Tag: TV

OPINION — Why Give Absurdities Ink & Prominence?

Elon Musk owns a communications company (and so much more), and if he wants to promote an idea, surely he is free to do so. That’s the epitome of free speech…. Unchecked, unregulated, and uncensored.

And when he suggests that a media company’s employees deserve a “long prison sentence” for a story that he disagrees with, again, he is free to shout that from his platform and bask in the glow of his X echo chamber, maganified by the Prince of Mar-a-Lago.

Musk has long criticized CBS for a Kamala Harris interview during the November election. Most recently, following a critical story about Musk’s closure of USAID, the DOGE boss wrote, “60 Minutes are the biggest liars in the world! They engaged in deliberate deception to interfere with the last election. They deserve a long prison sentence.”

Seriously… “a long prison sentence” for? What would be the legal charge? What is the offense? What is the rationale, other than perhaps currying favor with prominent politicians? Evidently, Musk didn’t learn about the American value of free speech in his South African school system.

While Musk can and should be allowed to say anything, why does other media give him any credence by repeating his nonsensical mutterings?

Deciding what to include on any media platform is the province of editors who, one hopes, make their decisions based on what is newsworthy, the prominence of the person speaking, and the likelihood that what’s said will be impactful.

On any responsible calculus, in my nearly 50-year experience in media, I believe even repeating silly ideas or promoting individuals who are so out of touch with inherent American values is, in itself, irresponsible.

Tiffany Network At Risk of Losing Its Luster

It is being reported that CBS News is entering negotiations with the F.C.C. because a settlement with the Trump administration is politically expedient.

Expedient for the parent organization, Paramount? Apparently.

As reported in the NY Times, “But in the wake of Mr. Trump’s election, CBS’s parent company, Paramount, has begun settlement discussions with representatives of Mr. Trump, according to several people with knowledge of the talks. Many executives at Paramount believe that settling the suit could help pave the way for the F.C.C. to approve Paramount’s planned multibillion-dollar merger with another company.”

Expedient also to avoiding any negative relations or a loss of access with the Trump White House? Perhaps true, but most likely a calculated decision based on fear of retribution from the press office.

The proposed settlement stems from a $10 billion lawsuit from President Trump over allegations of misleading editing in a CBS News 60 Minutes story from October 7, 2024.

Business settlements and political decisions based on real or imagined ramifications are one thing. But it is quite another for a major broadcaster to cave so willingly and early in the legal process. More alarming to veteran news people is the apparent surrender and kow tow to a personality.

If a story has been properly produced, vetted by experienced and senior editors, and scrubbed for accuracy, then the network should stand by the work. Stand by your reporters and editorial team. One presumes the experienced team at CBS 60 Minutes, the premier news magazine show on CBS, did their jobs properly and professionally. It would be a sad thing for risk-averse managers at the television network to scuttle the work and settle for the expedience of a new business deal.

Hinmatóowyalahtq̓it Was Right

Over the last 36 hours, much of the cable-verse has been unremarkably predictable. MSNBC grieves, Newsmax and Fox gloat, and CNN searches to strike a moderate tune, whatever that might be.

Each media entity is frantically and fanatically preaching to its choir. That’s what their audience wants and believes. That’s where their commercial success lies.

While I seriously doubt there has been any audience transference from its well-entrenched political ideology of choice, therein lies the problem.

They are squandering our future, and we are succumbing to their pabulum. Former New Mexico Governor and US Ambassador Bill Richardson promoted collaboration and compromise, “We cannot accomplish all that we need to do without working together.”

Instead, too many of us hear a story and mutter, “Geez, what a bitch!” Or dismiss some politician or businessman bemoaning, “What a rich bastard they are, what do they know about…?”
We pit one another against each other for short-term political gain. Congressperson Majorie Taylor Greene has announced her intention to hold hearings on the leftist-leaning PBS for insinuating that Elon Musk’s raised salute was an endorsement of either fascism or Nazism. Hearings? Really?

To quote one of America’s great orators, Bugs Bunny, “Heh. What a maroon!”

See, I did it there!

But I must also recognize that on the other side of the aisle, statements by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez routinely boil the blood of many conservatives.

We are seduced and reduced to embracing (liking?) a diet of bromides and broadsides from one side to the other and back again. We toss around words like liberty and freedom and define them solely and judgmentally in our terms… and if you disagree, you’re disloyal, un-American, and wrong.

Ronald Reagan reminded us to be more careful with what we say and what’s at stake. “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

We expect MSNBC to interview guests aligned with a left-of-center ideology, just as Newsmax or Fox celebrates the right. Name-calling predominates the headlines. Guests appear especially for their vitriol and the cleverness that predominate the airwaves.

Are media power brokers and gatekeepers so committed to being an echo chamber of their audience’s ideologies and so terrified of losing market share that they cannot present another idea?

Dare we suggest we deserve better?

Anchors and hosts giggle, make snarky editorial remarks, and castigate anyone who disagrees with their political line. Listen to the adjectives. Count the adverbs.

Admittedly, it’s so easy to sit in judgment. And the view ain’t bad either!

It is as unreasonable as it is unlikely that the media will change, and certainly not willingly, if ever. They will continue to pander to their perceptions of this divided and discordant mob of viewers.

Audiences respond to two distinct emotions. Anger and fear. Only. The more that fear is stoked, the angrier audiences become. The more that anger intensifies, the fear grows more profound.

What’s wrong with challenging audiences – not from opposite poles – but from a single theme articulated by Hinmatóowyalahtq̓it (Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce), “We must find a way to look after one another, as if we were one single tribe.”

Would you listen and watch? Or is that theme too frightening for you? Is there any media company or talent with courage which is willing to try?

I, for one, would be proud to produce a show like that.

Sun Zhu was right…

The following post is making the rounds…

“Help make history, Boycott Inauguration Day, by turning your TV off at 12 o’clock ET on January 20. Make this inauguration the least-watched live event in the history of television. What an incredible message to the new administration. And for someone who loves to talk about crowd size, this is not going to make him very happy. It will put him on notice That we, the people, also have power! What a wonderful way to make Martin Luther King proud with an old-school approach to change. So tell your friends and tell your friends to tell their friends. Don’t presume people are not going to watch let’s make sure everyone doesn’t. Turn the TV to PBS so all the civil rights documentaries will get the ratings.”

My response is, what absolute poppycock.

In the days of Neilsen ratings, when that was all that was available, measuring a TV audience was the prime way to gauge a media event. That was then. It’s not today.

This week’s Trump inauguration will be available to a global audience on television, cable, audio, social media, and countless internet streams. It is potentially going to be the most watched inauguration simply in terms of its distribution and availability.
The TV numbers will be a pittance.

So – you don’t want to watch? Good on you.

Good luck to you.

And PBS should be so lucky to see a surge in their ratings.

Does anyone think that the sycophants who surround this president would ever be so bold as to tell that narcissist about a campaign to boycott his remarks?

Take it a second step, if told, would he care? How would we know?

On a larger plane, I find it risible to think the next 4 years will be better tolerated by being an ostrich. For anyone who disagreed with the President-elect or voted for his opposition, I might offer, “Get over it.”

Mr. Trump won, perhaps not with the mandate he has claimed, but with sufficient numbers in the popular vote and with a Congress prepped to do his bidding.

Is the answer not to watch, listen, or react to them too? For 4 years?

As for the line, “What a wonderful way to make Martin Luther King proud with an old-school approach to change” the perpetrator of this campaign forgets that Dr. King was all about publicity for the cause of racial justice. And more, he was a fighter… lest you forget the arrests, injuries, and deaths suffered by those who chose to stand by him. “Old-school approach…” seems like looking at history through a colored lens that has been distorted by memories of a gentler day.

These days are not gentle, dear reader.

If one disagrees with policies or positions, it’s far braver to speak up than to remain mute. If you think the country is on the wrong path, then speak up and be heard.
Sun Zhu tells us the path to victory begins with ourselves.“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

Media Mayhem – The LA fires bring out the best and worst in reporting

This week’s fires in and around Los Angeles resemble an apocalypse.

Families lost loved ones; thousands more lost property accumulated over a lifetime.

The media coverage has been extensive on land and in the air. Anchors have raced from the safety and comfort of New York studios to appear earnestly reporting on the fire line.


Snarky tabloid stories poked at anchors who tailored their Nomex fire retardant suits to appear fitted (more dashing?). In a holocaust, I suppose some news heavyweights think it best to look good while reporting on other’s suffering… before returning to the comfort of 4-star hotels for the night.

As my friend and colleague Bob Sirkin posed in an email today, “I am tired of watching network anchors trying to squeeze out the very last drops of emotion from victims.  How much more do you want to ask the same banal questions to people who are left with nothing?”

The So California fires are a tragedy of unfathomable scope. Of course.

But dare we compare this natural destruction to human-caused misery in Gaza, the Ukraine, and Russia where cities have been leveled, buildings pancaked on residents asleep in their beds, and debris fields stretch for miles and miles – entire communities obliterated back to the stone age?

The media coverage and public interest in these stories has largely waned. Field reporters file stories about a horrific bombing or a gun battle, characterized by the news term “bang-bang.” But the rest of the story – about people…the losses they have sustained is largely sanitized from US media.

It’s absolutely as tragic, but if I may suggest, few if any of these victims likely have Go-Fund-Me pages.

The old bromide that all news is local is true, and the fires in California have greater resonance to fellow Americans than something happening thousands of miles away in a foreign country to people who are not “us.”

I get it.

Soon the fires will be contained. Even this weekend there will be less coverage as audiences over Saturday and Sunday decline and the newspapers shrink their page count. Anchors will return to their studios, where it is less expensive to sustain coverage.

The audience will tell pollsters that they’ve had enough, or feel overwhelmed, or worse yet, that the devastation is all beginning to look the same. And we’ll largely move on.

Newsroom cynics used to keep tally of what scope of devastation warranted network television news interest… hundreds of thousands of victims in a sub-continent typhoon barely earned a mention. Several thousand war casualties in Africa or several hundred killed in a South American earthquake might earn a flicker of acknowledgment. Scores in a domestic tragedy certainly earned a slot in the news window… but then, so too did a 2 car accident in New York’s Times Square so long as it was reported in the New York Post or Times.

I guess it’s all a matter of perspective after all.

PASTEURIZING MEDIA

Countering “media fallout”

{{This was written by my friend, teacher, and colleague Marty Perlmutter and first appeared on his substack today.It is thought provoking, and I felt worth sharing

Marshall McLuhan had a central idea he termed “media fallout.” He knew the only way to avoid the mind-manipulation of media was awareness of how these modes of consciousness envelopment work on our brains. In the absence of awareness, you have media fallout. He explained this to advertising and broadcast executives of the time — half a century ago. He said that he felt a lot like Louis Pasteur in 1860. He was aware of pervasive and invisible forces that caused disease and spread infection. But all around were individuals, doctors along with patients, oblivious to imperceptible but all-too-real microbes that were killing them.

To become conscious of how balkanized, corrupted, disinforming and ever-more-pathetic media are shaping our minds and behaviors requires a quantum leap in awareness of invisible forces. Sinclair Broadcasting and Fox News are the easiest of the “cavorting beasties” (as the inventor of the microscope termed single-cell organisms) to detect, and begin to disinfect. Social media, fragmented attention, cell phone dopamine addiction — these will take more time to elucidate and defang.

Our plight seems more fraught than simply entertaining ourselves to death. As McLuhan taught, what we’re not aware of will have its way with our delicate cerebra. A lot of what we’re dealing with now barely makes it to the cortex. This is the age of the medulla oblongata, the brain stem where fear and rage abide. While we are distracted, addicted, disinformed and terrorized, what hope is there that we’ll grok how this enveloping miasma operates?

Another teaching gives me hope. A peerless penetrator of the loom of passions and persuasions, Friedrich Nietzsche, taught, “Understanding stops action.” When you comprehend how something triggers you, when you grasp the roots of your convictions, there’s no heat, no drive to act. There is only a tranquility that passeth manipulation.

So spread the word: Cavorting beasties are abroad in the land. We cannot see or sense this stuff til we surface the mechanisms by which they reach into us. By slowly becoming aware of how these forces massage our senses, impact our feeling and thinking, we can disabuse ourselves of thralldom and become, truly and at last, free.

Vigilantism Against the Media… Maybe the media should correct the narrative?

The recent attack on a news reporter in Colorado by a man screaming epithets at him for not appearing to be a white, Anglo-Saxon American really should not surprise anyone.

What’s perhaps more surprising is how these racial or ethnic attacks have been perpetuated (and tolerated?) in this burgeoning era of “I hate anyone who doesn’t agree with or look like me.” When did Trump’s America become a battlecry for racial hate?

What prompts anyone to think they are doing a civilized act by randomly chasing another human being and beating them for their looks or a presumption of their inherent evil? Who gets to decide this? What sort of person animal has that chutzpah?

We can wring our hands over recent political diatribes glorifying vigilantism. We can decry bravado which promotes the superiority of some and the inferiority of others whom we dislike (or fear), but when did vigilantism become acceptable?

The media is the fall guy for a host of problems, real and manufactured. The media is allowing itself to be pilloried. The adults (owners, publishers, editors, statesmen) in the media must speak up as influencers, critically and urgently to set the record straight about the generally outstanding job being performed every day.

Audiences must not be allowed to randomly assume or equate cable talk-TV with responsible reporting; audiences must be corrected when they make assumptions or fall for a diet of propaganda; knowledge stems from bonafide news (sourced, double-checked, and most important of all: presented without emotion or adverbs). Noise is not to be confused with “news.”

At least that is what I believe and taught my students.

Dazzling the eye and luring audiences with more than clickbait

{Principally this post is aimed at my students but the profile of Teddy Banks makes for fascinating reading for all of us who create and post content}.

We appreciate the eye is always drawn to the headline, but do we pay as much attention to the font and appearance as we ought to?
Similarly, how attractive and eye-catching are our lower thirds and identifying graphics?
Do we just splat the words on our screens – or think about combinations of fonts, colors, and their juxtaposition as we might?

While this story is about a master craftsperson whose work admittedly is aimed at major motion picture studios, his thoughtful and artistic approach is worthy of your consideration too.

Tariffs, Talk, Trump – Trying to Determine Truths in Trade

Two recent stories on the effect of impending Chinese tariffs paint very different pictures. Two complimenting stories offer better depth.

Today’s anecdotal-led NYT story “Trump’s Tariffs Helped Northern Vietnam Boom Like Never Before. What Now?” strikes a note of cautious optimism for the Vietnamese economy based on an anticipated surge in production to avoid tariffs.

Monday’s more analytical China Global South Project’s “Sorry, Vietnam is NOT Going to Be the “Next China” presents a more sober view. Bylined by Eric Olander is the proposition that the US policy-making community’s expectation that Vietnam will emerge as the next China is delusional. Even with the best US intentions, ‘friend-shoring’ won’t cut the Chinese Goliath out of the tariff-trade equation.

Olander’s argument is that Vietnam’s unemployment rate is just 2.27% limiting the number of available workers. He writes VN doesn’t have either the supply chain or logistics network required to replace China and what’s more, so many of the raw materials used by Vietnamese manufacturing come from its northern neighbor.

Damien Cave’s Times story is more encompassing than Olander’s succinct analysis, but both are well-worth reading to gain a far deeper understanding among the hype, hope, and reality and to appreciate the complex global implications.