Viacom, Time Warner Cable help get people out of the house
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)
***
***
***
McCain, Obama tackle Monday Night Football
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.
Huffington Post top indy political blog for traffic
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)
Obama won in Indiana by 0.9% — the first time for a Democratic Presidential candidate since 1964. Massive voter registration and early voting helped. So did the recession. But Obama would not have won had a network of grassroots Hoosier volunteers not decided to try to close the gap in heavy rural Republican parts of the state from the 70-30% margins of defeat for Gore and Kerry to roughly 55-45% margins of defeat and even to Obama victories in impoverished southwestern Indiana counties and Terra Haute. A salient issue is whether the strategy of heavy campaigning in strong rural Republican areas might be successful in other solid red states like Mississippi and South Dakota where McCain won. Lawrence J.Friedman, Bloomington, Indiana
Presidential candidates: Love ‘em and Lehman
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:
While there is no doubt that media bias is a real factor out there, it really is also possible that negative stories rise about candidates who have more negative attributes, run a more negative campaign, and have generally made more mistakes or pursued bad policies.
Sometimes if it looks like a duck….
McCain Facebook game pokes fun at pork
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.
Is this humane? I wonder how Upton Sinclair would feel about this…
Ex-U.S. Presidential wannabes lambast campaign coverage
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.
Good comments on a dumb article. Sinead gave enough ‘truth’ points in her article to shoot herself in the foot several times over. It’s my belief that (as you label them) the “wannabes”, should more appropraitely be labeled the “Shouldabeens”. That is, if a Real discussion about the Real Issues this country faces were to have been ever discussed. Ever wonder why talk radio is booming these days? It’s because it makes a person think about the issues and what is actually happening in this country and the world. That is, unless your an “Air America” fan –> seemingly an extension of CNN. The only personalities I see on CNN that actually talk about the issues (agree or not) are Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs. The rest is garbage.I heard earlier today (not on the Boob tube of course), that Colin Powell and his wife have finished a new study that has found out that Minneapolis is one to the worst cities in the U.S. for graduating it’s students. In the study, “Fifty percent (50%) of all students in Minneapolis fail to graduate high school.” High School folks! And there are many, many other cities listed from all over the U.S. that are not far behind that. There are laws in place now that allow and protect these teenagers to chose as they please whether or not they want to continue attending high school. Are you the parent of one of these kids? Because if you are, you Cannot Lawfully Interfere with YOUR child’s “rights”. Just think, one day in the near future these brainiacs will have the same vote value as you and I.Larry (above) makes very good points too. Although, the way it is now, I’m not sure I would want my Congressman (who legally has a right to seek another job) to continue voting on legislation that he/she is not well-informed on. Missing votes on bills that they do not follow closely is probably a good thing. Although Larry points out the fact that if they want to seek such an office, they should step down from their current position. This might be tough since it would put most of them (who do not attain the job) out of their current position. Yes, imagine you or I trying to get away from work to go apply and “show & tell” for a new position.Here’s how I see a reform that may (or not) be plausible. If the current Senator or Representative wished to seek another job, so be it. If this job seek would interfere with their present duties of representing their constituents, they SHOULD STEP DOWN (so I agree with Larry). But the next step to this is the reform that MUST take place in the elections process. I don’t have all the details sorted out, but can’t we have an elections process that has very little money involved in it?? Now I’m stepping on the “marketeers” feet but, if there were an initial qualification process for actually being considered a candidate (not sure the details yet), then taking these candidates and having a series of debates (like shown before), but Completely Different. No more “sound bites” on a 30-second answer to a Big Issue. Debates Per Topic! (for the big issues)… and a round table discussion of issues and ideas. A more comfortable setting for the candidates, but a process nonetheless that allows each candidate to explain his ideas on a particular topic and have those ideas thrown around a bit. Even 2 hours to discuss 1 topic (ie. healthcare) is not enough to solve any problems but America would get a clear understanding on where the candidate stood on the issue and how much knowledge they really have on it. Anyway, this is part of my idea, and I’d also like to get rid of TV commercials for Presidential Candidates all-together. Your only selling yourself, but you don’t mention who you really are. I know marketing like this works, but works for who?? My opinion, the stupid people! That’s who! If I know your name because I saw your fancy, funny, cute Ad on TV or the internet, and I’ve never heard of the other candidate, I should vote for you based on that alone??? Never!! Sadly, many people DO vote based on the little knowledge they have of the Candidate. As John Edwards pointed out with the 24-hour media coverage, “What you’d expect is a more informed electorate, Unfortunately that’s not the case,”.
Looks like the Viacom stations aren’t going away, which for me is convenient…. I could have lived with a falling out with Viacom and TW, but really wasn’t looking forward to switching providers right now.@RogerKC — Sounds like you would favor an ‘a la carte’ option (as would I) that would allow you to buy only the channels you like. Would that allay your concerns, or would you still prefer to rally against the right of others to consume services you personally find useless?