Last night Olby went Kujo on Ted Koppel. Koppel? That nice old news man who once did that dry and somber news show called Nightline? Yep. That Ted Koppel.

In case you missed it, this past Sunday the Washington Post gave the former ABC News anchor a chunk of its Op-Ed page to get something off his chest. Koppel wrote about what’s happened to television news in the last decade or so and what he thinks it means for the country. Playing off the suspension a week earlier of MSNBC’s lefty pitbull Keith Olbermann for giving campaign donations to Democratic candidates, Koppel painted a larger picture of how the opinion-driven cable news networks are bad for democracy. Me and about a thousand other pundit/blogger/experts have said the same thing. He also lamented some golden mythical bygone era of television news as a font of objective, important journalism. Yeah that Camel Caravan sure was a great news program.

But here’s the bit that probably most got under Olby’s skin:

We live now in a cable news universe that celebrates the opinions of Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly – individuals who hold up the twin pillars of political partisanship and who are encouraged to do so by their parent organizations because their brand of analysis and commentary is highly profitable.

Olbermann truly believes that he is different from the likes of Beck and his archnemesis O’Reilly — that he is a journalist digging for truth as opposed to their slinging pure propaganda for their corporate paymaster. Here’s what KO said last night (OK, here’s some of what he said last night since he thought this subject deserved 12 minutes of airtime — I’ve chosen the more salient points):

The great change about which Mr. Koppel wrings his hands is not partisanship nor tone nor analysis. The great change was the creation of the sanitized image of what men like Cronkite and Murrow, and Kaltenborn  and Davis and Daly and Baukhage and Smith and Sevareid and Rather and Jennings and Polk and Koppel did. These were not glorified stenographers. These were not neutral men. These were men who did, in their day, what the best of journalists still try to do in this one, evaluate, analyze, unscramble, assess, put together a coherent picture or a challenging question, using only the facts as they can be best discerned, plus their own honesty and conscience.

——

Insist long enough that the driving principle behind the great journalism of the television era was neutrality and objectivity and not subjective choices and often dangerous evaluations and even commentary, and you will eventually leave the door open to pointless worship at the temple of a false god.

——

But, as long as there are two men, as long as they are fair and balanced, is not the news consumer entranced by the screaming and the fact that his man eventually and always outscreams the other? Is not he convinced that he has seen true journalism, true balance, true objectivity?

I have read and heard much of late including from Mr. Koppel in the Washington Post yesterday about how those who succeeded his grand era of false objectivity are only in it for the money or the fame or the chance to push a political party. Mr. Koppel also implied as others have that the men behind this network saw in the success of Fox News, a business opportunity to duplicate the style but change that content. Mr. Koppel implied that yesterday.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth, and the very kind of fact-driven journalism Mr. Koppel seems to be claiming he represents and I fail, would not stand for his sloppy assumptions and his false equivalence of “both sides do it.”

We do not make up facts here and when we make mistakes we correct them.

Demonstrably so as I have noted repeatedly in this blog. Legions of people watch Olbermann looking for mistakes and a few of them write blog dedicated to that pursuit. Look them over and you’ll find precious little those critics can point to that Olbermann gets wrong factually. But the absence of objective error does not, in Mr. Olbermann’s own construct, mean his show represents an honest reporting of stories. Anyone can align a series of carefully curated facts into an argument. That’s what attorneys do every day. But that doesn’t make them journalists and it doesn’t make the stories they tell true.

In beating up Mr. Koppel Olby goes for the low hanging fruit. The old broadcast news model is dead. I gave a college lecture last night and said the very same thing. I’ve been saying it for a couple of years. The audience is literally dying off as younger people (charitably defined as those under 50 in this case) get their information elsewhere. The problem lies in Olbermann’s belief that MSNBC represents the phoenix rising from the ashes of that old news world. Listen to how he defines what lies before us:

To equate this network with Fox, as Mr. Koppel did, to accuse us of having our own facts is another manifestation of a dangerously simplified understanding of modern news.

In the end Olbermann is simply delusional. Look at his final point:

I may ultimately be judged to have been wrong in what I am doing. Mr. Koppel does not have to wait. The kind of television journalism he eulogizes failed this country because when truth was needed, all we got were facts most of which were lies anyway. The journalism failed, and those who practiced it failed, and Mr. Koppel failed.

I don’t know that I’m doing it exactly right here. I’m trying. I have to. Because whatever that television news was before we now have to fix it. Good night and good luck.

Of course Olbermann worships at the alter of Murrow (“Good night and good luck”) but to equate what he does each night — sifting through facts and cherrypicking those that support the Olbermann world view — with Murrow’s crowning achievements is pure fantasy. Murrow didn’t come to his interviews with one set of facts to the exclusion of all others. His was great journalism because Murrow interviewed people, confronted them with facts and asked them to explain. If people were exposed as fools, knaves or worse, it was with their own words this was accomplished. When was the last time Keith Olbermann had on anyone with whom he disagrees?

Hell isn’t freezing over any time soon methinks.

The problem with Eliot Spitzer being given the seat at CNN in prime time is not that he hired a hooker. Or liked to have sex with his long black dress socks on. It’s that he basically abused his authority as Governor the same way Richard Nixon did as President.

Remember Troopergate? Spitzer’s Administration directed the state police to spy on his archnemesis, Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno. When it came to light Spitzer said he took “full responsibility” for the actions of his staff while proclaiming he knew nothing about what they’d done. Only after he’d resigned with his tail firmly between his legs did it become apparent that he lied.

He’s never answered for that. He’s never allowed himself to be grilled. I think as an act of courage he should bring NY Post Albany bureau chief (and tormentor of Governors) Fred Dicker on the new show as a guest. That would be some great TV.

(Video is in the box to the right.)

I’m mad! I want lower taxes! I’m not doing what the adults tell me to do! I want cookies for breakfast! And I don’t wanna get fat. And of course, I HATE YOU ALL!

The American press loves to place the voter on the highest pedestal. After all our little experiment in (sort of) direct democracy has, on balance, worked out pretty well over the last 230 odd years. But let’s be honest. Voters can be really stupid.

Take the voters of Harlem, for instance, or at least the 44 thousand that showed up Tuesday to ensure that Charlie Rangel would get chance to defend himself against a series of ethics charges brought by the generally reticent-to-act House Ethics Committee. They gave him a huge victory over the (relatively) respectable Adam Clayton Powell IV whose father Rangel beat oh so long ago by running as new blood against the old guard. Last night the new old guard hung on.

Rangel has been accused of, among other things, getting a long-time sweetheart deal for an office in a rent stabilized apartment building — an apartment that could have been used by one of his needy constituents. That kind of abuse of power directly impacting his own voters was not enough to get them to check the box for someone new. You gotta wonder what it would take?

Then there’s the action in “The First State” — Delaware — that has after last night made it the first state in crazy. Delaware Republicans — okay 57,000 of the 183,000 registered Republicans in the state — went big for Christine O’Donnell who besides being very conservative in a fairly moderate state, is as nutty as an Almond Joy. Speaking of joy, she is against masturbation and not afraid to make it a campaign issue. That should be fun.

O’Donnell’s win has all the cable “news” gasbags atwitter. So much to talk about! By beating the GOP party favorite with an endorsement from Sarah Palin she’s a symbol of “Republicans in turmoil” or… since she is so conservative and crazy she can’t win the general election dashing GOP hopes of a Senate seat pickup much to the delight of Democrats or… she represents a real movement that crosses party lines and represents dire threats to both parties. Well how about this: She’s a nut and the 30,000 Republicans who voted for her are stupid, petulant children.

I’m guessing I won’t be a guest speaker at the next Delaware Tea Party dinner.

Don’t get me wrong: I understand why people are angry. I got laid off by a giant money-grubbing corporation 18 months ago and watched with quiet glee as they’ve made one ridiculous error after the next. I’m angry about all the executives there and elsewhere that get big bonuses, excellent health care, lavish expense accounts, generous stock options, and fat paychecks for making shitty decisions at best, and often failing miserably at worst. The people in charge are always eager to talk about people under them taking responsibility for their actions but can’t seem to walk the walk. But let’s get something straight — there’s informed angry and stupid angry and an awful lot of voters seem to be stupid angry.

Like all those seniors who’ve been screaming socialism for the last two years any time anyone so much as mentions the health care reform bill that Obama signed into law. How’s your Medicare gramps? Since you’re opposed to the “government takeover of health care” let’s start dismantling said socialist product by taking away your Medicare card and your ridiculously expensive prescription drug benefit. Otherwise you’re gonna bankrupt your kids and grandkids.

Like all those Westerners who gather at anti-government Tea Party rallies demanding that the government “get off their backs”. Okay. First let’s start charging market prices for all the water that allows Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Wyoming, eastern Washington, Idaho, and New Mexico to support human life as our fat suburban asses know it. All that life-giving, housing-tract-creating water is courtesy of the damn government. And while we’re at it let’s get all those military bases out of the South (where they represent 20%-30% of most states’ economies) since that’s just government getting in the way.

Like all those out-of-work folks in the area formerly known as the Rust Belt and in the Northeast who are still mad about the bank and auto industry bailouts because the government gave away the store to those least in need. Now anyone in either party who supported either is tarred with their “vote for socialism”. Yeah! Because if those damn politicians in Washington hadn’t acted we’d all be so much better off. I know I’d be much happier waiting on soup lines and watching foreclosures reach Florida levels.

Like all of us who complain about our “high taxes” and lap up the “no new taxes” pablum politicians regurgitate with predictable election-year regularity. Yeah taxes are too damn high. So let’s cut those and all that wasteful spending. Like Medicare for seniors. Like the military, which consumed a trillion dollars in the pursuit of “victory” in Iraq. Like the subsidy for homeowner mortgages that are huge giveaways to the wealthy (we could keep them for the real middle class). Like agricultural subsidies that don’t lower prices nor save farm jobs but enrich giant farmbelt corporations. Like the 8 billion a year we send to Israel and Eqypt — let ‘em pay their own way. Like the school systems that still provide a pretty decent education — let families choose private schools and pay for what they think their kids need — or they could home school! And of course let’s do something about Social Security — maybe we could just stop indexing for inflation because after all, seniors are good at clipping coupons and penny-pinching. Or better yet let’s just pay them back what they put in and call it a day. They can live off their juicy 401k accounts.

Stupid angry voters. Fed by gutless politicians and venal, corrupt media outlets that have long ago given up any notion that news ought to be based on facts. Hell, many shows, blogs and stories don’t contain any facts. And yet we drink it in. Like kids who have yet to face the responsibilities of adulthood. Ay but there’s the rub.

As parents and adults we teach kids that life is about choices. Some easy, some hard. But all part of what it means to be a thinking, breathing, responsible citizen of the United States and, I daresay, the planet. You can have ice cream for dinner every night but there will be consequences. You can skip doing your homework but there will be consequences. You can have sex without protection but there will be consequences. You can have temper tantrums and lash out but there will be consequences.

Stupid angry voters meet the consequences of your actions: Incompetent, incapable public servants driven to destruction.

Smart not-so-angry voters meet the consequences of your inactions: See above.

Rupe and His Fox-Funding Terrorist

While I’m an equal opportunity critic of cable “news” I can’t pass up this opportunity to share a clip that offers compelling evidence that Fox is, at times, in the business of completely and utterly lying for the sake of pushing a partisan agenda. Journalism by any standard other than that of Chairman Mao, Josef Stalin, or Big Brother is simply not practiced much of the time at Fox “News”. As I wrote last week, the Not-at-Ground-Zero-not-a-Mosque pseudo controversy  is yet another case of cable “news” and its taboid breathren beating a dead horse in the dog days of August. (Wow! That was a tortured metaphor. But I digress.) This time, though, it’s even worse than you might have imagined.

Of course hypocrisy at Fox or MSNBC or occasionally CNN is nothing new. But in this case it exposes a dangerous pathology most closely resembling pure political propaganda.

Fox viewers are told that certain individuals are akin to dangerous enemies of the state but NOT that these same individuals are also funders of the network. How is that different from the way the Chinese government treats viewers of Chinese state television? How is it different from Big Brother employing Winston Smith at the Ministry of Truth to create a history that serves The Party, not the people?

This is a cancer that is killing our democracy. How can we ever solve any of the incredibly difficult problems we face if our information is served up by craven liars posing as journalists? Fox and its ilk have managed the unthinkable — sowing a level of distrust in the free press never before seen. In Gallup’s annual poll on how Americans think of our major institutions, TV news now falls below banks. Banks! It has been a precipitous slide since 2003 — coincidentally about the time Fox “News” began to take off in the ratings.

Americans aren’t stupid (generally, anyway). We don’t trust the press because so much of it has chased Fox down the rabbit hole of invective and opinion dressed in news drag. MSNBC jettisoned any pretense of being a part of NBC News when it turned to opinion in prime time. CNN, needing to compete, tolerated Lou Dobbs for years and is now pinning its revival on Eliot Spitzer (!?!?). Even the “real” news shows on the networks have fallen victim to fashion, dressing up their evening newscasts and shows like Nightline with breathless cable-style hyperbole and “edge”. And the audience? Vanishing.

As I pointed out last post and many times before, the audience for news on television (let alone newspapers) is disappearing — or dying if you read the stats another way. Every blogger (um…like me), analyst, columnist, seer and critic has poured out reasons why and fixes for the problem. But is is really a problem? Isn’t the real issue journalism and facts versus propaganda and lies?

This isn’t someone else’s problem to fix. If you eat crap everyday it will make you sick (or worse) as Morgan Spurlock so brilliantly demonstrated in Super Size Me. It follows that if you fill your brain with crap everyday it will make you sick as well — sick with the disease of illogical, uninformed, inchoate anger. So STOP watching this shit. If you really want to be a good flag-waving chest-thumping American, do just the tiniest bit of work and QUESTION WHAT THESE BASTARDS ARE TELLING YOU! Sometimes they’re reporting facts. Sometimes not. Don’t be a passive slug.

First off sorry about the verrrrry long lapse in postings. As I recently explained to a follower of Get Real, the whole point of this blog was not just to spout off but to bring facts to bear on the issues and arguments we often are drowning in. That means it can take a few hours to write each post and frankly, I haven’t had the time lately. I gotta make a living and running a media production company is more than a full-time job. (Obvious plug opportunity: Please visit us at dedappermedia.com and check out our new service at vidlab101.com). But then the news bug bites so hard I can’t resist. So for this fleeting moment I am back.

This whole “debate” about the Islamic center in Lower Manhattan had me recalling (not so fondly) what has become an annual rite of August. In my business August was always a slow news month in which producers yearned for a big story to rescue them from their torpor. At some point though news producers stopped waiting and hoping and began acting. We’ll find a dead horse and beat it.

Who can forget the summer of 2001 when Chandra Levy dominated the news — and not just cable news? Her story was a mainstay of the nightly network newscasts and even received significant coverage in the New York Times and Washington Post (where it was, at least, arguably a local story). Then there was the summer of 2003. The swiftboating of John Kerry was that August’s main course lead by Fox News but then picked up by everyone else. Last summer was all about the death panels coccooned deep within the heath care reform bill. And now we have the “Ground Zero Mosque.”

What’s become increasingly apparent with each passing August is that cable news networks should no longer be referred to as “news” networks. News used to mean a measured reporting of facts — because once upon a time back in the Age of Reason western civilization recognized that facts actually mattered. No more.

Now instead of having journalists go dig and interview and report, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day is filled with “experts” — a term now loosely applied to anyone who is reasonably telegenic, able to spit out invective on cue, and lacking any doubt in his or her righteousness. So rather than having journalists uncover the fact that Congressman Gary Condit apparently did NOT kill Chandra Levy, or that the Swift Boat ads were wholly untrue, or that there was no provision to off grandma in the health care bill, or that the “Ground Zero Mosque” is neither at ground zero nor a mosque, the cable “news” networks simple repeat lies as often as necessary to fill their vast voids of time.

Calling Fox or MSNBC a “news” network is about as accurate as calling whole grain Pringles (check ‘em out!) a health food. Any resemblance to the real thing is pure fantasy.

Further, this particular story is an especially egregious example of how partisan political narrative is hijacking just about everything in this country. Start wit the obvious FACTS:

1. It is not a mosque — it is an Islamic Center. See no difference? I guess you think a Catholic school is a church then.

2. It’s not at Ground Zero — it is two blocks away. For those of you unfamiliar with Lower Manhattan two blocks can be a different neighborhood entirely. For instance there’s a dirty sex club two blocks from Ground Zero.

3. Islam did not bring down the World Trade Center or fly a plane into the Pentagon. Terrorists did. Yes, they were Muslim but so what? Timothy McVeigh was a terrorist who happened to be Christian. Should we ban any Christian church from anywhere near the Oklahoma City bombing site? (Full disclosure: I am a family member of a OKC victim.) Or maybe since James Knopp killed Dr. Bernard Slepian in a fit of rage motivated by Knopp’s radical Christian beliefs any Christian church proposed for construction around Buffalo should be prevented. Let’s be honest about this: Opposition using this argument is quite simply anti-Muslim. I’m guessing hypersensitive Catholic Bill O’Reilly might devote a segment or two to me as an anti-Christian zealot if I opposed a church in Oklahoma City.

4. Who cares if “the families” don’t want it built? Seriously.

This is where we tread on delicate soil. From the start the families of victims have been given a lot of deference at every stage of the recovery, design and rebuilding processes. And for good reason. Their pain is by definition more acute than those of us who were there, or watched on TV. But they aren’t a “they.” I covered lots of stories with family angles while working at WNBC for a eight years after 9/11 and I’ve talked to a lot of family members. A couple of things you should know.

First, the ones who talk on camera and to reporters may represent the sentiments of some faction of families but not all. Second, many of those who put themselves out front have political motives (“It was Clinton’s fault! It was Bush’s fault! Giuliani is a hero! Giuliani is a goat!). Third the vast majority of the people who lost relatives do not speak to reporters and have not been polled in any real sense. They have moved on. Finally think about how many family members there are.

About 2800 people died in the towers and on the two planes that brought them down. If each victim had an average of three direct family members that’s almost 9000 family members right there. But add in the in-laws, parents, grandchildren who are sometimes speak to the media as family members and you’ve got tens of thousands of people who might legitimately be called family members of the victims. They are not a bloc. They do not share a single common goal or belief structure. I imagine if you could poll them you’d find a pretty similar pattern of belief about any given issue as you would the general population of the tri-state area.

So why should all of these peoples’ opinions be more important than those of, say, the tens of thousands of workers who have to walk through, around, or past Ground Zero every business day? Or the residents of Tribeca, Lower Manhattan and Battery Park City? The crutch of finding one or two people who lost a loved one on 9/11 who happen to share the ideological bent of the storyline as presented by Fox or MS is really old and dishonest. But honesty, like facts, have largely vanished from the cable “news” world.

Recently I was talking to someone about these networks and the idea that what is presented is not in any way, shape or form news. He, like many others outside the business, didn’t recognize that neither Fox nor MSNBC air actual reports any more. Television news was once the place where journalists went to locations to find facts, interview people with local expertise, and then write a report that helped viewers better understand a piece of their world through narrative. No longer. Not on cable.

Now reporters — when they appear at all — pop up in front of a camera to talk. Maybe you’ll get some video or a sound bite but not a carefully reported and crafted report that is the product of experience, time and effort. Not on your life. That costs money. Sending out a reporter, photographer and producer in order to create a 2 or 3 minute taped piece long ago was left to the nightly network shows. Cable won’t spend that kind of money. Sticking people in front of cameras and then sparking an argument fills far more time far more cheaply. That facts are not a part of most of these “discussions” doesn’t seem to bother the bosses or the relatively small audiences that tune in to Fox or MS all day long.

(Yes, they are small. Ratings are all relative so when you hear about Fox winning big it still means they have fewer than a million people watching at any given hour during the daytime. Prime time is a bit different but the biggest show still only gets about 3 million on a good night. Low-rated teen dramadies on the CW do better.)

I left out CNN only because with their huge staff of journalists around the world along with international channels the network does try and work in actual stories during the day. Not as many as they used to and the producers there love a chat fest as much as their competitors but at least CNN still sort of tries. Nonetheless the “mosque” story has been covered ad naseum at CNN as well and without much more regard for facts.

And so here we are with the Fourth Estate that our Founders saw as a critical watchdog against tyranny, instead being as venal and petty as the politicians they seek to demonize. Cravenly serving up whatever mindless nonsense that will draw in a few hundred thousand retirees with free time on their hands.

We deserve better. But until we demand it, we get what we pay for: August bullshit.

Chief Justice John Marshall: Not Enough "Experience"?

The one thing supporters and opponents of Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court should agree on is this: it’s about time we had some non-judges on the high court…again.

The history of the Supreme Court is one filled with brilliant (and some not-so-brilliant) members who had never been judges before being confirmed. That was once considered not only normal, but a good thing. The non-judges have been some of the most remarkable names in the Court’s long history: Marshall, Brandeis, Frankfurter, Rehnquist, Warren. Thirty-seven other justices were part of the “not-a-judge” club. They brought a different view from that forged by a career in robes and, whether you agreed with their reasoning on individual cases, you could not argue that their perspectives were valuable.

Some, like Alabama Senator Hugo Black, President William Taft, and California Governor Earl Warren brought the political experience of elected office. Their frame of reference was not a narrowly legalistic one but rather one that incorporated the give-and-take of the public will. Others, like Attorney General Harlan Stone, corporate attorney Lewis Powell, and NAACP chief counsel Thurgood Marshall saw the law in ways that were deeply informed by their varied careers.

This was once considered a benefit — the idea that the nine (men) would deliberate and debate using the experiences they brought to the Court was thought to be the essence of the uniquely powerful and independent American judiciairy. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote:

The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics. In order to know what it is, we must know what it has been, and what it tends to become.

Currently all nine members of the Court were not only circuit court judges but appellate court judges as well. They’re all steeped in the Federal judiciary, for better or worse. Amidst the predictable arguments from Kagan’s opponents — she’s a nutty liberal anti-military lesbian — her lack of judicial experience seems a pretty dumb thing to pick on. That didn’t stop the president of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center Ed Whelan from going in whole hog:

Kagan may well have less experience relevant to the work of being a justice than any justice in the last five decades or more. In addition to zero judicial experience, she has only a few years of real-world legal experience. Further, notwithstanding all her years in academia, she has only a scant record of legal scholarship.

All of which is true…of Kagan and the late William Rehnquist. Rehnquist — arguably the first justice to vigorously push a newly-developoing hard-right legal philosophy into the Supreme Court’s deliberations — was a darling of conservatives. But his resume was as “thin” as Kagan’s and arguably more troubling if “real-world” experience is what you’re after.

Out of Stanford Law in 1952 Rehnquist clerked for Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. It was there he wrote a controversial brief arguing that Plessy v Ferguson was “right and should be affirmed.” You may recall from 8th grade history that Plessy was the 1896 ruling in which the Court declared that racial segregation was perfectly constitutional under the theory that “separate but equal” accommodations were enough to satisfy the law. And that was pretty much that in terms of Rehnquist’s judicial legal experience.

He moved to Phoenix and was a private practice attorney who worked with the state’s Republican Party including Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. When Richard Nixon was elected he brought Rehnquist to Washington and installed him in the Attorney General’s office as essentially the AG’s legal counsel. Two years later Nixon placed him on the Court. While 26 Senators voted against him — including two Republicans — no one said he didn’t have enough judicial or legal experience.

The truth is Supreme Court nominations are now primarily political battles. Certainly Nixon faced something similar when his first two picks for the Court were rejected by the Senate but his next choice — Lewis Powell — was confirmed 89-1. That kind of vote wasn’t so rare all the way into the early 90s. As incredible as it seems now, uber-conservative Antonin Scalia was confirmed 98-0. Not one Democrat voted against the most provocatively conservative nominee in a generation. (OK Robert Bork was probably more provocative but still, 98-0???).

And so it should surprise no one that conservatives are bust trying to define the nominee just as they tried to do with Sonia Sotomayor and liberals did with Bork. The game is well known and it is on. The right is gonna have to do better than “she’s not been a judge” though. I’m betting they run with the gay thing. Let’s see how that works for them….

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.

Back up to this past winter when Paterson’s amateur-hour handling of his pick to replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate left just about everyone slack-jawed. He managed to piss of anyone connected to the Kennedys (not an insignificant body of people especially in the Democratic Party) by publicly dissing and embarrassing Caroline Kennedy before doing precisely what the White House didn’t want him to do — pluck newly-reelected Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand from her very Republican district thereby allowing the GOP to score a quick victory just months after Obama’s sweeping win. Fortunately for Dems the GOP in New York is even more dysfunctional than they are and managed to lose what should have been a sure win.

That gave New Yorkers a taste of the Governor’s incompetence. He then inexplicably fed that perception over the next couple of months by failing to exert any leadership over the Legislature as it’s members descended into chaos. Ever since Paterson’s poll numbers have been in the dumps and we’ve talked a lot about it here, here, and here. In fact all along we’ve said despite his disasterous ratings — even among African-Americans — Paterson was probably safe from a primary challenge unless a major African-American politician broke from supporting him.

Enter Barack Obama.

But why? Why would Obama care enough at this stage to get involved in New York’s local politics? He’s not from here. He doesn’t need help from a New York Governor. The election isn’t until 2010 when Congresssional elections will surely dominate the political storyline. So why?

Enter Chuck Schumer.

Several people close to Paterson and Schumer say this has Chuck’s fingerprints all over it. Schumer was the one who first mentioned Gillibrand and eventually got his way. Chuck is the one who in two terms heading the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee brought his party first into the majority and then made it filibuster-proof. Chuck is the (not so) hidden power center in the Senate. And Chuck doesn’t want to deal with a Governor heading the ticket in 2010 that could bring it all crashing down.

You see Senator Gillibrand is up for election in 2010 too and her poll numbers are only so-so despite her spreading a heavy dose of Chuck’s media magic across the Empire State. If Paterson is in trouble on top — especially if Rudy Giuliani were to run as he has been threatening — Gillibrand could be collateral damage. Meaning Chuck’s choice — Chuck’s bluest of blue states — could be the one that yields the filibuster-proof majority.

And so he called in the big gun to try and ease Paterson out. Unfortunately the Governor has other ideas and our sources say he is the one who leaked the story creating blowback on Obama and Schumer (neither of whom he is all that fond of anyway). So now Paterson can say he’s running and he’s standing up to pressure from his own party because he puts the people of New York first. Blah blah blah.

Michael Steele’s unchecked inanity aside (the Times lets the RNC Chairman get away with this: “I think Governor Paterson’s numbers are about the same as Governor Corzine’s numbers, and yet the president was with Governor Corzine and I don’t know whether there’s been a request for Governor Corzine to step down in New Jersey….” Corzine is down by 8, Paterson is down by 20), Obama should not have let himself be drawn into this mess this early. Worse, he got smacked by the woefully undertalented Paterson.

Nonetheless Paterson and the Democrats have real problems. Watch Charlie Rangel. If he starts spending private time with Paterson the feckless Governor may yet find himself with an ambassadorship to Fiji.