Media Business

Despite the fact that former Vice President Al Gore invented the information superhighway, Market Wire reported Wednesday that more Republicans use the Internet than Democrats (hat tip to Drudge): “Nielsen//NetRatings (NASDAQ: NTRT), a global leader in Internet media and market research, announced today that 36.6 percent of U.S. adults online are Republicans, 30.8 percent are Democrats and 17.3 percent are Independents. With campaign Web sites becoming increasingly important to reaching the electorate, candidates need to keep their fingers on the political pulse of the Internet.”

The article continued:

This is pretty funny, folks (hat tip to Michelle Malkin). Editor & Publisher reported Monday that just about every major metropolitan newspaper’s circulation was down during the six-month period ending September 2006. One of the notable exceptions is the New York Post, which not only saw its numbers increase, but is also now the number five paper in the country:

The Los Angeles Times reported that daily circulation fell 8% to 775,766. Sunday dropped 6% to 1,172,005

The San Francisco Chronicle was down. Daily dropped 5.3% to 373,805 and Sunday fell 7.3% to 432,957.

The New York Times lost 3.5% daily to 1,086,798 and 3.5% on Sunday to 1,623,697. Its sister publication, The Boston Globe, reported decreases in daily circulation, down 6.7% to 386,415 and Sunday, down 9.9% to 587,292.

The Washington Post lost daily circulation, which was down 3.3% to 656,297 while Sunday declined 2.6% to 930,619.

Drudge reported quite a shocker Thursday evening: “In an Ironic Twist of Events, NBC and The CW Television Network Refuse to Air Ads for Documentary Focusing on Freedom of Speech…NBC Claims that the Network ‘Cannot Accept These Spots as They are Disparaging to President Bush.’”

Shocking. For those that are interested, the ad is available here. In it is the famous line from one of the Chicks, "We're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas," as well as one clearly referring to Bush as a "dumb s---".

Drudge's report continued:

Photographer Emilio Morenatti, 37, of the Associated Press, was taken captive in the Gaza Strip this morning. No word from the captors yet, but my prayers are with Emilio and his family for his safe return! According to the captions on the photo wires, Emilio was accosted as he was leaving his apartment for an Associated Press vehicle, and was forced into the captors' vehicle. I'll fill in with more details as they come in. Hajed Hamdan, the AP driver assigned to pick up Emilio, was confronted by the captors, who stole his phone and keys, and instructed him at gunpoint to turn away.

Boy, it didn’t take long for Katie Couric to go from media darling to whipping girl, did it? You’d think the perky one did something really obscene, like stating that she was voting for a Republican in the upcoming midterm elections. Yet, there it was in large type at USA Today: “Couric Fails to Keep CBS News on Top for Long” (hat tip to TVNewser). In reality, that might be the kindest statement in this article about Couric which began (emphasis mine throughout):

This is a truly shocking revelation by the New York Times ombudsman Byrone Calame (hat tip to Michelle Malkin). In a column published Sunday, Calame – the Times' “public editor” – has reversed a previous position of his concerning the Times June 23 article about secret international banking surveillance designed to uncover the sources of terrorist funding. Now, Calame thinks it was a mistake for the Times to reveal the existence of this program (emphasis mine throughout):

After pondering for several months, I have decided I was off base. There were reasons to publish the controversial article, but they were slightly outweighed by two factors to which I gave too little emphasis. While it’s a close call now, as it was then, I don’t think the article should have been published.

Those two factors are really what bring me to this corrective commentary: the apparent legality of the program in the United States, and the absence of any evidence that anyone’s private data had actually been misused. I had mentioned both as being part of “the most substantial argument against running the story,” but that reference was relegated to the bottom of my column.

This is quite a reversal for Calame who wrote at the time:

Media Life magazine had two media experts answer why Air America went south. Nancy Haynes said exactly what I've said from the beginning, that taxpayer-funded radio was the big obstacle, over 700 affiliate stations, a very established network:

Air America has had an especially tough time growing its audience because its affiliates must take listeners almost entirely from other, more-established stations, and the most likely source for Air America to “steal” audience would be from NPR affiliates. Yet NPR's isteners are among radio's most loyal. That's bad news for Air America.

Andrew Ettinger added the other obvious point, that radio dynamos like Limbaugh and Hannity built slowly, from the commercial ground up, not from the philanthropy-driven top down:

Air America is grasping for straws in some mighty odd places. A mass email from Air America host Thom Hartmann today touts the parallels between the plight of the bankrupt left-wing radio network and, of all things, Fox News Channel [FNC] and the Washington Times.

Excerpts:

• "There are times when doing the profitable thing is also doing the right thing. That's certainly what Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch thought when they lost an average of $90 million a year for about five years before the Fox News Channel became profitable."

This is too extraordinary for words – not the possibility of it happening, but that anybody in the drive-by media would even suggest it. After all, if there ever was proof that the press are colluding with Democrats, here it is.

ABC News's "The Note" reported on October 19 that members of “The Old Media” are “giddy with excitement over the prospect of the Bush-Cheney-Rove-Mehlman machine losing," and are having “secret morning conference calls with Howard Dean and George Soros” to discuss how they “can keep the meta-narrative (‘The Democrats are going to beat Bush and run Congress!!’) going for another 19 days, without interruption.”

This is akin to Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift actually saying something bad about Bill Clinton. Yet, there it was, in black and white. Please be advised that the writers by-lined included Mark Halperin, David Chalian, Teddy Davis, Tahman Bradley, Sarah Baker, Catrin Jones, Erica Anderson, and Daniel Steinberger. As such, this wasn't one writer's opinion:

In another apparent win for the Internet and New Media, NBC Universal announced on Thursday (hat tip to Drudge) a restructuring of some of its on-air programming (emphasis mine throughout):

NBC Universal plans to cut US$750 million in operating expenses by the end of 2007 by eliminating employees, cutting back on scripted shows, and slashing its news budget, according to a report Thursday in the Wall Street Journal.

The moves come as more and more viewers and advertisers gravitate toward new media, NBC Universal chairman Bob Wright told the newspaper. He said the moves would restore the company to double-digit growth next year.

The article continued:

Check out the email below I just received from the Zogby polling group.  Anita Drobny and Sheldon Drobny, co-founders of the Air America Radio Network, along with a couple others, are starting a new liberal talk radio network to pick up where Air America is presumably about to leave off.  What does it say about the objectivity of Zogby's polling that John Zogby will be a regular contributor?

--------------

Air America Co-Founders Start New Liberal Talk Network: Mike Malloy, Joe Trippi and John Zogby join Nova M Radio

Nova M Radio, Inc. based in Phoenix, Arizona officially announced the formation of its new progressive talk radio network. Debuting on the network will be the long awaited return to the airwaves of America’s original “truth-seeker” Mike Malloy. The Mike Malloy Show will initially broadcast live, from 9PM -12 Midnight (EST) beginning October 30,2006 on Nova M Radio affiliate 1480-AM KPHX Phoenix. The Mike Malloy Show will be made available to affiliates across the nation and will also stream live on www.novamradio.com. Malloy on his return to the radio quipped “Yikes! That was close. To not be on the air during perhaps the most critical election in modern U-S history would have been a real bummer. But, we're back and here it is: The Nova M Radio network. Another crack in the wall of right-wing drivel that saturates the airwaves. Join me nightly, truth-seekers and goodbye Air America - hello Nova M!”

The Sacramento Bee reports that the media can't get enough of Julia Wilson, the California teenager who was investigated by the Secret Service for her "kill Bush" MySpace page.

Once upon a time Julia Wilson dreamed of becoming the next Christina Aguilera, a pop star famous for glamour but not politics. Instead, she's become the next Cindy Sheehan, receiving global attention for displaying her anger at President Bush.

The story of the Sacramento teenager questioned last week by federal agents about her anti-Bush Web page has spread around the world, with newspapers in Egypt, China, Australia and Europe publishing articles about her and national television stations clamoring for interviews.

It appears the early fascination with Katie Couric as an evening anchor has fallen quicker than temperatures in the Northeast. Drudge is reporting the perky one's ratings for Monday, Oct. 16, 2006:

NEW YORK CITY
WABC 7.1
WNBC 5.3
WCBS 3.7

LOS ANGELES
KABC 5.9
KNBC 3.1
KCBS 1.5

WASHINGTON, DC
NBC 9.3
ABC 7.8
CBS 2.5

Yikes. This certainly coincides with views expressed by Variety’s Brian Lowry on October 15 (hat tip to TVNewser):

Has another Internet giant gotten the Liberal Bias Virus? Well, the Associated Press is reporting that Yahoo is extending its relationship with CBS to offer more of its news clips beginning Tuesday:

Yahoo already shows national and international news from CBS' "60 Minutes" as well as Walt Disney Co.'s ABC and Time Warner Inc.'s CNN.

The latest deal will allow Yahoo to post 10 to 20 local news clips from each of the CBS-owned TV stations covered in the exclusive arrangement. The stations encompass the nation's largest metropolitan markets.

I bet you didn't know that Yahoo was already showing "60 Minutes" and CNN clips. Isn't that special? Of course, not everybody is happy about this:

The following is a collaboration with Marc Sheppard originally posted at The American Thinker.

Five months ago, the Internet’s top search engine Google was accused of banning conservative websites from its news crawl. Last week, the e-behemoth offered to purchase YouTube, the preeminent provider of videos over the Web that has recently been implicated in censorship of its own. With their pending merger, serious questions arise about the future of the most powerful telecommunications medium on the landscape, and who if anyone is trying to control its content.

The arrival of Katie Couric to the CBS anchor desk hasn't panned out like the suits had thought. It's really no surprise considering that she's made essentially no real editorial and staff changes to introduce ideological diversity to broadcast television. Last week, the CBS News staff nearly revolted when Couric and her producers dared to allow someone to say on the show that school violence is the product of people taking religion out of public schools.

Five weeks into her tenure at the "CBS Evening News," Katie Couric's broadcast continues to slip in the ratings, falling into third place last week for the second week in a row.

With an average of 7.04 million viewers, Couric's audience last week was the smallest she'd had since taking over the evening news anchor desk, and it's lower than the number that tuned in for her predecessor Bob Schieffer's last week on the air in late August, according to Nielsen Media Research. [...]

He never fulfilled his promise to squish Fox News "like a bug," but Ted Turner has finally delivered up the $1 billion he promised to the UN. Already, the international racketeering organization has burned through $600 million of it.

Reports Reuters:

The United Nations Foundation, created by media mogul Ted Turner, has donated $1 billion to U.N. projects over the past nine years, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said on Tuesday.

Turner, the founder of the CNN television network, himself donated $1 billion and his foundation raised millions from other corporations, governments and charities.

ABC anchor Charles Gibson doesn't have much of a nose for business it appears. In an interview with Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Gail Shister, he asserts that if the broadcast networks stopped running advertisements for products that target older viewers (denture cleaners, medication, etc.) and started running ads for products younger viewers like (cars, vacations, etc.) the younger folks would somehow tune in.

Sorry, Charlie, it doesn't work that way. Advertisers cater to those who watch your shows, not vice versa. A better solution would be to stop running healthcare hype stories and stop trying to scare viewers about various bugaboos.

With its lead anchor having such a poor grasp of how his own industry works, is it any wonder that ABC and the other liberal-dominated networks can't seem to understand the slightly more difficult concepts of basic economics?

Note to Shister: Cool people don't use the phrase "hip-a-doodle-do."

This afternoon I attended a panel discussion at The Heritage Foundation about the role of bloggers in pushing for Congress to pass the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006.

The law, sponsored by freshmen senators Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) provides for an online database of federal appropriations. The bill passed through Congress with relative ease, but had been blocked for a bit by long-time pork barrel spending champions Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) and Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska).

Among the panelists was veteran Cox Newspapers Washington reporter Rebecca Carr who marveled that she "couldn't get over how effective" the coalition of left- and right-wing bloggers had been in providing the political pressure and alternative media coverage of the legislation's progress.

Heritage's Mark Tapscott was not as surprised, pointing out that blogs bring to bear "the wisdom of crowds" to news gathering and political activism.

Taxpayer-funded NPR is liberally biased.

To you and me that may not exactly be earth-shattering news, but it is a bit surprising to hear admitted by liberal Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz. After all, this is the same guy who was "agnostic" about whether Keith Olbermann aims to forward a liberal agenda on his MSNBC program.

For my full article, click here. Here’s a taste:

Veteran Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz admitted recently what many conservatives have long argued: taxpayer-funded National Public Radio (NPR) leans heavily to the left politically.

“With the rise of Fox News and conservative talk radio and NPR on the left and certain liberal cable programs, there is, polls have shown, that people like hearing opinions that reinforce their own,” Kurtz said on the September 30 edition of CNN’s “In the Money.”

I must caution readers that the hypocrisy in the following is so delicious nothing on your desk or couch is safe from sudden hysterical outbursts: the New York Times published an article Monday (hat tip to TVNewser) analyzing a new Democrat strategy to appear on and attack the Fox News Channel. Deliciously, the writer, Lorne Manly, consistently suggested that FNC was a biased, propaganda arm of the Republican Party without recognizing that the overwhelming majority of Americans see the Times as a biased, propaganda arm of the Democrat Party.

The fun began early: “Though Fox News maintains that its reporting is down the middle, Democrats have long complained that the news channel operates like a public relations outpost of the Bush White House.” And, the fun came often:

This one’s really good, folks. Writing in Friday’s FrontPage Magazine, Professor Emeritus at Brooklyn Law School Henry Mark Holzer made the case for why the New York Times should be indicted for violating the Espionage Act (hat tip to American Thinker):

It is an article of faith on the Left and among its fellow travelers that the Bush administration stole two elections, made war on Iraq for venal reasons, tortured hapless foreigners, and conducted illegal surveillance of innocent Americans. A corollary of this mindset is that the press, primarily the Washington Post and The New York Times, has a right, indeed a duty, to print whatever they want about the administration—even if the information compromises national security.

Holzer marvelously responded to this absurd notion:

The Brussels Journal reported today (via FreeRepublic) that the third day of rioting in the Marollen district of Brussels commenced today, events which were sparked by the apparent murder of a Moroccan prisoner in a Brussels prison. What makes this story unusual is that so far, there has only been one report issued across the newswires (by Reuters) covering the events, and even though the rioting is entering its third day, not a single photographer has been dispatched to document the activities of the Muslim mob.

In today's Washington Post, Howard Kurtz writes of comments made by Thomas Edsall, who until recently served as a political reporter for the Post.

Mr. Edsall is quoted from an interview: (The) "mainstream media presents itself as unbiased, when in fact there are built into it many biases, and they are overwhelmingly to the left."

He also mentions he's never voted for a Republican presidential candidate and estimates that reporters vote for Democrats by somewhere between 15 to 1 and 25 to 1.

OK, so the mainstream media's persistent liberal bias isn't earth shattering news to most of us. Still, it's good to occasionally see an honest insider willing to admit the bias exists.

Apparently it's not just me.

Back when I was in college, I was involved in journalism in various capacities, in the classroom and at student newspapers. I couldn't help but notice in each place I went, women far outnumbered men. The Star-Tribune of Minnesota has picked up on a similar trend in the television industry. Men seem to be disappearing:

In TV news these days, a good man is hard to find.

At the networks, men still rule -- Katie Couric notwithstanding -- but at the local level, women have taken the lead. Nationally, they account for 57 percent of TV news anchors. [...]

The male disappearing act starts in the classroom. At the University of Minnesota this fall, women outnumber men 227 to 125 in the professional journalism major, which includes broadcasting. Ken Stone, a broadcast journalism professor who spent 20 years working in radio and TV news, has 10 women and six men in his advanced reporting class; he said that's as balanced as it gets.

Stone traces the trend to the 1970s, when women and minorities protested about domination of the airwaves by white men. One of his first journalism professors asked the men in his class to stand up, then told them, "Get a new career, there are too many of you." [...]

Well sports fans, the plot is getting so thick you can drive a truck over it. TV Newser is reporting that Bill Maher, host of HBO’s “Real Time” who went on quite a rant Friday night about being denied his free speech rights by CBS, might be mistaken. According to the New York Daily News (emphasis mine): “‘If I or my representatives got it wrong about how the 'Free Speech' segment of the 'CBS Evening News' is, sorry, our bad,’ Maher said yesterday in a statement. ‘I'm ready, willing and able to speak about the topic I originally suggested.’"

Isn’t that special? In fact, according to Vaughn Ververs at CBS’s “The Public Eye,” the “Evening News” is in no way opposed to addressing religion:

With the election now less than 50 days away, I thought it might be fun to highlight some late evening/morning news items that the media might chose to ignore. After all, in the past three business days, the press have chosen to mostly ignore plummeting natural gas and heating bills as reported here, and plummeting gas prices as reported here. What might represent their most absurd negligence today?

Well, here are two obvious candidates; you decide. First up has to be the just released results of a USA Today/Gallup poll indicating that President Bush’s approval rating has risen to 44 percent (highest in a year), and that likely voters are now evenly split between Democrats and Republicans in the upcoming elections (details to follow).

The plot thickens. After Bill Maher claimed on the Friday evening installment of HBO’s “Real Time” that CBS prevented him from discussing religion on the “freeSpeech” segment as reported by NewsBusters, the executive producer of the “Evening News” has now denied this. As reported by TVNewswer (hat tip to reader Tracheostomy):

In an e-mail to TVNewser, CBS responds to Bill Maher:

"Bill Maher was never told that he couldn't discuss religion in a 'Free Speech' segment," Rome Hartman, executive producer of the CBS Evening News, said. "In fact, 'Free Speech' has already addressed religion and we expect others will in the future."

This obviously goes counter to Maher’s statements on Friday: