Viacom and Time Warner Cable are doing their best to make sure that television addicts around the country get a chance to go outside and stretch their legs come New Year’s Day. Of course, the reason they’re doing their part for physical fitness has little to do with ensuring the health of their viewers.

As Reuters reports, Viacom — the company run by financially challenged media mogul Sumner Redstone — provides programming to cable networks like Time Warner Cable for a fee. Now we’re at a time when Viacom and Time Warner Cable are renegotiating the fee, a regular occurrence. Equally regular are the disputes that arise as the negotiators try to determine what a fair price is.

The ultimate loser turns out to be you, the faithful TV watcher, because the last resort of companies like Viacom is to pull their programs off the air. The idea is that sends watchers into paroxysms of rage, usually directed at the cable company that they give all their money to every month. Eventually, the idea goes, the cable company cries Uncle! and agrees to pay more money to bring you the programming. Yes, your bill goes up too, as it always does.

Here’s a sample of what will stop being broadcast on Jan. 1: Dora the Explorer, SpongeBob SquarePants, The Colbert Report, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Hills.

And here’s a sample of the pre-packaged righteous indignation that you hear at times like this from the companies:

Viacom: Time Warner Cable has dismissed our efforts at a fair compromise… As a result, we are sorry to say that for Time Warner Cable customers our networks will go dark as of 12:01 on January 1st.

Time Warner Cable, via spokesman Alex Dudley: “It just smacks of desperation from a company that is trying to make up for a failing business model on our subscribers’ backs, and we’re not going to take it.”

Don’t worry C-SPAN will continue uninterrupted.

Keep an eye on

• Speaking of cable, the 24-hour news channels got record ratings this year, though it looks like they would have made Obama race against McCain for another year, if just to keep them relevant until the financial crisis is expected to ease. (Los Angeles Times)
• The Village Voice continues to shed the names that made its name so famous. The latest axe casualty is Nat Hentoff, the influential jazz critic who started there in 1958. Sketches of Pain, anyone? (The New York Times)
• Vicki Iseman, intentionally or not, was kind enough to wait until after John McCain lost his 2008 presidential bid to sue The New York Times over its February 2008 article that the lobbyist said suggested that she and the Arizona senator were carrying on inappropriately in more ways than one. (Reuters)

On the slim chance that this year’s political television juggernaut has not penetrated the homes of devout sports fans, the campaign trail will lead Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama to ESPN’s Monday Night Football just hours before next week’s presidential election.

In pretaped interviews set to air during halftime of the Pittsburgh Steelers-Washington Redskins game, Obama and McCain will face probing questions from ESPN anchor Chris Berman about — sports.

“We are obviously primarily a sports network so the questions you are going to get here are going to be different than you would get with ABC News,” says ESPN spokesman Bill Hofheimer.

In 2006, Obama appeared in a Monday Night Football opening sequence ahead of the Chicago Bears-St. Louis Rams that played on speculation that he would announce his bid for president.  The Democrat and pick-up basketball enthusiast has since appeared in other ESPN coverage.

McCain has appeared on ESPN talk radio show ”Mike & Mike in the Morning” and sat down for an interview with ESPN sportscaster Bob Ley about sports legislation. His wife Cindy revealed her passion for “drifting” on ESPN’s E:60 news magazine program. 

ESPN, owned by the Walt Disney Co, will follow the McCain-Obama contest through election day by including election returns from sister network ABC in its “BottomLine” scores crawl along the bottom of TV screens.

(Photos: Reuters)

Political Web sites and blogs compete for scoops and eyeballs with an intensity rivaling the presidential candidates, so the Internet traffic figures released Wednesday by industry tracker comScore are likely to provide some bragging rights.

The winner is… HuffingtonPost.com  – founded by commentator Arianna Huffington, the site led among stand-alone political blogs and news sites with 4.5 million visitors in September, comScore said. That was way above the site’s tally of 792,000 in the same month last year.

It was followed by Politico.com with 2.4 million visitors and DrudgeReport.com with 2.1 million. The biggest gainer among the top five was realclearpoltics.com, a clearinghouse for commentary and polls that has become a must-read for the politically inclined. Its traffic surged almost six-fold from last year to 1.1 million visitors.

One of the few sites to see its traffic decline was FreeRepublic.com, a conservative-leaning site, which was the fifth most-visited destination but saw its traffic dip slightly to 987,000 visitors. Do the traffic numbers offer a larger comment about the ardor or optimism of either Democrats or Republicans in this election cycle? That’s a debate that’s probably better left to the pundits.

(reporting by Gabriel Madway)

Media coverage of the U.S. presidential race has not so much cast Democratic candidate Barack Obama in a favorable light as it has portrayed Republican opponent John McCain in a negative one.

That’ s the verbatim conclusion of a new report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism that analyzes the way the press has covered the campaign.

The report shows that negative stories about Arizona Sen. McCain has been decidedly unfavorable and has worsened over time, with negative stories about him outnumbering favorable Obama stories by more than three to one.

That and many more interesting details are available in the 35-page report, but what caught our attention, being a business-oriented news service, was a graph charting the tone of press coverage devoted to both candidates and how it changed after the bankruptcy filing of investment bank Lehman Brothers.

When Lehman collapsed, the percentage of negative stories about Obama plunged from 30 percent that week in September to just under 10 percent a week later. It scooted back up to 45 percent by early October and has been down again since then. Negative stories about McCain eased to 50 percent from… well, just a bit over 50 percent. Since then it’s surged to nearly 70 percent.

After Lehman collapsed, the reported noted that McCain tried to seize the initiative on the economic crisis.

According to the report:

In doing so, he became a dominant actor in the campaign drama, generating more coverage than any other presidential or vice presidential candidate for the first time in the general election season.

But as McCain did so, the media narrative about him grew increasingly negative.

There’s no doubt numerous factors could have affected the tone of the media’s campaign coverage, but it looks like Lehman’s collapse had at least some effect, at least according to the PEJ’s data. What do you think?

- Photo credit: Reuters/Jim Young (McCain and Obama at the 2008 Alfred E. Smith dinner)

Sort of like Walter Mondale’s 1984 political slogan, “Where’s the Beef?,” the 2008 political campaign is all about pork- pork barrelling, that is.

John McCain’s campaign last week launched a video game on Facebook called “Pork Invaders,” a spoof on the 1978 arcade favorite “Space Invaders” that takes aim at pork barrelling, or government spending that aims to satisfy a group of voters in exchange for their political support. 

In the game, players use arrow keys to shift a McCain logo across the screen to shoot red “vetoes” at a herd of pigs looming above.  But watch out, the pigs are ready to aim at and, well, soil, the Arizona Senator’s logo.  The more pigs players “veto,” the larger the amount of dollars saved in the budget. 

The low-tech game is a “unique way to get the Senator’s message out there about pork barrelling and earmarks,” according to Rick Gorka, a spokesman for the McCain campaign.  

Facebook users can add the video game application to their profiles.  This is one of the first online strategies McCain’s campaign has used on Facebook, a social online network popular with the young voters who have flocked to support McCain’s rival, Democrat Barack Obama.

“Folks on Facebook tend to get news in non-traditional means, whereas our grandparents would sit down and watch the news with Tom Brokaw,” said Gorka.  “Facebook is yet one avenue we can use to target voters in this election.”  

But will the game really be popular with young voters?  The majority of high school and college-aged Facebook users weren’t even born back when “Space Invaders” was popular and could miss the humor of the campaign’s spoof. 

McCain’s campaign describes the game as “very popular” with users, yet it’s only drawn 433 daily active users out of the 80 million on Facebook.  Obama doesn’t have his own video game (for now), but he still overwhelmingly leads McCain in terms of pledged Facebook supporters.  Over a million Facebook users list themselves as Obama fans, easily trumping McCain’s tally of 152, 619 supporters. 

– Posted by Jennifer Martinez

The wireless industry’s clout attracted former U.S. presidents last year, but this year it was just enough to lure the former wannabes.

This year’s headline keynote speakers at the CTIA annual industry showcase were former presidential candidates John Edwards and Fred Thompson? Last year the wireless show nabbed Former actual Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton as keynote speakers.

After lamenting lost chances and nodding to the increasing importance of technology in campaigns, both politicians then got busy criticizing how the mainstream media has handled the presidential campaign so far.

Edwards spent a good deal of his keynote discussing how voters, despite wall to wall coverage of the campaign, seemed largely ignorant of the remaining hopefuls’ John McCain (R), Barack Obama (D) and Hillary Clinton (D) differing approaches to issues such as global warming, national security or health care.

“What you’d expect is a more informed electorate,” said Edwards in answer a question about the impact of 24-hour media  coverage of the campaigns.
“Unfortunately that’s not the case,” he said during the questions session after his keynote.

“There is so much focus on the superficial. The American people deserve better. You deserve to be better informed than that,” said Edwards before refusing to reveal who he would vote for and saying that he would not consider a nomination for vice-president.

Thompson was equally contemptuous of the mainstream media campaign coverage. 
“There’s nothing more dangerous than a writer or a television personality with dead airtime he’s got to fill up,” said the former actor.

“Controversy is the name of the game and sometimes it’s generated when it’s not really there,” he said of coverage of the campaign so far.  “We’re seeing it in these campaigns, the good side and the bad side of these new ways to communicate,” said Thompson.

In his speech he referred  to the double-edged sword of blogs and services like Twitter, which lets users send updates to a large group of people.

However, neither seemed to blame the media for their failure to win nominations for the top job. Thompson blamed his failure on his taking advice that he should “be himself.”  Edwards said, “If some of you voted for me it wasn’t enough of you.”

(Photo: Sinead Carew / John Edwards (top); Fred Thompson (bottom)