Lost amidst the appropriately non-stop coverage of the failed car-bombing in Times Square, the predictably masturbatory coverage of the White House Correspondent’s Dinner (“Morning Joe” was particularly nauseating), and the other news of Obama’s first visit to the burgeoning enviro-cataclysm on the Gulf Coast, was Saturday afternoon’s commencement address by the President.

Obama, like others before him, chose to use the address not only to speak to a group of graduating college seniors, but to the rest of us as well. His topic was the media and his focus was one very close to this blog’s heart (can a blog have a heart? if it can have an oft-vented spleen, then why not…) — the vanishing importance of facts in journalism and in America.

Get Real has been, from the start, an attempt to separate the wheat (facts) from the chaff (opinion) when it comes to mainstream media reporting. We’ve taken on the NY Times and the NY Post — MSNBC and Fox News Channel. The point has not been to simply point fingers and move on but to get people to start thinking about the consequences of a media filled with people talking about the news instead of reporting the news. The distinction is important because without the reporting, the often expensive and painstaking work of gathering facts, highlighting mistruths, and giving the rest of us a baseline understanding of what’s actually going on, there will be no actual news left to talk about. The scary thing is how quickly we’ve moved in that direction.

And so on Saturday afternoon Obama chose to discuss this very topic.

Today’s 24/7 echo-chamber amplifies the most inflammatory soundbites louder and faster than ever before.  And it’s also, however, given us unprecedented choice.  Whereas most Americans used to get their news from the same three networks over dinner, or a few influential papers on Sunday morning, we now have the option to get our information from any number of blogs or websites or cable news shows.  And this can have both a good and bad development for democracy.  For if we choose only to expose ourselves to opinions and viewpoints that are in line with our own, studies suggest that we become more polarized, more set in our ways.  That will only reinforce and even deepen the political divides in this country.

Of course Obama has a political motive to talk about this. He won as the “uniter” by appealing to independents who told pollsters they didn’t like the tone in Washington. A year later the tone is uglier than ever and Obama knows he will never succeed by jumping into the swamp. But it was interesting the see the reaction to his speech of those around me. I was with a die-hard conservative and seated near some people who’d loudly talked about how they’d wished the university had picked someone other than “that socialist” to give the commencement. What did they think of all this? Obama continued.

If we choose to actively seek out information that challenges our assumptions and our beliefs, perhaps we can begin to understand where the people who disagree with us are coming from. Now, this requires us to agree on a certain set of facts to debate from.  That’s why we need a vibrant and thriving news business that is separate from opinion makers and talking heads. That’s why we need an educated citizenry that values hard evidence and not just assertion. As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously once said, “Everybody is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

That last bit had everyone, including the conservatives around me, clapping their hands and shaking their heads in agreement. So Kumbaya, right? If only life were so easy. Without resorting to an instant polling session (made impractical by the fact that the ceremony continued on for another hour) I couldn’t find out if everyone really in agreement or just agreeing that the other side should stick to the “facts” more. It would be great if the former was true but I fear it’s more likely the latter.

Several polls (notably the Pew Poll) have shown a deepening of the partisan news divide and an increase in American’s dependence on cable news networks for information. Since two of the three major cable news networks have abandoned almost any sense of objectivity (that afternoon a Fox News anchor teased an upcoming segment, “A new move to ban toys in Happy Meals: Is this another example of the nanny state? A fair and balanced debate next!”) it’s fair to say that more and more of us are seeing less and less actual journalism. The result, like that following our move towards a fat and sugar-laden fast food diet, is obesity — in this case an intellectual obesity in which people have no hunger for, nor interest in, anything they aren’t already consuming.

Obama’s plea for a healthier news diet was truly non-partisan because many liberals seem just as righteous in their certitude as conservatives (compare the Daily Kos with Red State and you’ll see what I mean). But will anybody actually act on the good doctor’s advice? Will the media actually spend a second to reflect on its responsibility for any of this? And if this is really so serious, shouldn’t Obama have repeated this address (or at least the substance of it) later Saturday when he flew back to Washington to speak at the White House Correspondents Dinner instead of giving a predictable, mildly amusing, totally inside-the-beltway dinner speech? That certainly would have garnered some headlines.

Instead it’s Monday, and everyone’s returned to their roles. On the kooky Fox and Friends co-anchor Brian Kilmeade looked at the surveillance video released by the NYPD showing the suspect in the Times Square car bomb attempt and said, “What I was surprised at is that right away they say he’s a forty-ish white guy…. I don’t know if they’re just placating the public but that doesn’t look like a white guy necessarily.” Check out the travesty here.

This morning all of our smartphones and email inboxes were filled with alerts from the papers — the economy is growing and the recession really seems to be over. Of course it “officially” ended six months ago but we long ago lost any belief in economists or their data. But note what the stories this morning said — consumer spending led the charge. Look at the Wall Street Journal’s lead graph:

The U.S. economy’s expansion slowed at the start of 2010, but the rise in consumer spending which drove it bodes well for the future.

If consumers are spending more they are by definition feeling better about the economy and that generally translates into feeling better about the current people in power. Not always, but generally and that bodes well for the Dems. Not that you’d know it from the news. While we can fully expect Maddow and Olbermann to point this out it’s unlikely we’ll be hearing anything from Fox or CNN any time soon about this because it doesn’t fit their narrative.

The political spin cycle now runs 24/7 and the cable nets have become video versions of the blogosphere — fast, furious and fundamentally useless as sources of journalism. Unless by journalism you mean the minute-by-minute chronicling of the rumor mill. So the storyline for now is set — the Democrats are headed for disaster in November, Obama is on a roll (until he isn’t), the Republicans are having an existential crisis and the Tea Party brigade holds all the cards. Nice story if any of it held water. Like much of what passes for news on these “news” networks, this story has shreds of truth that have been repurposed to build a simplistic, almost fictional, tale of political intrigue. The problem is people actually believe it’s based on reporting and facts, when it’s pretty clear it is not.

For junkies it’s fun to get caught up in the daily drama but let’s see what all these polls say in September. If the jobs picture is improving then as the GDP is now (and jobs are almost always a lagging indicator of economic conditions), history indicates that Democrats will probably lose seats in Congress, but not control over either or both chambers. So instead of watching the blowhards on cable, check in each month with the jobs report. It’ll tell you way more about what November holds than the ferocity of the Tea Baggers.

Are Americans too uninformed to be part of the process? OK that’s a little over the top but after the last year it’s really difficult for someone who’s spent a career trying to find the facts and then report them to watch the media, the pollsters, and the people follow each other down the rabbit hole into a world where every opinion is valid while every fact is either suspect or not worth our time.

Let’s ponder the polls on health care reform from just the last three frenzied weeks. It says a lot about what we’ve become.

Fox News’s last poll had some interesting wording:

Some Americans choose not to buy health insurance even though they can afford it. The president’s plan requires all Americans who can afford it to have some form of health insurance or else pay a penalty. Failure to pay the penalty would result in an even larger fine, a jail sentence of up to one year, or both. Do you think the government should be able to require all Americans who can afford it to have health insurance or pay a penalty, or not?

Yes                     29%

No                      68%

That was the sixth question Fox asked after the generic approve/disapprove and better/worse queries. I would have liked to see them follow with the same question but substituting “auto insurance” for “health insurance”. Alas that kind of thing was not on Fox’s agenda. For instance check out this one:

Some people think President Obama is showing strong leadership in his efforts to pass health care legislation by staying the course even in the face of opposition, while other people think he is showing stubbornness by ignoring opposition to the health care proposals and moving ahead anyway. Which is closer to your view?

Stubborn? Love that. Nowhere did Fox ask if people knew any facts about the bill. Not on the agenda.

I like this from CBS:

Do you feel you have a good understanding of how the current health care reform bill would affect you and your family, or is it confusing to you?

Good Understanding                       42%

Confusing                                        54%

So where’s the follow-up? Something like, “Why are you confused?” or “Who do you think made you confused?” or “Have you read anything other than headlines about the bill?” I guess it would have been too easy to ask if people thought the news media had done a good job of making the bill clear.

On the other hand CBS got an odd answer to this question:

Do you think Democrats who have been trying to pass the current health care bill have done so mainly because they believe it is good policy for the country, or mainly for political reasons?

Good Policy                                   35%

Political Reasons                           57%

Really? I guess the news that this is “political suicide” for Democrats hasn’t penetrated despite it becoming almost overnight conventional wisdom from the New York Times to Fox News.

The best poll by far was the one done by a health policy organization. The Kaiser Family Foundation Health Tracking Poll not only asked probing questions about what Americans think about the health care bill but also importantly what they know about it. Here are two:

As far as you know, has the independent Congressional Budget Office which analyzes the cost of legislation said the health reform legislation currently being discussed in Congress will increase the federal budget deficit over the next ten years, decrease the deficit over the next ten years, or is it not expected to have much impact on the deficit?

As far as you know, if Congress and the president did pass a health care reform bill, would most people who currently get health insurance coverage through their employers keep their existing health insurance arrangements or would most people have to change their existing health insurance arrangements?

On the first one 55% got it wrong and 15% got it right. (The CBO said it would decrease the deficit) while 48% got the second one right and 41% got it wrong (the bill would be unlikely to have much impact on people with company plans). Neither result is particularly reassuring that Americans know very much about what they are being asked to opine on.

Another interesting question came from the AP-GFK poll early in March. This one pointed up the childlike unfocused unhappiness of many Americans when it comes to health care (and I would argue a lot of other things but we’ll save that for another day):

How much, if at all, should the health care system in the United States be CHANGED? Would you say it should be changed a great deal, a lot, a moderate amount, a little, or not at all?

Great Deal                                  31%

A Lot                                           19%

Moderate Amount                       32%

A Little                                         13%

Not at All                                       4%

So 50% think the system needs significant change and 82% think it needs to change at least some. But how? AP didn’t ask. Probably because the leading answer would have been, “I don’t know but in some way that makes everyone happy.”

Instead we got some real gems like this one from CNN/Opinion Research Corp asked of those who said they oppose the final bill:

Do you oppose that legislation because you think its approach toward health care is too liberal, or because you think it is not liberal enough?

Liberal? The bill is a lot of things but “conservative” or “liberal” it is not. Those political terms are almost meaningless when you’re talking about politicians let alone a huge and complex reworking of one of the largest sectors of the U.S. economy. If you disagree then answer this: Is Medicare a “liberal” or “conservative” program? I’m gonna bet you wouldn’t get many of those aging Tea Party folks to say it’s “liberal” since most of them seem to be old enough to be getting their health care through Medicare.

Of course the pollsters don’t really deserve as much blame as their clients since that’s who pays the bills and signs off on how many questions will be asked. The fact that none of these news organizations was interested in finding out what, if anything, Americans knew about the health care reforms that will change a huge part of our economy and social system is a damning indictment on their failure to report both about the bill and the public’s failure to be responsible citizens.

Lest you think this is all much ado about nothing watch this video from an anti-health reform rally in Washington last week:

I’ve asked literally tens of thousands of questions to people over the years about what they think of political and policy decisions and this is not rare. This isn’t a conservative, liberal, rural, urban, racial, or anything else problem. This is an American problem. Everyone’s got an opinion but almost no one has an intelligent opinion yet all are treated equally. Everyone deserves to be heard. Right? Well, no.

What does it say about us as a country that both the pollsters and the polled appear appear to be completely and totally divorced from the “reality-based” world, and doesn’t care?

Can I Get a Pink Slip?

At the end of the day there is simply nothing more stunning about the Conan-Leno-NBC meltdown than this: Jeff Zucker still has a job.

Zucker-bashing has been a tried-and-true sport among entertainment reporters, business analysts, and Hollywood insiders for years. No one, the storyline goes, has done so much to destroy something so valuable and been rewarded so handsomely in the process. I won’t pile on lest I get a nosebleed on the way up….

But at the risk of further angering the guy who works for GE Medical in the UK who recently took exception with some of my thoughts about the Comcast-NBC deal and suggested I ought not write about things I don’t understand (because surely the business geniuses who have led GE’s stock price to decline by 2/3 since they took over do have valuable thoughts), I plunge ahead.

Having worked at NBC for 11 years and having been part of one of the many many waves of staff cuts I can’t help but admire Conan for doing the right thing and taking the high road — for the most part. Leno’s been shit on by the peacock more times than he can count but he’s grinned and beared it. Not Conan.

Conan tore into NBC brass in his hilarious Monday night monologue and then released a statement Tuesday in which he said he wouldn’t go along with the network’s embarrassing about-face. Whether it really has to do with his not wanting to participate in the “destruction” of a storied show (dude, it’s a TV show not the Magna Carta) is beside the point. He’s doing what thousands of former NBC staffers wish they could have done.

To be fair,  as Conan said in his statement, I have nothing to complain about. NBC paid me very well for a long time to do a job that I loved so much it didn’t really seem like work. It’s all the people who don’t have Conan’s stature — the legions of behind-the-scenes people who have been treated even more shabbily than the red-haired goofball — that are cheering him on. Television has always been a nasty business filled with mercurial egocentric madmen (and madwomen) but Jeff Zucker’s tenure sets a new standard for passive-aggressive slash-and-burn business demolition.

Conan is simply speaking truth to that misused power. Sadly, however, if he does leave NBC he will end up solving one of Zucker’s big problems. NBC can’t really use four (let’s not forget Carson Daly!) late night hosts and Conan has arguably shown the least promise. How ironic that Conan could help Zucker partially fix the mess of Zucker’s own making. Let’s not forget this total devaluation of a prized and profitable piece of TV real estate began back in 2004 when the fair-haired CEO convinced his boss, GE chief Jeff Immelt, that instead of fixing what was broke (no new hits in primetime during Zucker’s entire tenure) he needed to fix what wasn’t: late night. But then who’s gonna argue with the smartest guy in the room?

I’ll never forget the “town hall” meeting in 2008 in which the head of the “Local Media Division” (the then-new name for what used to be a collection of the most profitable local TV stations in America), John Wallace, waxed poetic about how he was outsmarting the competition by following the “Blue Ocean Strategy”. I chuckled under my breath. I knew the book.

Many of the people who then worked at WNBC gathered in the legendary Studio 6B where Jack Paar had invented “The Tonight Show” and where Channel 4 had broadcast the local news for three decades. We had been called together to hear about the big changes coming to our station and others across the division. At the time Wallace had been in charge for nine months but had made almost no appearances at the stations so this was his big coming out. Unfortunately there was no way for him to sugar coat the decisions he had made up in his office suite on the 52nd floor.

Wallace talked about how the business was changing — people were watching less broadcast TV, ad revenues were falling, and the high costs had to come down. What to do? Wallace said NBC needed to leave the red ocean and sail into a blue ocean — shorthand for a hot-at-the-time economic theory propagated by two economists who got a lot of space in the influential Harvard Business Review before compiling their new economic dreamscape in a best-selling book released in 2005. Their bottom line was relatively simple: leave the “red ocean” of battling known competitors in existing markets and sail to the “blue ocean” of unknown markets where competition is scarce or non-existent. Best of all a company can radically cut costs but still maintain big profits. Sounds good, no?

At NBC that meant giving up competing in the broadcast television space at the local level and instead repositioning as a “content provider” across numerous “platforms”. New websites! New workflows! Video screens on the PATH train! Monitors at gas pumps! And, oh yeah, half the staff. It’s worked out pretty well if going from the #1 brand to irrelevant was the goal.

I tell this story because Wallace is a favorite of Zucker. The “we’re-smarter-than-everybody-else” attitude is pervasive in the network’s executive suites. No matter that the authors of the Blue Ocean Strategy have been unable to show a single company that followed the plan and was successful. That the idea you could radically cut costs by giving up on a known business and still be just as profitable in an unknown (and perhaps non-existent) business sure sounded good in the boardroom!

The late-night fiasco is more of the same. Don’t compete at 10pm with ABC and CBS. Just give up and set sail for the blue ocean. Unfortunately there is no blue ocean in primetime. Just a blood-red ocean filled with giant icebergs — the sea in which the once proud and impregnable Titanic of broadcasting floats, dead in the water, and listing heavily. Yet the captain and his corporate masters act like he’s a genius. Please let me fail like that in a future life!

Tuesday’s review of Diane Sawyer’s debut in Tuesday’s NY Post is a case in point. Kyle Smith goes on a spleen dump and gets almost everything comically wrong. He’s one the the paper’s TV writers but you wouldn’t know it from his lack of knowledge, writing ability, or research acumen.

First let me say for the record that I don’t have strong feelings about Diane Sawyer one way or another. It’s good that two of the three big seats of TV journalism are filled with women (finally) but I kinda prefer Katie. Nonetheless I don’t watch any of the nightly newscasts regularly (I’m decidedly under the age of 63) so I don’t particularly care.

Second, it pays to remember here that the Post and Fox News are Rupert Murdoch’s one-two partisan political punchers — media outlets that feed off of one another to help create news-like events that do the boss’s bidding (see: Tea Partys). Once you get that it makes all the sense in the world why Mr. Smith would go to Cuckooland in talking about FNC competitor ABC News.

Smith takes Sawyer to task for interviewing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last week, holding the “get” until this week, and then not really grilling him. That’s all fair. TV news has always been about the “show” as much as the journalism and lining up big interviews so that the promotions department can tease the crap out of it is SOP on all the networks including Kyle’s beloved FNC. Remember Fox’s Sarah Palin week? A sharper bulb might have used ABC’s reliance on this old skool technique to point out how all the network news divisions have turned their nightly 22 minutes into shows about their anchors rather than about the news.

Instead Smith goes on to note that ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl did a piece on health care that was, according to Kyle, insufficiently like one Glenn Beck would do. He notes with derision that the story was filled with “last week’s” news about the deals made to get various Senators to back the bill. The same reports that fill his own paper’s coverage today. I’m pretty sure the intrepid Mr. Smith has not taken his complaints about the Post’s coverage to his boss Col Allen. Probably because the story is still developing….

Then there’s this:

A story on the dropping crime rate cited FBI statistics that showed, for instance, murder down 10 percent from January to June. Wait: you’re giving us news that became available July 1? Is this ABC or The History Channel?

Hahahaha. Oh that Kyle. So clever! But wait: it take the FBI six months to collect crime stats from the hundreds of cities and towns and law enforcement agencies across the country. So the FBI report was released…wait for it…yesterday. The day ABC (and everyone else including the NY Times, Bloomberg, the Washington Post, and 686 other news sites according to Google) reported on it. Apparently fact-checking is not a strong suit of either Mr. Smith or his paper. Maybe I can help. Here’s the press release from the FBI.

Smith digs Sawyer and her show as a “stale plate of info-leftovers for shut-ins, news for people who aren’t all that interested in news” without noting that the three network newscasts still get at least four times as many viewers as all of the prime-time cable clowns combined. I admit I’m not one of either group but if Smith’s colorful description of Sawyer’s show is accurate I can’t wait for him to let his quick wit loose on the shows of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity or Keith Olbermann all of which traffic in talking about days-old stories (forget about reporting anything) to audiences that are even older (and presumably more shut in) than the network newscasts.

Finally Smith shows his true colors when he derisively points out that the Sawyer broadcast spent 27 seconds on the death of actress Brittany Murphy as compared with 42 seconds on Obama delivering cookies to kids. I’m not sure either deserved that much time but what do I know? Unlike Kyle Smith I don’t work for a “news”  organization that devoted more back-to-back covers to Tiger Woods sex life than it did to the September 11th attacks in which almost 3000 Americans died.

What is Comcast thinking?

Normally Get Real is about politics but I can’t help myself on this one. I worked at NBC for 11 years and in the television biz for 21 years. It gives me a little perspective on the Comcast-NBC deal. A lot of people have written a lot of copy on this takeover and there are a lot of angles on it. But I haven’t see anyone point out the obvious: Comcast is looking a lot like Time-Warner, Rupert Murdoch, and GE in betting on the wrong company in the wrong business at the wrong time. The only thing Comcast has gotten right is the price — NBC is being stolen. We’ll get to that.

In all the coverage about Comcast’s purchase of NBC there’s been tons of talk about how NBC Universal has done very badly in traditional broadcast television world but very well in cable. True enough if your horizon stretches no further than, say, next summer. The obits for broadcast have been written before and with $600 billion in ad revenues sloshing around I’d bet the reports of broadcast television’s death are still very premature. But there’s no denying cable networks have a better economic model — at this moment. Here’s the conventional wisdom as written in the New York Times on Saturday:

NBC has been mired in fourth place among the major broadcast networks, and the economics of the broadcast television business has deteriorated in recent years amid declining overall ratings and a decline in advertising. By contrast, cable channels have continued to thrive because they rely on a steady stream of subscriber fees from cable companies like Comcast.

True dat. But for how long? AOL seemed like a sure thing when Time-Warner made one of the dumbest, costliest decisions in the history of corporate America. After all, everybody was getting on the web and AOL had the biggest market share. In dial-up.

Fast forward a few years and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corportation made what many considered a very savvy play by buying MySpace for $580 million. Rupe grabbed the hottest company in the hottest tech segment, social networking. But a funny thing happened on the way to the rich house — Facebook. FT has a pretty devastating look at all this here. As News Corp employee Homer Simpson would say, “Doh!”

And then there’s NBC itself. In 2006 GE allowed NBC honcho Jeff Zucker to spend $600 million (really!) on women’s web portal iVillage. Even at the time a lot of people questioned what they were smoking on the 52nd floor of 30 Rock. Needless to say, iVillage didn’t prove to be NBC’s salvation as women moved on to websites with better social networking. And that promised synergy? The iVillage Live TV show didn’t work out so well.

So now comes Comcast to snatch NBC away from a desperate GE. Clearly Comcast has driven a hard bargain as it is getting 51% of a $37 billion company (the new NBCU) for just 37% of $37 billion ($6.5 B paid to GE and $7.25 B in Comcast cable networks being put into the new company). But even at this fire sale price, is it a smart deal?

The potentially fatal troubles for broadcast have been easy to see for a decade for anyone bothering to look. Broadcast is a linear medium: you experience it in continuous timeframe. While first the VCR and now the DVR allowed viewers to take some control, broadcasters could still be sure their programming was being watched on televisions. That day is swiftly ending and with it broadcasters will be left high and dry.

Comcast, though, is a cable company and is not terribly interested in NBC’s broadcast unit nor it’s anachronistic television stations. For now the company is making all the right noises about keeping broadcasting free for the public, blah, blah, blah but there are a lot of regulators to please in the next year so what do you expect. Think about it: take NBC’s local stations. From Comcast’s perspective, what’s the point? When 90% of Americans get their TV via cable or satellite, what purpose does a local TV station play? Comcast could get NBC programming directly from NBC, split the cable fee revenue, and it’s cable subscribers wouldn’t know anything has changed (other than they’re missing the local news but NBC has pretty much given up on local news anyway and Comcast has 24/7 news operations in many markets so it’s unclear anyone would notice).

No, Comcast doesn’t care about broadcast. It wants Universal’s movies to fill its cable pipelines and it wants NBC’s hot cable networks and their hefty cash flows. Cable nets like the supposed crown jewels in NBC’s crown (Bravo, USA, SyFy) have two big advantages over their broadcast counterparts. First, cable audiences have different expectations about the amount and quality of programming on cable. While it’s true that cable nets are increasingly running first-rate original dramas, most of these channels live on a diet of reality, reruns, and replays. Programming a week of USA or Bravo is an exercise in putting a small number of shows into a large number of slots. And audiences are okay with that. Imagine CBS getting away with running only 3 or 4 hours of fresh programming a week.

The other edge cable has over broadcast is money. Cable nets get money from advertising and from the cable companies like Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, and Comcast. That’s why your cable bill is a hundred bucks a month. You are paying a buck for  O, another buck for Nat Geo, maybe two bucks for Discovery or A+E, and pretty soon you’ve spent some real money. That’s the dirty little (not so) secret of the cable biz. But it’s also where the fallacy of Comcast deal lies.

People have stopped watching broadcast TV in large numbers because they can see broadcast TV programming when and where they want it. Viewers are in control and that is decimating the broadcast industry. A friend of mine watches downloaded commercial-free episodes of Fox’s “Glee” on his iPhone. Not because he can’t watch it on TV when it actually airs or on DVR playback but because this method gives him TOTAL control. And there’s the canary in cable’s coalmine.

What happens when people start dropping their cable TV connections in the same way they’re dropping their telephone landlines? It’s not a hypothetical. There’s strong evidence this is just beginning to happen with young adults who aren’t cutting out cable — they’re not getting in the first place. Did you catch the lead paragraphs in Brian Stelter’s Times piece on this very topic?

As she prepared her daughter for college, Anne Sweeney insisted that a television be among the dorm room accessories. “Mom, you don’t understand. I don’t need it,” her 19-year-old responded, saying she could watch whatever she wanted on her computer, at no charge. That flustered Ms. Sweeney, who happens to be the president of the Disney-ABC Television Group.

“You’re going to have a television if I have to nail it to your wall,” she told her daughter, according to comments she made at a Reuters event this week. “You have to have one.”

But she does not, actually. For 60 years, TV could be watched only one way: through the television set. Now, though, millions watch shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” on demand and online on network Web sites like Ms. Sweeney’s ABC.com and on the Internet’s most popular streaming hub, Hulu.com.

Ask a 25-year-old what night, time, and channel her 3 favorite shows are on — cable or broadcast. You’ll be stunned at how few can do it. That’s because it’s no longer how people find and use video media. Here’s another way of looking at it: why do we still have channel numbers? I have no idea what channel number MSNBC or Bravo or TNT are on. Do you? Verizon FiOS already groups cable networks by themes in their system. Channel numbers are as archaic and irrelevant as program times.

Which brings us back to GE’s pathetic stewardship of NBC and Comcast’s late-to-the-dance takeover of the faded legend. Everybody touts the great cash-generating cable nets Comcast is getting. But if the band has packed up, the bar has closed, and the lights are about to be shut off at broadcast’s goodbye party, the DJ is clearly preparing to spin “Last Dance” at cable’s shindig.

GE is taking a well-deserved bath on NBC Universal but it’s far from clear Comcast is getting  an asset with anything other than declining value. AOL anyone?

Funny thing is the preaction from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and it’s enablers in the blogosphere was just as predictable. They have signaled from the start of the Afghanistan conversation that more troops — escalation — was a terrible, dangerous decision they could not support. Now that the Iraq War is winding down it’s no time to up the ante on another foreign adventure whose subtitle is “Quagmire.” Their talking point: Vietnam.

What seems to be missing here is an undeniable fact which Obama helpfully reminded America about right at the start of his (too) lengthy speech:

Just days after 9/11, Congress authorized the use of force against al-Qaida and those who harbored them — an authorization that continues to this day. The vote in the Senate was 98 to 0. The vote in the House was 420 to 1.

No one has really argued that the threat from al-Qaida has vanished. Indeed Obama’s critics on both sides (many of whom participated in those votes) acknowledge the criminal terrorist gangs have regrouped along both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. But to say (as some progressives do) that this wouldn’t be the case had Bush not redirected the effort to Iraq where al-Qaida had no personnel and no bases, is a red herring. Yes it’s true history will almost certainly regard Bush’s Iraq dance as a sham and a distraction but that doesn’t mean al-Qaida isn’t alive and well in Afghanistan. Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ Feingold makes a more convincing case in questioning whether more troops now, years after military commanders on the ground began asking for them, will actually work. He raises valid questions and he may be right but Obama is betting additional troops will make the difference. There is no demonstrably right answer. It’s a toss of the dice either way with our national security at stake.

On the other hand to argue that Obama’s decision is late (a total lie, as the AP helpfully points out on Fox’s website) or that in setting a deadline he is sending a message to the terrorists to,

Wait it out. Blend in. Pretend to be a non-terrorist until July of 2011, then all will be well.

is kinda bizarre. That last quote was from the radical Christian radioman Kevin McCullough whose “analysis” of the Obama speech was prominently featured on Fox’s website yesterday evening. He spins the yarn that setting objectives and deadlines is handing al-Qaida a gift. We’ll be hearing that non-stop for a while I suspect since conservatives have been pushing for big troop deployments to Afghanistan for months. But doing a troop surge and then setting deadlines for withdrawal is precisely what Bush eventually did in Iraq and, much to the chagrin of his critics, it worked better than anything else he tried. Indeed Bush’s conservative defenders say liberals refuse to give him credit for accomplishing what those critics said he wouldn’t with the surge.

What last night’s speech really did was make plain that there are no good choices here and that while our last President governed with his gut, this one is governing with his head. To some that may sound like an improvement but it doesn’t mean he’s gonna get it right either.

Joker or Whiteface?

It was inescapable from the very start of Barack Obama’s campaign waaaaay back in January 2007 that race and racism would play a big part in whatever came to pass. And of course it did and it has and it still is and it always will. Now the New York Times — or to be fair one of her columnists — has finally said what is pretty apparent: An awful lot of the screaming incoherent rage ostensibly directed at Obama’s actions is actually just plain racism.

Maureen Dowd put it this way on Sunday:

I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.

Nothing new here if you’re a regular follower of even the slightly-left-of-center blogosphere but for the Doyenne of the Paper of Record it’s a mighty leap.

It’s not a leap Obama nor his inner circle want to make, though, lest the President get drawn into the elemental American battle. It’s been raging for 300 hundred years — from the Founders through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Brown v. Board, OJ Simpson, to the first African-American president. America has never worked through it’s race-tainted birth and probably never will unless and until we’re all so intermixed that to be American means to be “Made of Many Parts.”

Obama has done his best to act as if we are post-racial but he, and everyone else, knows better. As a black man, though, he can’t actually engage in this battle directly without becoming exactly what his conservative critics so desire — another Jesse Jackson. Turning Obama into a black guy who happens to be President (as opposed to what he is: the President who happens to be a black guy) would be a major accomplishment for the Beck-Limbaugh Axis of Anger. And so they will continue to work very hard on that goal knowing they have fertile soil in which to till their seeds of rage.

In the meantime let’s face the facts: When a bunch of angry, white, post-65-year-old people scream and yell all summer about the government taking over health care, it cannot really be about the government taking over health care. Why? Because the screamers all have government health care. It’s called Medicare and every American over 65 gets it (not that Maria Bartiromo would know this). So when these folks rage with such force that they risk stroke and heart attack they do so knowing full well that should such a health calamity befall them, you and I  will pick up the tab for their hospitalization and care. Must be nice.

And when fringe groups organize Tea Parties to protest taxes and bailouts that then reappear months later as personal hate-fests aimed at one man, it is clearly not about taxes and bailouts which got relatively scant attention at Saturday’s big 9/12 rally in Washington. The rally, which was respectfully covered by the Washington Post and The Hill has become yet another paper tiger for conservatives like Matt Welch (of the conservative opinion mag Reason) writing in today’s New York Post:

How do you marginalize a significant protest against a politician or policy you support? Lowball the numbers, then dismiss participants as deranged and possibly dangerous kooks. In the case of Saturday’s massive 9/12 protest in Washington, done and done.

“Small protest,” popular lefty blogger Josh Marshall reported from his armchair, as an overflow crowd (at least 100,000, by my rough, unscientific estimate) filled the 1.5 miles between the south White House and the US Capitol, spilling out all over the National Mall and even down the street to Union Station.

Welch goes on to quote the head of a DC-based think tank and, of course, Dowd. When he frames the argument that way (using a liberal blogger, a think-tanker, and a liberal op-ed columnist as the only evidence of media bias) he’s able to make a convincing case that the protest had nothing to do with race and everything to do with the mainstream media keeping the facts from the American people. Well done sir!

Of course we can thank Representative Addison Graves Wilson Sr. (oh, sorry, that’s Joe to his constituents) of “You Lie!” fame for at least some of this belated recognition of racism as the root. The Republican Congressman from the great state of South Carolina was a folk hero at the march on Saturday for allegedly speaking truth to power. There were more than a few “Joe for President” signs. But as Dowd put it better than I can:

The congressman, we learned, belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol and denounced as a “smear” the true claim of a black woman that she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the ’48 segregationist candidate for president.

Joe Wilson is a racist. And so are many of the people that have attended rallies and town halls who are incapable of explaining what it is they are opposed to other than “him”. “Socialism” doesn’t count — especially for Medicare recipients and anyone who lives in the West where life exists in most places only because the Federal government built dams to provide cheap water and cheap power. Glenn Beck and Rush Limbauch are racists of convenience: Spouting thinly-veiled racism earns them huge paychecks (Limbaugh = $38 million/year minimum, Beck = $18 million/year).

Case in point: Beck’s recent regurgitation of a video showing young black men in military camo pants and blue t-shirts doing some sort of drill. Watch it all here. Beck first spent a couple of weeks wondering what these young men were up to back in October (during the last month of the campaign natch) and never quite was able to discover (despite plenty of very quick posts to the web explaining what the video was) that it was a high-school drill team practice. If only they’d been dressed in leotards he would have understood! In fact Beck learned very quickly what the video was and he certainly knows now but he still uses it to conjure up the specter of a secret army of black men ready to help the black president get his way — and give us all health care….

And then there’s that Obama as The Joker poster. Is it an affirmative action success story that a black man is playing the Joker? Or is it a not-very-subtle racist reminder of the not-so-distant past? We report, you decide.

Everyone knows there’s deep-seated racism in America and it’s not just among white people. Latinos, Asians, Blacks, Caribbean-Americans, Indians. There’s racism in every group and in every one of us. Sometimes there’s a lot,  sometimes very little. And that’s what Obama tried to be open about in his groundbreaking speech on race during the campaign. His grandma was a little bit racist and so is he. His point was that racism is alive and well and will never go away unless we acknowledge it, talk about it, and keep it uncovered.

Unfortunately some people have taken that to mean wearing racism on one’s sleeve is a good thing.

The arguments about the relative merits of various plans, the depth of the problem, and even who is most to blame are almost beside the point. Certainly Atul Gawande’s take in the New Yorker’s June 1 issue in which he explained why McAllen, Texas is the nation’s second most expensive health care market is very persuasive in arguing that who pays is much less in important than in how medical care is coordinated. And in a follow-up this past week the New York Times front-paged a story about how McAllen, Texas is — shockers! — among a handful of much larger cities whose “citizens” have donated the most money to Congress in order to influence the health care debate. The story goes on to explain how the very things that Gawande identified as the reasons McAllen’s health care is so expensive have been preserved in the latest version of the House bill. Those doctors are getting a good ROI apparently. So much for reform.

Should we be surprised? Hell no. Harry and Louise may be on the side of reform this time around but the fact that they are back at all is a vivid reminder how incredibly difficult fixing our ridiculous system is. Which is where Obama’s arrogance has made things worse.

We didn’t need Hillary Clinton to tell us that if the U.S. health care system was to really be changed (and it is f*cked up: highest cost in the world producing middling results) a President had to have a war plan. The arguments from doctors, health insurance companies, free-market conservatives, Blue Dog Democrats, and Big Pharma were predictable. Their combined ability to drive the debate should have been worry #1 for the Obama team. ClintonCare was KO’d by a combination of White House hubris and a masterful public relations campaign from opponents. How could Obama not avoid following the same path?

The President apparently believed his mandate and his popularity ratings big enough to magnify his bully pulpit in such a way that he alone could counter the other side. He mistakenly thought that (as did the last Democratic President in the months after he was elected) and having a Democratic Congress was enough. But that was just silly from the start. As multiple reporters have pointed out over the past few months most Americans desperately want the health care system changed — just not in any way that will effect the way it currently works for them. I know that sounds absurd but it’s true.

Americans who have health insurance may complain about the costs but flash a little “socialized medicine” snake oil in front of them and see how fast they switch sides. That’s because even with their co-pays and premiums they don’t really pay anything like the full cost of their health care. Their employers pay a sizable chunk and then that’s subsidized by you and me through an outdated tax credit for health premiums. So Americans are paying twice as much as anyone else — it’s just hidden.

Americans without health insurance — as large and growing a group as that might be — are unfortunately less likely to vote and therefore have less political clout than those with care. So even if they buy into ObamaCare and aren’t persuaded by the RedsCare crowd, they don’t really have the juice to make a difference in the debate.

And look at all those talking heads. Last time around CNN was the only 24/7 cable news network and they actually did news. Now three networks (five if you count CNBC and FBC) spend all day talking about the news instead of the more expensive task of reporting it. Of course all of these fine people who gather to impart their wisdom have generous employer-funded taxpayer-subsidized health plans. In fact the on-air folks at NBC left their union several years back because some rebelled when the union health plan instituted premiums. Yep before 2006 they paid no premiums and they thought that was normal. That’s how out-to-lunch some of these all-day bloviators are.

So in the face of all this readily apparent information what does Obama do? Not a whole lot. His personal appeals and working with Congress aside, the President has done virtually nothing to successfully prepare for, or more importantly, preempt the predictable onslaught. His last minute prime time seminar was too lame too little too late. And so Congress slinks away for the rest of the summer having passed nothing, Obama is left to lick his wounds, and We the People are no closer to having a rational health care system.

Nice going O. The only hope we have is that he seems to learn from his mistakes. Let’s hope the horse hasn’t left the barn.

Starr writes about the long slow decline in Oprah’s ratings for her afternoon syndicated talk show. He notes early on that the show’s numbers are “down by nearly a third, 32 percent, records show” before jumping into the speculation pool for a quick dip of “Why?”

One source suggested she has too many projects and isn’t giving enough of her attention to the show any more. Then Starr hops into the deep end:

Others have speculated that Oprah is seeing an “Obama Backlash” — a reaction against her public endorsement of Barack Obama’s presidential run and her active campaigning for him. It’s not necessarily that people were against Obama, the theory goes. They just did not like the talk-show host taking sides in a political campaign — something she’d never done before. It took away the feeling fans had that somehow Oprah was above the fray.

Hmmm. What a great theory. Except for the part about her ratings dropping for each of the last five years. Oh, yeah, that. Ratings are down 21% for TV’s biggest hit, American Idol since 2006. I’m sure Obama has something to do with that too.

Not that the Post writes about ratings like an industry trade nor should it be expected too but isn’t the more interesting story about Oprah is that even she is not immune to the reality that broadcast television is dying almost as fast as newspapers. Ratings for broadcast television — network, local, and syndicated — have collapsed and with the recession ad revenue has followed. Plenty of people in the industry are talking not about a rebound but a reinvention. Without it broadcast television as a dominant or even significant media force in America will end.

The real deal on Oprah is this: It costs local stations vast sums of money to buy Oprah each week and for years it’s been worth it. Oprah rocked the ratings and delivered those viewers to stations’ local newscasts where they recouped the investment. Not any more. Local news ratings in the 4pm and 5pm time slots have plummeted across the country (so badly at the flagship station for fourth-place NBC that WNBC will kill off the famed “Live at Five” newscast in September and fill the hour with super cheap lifestyle programming) leaving station managers desperate to cut costs.

Oprah’s syndication deal only runs through the 2011 season and she is launching her own cable network next year. The economics — both for local stations and Oprah — dictate that she leave broadcast television in much the way pro sports (other than football) have done.

So when the Post headlines “Game O-ver?” the paper isn’t wrong. It’s just the headline shouldn’t be about Oprah, it should be about broadcast television.