There used to be a saying about Henry Luce’s publications, “Life is for people who can’t read, and Time is for people who can’t think.”
H/t JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
Category: Media
DINOs, F%$# ‘Em
Gee, a bunch of the Democrats In Name Only are objecting to the Obama campaign’s ads criticizing Romney’s tenure as head of Bain Capital.
You know, if you took their dicks out of your mouth, and realized that campaign donations from rich looters are not the be all and end all, you would realize that this is a political winner:
Some influential Democrats on and off Capitol Hill are refusing to give President Obama political cover for his attacks on Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital.
Despite pushback from more than a half-dozen Democrats, the Obama campaign on Tuesday defended how it has scrutinized Romney’s business background.
The business model of private equity firms is to make money by either flipping, or leveraging firms, to extract value.
They are the financial equivalent of automotive chop shops.
Words I Never Thought That I Would Ever Say
Good for George Lucas.
George Lucas wanted to expand his movie studios in Marin County, but has been running into a torrent of obstructionism and NIMBY from the local home owners for 25 years, and so they’ve thrown in the towel, and will be selling the land to the Marin County Foundation to create low-income housing:
He’s working with the Marin Community Foundation to instead construct affordable housing for either low-income families or seniors living on small, fixed incomes. In order to smooth along the development, he’s already given them all of the pricey technical studies and land surveys Lucasfilm spent years conducting. And we think that’s just great. Because if there’s one thing rich people will hate more than having movie magic made in their backyard, it’s poor people moving in.
Heh.
Newspapers Are Not Dying, They Are Being Murdered by Management
Because instead of reinvesting in their business, they are spending their money on dividends and stock buybacks:
The Washington Post Company‘s dismal quarterly earnings release last week was received with something of a shrug—more of the same. But the report is worse than the reaction suggests and raises fundamental questions about the Post’s strategy, not just for the newspaper, but for the whole company.
If you hadn’t heard, the Washington Post Company is basically a for-profit college/SAT-prep firm that sidelines as a cable-TV provider and newspaper publisher. The august Washington Post (I’ll italicize Post here when referring to the newspaper and won’t when referring to its parent) contributed just 15 percent to its namesake company’s revenue in the first quarter but was a $23 million drag on the bottom line.
Kaplan, the Post’s education division, is the company’s cash cow, and a few years ago looked like the newspaper’s savior. But its revenue has fallen sharply over the last year and a half since for-profit schools, very much including Kaplan’s, came under pressure for predatory practices. Its sales tumbled 14 percent from 2010 to 2011 and dropped another 11 percent in the first quarter.
Its deteriorating prospects spells more trouble for the Post’s newspaper division, whose very bad first quarter included not only that $23 million loss but also a 7 percent decline in revenue. Crucially, its digital ad revenue—the paper’s main hope for the future—went into reverse and hit negative 8 percent. It’s just the latest in a long line of bad results.
The Post’s newspaper division (which includes Slate) has posted losses in thirteen of the last fifteen quarters, a trail of red ink that has led to cumulative losses of $412 million over the period. Its revenue has declined in twenty of the last twenty-two quarters and last year it brought in fully one-third less—$314 million—than it did at its peak in 2006. Layoffs have reduced the Post’s newsroom to a little more than half its peak size.
Despite this, the company continues to fork over hundreds of millions of dollars to shareholders in the form of dividends and share repurchases. The Post is disgorging the cash, as JW Mason calls it, to investors and depriving its businesses of resources.
…………
This is financialization at work. Instead of investing in its business operations, the Post is investing in its stock, which is a very different thing. The only way this bet pans out is if the Post’s shares rebound significantly in coming years. Would you put money on that? I sure wouldn’t (moreover, the company effectively levered up to buy them. The Post rolled over $395 million in debt in early 2009 to mature in 2019—at a 1.75 percent premium to its old bonds).
Where would the Post be if its parent company had invested even one-quarter of that nearly one billion dollars in its newspaper, or in some other profit-making, preferably non-predatory venture? That’s unknowable, of course, but it’s worth thinking about when you ponder why newspapers haven’t better adapted to the digital age.
The facts are stark, though I think that part of the the author’s thesis, that the WaPo should go behind a paywall, is fundamentally wrong.
People have not payed for news in newspapers since the beginning of the modern mass market newspaper, they have paid for ink on paper, and the content has been paid for by advertising.
The problem is not the internet, it’s Craigslist. The classifieds have always been the most profitable source of ad revenue for papers, particularly in local markets.
Unfortunately, as opposed to finding a way to fight this, or another potential source of revenue, the news papers go for Wall Street rules, which means asset stripping rather than investment.
A Good Essay on Putin
Stephen Cohen makes some very good points, like the fact that Russia has become less corrupt, journalists and dissidents are less likely to be murdered, his elections are fairer, etc.
Of course, better and more democratic than Yeltsin is not a tough act to follow.
Yeltsin and his cronies looted the country, splitting the proceeds with western banksters, murdered journalists as a fairly brisk clip, impoverished the nation, literally prostituting many of its citizens, and shelled the parliament when they did not do his bidding.
What he misses though is why the west hates Putin so much. It all comes down to the, “Splitting the proceeds with the western banksters,” bit.
One of the rules of the modern neocolonial finance regime is that finance’s masters of the world get to steal other people’s stuff, and those people never get it back.
Editing Fail
I wonder if anyone got fired over this.
H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
Nice Golden Egg, Bird. See the Farmer With the Axe?
In a development that should surprise no-one following Comcast’s purchase by NBC, Hulu will start requiring a cable account for access:
Viewers who stream network TV shows may soon discover the free ride is not so free.
Hulu, which attracted 31 million unique users in March under a free-for-all model, is taking its first steps to change to a model where viewers will have to prove they are a pay-TV customer to watch their favorite shows, sources tell The Post.
In fact, the move by Hulu toward the new model — called authentication because viewers would have to log in with their cable or satellite TV account number — was behind the move last week by Providence Equity Partners to cash out of Hulu after five years, these sources said.
And it’s not just Hulu making it tougher for cable-cutters to stream shows and other content.
Fox, owned by News Corp., which also owns The Post, is expected to begin talks soon with Comcast on a TV Everywhere deal that will require authentication. Plus, Philadelphia-based Comcast is expected to switch to an authentication model for this summer’s Olympic Games (see story at right).
The move toward authentication is fueled by cable companies and networks looking to protect and profit from their content.
Their content?
With all due respect to the fine gentlemen at Comcast, about the only work of convincing fiction that they produce are their own advertisements.
It also appears to be a violation of their agreement that the FCC required for the NBC/Comcast merger:
“The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was asked to include as a condition of Comcast’s takeover of NBCU that subscription to a pay-TV service not be required for access to Hulu,” said Public Knowledge President Gigi Sohn. “It is a shame the Commission declined to do so.”
Free Press saw it differently. “This sudden move to big cable’s preferred business model raises serious questions about whether Comcast is violating the conditions of its merger with NBCUniversal,” said the group, “a deal that gave the company a large ownership stake in Hulu.” As a condition for approval of the merger, the cable giant agreed to relinquish any right “to influence, control or participate in the governance or management of Hulu.”
“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” said Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood, “or at least a compelling reason to investigate. Under the terms of its acquisition of NBCUniversal, Comcast is forbidden from influencing Hulu’s operations. Today’s announcement looks an awful lot like an example of such influence.”
what is going on here is that they are killing the business in order to maintain control.
In the short run, it may make sense, since this allows them to maintain their monopoly rents on their subscribers, for a while at least.
One of thei early investors, however, bailed out on Hulu:
Hulu.com owners Walt Disney Co. (DIS), Comcast Corp. and News Corp. (NWSA) are close to buying out Providence Equity Partners Inc.’s stake at a price valuing the company at about $2 billion, said two people with knowledge of the matter.
Providence is selling its 10 percent share in Los Angeles- based Hulu for about $200 million after investing $100 million when the venture began in 2007, according to the people, who weren’t authorized to talk publicly.
“This would be the optimal outcome,” David Bank, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets in New York, said in an interview. “The real value of Hulu will be discovered on a longer time frame than what’s likely optimal for Providence.”
It ain’t the time frame, it’s that their interest is in the success of Hulu, and not of the cable companies, and they realized that the management is the cable companies’ moles.
Truth be told, except for the wonderful Alec Baldwin brain sucker ads, this does not really effect me, but it’s seriously galling.
Signs of the Apocalypse: Bloomberg Edition
The editors at Bloomberg are calling for an increase in the minimum wage:
Here’s an unhappy observation about the minimum wage: Congress last increased the rate in stages in 2006, topping it out at $7.25 an hour in 2009, or $15,080 a year.
That amount, when adjusted for inflation, is actually lower than what a minimum-wage worker earned in 1968 and is too meager to offer anyone the chance to climb out of poverty, let alone afford basic goods and services.
About 10 states are now considering raising the rate, and Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, is proposing to increase the federal rate in three increments to $9.80 an hour in 2014. Many of the initiatives under consideration would smartly tie the minimum wage to the cost of living, meaning that those workers’ wages would finally keep up with inflation.
………
It’s also becoming clear that many Americans are being forced to take lower-paying jobs and that a low-wage bias is creeping into the economy, as Bloomberg economist Joseph Brusuelas recently put it. In many cases, minimum-wage work is all that’s available, which may explain why such workers are older and better-educated than they were three decades ago. In 2010, nearly 44 percent of minimum-wage workers had either attended or graduated from college, up from 25.2 percent in 1979, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal think tank.
Raising the minimum wage won’t entirely solve the problem of anemic incomes, but it would help. Economists have long found that boosting the minimum wage can raise income levels for those earning just above the minimum. Employers, seeking to protect “wage ladders,” often bump up salaries for slightly higher-paid employees, too.
………
The editorial page of Bloomberg is not like the moon-bat insane Wall Street Journal‘s page, they don’t contract facts on the front page in the OP/Ed Section, but this is not a populist publication by any means, and they just called out the neoliberal consensus that calls for more suffering from the least of us.
I’m beginning to think that economic populism may be a winner this year.
No Blogging for You!
No Soup For You!
Yeah, we are preparing frantically for the Passover Seder, so I won’t have any time today.
BTW, this is my first ever Seinfeld reference on my blog, which is interesting, since I never watched the show when it was on.
Just Saw Olbermann on Letterman
They talked about his firing, and Olbermann was pretty magnanimous about his exit. He basically said that it wasn’t a good match, and that Current TV just couldn’t handle the demands of the show.
I’m not sure how this will all end up, but it was a remarkably fun and light hearted bit.
What the F%$#?
Keith Olbermann just got fired by Current TV:
The cable channel indicated that he had failed to honor the terms of his five-year, $50 million contract, giving the channel the right to terminate it. Starting Friday night, the former New York Gov. Eliot L. Spitzer will take over Mr. Olbermann’s 8 p.m. time slot.
In reading the statement from Current TV (Below, after break) it appears that he was simply too difficult to work with.
I can’t imaging that it’s ratings. He really put the network on the map.
This is a recurring issue in his career, and he really needs to address this.
To the Viewers of Current:We created Current to give voice to those Americans who refuse to rely on corporate-controlled media and are seeking an authentic progressive outlet. We are more committed to those goals today than ever before.Current was also founded on the values of respect, openness, collegiality, and loyalty to our viewers. Unfortunately these values are no longer reflected in our relationship with Keith Olbermann and we have ended it.We are moving ahead by honoring Current’s values. Current has a fundamental obligation to deliver news programming with a progressive perspective that our viewers can count on being available daily — especially now, during the presidential election campaign. Current exists because our audience desires the kind of perspective, insight and commentary that is not easily found elsewhere in this time of big media consolidation.As we move toward this summer’s political conventions and the general election in the fall, Current is making significant new additions to our broadcasts. We have just debuted six hours of new programming each weekday with Bill Press (“Full Court Press” at 6 am ET/3 am PT) and Stephanie Miller (“Talking Liberally” at 9 am ET/6 pm PT).We’re very excited to announce that beginning tonight, former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer will host “Viewpoint with Eliot Spitzer,” at 8 pm ET/5 pm PT. Eliot is a veteran public servant and an astute observer of the issues of the day. He has important opinions and insights and he relishes the kind of constructive discourse that our viewers will appreciate this election year. We are confident that our viewers will be able to count on Gov. Spitzer to deliver critical information on a daily basis.All of these additions to Current’s lineup are aimed at achieving one simple goal — the goal that has always been central to Current’s mission: To tell stories no one else will tell, to speak truth to power, and to influence the conversation of democracy on behalf of those whose voices are too seldom heard. We, and everyone at Current, want to thank our viewers for their continued steadfast support.Sincerely,Al Gore & Joel HyattCurrent’s Founders
My full statement:
I’d like to apologize to my viewers and my staff for the failure of Current TV.
Editorially, Countdown had never been better. But for more than a year I have been imploring Al Gore and Joel Hyatt to resolve our issues internally, while I’ve been not publicizing my complaints, and keeping the show alive for the sake of its loyal viewers and even more loyal staff. Nevertheless, Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt, instead of abiding by their promises and obligations and investing in a quality news program, finally thought it was more economical to try to get out of my contract.It goes almost without saying that the claims against me implied in Current’s statement are untrue and will be proved so in the legal actions I will be filing against them presently. To understand Mr. Hyatt’s “values of respect, openness, collegiality and loyalty,” I encourage you to read of a previous occasion Mr. Hyatt found himself in court for having unjustly fired an employee. That employee’s name was Clarence B. Cain.
In due course, the truth of the ethics of Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt will come out. For now, it is important only to again acknowledge that joining them was a sincere and well-intentioned gesture on my part, but in retrospect a foolish one. That lack of judgment is mine and mine alone, and I apologize again for it.
Rupert Needs to Be Banned from Broadcast Ownership Right Now
The latest news is that News Corp paid hackers to help people steal the broadcasts of its primary competitor:
Part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation empire employed computer hacking to undermine the business of its chief TV rival in Britain, according to evidence due to be broadcast by BBC1’s Panorama programme on Monday .
The allegations stem from apparently incriminating emails the programme-makers have obtained, and on-screen descriptions for the first time from two of the people said to be involved, a German hacker and the operator of a pirate website secretly controlled by a Murdoch company.
The witnesses allege a software company NDS, owned by News Corp, cracked the smart card codes of rival company ONdigital. ONdigital, owned by the ITV companies Granada and Carlton, eventually went under amid a welter of counterfeiting by pirates, leaving the immensely lucrative pay-TV field clear for Sky.
The allegations, if proved, cast further doubt on whether News Corp meets the “fit and proper” test required to run a broadcaster in Britain. It emerged earlier this month that broadcasting regulator Ofcom has set up a unit called Project Apple to establish whether BSkyB, 39.1% owned by News Corp, meets the test.
No, News Corp is not “fit and proper” to broadcast in the UK.
FCC Takes a Bite Out of Clear Channel and Its Ilk
It looks like the FCC is finally moving on low power local radio, and in so doing, they are going to be kneecapping crappy mass market radio, which includes a lot of the right wing talkers:
A Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decision issued Monday (PDF) will clear the runway for hundreds of new community radio stations that broadcast on low-power FM signals, bringing progressive, community voices to urban areas that have for decades only known what’s being broadcast by major corporations and America’s political right.
In other words, the dismantling of Rush Limbaugh was just the beginning, and the whole FM dial is next.
The FCC’s decision on Monday wipes away a massive backlog of applications for FM repeater stations, which are transmitters that repeat signals broadcast by corporate and religious radio operators — many of which rake in big listening audiences for right-wing syndicated talk shows.
“So, what a lot of right-wing, conservative radio stations have been able to do is expand their reach out in communities by just having these translators out in the wild, which is why Rush Limbaugh gets the type of audience that he has — because the networks take one signal and repeat it over and over and over across the dial all over the country,” Steven Renderos, national organizer with the Center for Media Justice, told Raw Story on Tuesday. “They’re constantly looking for opportunities to expand that, so there were a slew of these applications pending at the FCC.”
…………
Instead of slowly grinding down thousands of repeater station applications that leave no room for community radio, the FCC essentially threw most of those applications away by limiting who can apply, how many filings a single entity can make, and which markets can consider new repeaters — all of which frees up the regulatory body to examine applications for new community stations. The regulatory agency still gave some deference to corporate broadcasters, however, by allowing them one shot at revising their applications to fit the new guidelines.
…………
The FCC’s move Monday was the first step on a path laid out by the Local Community Radio Act, signed by President Barack Obama at the start of 2011, which represented the first real victory in activists’ long fight against the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) the radio industry’s biggest lobbying group. The bill freed up portions of the radio spectrum that had otherwise been kept empty by the larger broadcasters, who had long insisted upon four clicks of blank space on the FM dial to prevent interference. It also stipulated that new space on the dial must be reserved for community stations in urban areas where there might otherwise be none.
The radio stations that they are clearing the deck are limited to non profits, and each one has to be independently owned.
So, we’ll see more diversity on radio, and we’ll have better radio.
How Much Would It Cost to Leave Him There?
At Least, there is Symmetry
The good folks at Westover “G-d Hates F*gs” Baptist are now looking to support Rush Limbaugh by purchasing ads on his show:
There’s something so deliciously ironic, so perfectly just in this. The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that Rush Limbaugh has a new sponsor anxious to buy up lots of ad space on his show: Westboro Baptist Church. Is there anything more delicious than the idea of the haters advertising on the hater’s show?
Premiere Networks has released a statement saying they will not accept any ads from the group. Who knew they had standards of what Limbaugh maligns as “political correctness.”
I don’t understand why they won’t take the ads, it’s a match made in heathen heaven.
They Can’t Even Give Away Ads on Rush Limbaugh’s Show
For the next two weeks, his syndicate, Premiere Networks, will be suspending their national ads from his show:
Radio-Info.com reports that Premiere Networks, which syndicates the Rush Limbaugh show, told its affiliate radio stations that they are suspending national advertising for two weeks. Rush Limbaugh is normally provided to affiliates in exchange for running several minutes of national advertisements provided by Premiere each hour. These ads called “barter spots.” These spots are how Premiere makes its money off of Rush Limbaugh and other shows it syndicates.
But without explanation, Premiere has supended these national advertisements for two weeks. Radio-Info.com calls the move “unusual.” The development suggests that Rush Limbaugh’s incessant sexist attacks on Sandra Fluke have caused severe damage to the show.
They are suspending the spots because they cannot give them away right now, and dead air is not a reasonable alternative.
This is a good thing, notwithstanding the concerns from the commentariat about a “slippery slope” of censorship. (Yeah, I’m talking to you Kevin Drum)
It’s pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-liberal hand wringing bullsh%$.
Being on the East Coast, I still hear now and again WBZ’s late night talk radio, which, even though its hosts lean right about 80% of the time is kind of a pre-repeal-of-the-fairness-doctrine relic, and their producers don’t pre-screen for conservative political orthodoxy.
In particular, I remember the late David Brudnoy, who was a conservative, and a libertarian, and one with VERY strongly held beliefs. (He loathed the Clintons)
The fact is that the most extreme of their hosts (like Brudnoy) re to the right about like Ed Schultz is on the left.
What you have on the air on the right wing right now are, to paraphrase Roger Stone, “Rat F%$#ing” political operatives.
If sponsors flee the freak show conservatives, it is an unalloyed good.
To think otherwise is to declare that Rachel Maddow and Glen Beck to be to opposite sides of the same coin.
I have no problems with polemicists, and neither will advertisers.
What is happening now is that sponsors are getting the message now that there are risks to backing the partisan Rat F%$#ers, and this is an unalloyed good.
Heh
It looks like Rush’s going postal is causing significant blow-back for all of the hate jocks:
Rush Limbaugh made the right-wing talk-radio industry, and he just might break it.
Because now the fallout from the “slut” slurs against Sandra Fluke is extending to the entire political shock-jock genre.
Premiere Networks, which distributes Limbaugh as well as a host of other right-wing talkers, sent an email out to its affiliates early Friday listing 98 large corporations that have requested their ads appear only on “programs free of content that you know are deemed to be offensive or controversial (for example, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Leykis, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity).”
This is big. According to the radio-industry website Radio-Info.com, which first posted excerpts of the Premiere memo, among the 98 companies that have decided to no longer sponsor these programs are “carmakers (Ford, GM, Toyota), insurance companies (Allstate, Geico, Prudential, State Farm), and restaurants (McDonald’s, Subway).” Together, these talk-radio advertising staples represent millions of dollars in revenue.
They have a right to speak.
They don’t have a right to make millions of dollars a year to do so.
Please Let This Mean That Marty Peretz is Fired, it is Good
One of the founders of Facebook, Chris “Not Zuckerberg” Hughes has purchased The New Republic:
The newest owner of The New Republic magazine is Chris Hughes, a new-media guru who co-founded Facebook and helped to run the online organizing machine for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.
Mr. Hughes’s purchase of a majority stake in the magazine will be announced on Friday, once again remaking the masthead of the nearly century-old magazine that helped define modern American liberalism.
Of course, over the past 40 years, the former owner, Marty Peretz, has done his best to betray American liberalism.
TNR has been reduced to a caricature, endorsing just about every bone-headed ‘Phant idea, particularly in the foreign policy area, and giving Republicans the the refrain, “Even the liberal New Republic.”
That, and the fact that TNR is a petri dish for trustifarian Ivy Leaguer plagiarists, like Glass and Shalit.
This is why it’s circulation has fallen, and its publication frequency has been cut in half,and The Nation has 3 times the circulation.
I don’t expect “Not Zuckerberg” to turn this around though. His brave new idea is to sprinkle Web 2.0 pixie dust to make everything work:
His focus, he said in an interview in advance of the announcement, will be on distributing the magazine’s long-form journalism through tablet computers like the iPad. Though he does not intend to end the printed publication, “five to 10 years from now, if not sooner, the vast majority of The New Republic readers are likely to be reading it on a tablet,” he said.
The problem is that the magazine sucks. The only thing that tablet, or web based, features can do is lower the cost of distribution, and allow for some multimedia content.
Its employment policy is best described as affirmative action for overpriviliged youth, and its schtick, hippie punching, was old in 1982.
Signs of the Apocalypse: Rush Limbaugh Edition
He has apologized for calling a 30-year old contraception advocate and law student a slut, and suggesting that she should post sex tapes to the internet:
US radio host Rush Limbaugh has apologised for calling a law student a “slut” for her views on contraception.
In comments on his radio show earlier this week, Mr Limbaugh suggested Sandra Fluke’s testimony to a US congressional committee made her “a prostitute”.
In a statement released on his website, Mr Limbaugh apologised to Ms Fluke “for the insulting word choices” and said he “did not mean a personal attack”.
I think it had more to do with something like a dozen of his sponsors dropping his white, flabby, pimpled ass.
Romney Wins in Michigan and Arizona
The freak show will continue, but it’s over.
About the only people who will keep propping up the freak of the week against Romney will be the press corps(e) because they hate Mitt Romney, and because it sells newspapers.
Seriously though, why does the mainstream political media sound like a bunch of junior high school girls slamming other girls over their shoe choices.