Series News - World-of-Newave.info http://answers.world-of-newave.info/series-news.htm Latest news and articles about Series News en-us Copyright (c)2004-2008.§/Newave SARL. All rights reserved. webmaster@world-of-newave.com (Webmaster) Sat, 30 Aug 2008 03:46:50 GMT Sat, 30 Aug 2008 03:46:50 GMT Newave Lisa XML Engine v1.0 - http://www.world-of-newave.info/about.htm 60 http://www.world-of-newave.info/images/wi8831.gif World-of-Newave.info - Knowledge and Informational Database http://www.world-of-newave.info/ 88 31 {ISSUES > BIAS AND BALANCE} - Cameron called McCain VP stories "erroneous reports" and said Fox News didn't report them -- but it did http://articles.world-of-newave.info/society/issues/business/media/bias-and-balance/cameron-called-mccain-vp-stories-erroneous-reports-20080835246.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/society/issues/business/media/bias-and-balance/cameron-called-mccain-vp-stories-erroneous-reports-20080835246.htm Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:54 GMT During the August 28 edition of Fox News' The Strategy Room, chief political correspondent Carl Cameron said that the Associated Press "is reporting that [Sen.] John McCain has not made up his mind" as to who will be his vice-presidential running mate. Cameron went on to say: "That's the Associated Press dealing with what was a series of erroneous reports last night on a half a dozen different blogs and media outlets -- not Fox News -- that suggested that McCain had made up his mind and had intended to tell his potential pick today" [emphasis added]. However, during the 12 a.m. ET hour of Fox News' August 28 coverage of the Democratic National Convention, host Greta Van Susteren reported: "And speaking of Senator McCain, there's big news in his campaign tonight. Senator McCain has reportedly chosen his vice presidential running mate, and that person will be notified tomorrow. Senator McCain is expected to announce his running mate Friday morning in Dayton, Ohio." As Van Susteren spoke, Fox News displayed the following on-screen text under a "BREAKING NEWS" header: "Sen McCain Has Chosen His Vice-Presidential Running Mate" and "McCain Will Inform His Running Mate of His Decision Tomorrow." Mediamatters.Org Cameron called McCain VP stories "erroneous reports" and said Fox News didn't report them -- but it did {new window}   Mediamatters.Org - During the August 28 edition of Fox News' The Strategy Room, chief political correspondent Carl Cameron said that the Associated Press "is reporting that [Sen.] John McCain has not made up his mind" as to who will be his vice-presidential running mate. Cameron went on to say: "That's the Associated Press dealing with what was a series of erroneous reports last night on a half a dozen different blogs and media outlets -- not Fox News -- that suggested that McCain had made up his mind and had intended to tell his potential pick today" [emphasis added]. However, during the 12 a.m. ET hour of Fox News' August 28 coverage of the Democratic National Convention, host Greta Van Susteren reported: "And speaking of Senator McCain, there's big news in his campaign tonight. Senator McCain has reportedly chosen his vice presidential running mate, and that person will be notified tomorrow. Senator McCain is expected to announce his running mate Friday morning in Dayton, Ohio." As Van Susteren spoke, Fox News displayed the following on-screen text under a "BREAKING NEWS" header: "Sen McCain Has Chosen His Vice-Presidential Running Mate" and "McCain Will Inform His Running Mate of His Decision Tomorrow."
Media Matters - Cameron called McCain VP stories "erroneous reports" and said Fox News didn't report them -- but it did {...}
Published: August 29, 2008, 12:00 am - Indexed: August 29, 2008, 2:13 pm - Page Size: 19KB
Category: Society > Issues > Business > Media > Bias and Balance

]]> Society > Issues > Business > Media > Bias and Balance {COMICS > P} - News: The Woods, Part Two http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/comics/comic-strips-and-panels/p/news-the-woods-part-two-20080859327.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/comics/comic-strips-and-panels/p/news-the-woods-part-two-20080859327.htm Wed, 27 Aug 2008 08:00:00 GMT Tycho : It has always been true that the deeper one goes into the woods, the stranger and more wooly things become.  Know this:  there is one more comic in this series.  And we have reserved some wool. I've got a new machine, now, which makes every game a pleasure torrent. I installed Company Of Heroes again just so my machine could brutalize it, and the results were cathartic. Last year's holiday didn't have enough delights in it to make me depose the old box, called Czar in its heyday, a machine that grew increasingly wretched and pitiful in its dotage. This ... Penny-arcade.Com News: The Woods, Part Two {new window}   Www.Penny-arcade.Com - Tycho : It has always been true that the deeper one goes into the woods, the stranger and more wooly things become.  Know this:  there is one more comic in this series.  And we have reserved some wool. I've got a new machine, now, which makes every game a pleasure torrent. I installed Company Of Heroes again just so my machine could brutalize it, and the results were cathartic. Last year's holiday didn't have enough delights in it to make me depose the old box, called Czar in its heyday, a machine that grew increasingly wretched and pitiful in its dotage. This ...
Penny Arcade! - The Woods, Part Two {...} Equal parts comics and commentary, Penny Arcade features Tycho and Gabe, the alter egos of creators Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Read about the antics and thoughts of the Penny Arcade crew, updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. {...}
Published: August 27, 2008, 8:00 am - Indexed: August 29, 2008, 1:09 pm - Page Size: 13KB
Category: Arts > Comics > Comic Strips and Panels > P

]]> Arts > Comics > Comic Strips and Panels > P {ISSUES > BIAS AND BALANCE} - Sean Hannity: "I think I was more fair to the Clintons" http://articles.world-of-newave.info/society/issues/business/media/bias-and-balance/sean-hannity-i-think-i-was-more-fair-to-the-clintons-20080845731.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/society/issues/business/media/bias-and-balance/sean-hannity-i-think-i-was-more-fair-to-the-clintons-20080845731.htm Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:34:28 GMT On the August 21 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, co-host Sean Hannity said to Fox News contributor Geraldine Ferraro: "[Y]ou've been one of the Clinton supporters that have been very vocal, very unhappy about the way [Sen. Barack] Obama treated [Sen. Hillary] Clinton." Ferraro responded: "And the media treated Clinton." Hannity said: "No, I think I was more fair to the Clintons." Hannity did not explain what he meant by "fair," but during the Democratic presidential primaries, Hannity asserted: "I'm leading the Stop Hillary Express." According to a July 16 American Spectator piece by Robert Stacy McCain, "[F]or months, Hannity opened his daily radio show by welcoming his 12 million listeners aboard the 'Stop Hillary Express.' " Also: On the July 22, 2007, edition of Fox News' Hannity's America, teasing a segment on "the mysterious death of [former deputy White House counsel] Vince Foster," Hannity asked: "Did a close friend of Hillary Clinton commit suicide, or was it a massive cover-up?" During the segment, Hannity asserted that on July 20, 1993: "Vince Foster got in his car and drove to Fort Marcy Park in Virginia. And he supposedly walked through the woods, and depending on which version of the story you believe, he took his own life." Hannity billed this segment as "one of the darkest and most mysterious" of "The Clinton Chapters," a regular series on Hannity's America whose assertions Media Matters for America has repeatedly debunked. A week earlier, Hannity baselessly asserted on Hannity's America that "there are still many chapters remaining open from her [Hillary Clinton's] time at the Rose Law Firm. Take Whitewater and the death of Vince Foster." As Media Matters documented, Foster's death was conclusively determined by several investigations to have been a suicide. On the December 2, 2007, edition of Hannity's America, Hannity asserted: "[T]onight, we travel back in time to the early 70's, and based on reporting from New York Sun reporter Josh Gerstein, we take a rare look at Hillary Clinton's affiliation with a group of radicals more than three decades ago." Hannity was referring to Clinton's time as a law clerk for the then-California law firm Treuhaft, Walker, and Burnstein in the early 1970s. However, during the following segment, which was supposedly "based on reporting from" Gerstein, Hannity omitted key points from Gerstein's own reporting. Specifically, Hannity reported that Jessica Mitford, who was married to Robert Treuhaft, one of the partners at the firm, tried to get the state of Arkansas to pardon Arkansas prison escapee James Dean Walker after Bill Clinton became governor of the state. But Hannity did not report that, according to Gerstein, Clinton rebuffed the request. Further, Hannity questioned whether Clinton had "sympathy with the communist Party" in deciding to clerk at the firm but did not note Gerstein's report quoting one of the firm's partners, who said Clinton was "much more of a classic liberal than the rest of us." On the November 13, 2007, edition of Hannity & Colmes, co-host Hannity said: "All year long, publications like The New York Times, Washington Post, Time, and Newsweek have all reported what they call [Republican presidential candidate] Rudy Giuliani's temper. Well, the subjectiveness aside, couldn't the same questions be asked about Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton?" Hannity then asked Fox News contributor Kirsten Powers and Sirius Satellite Radio host Andrew Wilkow whether Clinton has "the temperament to be president." Powers responded: "I think she does. I think she has a temper, as do many politicians. And Rudy Giuliani, your favorite, has a temper, as ... do many people." Powers later asserted: "I think you've got to keep it in the context of what she does ... and who she is. And I'm just telling you -- first of all, I do have to say that while there are people who say that she has a bad temper, she had almost no turnover on her staff in the White House, so that says something." Hannity responded, " '[C]ause they were scared to probably leave," to which Powers replied, "No, I know a lot of them and they like her." On the July 1, 2007, edition of Hannity's America, Hannity played a clip from a May 29 speech by Clinton -- in which she said it is time for America "to reject the idea of an on-your-own society and to replace it with shared responsibility for shared prosperity" -- and added, "This isn't the first time Hillary has made her socialist views and intentions so apparent." Hannity also characterized the speech as Clinton "blast[ing] the free market." In fact, Clinton said in the same speech that "there is no greater force for economic growth than free markets, but markets work best with rules that promote our values, protect our workers and give all people a chance to succeed." On the June 17, 2007, edition of Hannity's America, Hannity cropped a December 2003 speech by Clinton before the Council on Foreign Relations to accuse her of "hypocrisy." Hannity claimed that after demonstrating support for the war in Iraq and voting to authorize the use of military force, Clinton "quickly changed beats" after opposition to the war grew and claimed that, in June 2006, "[a]lmost out of nowhere," Clinton "started to blame the president for misleading Congress." In making the claim, Hannity quoted portions of Clinton's December 2003 speech, but not passages in which she criticized the Bush administration's use of that authority. Moreover, as Media Matters has noted, Clinton accused Bush of misusing the authority given him in the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq long before the June 2006 speech. After playing a clip of Clinton stating, "If anybody tells you there is no vast right-wing conspiracy, tell them that New Hampshire has proven it in court. We have the -- we have the facts, and we're going to make that a crime," on the March 13, 2007, edition of Hannity & Colmes, Hannity immediately denounced her comments as "hate speech." Yet Hannity did not explain that Clinton was referring to felony convictions of a Republican National Committee regional political director, a GOP operative, and a former executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party stemming from a 2002 phone-jamming scandal that sought to immobilize Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts and, according to a May 17, 2006, Washington Post article, "helped John E. Sununu [R-NH] win his Senate seat by 51 to 47 percent, a 19,151-vote margin." On the January 3, 2007, edition of Hannity & Colmes, Hannity insinuated that the Clinton campaign was behind a "leak[]" to The Washington Post about Obama's drug use, when in fact the Post article Hannity was citing was about Obama's admitting to having used cocaine in his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (Crown). From the August 21 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes: HANNITY: All right. That's -- you've been one of the Clinton supporters that have been very vocal, very unhappy about the way Obama treated Clinton. Who are you voting for? FERRARO: And the media treated Clinton. HANNITY: No, I think I was more fair to the Clintons. FERRARO: I know. I know. It's amazing how many people have said, "We -- we're now watching Fox because they're fair and balanced." But it is just amazing. HANNITY: Well, what do you mean amazing? We've always -- I've always had him -- FERRARO: It's amazing to me. HANNITY: [pointing to co-host Alan Colmes] -- burning me here. COLMES: Don't point. Mediamatters.Org Sean Hannity: "I think I was more fair to the Clintons" {new window}   Mediamatters.Org - On the August 21 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, co-host Sean Hannity said to Fox News contributor Geraldine Ferraro: "[Y]ou've been one of the Clinton supporters that have been very vocal, very unhappy about the way [Sen. Barack] Obama treated [Sen. Hillary] Clinton." Ferraro responded: "And the media treated Clinton." Hannity said: "No, I think I was more fair to the Clintons." Hannity did not explain what he meant by "fair," but during the Democratic presidential primaries, Hannity asserted: "I'm leading the Stop Hillary Express." According to a July 16 American Spectator piece by Robert Stacy McCain, "[F]or months, Hannity opened his daily radio show by welcoming his 12 million listeners aboard the 'Stop Hillary Express.' " Also: On the July 22, 2007, edition of Fox News' Hannity's America, teasing a segment on "the mysterious death of [former deputy White House counsel] Vince Foster," Hannity asked: "Did a close friend of Hillary Clinton commit suicide, or was it a massive cover-up?" During the segment, Hannity asserted that on July 20, 1993: "Vince Foster got in his car and drove to Fort Marcy Park in Virginia. And he supposedly walked through the woods, and depending on which version of the story you believe, he took his own life." Hannity billed this segment as "one of the darkest and most mysterious" of "The Clinton Chapters," a regular series on Hannity's America whose assertions Media Matters for America has repeatedly debunked. A week earlier, Hannity baselessly asserted on Hannity's America that "there are still many chapters remaining open from her [Hillary Clinton's] time at the Rose Law Firm. Take Whitewater and the death of Vince Foster." As Media Matters documented, Foster's death was conclusively determined by several investigations to have been a suicide. On the December 2, 2007, edition of Hannity's America, Hannity asserted: "[T]onight, we travel back in time to the early 70's, and based on reporting from New York Sun reporter Josh Gerstein, we take a rare look at Hillary Clinton's affiliation with a group of radicals more than three decades ago." Hannity was referring to Clinton's time as a law clerk for the then-California law firm Treuhaft, Walker, and Burnstein in the early 1970s. However, during the following segment, which was supposedly "based on reporting from" Gerstein, Hannity omitted key points from Gerstein's own reporting. Specifically, Hannity reported that Jessica Mitford, who was married to Robert Treuhaft, one of the partners at the firm, tried to get the state of Arkansas to pardon Arkansas prison escapee James Dean Walker after Bill Clinton became governor of the state. But Hannity did not report that, according to Gerstein, Clinton rebuffed the request. Further, Hannity questioned whether Clinton had "sympathy with the communist Party" in deciding to clerk at the firm but did not note Gerstein's report quoting one of the firm's partners, who said Clinton was "much more of a classic liberal than the rest of us." On the November 13, 2007, edition of Hannity & Colmes, co-host Hannity said: "All year long, publications like The New York Times, Washington Post, Time, and Newsweek have all reported what they call [Republican presidential candidate] Rudy Giuliani's temper. Well, the subjectiveness aside, couldn't the same questions be asked about Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton?" Hannity then asked Fox News contributor Kirsten Powers and Sirius Satellite Radio host Andrew Wilkow whether Clinton has "the temperament to be president." Powers responded: "I think she does. I think she has a temper, as do many politicians. And Rudy Giuliani, your favorite, has a temper, as ... do many people." Powers later asserted: "I think you've got to keep it in the context of what she does ... and who she is. And I'm just telling you -- first of all, I do have to say that while there are people who say that she has a bad temper, she had almost no turnover on her staff in the White House, so that says something." Hannity responded, " '[C]ause they were scared to probably leave," to which Powers replied, "No, I know a lot of them and they like her." On the July 1, 2007, edition of Hannity's America, Hannity played a clip from a May 29 speech by Clinton -- in which she said it is time for America "to reject the idea of an on-your-own society and to replace it with shared responsibility for shared prosperity" -- and added, "This isn't the first time Hillary has made her socialist views and intentions so apparent." Hannity also characterized the speech as Clinton "blast[ing] the free market." In fact, Clinton said in the same speech that "there is no greater force for economic growth than free markets, but markets work best with rules that promote our values, protect our workers and give all people a chance to succeed." On the June 17, 2007, edition of Hannity's America, Hannity cropped a December 2003 speech by Clinton before the Council on Foreign Relations to accuse her of "hypocrisy." Hannity claimed that after demonstrating support for the war in Iraq and voting to authorize the use of military force, Clinton "quickly changed beats" after opposition to the war grew and claimed that, in June 2006, "[a]lmost out of nowhere," Clinton "started to blame the president for misleading Congress." In making the claim, Hannity quoted portions of Clinton's December 2003 speech, but not passages in which she criticized the Bush administration's use of that authority. Moreover, as Media Matters has noted, Clinton accused Bush of misusing the authority given him in the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq long before the June 2006 speech. After playing a clip of Clinton stating, "If anybody tells you there is no vast right-wing conspiracy, tell them that New Hampshire has proven it in court. We have the -- we have the facts, and we're going to make that a crime," on the March 13, 2007, edition of Hannity & Colmes, Hannity immediately denounced her comments as "hate speech." Yet Hannity did not explain that Clinton was referring to felony convictions of a Republican National Committee regional political director, a GOP operative, and a former executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party stemming from a 2002 phone-jamming scandal that sought to immobilize Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts and, according to a May 17, 2006, Washington Post article, "helped John E. Sununu [R-NH] win his Senate seat by 51 to 47 percent, a 19,151-vote margin." On the January 3, 2007, edition of Hannity & Colmes, Hannity insinuated that the Clinton campaign was behind a "leak[]" to The Washington Post about Obama's drug use, when in fact the Post article Hannity was citing was about Obama's admitting to having used cocaine in his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (Crown). From the August 21 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes: HANNITY: All right. That's -- you've been one of the Clinton supporters that have been very vocal, very unhappy about the way Obama treated Clinton. Who are you voting for? FERRARO: And the media treated Clinton. HANNITY: No, I think I was more fair to the Clintons. FERRARO: I know. I know. It's amazing how many people have said, "We -- we're now watching Fox because they're fair and balanced." But it is just amazing. HANNITY: Well, what do you mean amazing? We've always -- I've always had him -- FERRARO: It's amazing to me. HANNITY: [pointing to co-host Alan Colmes] -- burning me here. COLMES: Don't point.
Media Matters - Sean Hannity: "I think I was more fair to the Clintons" {...} On Hannity & Colmes , Sean Hannity said to Fox News contributor Geraldine Ferraro: "[Y]ou've been one of the Clinton supporters that have been very vocal, very unhappy about the way [Sen. Barack] Obama treated [Sen. Hillary] Clinton." Ferraro responded: "And the media treated Clinton." Hannity said: "No, I think I was more fair to the Clintons." In fact, during the Democratic presidential primaries, Hannity asserted: "I'm leading the Stop Hillary Express." Hannity also reportedly referred to his nationally syndicated radio program as "The Stop Hillary Express" during the time and has repeatedly advanced smears of the Clintons. {...}
Published: August 26, 2008, 12:34 am - Indexed: August 26, 2008, 9:28 pm - Page Size: 27KB
Category: Society > Issues > Business > Media > Bias and Balance

]]> Society > Issues > Business > Media > Bias and Balance {AUTOS > MAGAZINES AND E-ZINES} - A Ford Tough Year for the F-150 http://articles.world-of-newave.info/recreation/autos/magazines-and-e_zines/a-ford-tough-year-for-the-f-150-20080867321.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/recreation/autos/magazines-and-e_zines/a-ford-tough-year-for-the-f-150-20080867321.htm Fri, 22 Aug 2008 16:58:52 GMT Pity the poor F-150, loyal workhorse of farmers, union laborers, and that half-in-the-bag handyman who rode your tail all the way home from work. As if it wasn't a grave enough indignation to lose best-seller status to the vegetarian Honda Civic, a car that never did a day's worth of manual labor in it's garage-kept high-falutin' city life, Motor Trend reports the F-150 has been ungraciously stripped of several million option configurations. Now, there only a measly ten million customized combinations of drivetrain, body, and electronic bells and whistles. The move to cut option packages, Automotive News says, began when Ford CEO Alan Mulally had difficulty figuring out the option packages on an E-series van he was buying for his mother's senior center. While "CEO tries to buy own company's product, gets flummoxed at the dealership, vows to change things" makes a good story, we bet that the changes have something to do with the added cost of all those options. Since all those electronic doo-dads require entirely different wiring harnesses, the F-150 assembly line looked like it was designed more by Xzibit than Henry Ford. Additionally, it was so easy for customers to have a truck custom built that dealer inventory sat stagnant. "Dealers would sit with items on the lot for six to 12 months if you ordered it the wrong way," dealer task force member Rich Savino told Automotive News. In addition to Ford's trucks, Ford promises that most car lines will have fewer than a thousand combinations, with the Focus only getting 150 flavors.One option that DPW employees will be glad to see axed is "air conditioning delete."  Even if there are tight times at City Hall, Ford won't build an F-150 with just a fan. In fact, the guys who paint the fire hydrants might get some more options, as Ford plans to bundle the most popular options into packages that cost lest than the sum of their parts. Those seat heaters would sure be nice on a plow... Already, one option delete that's put a hitch in the giddy-up of would-be truck buyers is the lack of a manual transmission. Neither Ford nor Chevy (not to mention Toyota and Nissan) offers a stick instead of a slush-box. Those looking to carry the do-it-yourself ethic into the driver's seat will be pleased to note that Dodge still puts a five-speed in the Ram. We hear that these days, you can get a pretty good deal on any truck with horns on the hood. So far, there has been no petition drive to reinstate factory-installed DVD players in the headrests, which are still available as a dealer-installed option. Ford also promised not to cut any of their "special edition" trim levels, and reiterated their commitment to the ultra high end Platinum Edition. We hope the Platinum will be good enough for the homeowners' associations of suburban Dallas, who famously banned an F-150 from a resident's driveway while allowing a gawdawful Avalanche up the street. Sadly, there will be no Toby Keith Edition, nor a W Crawford Ranch Edition. Blog.Wired.Com A Ford Tough Year for the F-150 {new window}   Blog.Wired.Com - Pity the poor F-150, loyal workhorse of farmers, union laborers, and that half-in-the-bag handyman who rode your tail all the way home from work. As if it wasn't a grave enough indignation to lose best-seller status to the vegetarian Honda Civic, a car that never did a day's worth of manual labor in it's garage-kept high-falutin' city life, Motor Trend reports the F-150 has been ungraciously stripped of several million option configurations. Now, there only a measly ten million customized combinations of drivetrain, body, and electronic bells and whistles. The move to cut option packages, Automotive News says, began when Ford CEO Alan Mulally had difficulty figuring out the option packages on an E-series van he was buying for his mother's senior center. While "CEO tries to buy own company's product, gets flummoxed at the dealership, vows to change things" makes a good story, we bet that the changes have something to do with the added cost of all those options. Since all those electronic doo-dads require entirely different wiring harnesses, the F-150 assembly line looked like it was designed more by Xzibit than Henry Ford. Additionally, it was so easy for customers to have a truck custom built that dealer inventory sat stagnant. "Dealers would sit with items on the lot for six to 12 months if you ordered it the wrong way," dealer task force member Rich Savino told Automotive News. In addition to Ford's trucks, Ford promises that most car lines will have fewer than a thousand combinations, with the Focus only getting 150 flavors.One option that DPW employees will be glad to see axed is "air conditioning delete."  Even if there are tight times at City Hall, Ford won't build an F-150 with just a fan. In fact, the guys who paint the fire hydrants might get some more options, as Ford plans to bundle the most popular options into packages that cost lest than the sum of their parts. Those seat heaters would sure be nice on a plow... Already, one option delete that's put a hitch in the giddy-up of would-be truck buyers is the lack of a manual transmission. Neither Ford nor Chevy (not to mention Toyota and Nissan) offers a stick instead of a slush-box. Those looking to carry the do-it-yourself ethic into the driver's seat will be pleased to note that Dodge still puts a five-speed in the Ram. We hear that these days, you can get a pretty good deal on any truck with horns on the hood. So far, there has been no petition drive to reinstate factory-installed DVD players in the headrests, which are still available as a dealer-installed option. Ford also promised not to cut any of their "special edition" trim levels, and reiterated their commitment to the ultra high end Platinum Edition. We hope the Platinum will be good enough for the homeowners' associations of suburban Dallas, who famously banned an F-150 from a resident's driveway while allowing a gawdawful Avalanche up the street. Sadly, there will be no Toby Keith Edition, nor a W Crawford Ranch Edition.
A Ford Tough Year for the F-150 | Autopia from Wired.com {...} Pity the poor F-150, loyal workhorse of farmers, union laborers, and that half-in-the-bag handyman who rode your tail all the way home from work. As if it wasn't a grave {...}
Indexed: August 22, 2008, 4:58 pm - Page Size: 66KB
Category: Recreation > Autos > Magazines and E-zines

]]> Recreation > Autos > Magazines and E-zines {ISSUES > BIAS AND BALANCE} - Boehlert: Fox News and Jerome Corsi, living in the past http://articles.world-of-newave.info/society/issues/business/media/bias-and-balance/boehlert-fox-news-and-jerome-corsi-living-in-the-20080837517.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/society/issues/business/media/bias-and-balance/boehlert-fox-news-and-jerome-corsi-living-in-the-20080837517.htm Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:00:57 GMT It sure felt like déjà vu all over again, didn't it? No election watcher could forget the summer of 2004, when Fox News repeatedly invited Swift Boat author John O'Neill onto cable prime time and allowed him to air his scurrilous allegations about Sen. John Kerry's Vietnam War record. Even before the partisan Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group unveiled its infamous television ads, it was on Fox News where the controversy was birthed. It was Fox News that allowed O'Neill a mostly unobstructed platform on August 10, 17, 19, and 24, 2004, to libel Kerry and to gin up a controversy that eventually swamped the Democratic candidate for most of that crucial summer month. Then, almost exactly four years later to the dates (on July 31, August 3, 12, and 14), Fox News presented its White House campaign sequel. It welcomed O'Neill's Swift Boat writing partner, Jerome Corsi, to publicize his new attack book, The Obama Nation. Laying out his fever-swamp allegations about Obama's drug use and his supposed connections to Islam, Corsi enjoyed the type of national exposure, courtesy of Fox News, that every author craves. It was an audience that helped propel The Obama Nation to No. 1 on the bestsellers list, which then ignited wide-scale mainstream coverage for Corsi and his book. In other words, everything was going according to plan. The sequel had been set up -- had been marketed -- just like the Swift Boat predecessor, and now all conservatives had to do was sit back and watch the fun, as the Obama campaign became engulfed in Corsi-led controversy. Right? It hasn't worked that way. The Obama Nation's allegations, as slight and flimsy as they are, have taken a back seat to questions about Corsi's own credibility. In fact, journalists have likely spent more time dissecting the errors in Obama Nation and highlighting Corsi's controversial path, including the hateful, bigoted items he used to post in online forums, than they have focusing on the allegations Corsi wanted to broadcast. As the conservative National Review Online noted with frustration, "The media narrative thus becomes 'Corsi refuted' rather than 'Obama embattled.' " Add in the fact that some conservatives have stepped forward to publically denounce Corsi and his brand of slime, beseeching the movement to divorce itself from Corsi's unsubstantiated attacks, and suddenly the sequel is in real distress. Oh sure, it's selling. (Thanks in part to bulk sales, a right-wing marketing staple.) But in terms of affecting the race, in terms of gumming up the works for the Obama campaign, the book has so far been a bust. What happened? How did a sure-fire follow-up hit turn into such a trouble-plagued production? And why isn't Fox News' Swift Boat formula working? Simple. Both Corsi and the Fox News team are living in the past and failed to realize how dramatically the media landscape has shifted since the shady Swift Boat accusers were able to deftly use the media to spread their lies. First and foremost, the progressive movement has spent the last four years bulking up its infrastructure, and specifically readying itself to respond to media-driven attacks from the right; the way Media Matters for America immediately blanketed The Obama Nation and documented its egregious errors (often floated on Fox News) and also raised doubts about the author's veracity and integrity. And thanks to the larger Netroots community, Corsi hasn't had any breathing room to spread his misinformation. But there were also key marketplace changes within the cable news industry that affected the Corsi coverage, I think. Because remember that in 2004, Fox News drove the Swift Boat saga; it was practically a co-sponsor of the anti-Kerry crusade, devoting endless hours to promoting the Vietnam-era allegations. By sheer force of repetition, Fox News, then the dominant player in cable news, forced its competitors to not only acknowledge the Swift Boat story, but to go all in as well. And soon all the cable news outlets were treating the Swift Boat saga with Fox News-like breathlessness. (CNN aired nearly 300 segments referencing the topic.) And just like Fox, they weren't asking the tough questions. Instead, they gave the Swift Boat accusers the same free ride that Fox News did. They became media enablers, too. Not this time around. With Fox News no longer the dominant cable news king -- and with Fox News no longer driving the campaign narratives -- its competitors opted for a much different approach to covering Corsi. And I think the coverage from the competitors sent a subtle, yet simple, message: We no longer take our cues from Fox News' lead, because they no longer dictate campaign coverage. Instead, we're going to exult in our role as a counterbalance, as a fact-checker, to the Fox News-produced Corsi attack campaign. In fact, we're gonna help pull the curtain back on Corsi. Just look at how MSNBC anchor Contessa Brewer greeted Corsi, as he ventured for the first time beyond the friendly TV confines of Rupert World: BREWER: You say it's a comprehensive look, and yet there are already online bloggers that are going through this book page by page and picking apart what they see as factual errors. ... If they're going through, and they're finding all of these factual errors in your book, why should we give you the credibility? CNN's Campbell Brown introduced a prime-time report by announcing, "Obama Nation is riddled with pretty much every unsubstantiated rumor you ever heard about Obama." And on Larry King Live, Corsi was forced to face off against Media Matters Senior Fellow Paul Waldman, who refused to let the author spread his misinformation uncontested. All the above represented precisely what the press, and most especially the cable outfits, should have done -- but mostly refused to do -- in 2004. They refused to allow articulate, independent critics onto the national stage to debunk the patently false Swift Boat charges. Instead, the press most often treated the Swift Boat story as a political one, which meant amplifying the partisan charges and then going to the Kerry campaign for a quote, or inviting a Kerry campaign surrogate on the air to debate a Swift Boat liar. Rather than forcefully labeling the Swift Boat attacks a charade and IDing the attackers as pranksters, and instead of holding the Swift Boat accusers accountable, the press played dumb and abandoned its traditional campaign role. As Greg Mitchell at Editor & Publisher noted, "The mainstream press gave the charges -- carried in ads, in books and articles, and in major TV appearances -- a free ride for a spell, then a respectful airing mixed with critique, before in many cases finally attempting to shoot them down as overwhelmingly exaggerated or false." In the infamous words of former Washington Post executive editor Len Downie, upon being pressed about the paper's Swift Boat coverage in August 2004: "We are not judging the credibility of Kerry or the [Swift Boat] Veterans, we just print the facts." Talk about abdicating your role as journalists. During the Swift Boat hoax, Downie and his team at the Post essentially walked off the field, refusing to officiate the smear campaign. Wasn't judging the credibility of the previously unknown Swift Boat accusers precisely what the Post and the rest of the press should have been doing in August 2004? Thankfully, that kind of cowardice has been replaced by actual journalism when dealing with the Corsi sequel. And on TV, I'd suggest that about-face has been fueled by Fox News' fall from ratings grace, as its competitors, flush with confidence, realize they no longer have to follow. Instead, they can lead. Of course, the fact that Corsi won't admit or correct obvious errors in his book has only emboldened the press to pose tough questions. His often loopy logic has also not helped him, like suggesting we cannot believe Obama when he said he stopped taking drugs in college because, according to the author, "self-reporting, by people who have used drugs, as to when they stopped is inherently unreliable." When Corsi stumbled down that twisted path on CNN's Larry King Live last week, Media Matters' Waldman was waiting to pounce: WALDMAN: You put up on right-wing websites a whole series of bigoted and hateful posts in 2002 and 2003 that you later had to admit to when you got found out -- all kinds of really vile, malicious stuff. CORSI: OK. If you -- WALDMAN: Now, you say that you've stopped that. You say that you've stopped that and you don't put up those kinds of vile, bigoted, malicious, hateful posts on right-wing websites. But all we have is your word. I mean, do -- can we really trust you? People who do that kind of thing, well, you know, they're not really very trustworthy. CORSI: We have -- WALDMAN: So can we trust you? Are you still doing that? CORSI: You have more than my word. You've got the record of everything I've written since then. WALDMAN: Can you prove that you're not doing it anonymously? Can you prove it? I'm hard-pressed to recall the last time I saw an author get so thoroughly discredited on national television the way Corsi was at the hands of Waldman. (The encounter simply confirmed why conservatives often refuse to go head-to-head with reps from Media Matters in public settings.) That undressing proved infectious within the mainstream media, as it began to spell out, fairly and accurately, what Corsi and his book were about. The Associated Press' Nedra Pickler reported, "Corsi suggests, without a shred of proof, that Obama may be using drugs today. Obama has acknowledged using marijuana and cocaine as a teenager but says he quit when he went to college and hasn't used drugs since." The New York Times' political blog, The Caucus, set aside space to detail Corsi's touting of radical 9-11 theories that suggest explosives detonated inside the Twin Towers were also responsible for the destruction, not just the terrorist-piloted jumbo jets. And Politico noted how Corsi had "left a trail of wild theories, vitriol and dogma that have called into question his credibility." Is it some sort of collective penance journalists are serving for the media's Swift Boat failures of 2004? Who knows? But it's exactly what journalists ought to be doing when mischief-makers like Corsi climb onto the national stage (ladder, courtesy of Simon & Schuster), and start making unsubstantiated charges about presidential contenders. Conservatives now whine about the press taking sides, that it's teaming up on Corsi. In fact, the press is simply doing exactly what it should have done in 2004, and that's vet the accuser. Period. The game has changed. But somebody forgot to tell Corsi and his friends at Fox News. Mediamatters.Org Boehlert: Fox News and Jerome Corsi, living in the past {new window}   Mediamatters.Org - It sure felt like déjà vu all over again, didn't it? No election watcher could forget the summer of 2004, when Fox News repeatedly invited Swift Boat author John O'Neill onto cable prime time and allowed him to air his scurrilous allegations about Sen. John Kerry's Vietnam War record. Even before the partisan Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group unveiled its infamous television ads, it was on Fox News where the controversy was birthed. It was Fox News that allowed O'Neill a mostly unobstructed platform on August 10, 17, 19, and 24, 2004, to libel Kerry and to gin up a controversy that eventually swamped the Democratic candidate for most of that crucial summer month. Then, almost exactly four years later to the dates (on July 31, August 3, 12, and 14), Fox News presented its White House campaign sequel. It welcomed O'Neill's Swift Boat writing partner, Jerome Corsi, to publicize his new attack book, The Obama Nation. Laying out his fever-swamp allegations about Obama's drug use and his supposed connections to Islam, Corsi enjoyed the type of national exposure, courtesy of Fox News, that every author craves. It was an audience that helped propel The Obama Nation to No. 1 on the bestsellers list, which then ignited wide-scale mainstream coverage for Corsi and his book. In other words, everything was going according to plan. The sequel had been set up -- had been marketed -- just like the Swift Boat predecessor, and now all conservatives had to do was sit back and watch the fun, as the Obama campaign became engulfed in Corsi-led controversy. Right? It hasn't worked that way. The Obama Nation's allegations, as slight and flimsy as they are, have taken a back seat to questions about Corsi's own credibility. In fact, journalists have likely spent more time dissecting the errors in Obama Nation and highlighting Corsi's controversial path, including the hateful, bigoted items he used to post in online forums, than they have focusing on the allegations Corsi wanted to broadcast. As the conservative National Review Online noted with frustration, "The media narrative thus becomes 'Corsi refuted' rather than 'Obama embattled.' " Add in the fact that some conservatives have stepped forward to publically denounce Corsi and his brand of slime, beseeching the movement to divorce itself from Corsi's unsubstantiated attacks, and suddenly the sequel is in real distress. Oh sure, it's selling. (Thanks in part to bulk sales, a right-wing marketing staple.) But in terms of affecting the race, in terms of gumming up the works for the Obama campaign, the book has so far been a bust. What happened? How did a sure-fire follow-up hit turn into such a trouble-plagued production? And why isn't Fox News' Swift Boat formula working? Simple. Both Corsi and the Fox News team are living in the past and failed to realize how dramatically the media landscape has shifted since the shady Swift Boat accusers were able to deftly use the media to spread their lies. First and foremost, the progressive movement has spent the last four years bulking up its infrastructure, and specifically readying itself to respond to media-driven attacks from the right; the way Media Matters for America immediately blanketed The Obama Nation and documented its egregious errors (often floated on Fox News) and also raised doubts about the author's veracity and integrity. And thanks to the larger Netroots community, Corsi hasn't had any breathing room to spread his misinformation. But there were also key marketplace changes within the cable news industry that affected the Corsi coverage, I think. Because remember that in 2004, Fox News drove the Swift Boat saga; it was practically a co-sponsor of the anti-Kerry crusade, devoting endless hours to promoting the Vietnam-era allegations. By sheer force of repetition, Fox News, then the dominant player in cable news, forced its competitors to not only acknowledge the Swift Boat story, but to go all in as well. And soon all the cable news outlets were treating the Swift Boat saga with Fox News-like breathlessness. (CNN aired nearly 300 segments referencing the topic.) And just like Fox, they weren't asking the tough questions. Instead, they gave the Swift Boat accusers the same free ride that Fox News did. They became media enablers, too. Not this time around. With Fox News no longer the dominant cable news king -- and with Fox News no longer driving the campaign narratives -- its competitors opted for a much different approach to covering Corsi. And I think the coverage from the competitors sent a subtle, yet simple, message: We no longer take our cues from Fox News' lead, because they no longer dictate campaign coverage. Instead, we're going to exult in our role as a counterbalance, as a fact-checker, to the Fox News-produced Corsi attack campaign. In fact, we're gonna help pull the curtain back on Corsi. Just look at how MSNBC anchor Contessa Brewer greeted Corsi, as he ventured for the first time beyond the friendly TV confines of Rupert World: BREWER: You say it's a comprehensive look, and yet there are already online bloggers that are going through this book page by page and picking apart what they see as factual errors. ... If they're going through, and they're finding all of these factual errors in your book, why should we give you the credibility? CNN's Campbell Brown introduced a prime-time report by announcing, "Obama Nation is riddled with pretty much every unsubstantiated rumor you ever heard about Obama." And on Larry King Live, Corsi was forced to face off against Media Matters Senior Fellow Paul Waldman, who refused to let the author spread his misinformation uncontested. All the above represented precisely what the press, and most especially the cable outfits, should have done -- but mostly refused to do -- in 2004. They refused to allow articulate, independent critics onto the national stage to debunk the patently false Swift Boat charges. Instead, the press most often treated the Swift Boat story as a political one, which meant amplifying the partisan charges and then going to the Kerry campaign for a quote, or inviting a Kerry campaign surrogate on the air to debate a Swift Boat liar. Rather than forcefully labeling the Swift Boat attacks a charade and IDing the attackers as pranksters, and instead of holding the Swift Boat accusers accountable, the press played dumb and abandoned its traditional campaign role. As Greg Mitchell at Editor & Publisher noted, "The mainstream press gave the charges -- carried in ads, in books and articles, and in major TV appearances -- a free ride for a spell, then a respectful airing mixed with critique, before in many cases finally attempting to shoot them down as overwhelmingly exaggerated or false." In the infamous words of former Washington Post executive editor Len Downie, upon being pressed about the paper's Swift Boat coverage in August 2004: "We are not judging the credibility of Kerry or the [Swift Boat] Veterans, we just print the facts." Talk about abdicating your role as journalists. During the Swift Boat hoax, Downie and his team at the Post essentially walked off the field, refusing to officiate the smear campaign. Wasn't judging the credibility of the previously unknown Swift Boat accusers precisely what the Post and the rest of the press should have been doing in August 2004? Thankfully, that kind of cowardice has been replaced by actual journalism when dealing with the Corsi sequel. And on TV, I'd suggest that about-face has been fueled by Fox News' fall from ratings grace, as its competitors, flush with confidence, realize they no longer have to follow. Instead, they can lead. Of course, the fact that Corsi won't admit or correct obvious errors in his book has only emboldened the press to pose tough questions. His often loopy logic has also not helped him, like suggesting we cannot believe Obama when he said he stopped taking drugs in college because, according to the author, "self-reporting, by people who have used drugs, as to when they stopped is inherently unreliable." When Corsi stumbled down that twisted path on CNN's Larry King Live last week, Media Matters' Waldman was waiting to pounce: WALDMAN: You put up on right-wing websites a whole series of bigoted and hateful posts in 2002 and 2003 that you later had to admit to when you got found out -- all kinds of really vile, malicious stuff. CORSI: OK. If you -- WALDMAN: Now, you say that you've stopped that. You say that you've stopped that and you don't put up those kinds of vile, bigoted, malicious, hateful posts on right-wing websites. But all we have is your word. I mean, do -- can we really trust you? People who do that kind of thing, well, you know, they're not really very trustworthy. CORSI: We have -- WALDMAN: So can we trust you? Are you still doing that? CORSI: You have more than my word. You've got the record of everything I've written since then. WALDMAN: Can you prove that you're not doing it anonymously? Can you prove it? I'm hard-pressed to recall the last time I saw an author get so thoroughly discredited on national television the way Corsi was at the hands of Waldman. (The encounter simply confirmed why conservatives often refuse to go head-to-head with reps from Media Matters in public settings.) That undressing proved infectious within the mainstream media, as it began to spell out, fairly and accurately, what Corsi and his book were about. The Associated Press' Nedra Pickler reported, "Corsi suggests, without a shred of proof, that Obama may be using drugs today. Obama has acknowledged using marijuana and cocaine as a teenager but says he quit when he went to college and hasn't used drugs since." The New York Times' political blog, The Caucus, set aside space to detail Corsi's touting of radical 9-11 theories that suggest explosives detonated inside the Twin Towers were also responsible for the destruction, not just the terrorist-piloted jumbo jets. And Politico noted how Corsi had "left a trail of wild theories, vitriol and dogma that have called into question his credibility." Is it some sort of collective penance journalists are serving for the media's Swift Boat failures of 2004? Who knows? But it's exactly what journalists ought to be doing when mischief-makers like Corsi climb onto the national stage (ladder, courtesy of Simon & Schuster), and start making unsubstantiated charges about presidential contenders. Conservatives now whine about the press taking sides, that it's teaming up on Corsi. In fact, the press is simply doing exactly what it should have done in 2004, and that's vet the accuser. Period. The game has changed. But somebody forgot to tell Corsi and his friends at Fox News.
Media Matters - Fox News and Jerome Corsi, living in the past {...}
Published: August 19, 2008, 4:00 pm - Indexed: August 20, 2008, 11:12 am - Page Size: 25KB
Category: Society > Issues > Business > Media > Bias and Balance

]]> Society > Issues > Business > Media > Bias and Balance {NEWS > BREAKING NEWS} - Fitting Network TV for a Toe Tag http://articles.world-of-newave.info/news/breaking-news/fitting-network-tv-for-a-toe-tag-20080836112.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/news/breaking-news/fitting-network-tv-for-a-toe-tag-20080836112.htm Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:00:00 GMT News from Portfolio.com Also on Portfolio Can Jeff Zucker Reinvent Broadcast TV? Best Buy Starts Selling the iPhone What a Former Hockey GM Can Tell the Music Industry Subscribe to Portfolio magazine For 20 years, Ted Harbert worked at ABC. He started there right out of college in 1977, when the network, along with CBS and NBC, was the only game in town and was the hit factory responsible for Happy Days; Charlie's Angels; Rich Man, Poor Man and Roots. By 1996, when Harbert was running ABC, those glory days were ending. All three networks were still colossal, but Fox had established its beachhead, and cable's market penetration was almost complete. The '80s had seen the rise of MTV. And CNN was by then a big deal, not just an incinerator for Ted Turner's extra cash. ESPN was competing aggressively. Individually, none of these channels got much of a rating most of the time, but the damage was starting to add up. "People would say, 'Oh, they're nibbling away, they're nibbling away,'" Harbert recalls. "And we would always say, 'Well, they can nibble, but they're never gonna really take us.' And then they took us." Today, Harbert is president and C.E.O. of the Comcast Entertainment Group. He oversees The Style Network, G4?a six-year-old channel aimed at young men who love videogames?and C.E.G.'s most recognizable offering, E!, which features celebrity news. E! ranks 31st among the most-watched basic-cable channels, which means that, in general, less than 1 percent of America's 112 million TV households are watching it during prime time. Yet Harbert is probably sleeping better these days than his former colleagues at the broadcast networks. When Harbert talks about television, it's with the sober clarity of someone who has looked at life from both sides now and has seen that only one business model is working. Cable networks target just those viewers who want what they have to offer. Broadcast networks want everyone. And the business of wanting everyone has never been worse. At the end of last season, ABC, CBS, and NBC reported their smallest combined audience ever, an event that has become a gloomy yearly occurrence. Meanwhile, cable?counting both basic channels and pay services like HBO and Showtime?now receives 55 percent of the total viewership. It may be time to perform an autopsy on network TV, which some have pronounced officially dead at age 60, the victim of a lifetime of big spending, hard living, and bad planning. Here's the coroner's report: The evening newscasts have been mowed down by cable's heat, spin, and round-the-clock immediacy. In prime time, nobody watches reruns anymore?and reruns, along with syndication, used to be the only way comedy and drama series, the heart of a network's prime-time business, made money. (The way they make money now is...well, the networks will get back to you as soon as they figure that out.) Speaking of old-school, half-hour sitcoms: Once, 50 of them were on the air at a time. Today, they're all but gone. Suddenly, people just stopped liking them. Prime-time news magazines? Barely holding on. "Protected" time slots? Viewers accustomed to Web surfing and channel flipping at hyperspeed aren't going to watch a new show just because they're too lazy to change the channel after The Biggest Loser. The audience for daytime soaps, a profitable staple since TV's infancy, has shrunk so dramatically that the form may vanish within a few years. This is all very bad news for a medium that hasn't come up with a fresh format since 2000, when CBS launched Survivor, the gold rush in reality-TV competitions. (P.S.: Survivor isn?t what it used to be either.) It's unlikely that a broadcast network is ever again going to create a megahit like The Cosby Show, which at its mid-?80s peak drew as many as 50 million viewers an episode. For several years now, TV's top event has been Fox's American Idol. Last season, it drew 28.8 million viewers a week. Conversations about the future of television tend to vault way past next week or next year into a world where schedules don't exist and 10,000 programming options are all available at any moment, half of them fully interactive. (Not enjoying this episode of Law & Order: Moonbase? That's OK?you can change the plot!) It sounds like fun. But in reality, the number of cable channels has topped out. And the number of households that subscribe to basic cable?about 65 million?hasn't budged for a decade. That's roughly 58 percent of all American TV households and it's a much higher percentage of the total households that advertisers actually care about. People who have something to sell are attracted to viewers who have already demonstrated their willingness to buy something (like cable TV). The cable business is booming: Annual advertising revenues have jumped from $8.1 billion in 1997 to a projected $28.6 billion this year. So before the death knell tolls, let's consider some ways broadcast TV might be reborn. 1. Accept the fact that niche is the new normal. The most popular cable networks average fewer than 3 million viewers a night. But add up all those little niches, and how much of an audience is left? Even TNT and USA, the two cable channels whose original programming most closely resembles that of broadcast networks, are carving out distinctive spaces for themselves. Turner Networks president Steve Koonin has successfully promoted TNT as a network for drama and TBS as a home for comedy?two old-school broadcast mainstays. But, he says, "Within the wide berth of comedy and drama as prospective brands, we're looking at where there are underserved audiences, and we're finding them in family viewers, African Americans, women, and action lovers." When groups that vast are being won over by cable, broadcast's claim that it reaches for everyone starts to ring a little hollow, especially when cable networks are making shows that are just like broadcast series, except a little better. To be fair to the networks, the playing field isn't level: Small cable channels can impress advertisers simply by growing. Networks can't?so a show with a viewership of 4 million is a hit on USA and a flop on CBS. But the differences are diminishing. In the spring, Koonin took an aggressive gamble to make this clear: He scheduled Turner Networks' upfronts cheek-to-cheek with those of the broadcast networks. "Koonin was brilliant," says Brian Terkelsen, of the brand consultancy MediaVest. "In my opinion, that was the turning point. We'll all look back and say the one riff that he did onstage that week shifted everything for cable and broadcasting. What he did was, he got up there and said, 'If I were to tell you the story of two networks, and one had a talking car and a steroid in a unitard who was beating up an average guy in a game show, and the other had an Academy Award-winning actress in her second season and a Golden Globe winner in her fourth season, which would you think was which?'" Koonin then unveiled slides of the cheesy shows?NBC's Knight Rider and American Gladiators?and the classy ones: TNT?s Saving Grace and The Closer. Point made, brutally. "If anybody in the room didn't think, 'Holy shit! It's all changed,'" Terkelsen says, "they?re morons." 2. Know your brand. "There are an awful lot of channels available to people in the average digital home," says FX president John Landgraf. "So if you don?t stand for something, you stand for nothing." FX, he says, "appeals to people with a certain taste for edgy, innovative quality." He has established the brand with material that's positioned exactly halfway between what the networks and pay cable offer. Its signature shows?Rescue Me, The Shield, Damages, Nip/Tuck?tend to be hard-driving adult dramas that are one big step raunchier, bloodier, sexier, cooler, and rougher than the broadcast networks' cop/lawyer/doctor equivalents. It wasn't a smooth road for the network, which was founded in 1994. "FX toyed, in its earlier incarnations, with various branding strategies," Landgraf recalls, "from live television?its original motto was 'TV made fresh daily'?to a time when it was much more explicitly appealing to men." Back then, it often looked like the NASCAR channel. To redefine itself, FX had to make casual viewers expendable in order to build its rep with committed ones. "We want to have somebody's favorite show," Landgraf says, "not everybody's 10th-favorite show." Rebranding to that degree isn't without its risks. Several years ago, Bravo became a haven for young, hip, gay-friendly consumers with lots of disposable income. That meant walking away from the (few) viewers who knew it as a poor man's PBS, a repository for dusty filmed productions of Swan Lake. If the one-two punch of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Project Runway hadn't succeeded, the channel could well have gone down for the count. Similarly, at Turner, Koonin canceled TNT's most popular offering?wrestling?in order to make its metamorphosis into a drama-driven cable network credible. Those gambles paid off because Bravo, FX, and TNT all followed through swiftly to build on their initial hits. Likewise, AMC, which specializes in old movies, didn't waste a minute after critics acclaimed the first season of its original show Mad Men: It began developing other dramas, knowing its newfound audience needed more reasons to stick around. Without moves like that, a rebranding effort can quickly give rise to skepticism. A&E spent big money to buy reruns of HBO's The Sopranos because it wanted to be seen as the kind of network that would air a show like The Sopranos. But it's not; it's the kind of network that would air reruns of The Sopranos and take out the bad words. In many ways, the networks themselves already have specific brand identities; they just don't admit it. For decades, CBS has had the most elderly demographic among the major networks. ABC specializes in comedies and light dramas with strong female appeal, from Desperate Housewives to Grey's Anatomy to Ugly Betty. Fox?with the exception of American Idol?is largely aimed at guys, whether via action dramas like 24 and Prison Break, Sunday-night cartoons, or the never-ending, shaky-cam glimpse of night-shift squalor that is Cops. The fledgling CW is building on Gossip Girl and America?s Next Top Model to chase young women. NBC's struggles are not unrelated to the fact that it's still trying to be all things to all people: When you offer programming like 30 Rock to a smart, affluent audience but also rely on diet contests, game shows, and To Catch a Predator to fill prime time, you can't blame viewers for not knowing what to expect. 3. Don't count on "flow" unless all your programming is aimed at the same audience. Zip through FX's schedule, and at some point, you will see an episode of Rescue Me, followed by another episode of Rescue Me, and another and another. And when Bravo is hard-selling one of its hits, the word overkill is not in its vocabulary. "The great thing about our shows is, people want to see them again," says Andy Cohen, Bravo's senior vice president for original programming. "A lot of times, we'll premiere an episode of Top Chef and then rerun the episode right when it's over. And people stay tuned! Some of our shows are really like crack," he laughs. This practice makes sense in two ways: It's cost-efficient and it builds loyalty. The tactic used to be dismissed as killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, until people noticed that the goose kept on thriving. Now it's just a matter, as Cohen puts it, of "feeding the beast." Since embracing the episode-marathon strategy several years ago?as a way to pump life into Project Runway, which was struggling in its first year?Bravo has seen ratings for its flagship shows grow every season. The fourth cycle of Top Chef, which aired in the spring, outperformed the third, which beat the second, which outdid the first. The broadcast networks used to count on that kind of steady growth in the first few years of one of their hits. But recently, scripted series like Ugly Betty and Heroes have started losing viewers after just one season. Given that alarming turnabout, you'd think the networks would be doing everything in their power to build the equity of a potential new hit. But no. Their schedules, set in stone decades ago, remain inviolable: news and chitchat before noon, soaps and talk shows in the afternoon, local and national evening news and infotainment later in the day, talk shows at bedtime. Some of these programming blocks justify themselves economically, but others aren't as cost-effective. Daytime soaps occupy a large swath of airtime that could occasionally be used to repurpose a network's prime-time schedule cheaply and efficiently. 4. Content counts. Discussions at the networks about what's depleting their viewership tend to focus on familiar culprits: YouTube. The internet. Xbox. The iPod. Too many options. (Capitalism can be so unfair!) This leads to brainstorming sessions about making TV more like the internet, resulting in a lot of overexcited press releases announcing how one-minute "minisodes" of your favorite shows will be exclusively available on a network website, or Twittered to you line by line as they're being written, or beamed directly into your cerebral cortex via Bluetooth. Enough already. Competition from other media is real, but it's also a convenient excuse to not focus on programming. You don't hear American Idol's producers whining about how the internet is draining their audience, because they know that their audience is on the internet. Viewers go there to talk, read, kvetch, and gossip?about American Idol. Creating substance-free shows because you think your audience has no attention span is a sucker's game. And streaming shows for free is, so far, doing a lot more for viewers than it is for a network's balance sheet. Instead, the networks should try to make TV shows for people who want to watch TV shows. There seems to be no shortage of viewers out there: For all the hand-wringing about how new media are sapping television's audience, the average viewer of online video in April watched fewer than eight minutes a day. By contrast, the average household has its TV on for eight hours and 14 minutes daily. That's a record. (One that should make all of us rear back in horror, but that's another story.) 5. When you say the TV season is 52 weeks, you have to mean it. Madison Avenue is still fond of the old-fashioned idea of fall as a launchpad for a new TV season, and so are many viewers. But does that mean the networks should continue taking summers off? Sure, they run original programming in July and August, but "original" in this context generally means a series so odd that they couldn't find a place for it in the regular season, or Celebrity Circus, or 85 variations on foreign game shows (this summer's flavor of the moment). It's a bind, since a real commitment to top-quality original programming during the summer costs money that the broadcast networks don't have right now, but a diet of reruns and cut-rate schlock may cost them viewers. According to Comcast's Harbert, when broadcast execs ask for new shows year-round, "the finance guys say, 'You're killing me!' And the programming guys say, 'Yeah, but if I put on repeats, they're going to have terrible ratings, and we'll have no promo base for fall.' And everybody's right." But investing in shows?and thus in audience building?is a smarter long-term strategy. It's no accident that cable hits like Lifetime's Army Wives, USA's Burn Notice, and TNT's The Closer all launched in summer, allowing cable to perform its annual raid on broadcast viewers. 6. Don't break faith with your audience. Broadcast networks routinely spend three months promoting a show that they then cancel after two airings. Or they get a few million viewers hooked on a serialized drama and then drop it midway through a season, leaving fans hanging. This simply never happens on cable, where if a series gets a 13-episode order, those 13 episodes are damn well going to air, even if it's just because there?s nothing else to take their place. Every time the networks reshuffle their grid in a spasm of quick-fix panic, they disenchant more viewers. 7. If you can't beat 'em, eat 'em. Ben Silverman, NBC's head programmer, may fret when one of his network's shows struggles against a basic-cable hit like Bravo's Top Chef or the Sci Fi Channel's Battlestar Galactica. But his boss, NBC Universal C.E.O. Jeff Zucker, will rest easy, because his company also owns Bravo. And the Sci Fi Channel. And a whole lot more. The notion that the "500-channel universe" is a pie being cut into ever-tinier slivers ignores the fact that the vast majority of what we watch fills the coffers of a small handful of megaliths, just as it always has. Take a closer look at that pie: Besides Bravo and Sci Fi, NBC Universal also owns USA, the highest-rated ad-supported cable channel; MSNBC; CNBC; ShopNBC; Oxygen; Telemundo; and one-third of A&E Television, itself a conglomeration that includes A&E, the History Channel, and the Biography Channel. Disney owns ABC, ESPN, SoapNet, ABC Family, its own one-third share of A&E, and half of Lifetime. It also, of course, owns the Disney Channel, the top-rated basic-cable outlet of any kind. Viacom and CBS, though now traded separately on Wall Street, are both controlled by one man, Sumner Redstone. CBS owns Showtime, the Movie Channel, and half of the CW. Viacom?s list of properties includes MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Spike TV, BET, and Comedy Central. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. owns Fox, Fox News, FX, and, well, everything with the word Fox in it, from Fox College Sports to the Fox Reality Channel. Time Warner owns the other half of the CW, as well as CNN, TNT, TBS, TCM, HBO, Cinemax, the Cartoon Network, and TruTV (formerly CourtTV). So a half-dozen companies own not only five broadcast networks but also a majority of the cable channels that anyone actually watches?including all 10 of prime time's highest-rated cable networks, which together accounted for more than 18 million viewers a night last year. To anyone worried about where network viewers have gone: They may have left the building, but they haven?t escaped the compound. 8. Lowered expectations can be your best friend. The current chaos in TV has a silver lining: In an era of on-demand options, streaming video, full-season DVD releases for latecomers, multiple airings of the same show, and the inexorable march of DVRs, the definition of success is more slippery than it used to be. Eventually, a modernized ratings system will capture and aggregate all of these viewers, which will primarily help series that appeal to a young, I-want-it-when-I-want-it audience. By contrast, a show whose viewers could make up an AARP convention isn't going to benefit much from this brave new world. The ratings for 60 Minutes, for example, grow by only 3 percent when DVR use is factored in. But until that's all sorted out, there's plenty of room for spin. In a TV universe without a center, if nothing is really a hit, then everything is. If you can't crack Nielsen's top 10, you can tell Madison Avenue that you wildly overperform among viewers with lots of disposable income?and you get as much as a 40 percent jump in audience when you take into account DVR use, as is the case with The Office. AMC's Mad Men counts as a hit because it's great, it wins awards and critical raves, and until recently, it was the only show of its kind on the channel, so there was nothing to compare it with. The History Channel's Ice Road Truckers (a reality series devoted entirely to truckers driving across large expanses of ice) is a hit because it outperformed anything the History Channel had ever aired and demolished the image of the channel as a musty attic full of newsreel footage about Hitler. A show can even claim hit status because of the magazine covers, text-message traffic, and internet buzz it generates: From the amount of attention paid to the CW's teen soap Gossip Girl last season, one wouldn't know that it ranked 150th out of 161 shows and drew just 2.4 million viewers a week. So the good news for networks is that it may be possible to stop the bleeding. The bad news is that the patient can't be cured. For 50 years, pop culture has moved in only one direction?toward more options, fewer mass phenomena, and greater consumer control. And there's no turning that around, especially with a generation of viewers that sees no meaningful distinction between a broadcast network and a cable channel. What that means isn't just the end of a few old business models, but the end of TV as we've known it. America's most unifying cultural medium for the past 60 years has now followed music and movies in surrendering its mass appeal in order to cater to a populace organized entirely by self-defining niches. Welcome to the new era of post-popular culture, in which there's something for anyone, but nothing for everyone. What on earth will we all talk about tomorrow morning? Wired.Com Fitting Network TV for a Toe Tag {new window}   Www.Wired.Com - News from Portfolio.com Also on Portfolio Can Jeff Zucker Reinvent Broadcast TV? Best Buy Starts Selling the iPhone What a Former Hockey GM Can Tell the Music Industry Subscribe to Portfolio magazine For 20 years, Ted Harbert worked at ABC. He started there right out of college in 1977, when the network, along with CBS and NBC, was the only game in town and was the hit factory responsible for Happy Days; Charlie's Angels; Rich Man, Poor Man and Roots. By 1996, when Harbert was running ABC, those glory days were ending. All three networks were still colossal, but Fox had established its beachhead, and cable's market penetration was almost complete. The '80s had seen the rise of MTV. And CNN was by then a big deal, not just an incinerator for Ted Turner's extra cash. ESPN was competing aggressively. Individually, none of these channels got much of a rating most of the time, but the damage was starting to add up. "People would say, 'Oh, they're nibbling away, they're nibbling away,'" Harbert recalls. "And we would always say, 'Well, they can nibble, but they're never gonna really take us.' And then they took us." Today, Harbert is president and C.E.O. of the Comcast Entertainment Group. He oversees The Style Network, G4?a six-year-old channel aimed at young men who love videogames?and C.E.G.'s most recognizable offering, E!, which features celebrity news. E! ranks 31st among the most-watched basic-cable channels, which means that, in general, less than 1 percent of America's 112 million TV households are watching it during prime time. Yet Harbert is probably sleeping better these days than his former colleagues at the broadcast networks. When Harbert talks about television, it's with the sober clarity of someone who has looked at life from both sides now and has seen that only one business model is working. Cable networks target just those viewers who want what they have to offer. Broadcast networks want everyone. And the business of wanting everyone has never been worse. At the end of last season, ABC, CBS, and NBC reported their smallest combined audience ever, an event that has become a gloomy yearly occurrence. Meanwhile, cable?counting both basic channels and pay services like HBO and Showtime?now receives 55 percent of the total viewership. It may be time to perform an autopsy on network TV, which some have pronounced officially dead at age 60, the victim of a lifetime of big spending, hard living, and bad planning. Here's the coroner's report: The evening newscasts have been mowed down by cable's heat, spin, and round-the-clock immediacy. In prime time, nobody watches reruns anymore?and reruns, along with syndication, used to be the only way comedy and drama series, the heart of a network's prime-time business, made money. (The way they make money now is...well, the networks will get back to you as soon as they figure that out.) Speaking of old-school, half-hour sitcoms: Once, 50 of them were on the air at a time. Today, they're all but gone. Suddenly, people just stopped liking them. Prime-time news magazines? Barely holding on. "Protected" time slots? Viewers accustomed to Web surfing and channel flipping at hyperspeed aren't going to watch a new show just because they're too lazy to change the channel after The Biggest Loser. The audience for daytime soaps, a profitable staple since TV's infancy, has shrunk so dramatically that the form may vanish within a few years. This is all very bad news for a medium that hasn't come up with a fresh format since 2000, when CBS launched Survivor, the gold rush in reality-TV competitions. (P.S.: Survivor isn?t what it used to be either.) It's unlikely that a broadcast network is ever again going to create a megahit like The Cosby Show, which at its mid-?80s peak drew as many as 50 million viewers an episode. For several years now, TV's top event has been Fox's American Idol. Last season, it drew 28.8 million viewers a week. Conversations about the future of television tend to vault way past next week or next year into a world where schedules don't exist and 10,000 programming options are all available at any moment, half of them fully interactive. (Not enjoying this episode of Law & Order: Moonbase? That's OK?you can change the plot!) It sounds like fun. But in reality, the number of cable channels has topped out. And the number of households that subscribe to basic cable?about 65 million?hasn't budged for a decade. That's roughly 58 percent of all American TV households and it's a much higher percentage of the total households that advertisers actually care about. People who have something to sell are attracted to viewers who have already demonstrated their willingness to buy something (like cable TV). The cable business is booming: Annual advertising revenues have jumped from $8.1 billion in 1997 to a projected $28.6 billion this year. So before the death knell tolls, let's consider some ways broadcast TV might be reborn. 1. Accept the fact that niche is the new normal. The most popular cable networks average fewer than 3 million viewers a night. But add up all those little niches, and how much of an audience is left? Even TNT and USA, the two cable channels whose original programming most closely resembles that of broadcast networks, are carving out distinctive spaces for themselves. Turner Networks president Steve Koonin has successfully promoted TNT as a network for drama and TBS as a home for comedy?two old-school broadcast mainstays. But, he says, "Within the wide berth of comedy and drama as prospective brands, we're looking at where there are underserved audiences, and we're finding them in family viewers, African Americans, women, and action lovers." When groups that vast are being won over by cable, broadcast's claim that it reaches for everyone starts to ring a little hollow, especially when cable networks are making shows that are just like broadcast series, except a little better. To be fair to the networks, the playing field isn't level: Small cable channels can impress advertisers simply by growing. Networks can't?so a show with a viewership of 4 million is a hit on USA and a flop on CBS. But the differences are diminishing. In the spring, Koonin took an aggressive gamble to make this clear: He scheduled Turner Networks' upfronts cheek-to-cheek with those of the broadcast networks. "Koonin was brilliant," says Brian Terkelsen, of the brand consultancy MediaVest. "In my opinion, that was the turning point. We'll all look back and say the one riff that he did onstage that week shifted everything for cable and broadcasting. What he did was, he got up there and said, 'If I were to tell you the story of two networks, and one had a talking car and a steroid in a unitard who was beating up an average guy in a game show, and the other had an Academy Award-winning actress in her second season and a Golden Globe winner in her fourth season, which would you think was which?'" Koonin then unveiled slides of the cheesy shows?NBC's Knight Rider and American Gladiators?and the classy ones: TNT?s Saving Grace and The Closer. Point made, brutally. "If anybody in the room didn't think, 'Holy shit! It's all changed,'" Terkelsen says, "they?re morons." 2. Know your brand. "There are an awful lot of channels available to people in the average digital home," says FX president John Landgraf. "So if you don?t stand for something, you stand for nothing." FX, he says, "appeals to people with a certain taste for edgy, innovative quality." He has established the brand with material that's positioned exactly halfway between what the networks and pay cable offer. Its signature shows?Rescue Me, The Shield, Damages, Nip/Tuck?tend to be hard-driving adult dramas that are one big step raunchier, bloodier, sexier, cooler, and rougher than the broadcast networks' cop/lawyer/doctor equivalents. It wasn't a smooth road for the network, which was founded in 1994. "FX toyed, in its earlier incarnations, with various branding strategies," Landgraf recalls, "from live television?its original motto was 'TV made fresh daily'?to a time when it was much more explicitly appealing to men." Back then, it often looked like the NASCAR channel. To redefine itself, FX had to make casual viewers expendable in order to build its rep with committed ones. "We want to have somebody's favorite show," Landgraf says, "not everybody's 10th-favorite show." Rebranding to that degree isn't without its risks. Several years ago, Bravo became a haven for young, hip, gay-friendly consumers with lots of disposable income. That meant walking away from the (few) viewers who knew it as a poor man's PBS, a repository for dusty filmed productions of Swan Lake. If the one-two punch of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Project Runway hadn't succeeded, the channel could well have gone down for the count. Similarly, at Turner, Koonin canceled TNT's most popular offering?wrestling?in order to make its metamorphosis into a drama-driven cable network credible. Those gambles paid off because Bravo, FX, and TNT all followed through swiftly to build on their initial hits. Likewise, AMC, which specializes in old movies, didn't waste a minute after critics acclaimed the first season of its original show Mad Men: It began developing other dramas, knowing its newfound audience needed more reasons to stick around. Without moves like that, a rebranding effort can quickly give rise to skepticism. A&E spent big money to buy reruns of HBO's The Sopranos because it wanted to be seen as the kind of network that would air a show like The Sopranos. But it's not; it's the kind of network that would air reruns of The Sopranos and take out the bad words. In many ways, the networks themselves already have specific brand identities; they just don't admit it. For decades, CBS has had the most elderly demographic among the major networks. ABC specializes in comedies and light dramas with strong female appeal, from Desperate Housewives to Grey's Anatomy to Ugly Betty. Fox?with the exception of American Idol?is largely aimed at guys, whether via action dramas like 24 and Prison Break, Sunday-night cartoons, or the never-ending, shaky-cam glimpse of night-shift squalor that is Cops. The fledgling CW is building on Gossip Girl and America?s Next Top Model to chase young women. NBC's struggles are not unrelated to the fact that it's still trying to be all things to all people: When you offer programming like 30 Rock to a smart, affluent audience but also rely on diet contests, game shows, and To Catch a Predator to fill prime time, you can't blame viewers for not knowing what to expect. 3. Don't count on "flow" unless all your programming is aimed at the same audience. Zip through FX's schedule, and at some point, you will see an episode of Rescue Me, followed by another episode of Rescue Me, and another and another. And when Bravo is hard-selling one of its hits, the word overkill is not in its vocabulary. "The great thing about our shows is, people want to see them again," says Andy Cohen, Bravo's senior vice president for original programming. "A lot of times, we'll premiere an episode of Top Chef and then rerun the episode right when it's over. And people stay tuned! Some of our shows are really like crack," he laughs. This practice makes sense in two ways: It's cost-efficient and it builds loyalty. The tactic used to be dismissed as killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, until people noticed that the goose kept on thriving. Now it's just a matter, as Cohen puts it, of "feeding the beast." Since embracing the episode-marathon strategy several years ago?as a way to pump life into Project Runway, which was struggling in its first year?Bravo has seen ratings for its flagship shows grow every season. The fourth cycle of Top Chef, which aired in the spring, outperformed the third, which beat the second, which outdid the first. The broadcast networks used to count on that kind of steady growth in the first few years of one of their hits. But recently, scripted series like Ugly Betty and Heroes have started losing viewers after just one season. Given that alarming turnabout, you'd think the networks would be doing everything in their power to build the equity of a potential new hit. But no. Their schedules, set in stone decades ago, remain inviolable: news and chitchat before noon, soaps and talk shows in the afternoon, local and national evening news and infotainment later in the day, talk shows at bedtime. Some of these programming blocks justify themselves economically, but others aren't as cost-effective. Daytime soaps occupy a large swath of airtime that could occasionally be used to repurpose a network's prime-time schedule cheaply and efficiently. 4. Content counts. Discussions at the networks about what's depleting their viewership tend to focus on familiar culprits: YouTube. The internet. Xbox. The iPod. Too many options. (Capitalism can be so unfair!) This leads to brainstorming sessions about making TV more like the internet, resulting in a lot of overexcited press releases announcing how one-minute "minisodes" of your favorite shows will be exclusively available on a network website, or Twittered to you line by line as they're being written, or beamed directly into your cerebral cortex via Bluetooth. Enough already. Competition from other media is real, but it's also a convenient excuse to not focus on programming. You don't hear American Idol's producers whining about how the internet is draining their audience, because they know that their audience is on the internet. Viewers go there to talk, read, kvetch, and gossip?about American Idol. Creating substance-free shows because you think your audience has no attention span is a sucker's game. And streaming shows for free is, so far, doing a lot more for viewers than it is for a network's balance sheet. Instead, the networks should try to make TV shows for people who want to watch TV shows. There seems to be no shortage of viewers out there: For all the hand-wringing about how new media are sapping television's audience, the average viewer of online video in April watched fewer than eight minutes a day. By contrast, the average household has its TV on for eight hours and 14 minutes daily. That's a record. (One that should make all of us rear back in horror, but that's another story.) 5. When you say the TV season is 52 weeks, you have to mean it. Madison Avenue is still fond of the old-fashioned idea of fall as a launchpad for a new TV season, and so are many viewers. But does that mean the networks should continue taking summers off? Sure, they run original programming in July and August, but "original" in this context generally means a series so odd that they couldn't find a place for it in the regular season, or Celebrity Circus, or 85 variations on foreign game shows (this summer's flavor of the moment). It's a bind, since a real commitment to top-quality original programming during the summer costs money that the broadcast networks don't have right now, but a diet of reruns and cut-rate schlock may cost them viewers. According to Comcast's Harbert, when broadcast execs ask for new shows year-round, "the finance guys say, 'You're killing me!' And the programming guys say, 'Yeah, but if I put on repeats, they're going to have terrible ratings, and we'll have no promo base for fall.' And everybody's right." But investing in shows?and thus in audience building?is a smarter long-term strategy. It's no accident that cable hits like Lifetime's Army Wives, USA's Burn Notice, and TNT's The Closer all launched in summer, allowing cable to perform its annual raid on broadcast viewers. 6. Don't break faith with your audience. Broadcast networks routinely spend three months promoting a show that they then cancel after two airings. Or they get a few million viewers hooked on a serialized drama and then drop it midway through a season, leaving fans hanging. This simply never happens on cable, where if a series gets a 13-episode order, those 13 episodes are damn well going to air, even if it's just because there?s nothing else to take their place. Every time the networks reshuffle their grid in a spasm of quick-fix panic, they disenchant more viewers. 7. If you can't beat 'em, eat 'em. Ben Silverman, NBC's head programmer, may fret when one of his network's shows struggles against a basic-cable hit like Bravo's Top Chef or the Sci Fi Channel's Battlestar Galactica. But his boss, NBC Universal C.E.O. Jeff Zucker, will rest easy, because his company also owns Bravo. And the Sci Fi Channel. And a whole lot more. The notion that the "500-channel universe" is a pie being cut into ever-tinier slivers ignores the fact that the vast majority of what we watch fills the coffers of a small handful of megaliths, just as it always has. Take a closer look at that pie: Besides Bravo and Sci Fi, NBC Universal also owns USA, the highest-rated ad-supported cable channel; MSNBC; CNBC; ShopNBC; Oxygen; Telemundo; and one-third of A&E Television, itself a conglomeration that includes A&E, the History Channel, and the Biography Channel. Disney owns ABC, ESPN, SoapNet, ABC Family, its own one-third share of A&E, and half of Lifetime. It also, of course, owns the Disney Channel, the top-rated basic-cable outlet of any kind. Viacom and CBS, though now traded separately on Wall Street, are both controlled by one man, Sumner Redstone. CBS owns Showtime, the Movie Channel, and half of the CW. Viacom?s list of properties includes MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Spike TV, BET, and Comedy Central. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. owns Fox, Fox News, FX, and, well, everything with the word Fox in it, from Fox College Sports to the Fox Reality Channel. Time Warner owns the other half of the CW, as well as CNN, TNT, TBS, TCM, HBO, Cinemax, the Cartoon Network, and TruTV (formerly CourtTV). So a half-dozen companies own not only five broadcast networks but also a majority of the cable channels that anyone actually watches?including all 10 of prime time's highest-rated cable networks, which together accounted for more than 18 million viewers a night last year. To anyone worried about where network viewers have gone: They may have left the building, but they haven?t escaped the compound. 8. Lowered expectations can be your best friend. The current chaos in TV has a silver lining: In an era of on-demand options, streaming video, full-season DVD releases for latecomers, multiple airings of the same show, and the inexorable march of DVRs, the definition of success is more slippery than it used to be. Eventually, a modernized ratings system will capture and aggregate all of these viewers, which will primarily help series that appeal to a young, I-want-it-when-I-want-it audience. By contrast, a show whose viewers could make up an AARP convention isn't going to benefit much from this brave new world. The ratings for 60 Minutes, for example, grow by only 3 percent when DVR use is factored in. But until that's all sorted out, there's plenty of room for spin. In a TV universe without a center, if nothing is really a hit, then everything is. If you can't crack Nielsen's top 10, you can tell Madison Avenue that you wildly overperform among viewers with lots of disposable income?and you get as much as a 40 percent jump in audience when you take into account DVR use, as is the case with The Office. AMC's Mad Men counts as a hit because it's great, it wins awards and critical raves, and until recently, it was the only show of its kind on the channel, so there was nothing to compare it with. The History Channel's Ice Road Truckers (a reality series devoted entirely to truckers driving across large expanses of ice) is a hit because it outperformed anything the History Channel had ever aired and demolished the image of the channel as a musty attic full of newsreel footage about Hitler. A show can even claim hit status because of the magazine covers, text-message traffic, and internet buzz it generates: From the amount of attention paid to the CW's teen soap Gossip Girl last season, one wouldn't know that it ranked 150th out of 161 shows and drew just 2.4 million viewers a week. So the good news for networks is that it may be possible to stop the bleeding. The bad news is that the patient can't be cured. For 50 years, pop culture has moved in only one direction?toward more options, fewer mass phenomena, and greater consumer control. And there's no turning that around, especially with a generation of viewers that sees no meaningful distinction between a broadcast network and a cable channel. What that means isn't just the end of a few old business models, but the end of TV as we've known it. America's most unifying cultural medium for the past 60 years has now followed music and movies in surrendering its mass appeal in order to cater to a populace organized entirely by self-defining niches. Welcome to the new era of post-popular culture, in which there's something for anyone, but nothing for everyone. What on earth will we all talk about tomorrow morning?
Read about the latest Entertainment News on Wired.com, including art, technology, films, animation, music, web video, tv, podcasts, and blogs. {...}
Published: August 13, 2008, 4:00 pm - Indexed: August 14, 2008, 9:18 pm - Page Size: 63KB
Category: News > Breaking News

]]> News > Breaking News {SYSTEMS > NEWS AND MEDIA} - Mac Gaming News - Macgamestore Releases Blood Ties for the Mac http://articles.world-of-newave.info/computers/systems/apple/macintosh/news-and-media/mac-gaming-news-macgamestore-releases-blood-ties-2008088754.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/computers/systems/apple/macintosh/news-and-media/mac-gaming-news-macgamestore-releases-blood-ties-2008088754.htm Fri, 08 Aug 2008 13:05:00 GMT Macgamestore.com announced the immediate availability of Blood Ties for the Mac on Friday. Blood Ties is based on the Canadian TV series of the same name and sends players on a hunt to solve the mystery behind missing persons cases linked to a secret society Macobserver.Com Mac Gaming News - Macgamestore Releases Blood Ties for the Mac {new window}   Www.Macobserver.Com - Macgamestore.com announced the immediate availability of Blood Ties for the Mac on Friday. Blood Ties is based on the Canadian TV series of the same name and sends players on a hunt to solve the mystery behind missing persons cases linked to a secret society
Mac Gaming News - Macgamestore Releases Blood Ties for the Mac || The Mac Observer {...}
Published: August 8, 2008, 1:05 pm - Indexed: August 9, 2008, 11:23 am - Page Size: 34KB
Category: Computers > Systems > Apple > Macintosh > News and Media

]]> Computers > Systems > Apple > Macintosh > News and Media {LITERATURE > RSS FEEDS} - Stargate News http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/literature/genres/science-fiction/rss-feeds/stargate-news-2008086906.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/literature/genres/science-fiction/rss-feeds/stargate-news-2008086906.htm Wed, 06 Aug 2008 23:33:54 GMT Fans of the great Stargate television shows will be glad to know that a new series, Stargate Universe, is in the works. But they'll want to keep up with all the latest Stargate news on Xenite.Org's new Stargate News Web site. Enjoy! Xenite.Org Stargate News {new window}   Www.Xenite.Org - Fans of the great Stargate television shows will be glad to know that a new series, Stargate Universe, is in the works. But they'll want to keep up with all the latest Stargate news on Xenite.Org's new Stargate News Web site. Enjoy!
Stargate News - Stargate SG1, Stargate: Atlantis, Stargate Universe News {...} News headlines from around the world about Stargate-SG1, Stargate: Atlantis, and Stargate: Universe ... {...}
Indexed: August 6, 2008, 11:33 pm - Page Size: 20KB
Category: Arts > Literature > Genres > Science Fiction > RSS Feeds

]]> Arts > Literature > Genres > Science Fiction > RSS Feeds {LITERATURE > CYBERPUNK} - Electronic eyeball http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/literature/genres/cyberpunk/electronic-eyeball-2008083012.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/literature/genres/cyberpunk/electronic-eyeball-2008083012.htm Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:14:00 GMT Materials scientists are developing an eye-shaped camera that uses a single lens to produce a distortion-free image. Most cameras require multiple lenses but the human eye does not. Now though, John Rogers and his colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign used flexible electronic circuits to mimic our own single-lens eyes. From Nature News: The team's solution was to use a series of silicon photodetectors (pixels) connected by thin metal wires. This network is supported and encapsulated by a thin film of polyimide plastic, allowing the flexible scaffold to bend when compressed. This scaffold takes up the mechanical stress and protects the pixels as the array takes its hemispherical shape. The team made a hollow dome about 2 centimetres wide from a rubber-like material called poly(dimethylsiloxane). They flattened out the stretchy dome, and attached the electronic mesh. Then, as the hollow dome snapped back into its original shape, it pulled the array with it, forming a hemisphere that could be attached to a lens; the basis of the camera ?The ability to wrap high quality silicon devices onto complex surfaces and biological tissues adds very interesting and powerful capabilities to electronic and optoelectronic device design,? says Rogers. "It allows us to put electronics in places where we couldn't before." Electronic eye (Nature News)... Boingboing.Net Electronic eyeball {new window}   Www.Boingboing.Net - Materials scientists are developing an eye-shaped camera that uses a single lens to produce a distortion-free image. Most cameras require multiple lenses but the human eye does not. Now though, John Rogers and his colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign used flexible electronic circuits to mimic our own single-lens eyes. From Nature News: The team's solution was to use a series of silicon photodetectors (pixels) connected by thin metal wires. This network is supported and encapsulated by a thin film of polyimide plastic, allowing the flexible scaffold to bend when compressed. This scaffold takes up the mechanical stress and protects the pixels as the array takes its hemispherical shape. The team made a hollow dome about 2 centimetres wide from a rubber-like material called poly(dimethylsiloxane). They flattened out the stretchy dome, and attached the electronic mesh. Then, as the hollow dome snapped back into its original shape, it pulled the array with it, forming a hemisphere that could be attached to a lens; the basis of the camera ?The ability to wrap high quality silicon devices onto complex surfaces and biological tissues adds very interesting and powerful capabilities to electronic and optoelectronic device design,? says Rogers. "It allows us to put electronics in places where we couldn't before." Electronic eye (Nature News)...
Electronic eyeball - Boing Boing {...}
Published: August 6, 2008, 7:14 pm - Indexed: August 6, 2008, 9:56 pm - Page Size: 41KB
Category: Arts > Literature > Genres > Cyberpunk

]]> Arts > Literature > Genres > Cyberpunk {NEWS > BREAKING NEWS} - Disney Leading Hollywood to the Videogame Grail http://articles.world-of-newave.info/news/breaking-news/disney-leading-hollywood-to-the-videogame-grail-2008081963.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/news/breaking-news/disney-leading-hollywood-to-the-videogame-grail-2008081963.htm Wed, 06 Aug 2008 16:15:00 GMT News from Portfolio.com Also on Portfolio American Apparel Cashes In on Hip, Cheap Web Ads When Will IOC Realize Olympics Were Made for Web? The Wall Street Journal's Broken Subscription System Subscribe to Portfolio magazine In 2002, when Graham Hopper was tapped to head Disney's videogame operations, his bosses gave him a choice: Come up with a dramatic plan to reinvigorate the flailing unit or downsize and focus exclusively on licensing to other companies. It was far from an obvious choice. At the time, many Hollywood studios were getting out of the games game?Universal Studios, 20th Century Fox, and DreamWorks dumped the divisions they had launched during the digital boom of the 1990s, having learned the hard way that the ability to make successful films and television shows didn't mean squat in the interactive world. Producing quality videogames required hundreds of millions of dollars and years of patience. Hopper convinced his bosses to hang on?with a small footprint, making cheap games based on Disney Channel fare like Hannah Montana and Kim Possible. Just five years later, that decision has put it ahead of the pack, as Hollywood goes hurtling back into videogames. Paramount and Universal are spending tens of millions of dollars to create a new slate of products, and MTV and Warner Bros. have invested hundreds of millions to build themselves into major publishers. "If you were to build an entertainment company from scratch today, you wouldn't even question that games should be in it," says Hopper, a dapper South African who spent a decade in Disney consumer products before his videogame stint. It's not the first time such words have been uttered in Hollywood, but there's a sense of inevitability?for some, perhaps even desperation?this time around. When Hollywood exited videogames five years ago, it was riding high on revenues from DVDs. Today, home entertainment is shrinking, box office is flat, the TV audience is increasingly splintered, and significant internet money remains hypothetical. Videogame revenue, meanwhile, shot up 34 percent last year and has increased 49 percent so far in 2008. Companies are busily recruiting experienced talent, spending big on acquisitions, and pushing through early failures. Warner Bros. made its first stab at videogames with the 2005 flop The Matrix Online, but has gone on to release a much broader slate?and spent more than $200 million last year to buy British developer Traveller's Tales, maker of the ultra-successful Lego Star Wars games. Movie-based videogames have a deservedly terrible reputation. Since they're often made on the 12- to 18-month timeframe of a film's production schedule rather than the three years it takes to produce a major console game, and can sell well on the back of a movie's mega-marketing spend, they're regularly amongst the lowest-quality titles on the market. For proof, just check the reviews of recently licensed games like Iron Man and Wall-E." But even adaptations that sell can tarnish a brand with young consumers if the games stink?something studios now recognize. Universal, not wanting to rush its self-financed Wanted game, hasn't announced a release date yet, even though the film is out. Warner Bros. is turning Watchmen into a series of small downloadable games rather than rush one big package for the film's release next March. "The ultimate goal for us is to have our best IP well established and sustainable on the videogame market," says Martin Tremblay, who worked at Ubisoft and Vivendi Games before becoming president of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment in June. Accomplishing that is a crucial first step for studios before becoming a fully legit publisher by moving into original titles. So far, Disney is the only player in Hollywood that has already done so. After establishing girl-targeted brands like Hannah Montana and Kim Possible as million-unit-plus sellers in 2003 and 2004, it came into 2005 with a small but viable publishing operation. "This is a very disciplined company, so we were given a small amount of resources at first to prove we could be successful," recalls Hopper. "Then we were able to get more investment and just keep on growing." Disney's C.F.O., Tom Staggs, said last year that the conglomerate is prepared to more than triple its spending on games from $100 million in 2006 to $350 million by 2012. Disney recently moved videogames out of the sprawling consumer-products unit and into a new operating division along with online media. The revived Disney Interactive Studios (formerly Buena Vista Games) has used its capital infusion to acquire six development studios (the folks who actually make the games) since 2005, and has a slate of 19 titles for its fiscal year ending in September, significantly more than any other media conglomerate and even some pure-play publishers like Sumner Redstone's struggling Midway or Eidos. "By the existing model, Disney is definitely in the lead. They are a good year or two ahead of Warner," observes Keith Boesky, a former president of Eidos who now leads his own videogame agency. "The question is whether one of the other studios will come up with a better way to pursue the market." About 70 percent of Disney's games are based on existing film and TV properties like Prince Caspian and High School Musical?the bread and butter of Disney Interactive's business. But the real reason the company is willing to invest so much may lie in that other 30 percent. Its small but growing slate of original titles, which started last year with alien-exploration game Spectrobes and is expanding this fall with the stunt-driving title Pure and Guitar Hero-like music simulator Ultimate Band, are potentially more than just game properties. They're new franchises that can eventually flow through the Disney pipeline: Imagine Pure the theme park ride or Spectrobes the animated TV show. "They're a content engine, like any other form of media," Hopper says. Core videogame players are still largely young males, and Disney Interactive has started pursuing them with games like Pure and February's Halo-esque shooter Turok, based on a comic book about a dinosaur hunter. That's not exactly standard fare from the most conservative studio in Hollywood. "Part of our opportunity here is to connect in a relevant way with demographics groups that are otherwise harder for our company to reach," Hopper says. "It's easy to get other publishers to license our hit movies or TV shows, but if we want to invest in new customers via videogames, we have to do it ourselves." Wired.Com Disney Leading Hollywood to the Videogame Grail {new window}   Www.Wired.Com - News from Portfolio.com Also on Portfolio American Apparel Cashes In on Hip, Cheap Web Ads When Will IOC Realize Olympics Were Made for Web? The Wall Street Journal's Broken Subscription System Subscribe to Portfolio magazine In 2002, when Graham Hopper was tapped to head Disney's videogame operations, his bosses gave him a choice: Come up with a dramatic plan to reinvigorate the flailing unit or downsize and focus exclusively on licensing to other companies. It was far from an obvious choice. At the time, many Hollywood studios were getting out of the games game?Universal Studios, 20th Century Fox, and DreamWorks dumped the divisions they had launched during the digital boom of the 1990s, having learned the hard way that the ability to make successful films and television shows didn't mean squat in the interactive world. Producing quality videogames required hundreds of millions of dollars and years of patience. Hopper convinced his bosses to hang on?with a small footprint, making cheap games based on Disney Channel fare like Hannah Montana and Kim Possible. Just five years later, that decision has put it ahead of the pack, as Hollywood goes hurtling back into videogames. Paramount and Universal are spending tens of millions of dollars to create a new slate of products, and MTV and Warner Bros. have invested hundreds of millions to build themselves into major publishers. "If you were to build an entertainment company from scratch today, you wouldn't even question that games should be in it," says Hopper, a dapper South African who spent a decade in Disney consumer products before his videogame stint. It's not the first time such words have been uttered in Hollywood, but there's a sense of inevitability?for some, perhaps even desperation?this time around. When Hollywood exited videogames five years ago, it was riding high on revenues from DVDs. Today, home entertainment is shrinking, box office is flat, the TV audience is increasingly splintered, and significant internet money remains hypothetical. Videogame revenue, meanwhile, shot up 34 percent last year and has increased 49 percent so far in 2008. Companies are busily recruiting experienced talent, spending big on acquisitions, and pushing through early failures. Warner Bros. made its first stab at videogames with the 2005 flop The Matrix Online, but has gone on to release a much broader slate?and spent more than $200 million last year to buy British developer Traveller's Tales, maker of the ultra-successful Lego Star Wars games. Movie-based videogames have a deservedly terrible reputation. Since they're often made on the 12- to 18-month timeframe of a film's production schedule rather than the three years it takes to produce a major console game, and can sell well on the back of a movie's mega-marketing spend, they're regularly amongst the lowest-quality titles on the market. For proof, just check the reviews of recently licensed games like Iron Man and Wall-E." But even adaptations that sell can tarnish a brand with young consumers if the games stink?something studios now recognize. Universal, not wanting to rush its self-financed Wanted game, hasn't announced a release date yet, even though the film is out. Warner Bros. is turning Watchmen into a series of small downloadable games rather than rush one big package for the film's release next March. "The ultimate goal for us is to have our best IP well established and sustainable on the videogame market," says Martin Tremblay, who worked at Ubisoft and Vivendi Games before becoming president of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment in June. Accomplishing that is a crucial first step for studios before becoming a fully legit publisher by moving into original titles. So far, Disney is the only player in Hollywood that has already done so. After establishing girl-targeted brands like Hannah Montana and Kim Possible as million-unit-plus sellers in 2003 and 2004, it came into 2005 with a small but viable publishing operation. "This is a very disciplined company, so we were given a small amount of resources at first to prove we could be successful," recalls Hopper. "Then we were able to get more investment and just keep on growing." Disney's C.F.O., Tom Staggs, said last year that the conglomerate is prepared to more than triple its spending on games from $100 million in 2006 to $350 million by 2012. Disney recently moved videogames out of the sprawling consumer-products unit and into a new operating division along with online media. The revived Disney Interactive Studios (formerly Buena Vista Games) has used its capital infusion to acquire six development studios (the folks who actually make the games) since 2005, and has a slate of 19 titles for its fiscal year ending in September, significantly more than any other media conglomerate and even some pure-play publishers like Sumner Redstone's struggling Midway or Eidos. "By the existing model, Disney is definitely in the lead. They are a good year or two ahead of Warner," observes Keith Boesky, a former president of Eidos who now leads his own videogame agency. "The question is whether one of the other studios will come up with a better way to pursue the market." About 70 percent of Disney's games are based on existing film and TV properties like Prince Caspian and High School Musical?the bread and butter of Disney Interactive's business. But the real reason the company is willing to invest so much may lie in that other 30 percent. Its small but growing slate of original titles, which started last year with alien-exploration game Spectrobes and is expanding this fall with the stunt-driving title Pure and Guitar Hero-like music simulator Ultimate Band, are potentially more than just game properties. They're new franchises that can eventual