the FT in Britain last year from a pound to GBP 1.30, and we’ve just gone up from 1.30 to 1.50. Circulation wasn’t affected [the first time]. It increased.

Q: How do you fight the proliferation of competitors out there, if indeed your rivals are legion rather than just the WSJ?

A: There’s a sea of information and you can drown in it. People really need a trusted guide. They need brands and journalists that they can turn to and know that they’re accurate, that they have integrity and trust.

Q: How is the U.S. edition working out?

A: The U.S. quite frequently is our biggest edition. We launched in the U.S. 10 years ago, and now it’s vying with the U.K edition to be the biggest.

Q: Why make 30 articles free on the Web? Why not lock it all up or go all the way free? (The FT lets you read five articles, then you must register. After you hit 30, you must subscribe to read more.)

A: I think the idea of the one-size-fits-all model is, again, pretty anachronistic. There’s no need to be either-or, free or subscription. There are different kinds of users, we have difference kinds of audiences. And we want to be flexible enough to meet all their needs.

Q: What color is your paper? Salmon? Pink?

A: Pink.

Q: Why?

A: Because it’s very powerful branding. If you go to China nowadays, you’ll see a lot of business newspapers that are pink. Financial sections of some of the papers in Britain are pink. [As is the Economic Times in India, I discovered last month]. So I think we’ve established pink as the color of business journalism.

Q: Are you going to keep it pink?

A: Oh yeah.

(Photo: Reuters / Financial Times reader at a Russian Economic Forum meeting in London in 2005)

My colleague Scott Hillis, who writes about Apple, even volunteered to do the tasing, while checking out the new MP3 playing abilities of its new holster. He wondered whether the music would pause, like the iPhone when a call comes in. (Answer: no, the 1GB player is just on the holster and is not connected to the Taser.)

Details on the new Taser C2: 0-15-foot range, 30 second cycle, integrated LED light, optional laser sight, comes in metallic pink, black pearl, titanium silver, electric blue (get it?), leopard, redhot red (get it?) and fashion pink.

Taser International VP of communications Stephen Tuttle (check out his tie) explains:

Here’s a sample. The effect is not quite the same in real life, but it’s the best I could do with my camera.

Somebody please contact Mark Cuban. Turns out he’s one of the few with the now-paltry 103-incher.

Panasonic spokesman Jeff Samuels also explains why anyone needs something that big and who could possibly afford it.