FunctionalAmbivalent

A Brief Reminder of My Great Wisdom and Prescience

The Weather Channel sold over the weekend to NBC. The price was not disclosed, but the number $5 billion has been bandied about, probably incorrectly.

I was in the television business when the weather channel premiered, and I mocked it smugly as the stupidest idea I'd ever heard.

"What's next," I said self-importantly, "the Back Yard Channel? 'Live from your backyard! See the grass grow! The wind blow through the trees.' How about reruns of a summer afternoon during the winter? The Weather Channel. This is the stupidest idea I've ever heard!"

Yeah, well: the Weather Channel is now mandatory on every cable system in the country. Its website, weather.com, is right up there atop my very own browser favorites list. I check it several times a day, and it reports to me the conditions on my favorite golf courses. I know people who watch it for hours at a time.

Notably, I'm no longer in the TV business.

Ultimately, the Decision Came Down To This: It's My Blog and I Can Do Whatever I Want With It

The "Delta's Number 1 News Team" from WABG in Greenville, Mississippi. Among the stories archived on the WABG website: a feature on rising fast food prices. The news team displays enormous understanding of Soviet-style economics when it reports that the Greenville Burger King has raised the price of a Whopper by 11 cents because demand for Whoppers is down. Watch here.

If This Means There Won't Be As Many of Those Maudlin 'Up Close and Personal' Features, Count Me a Commie

At an acrimonious meeting in Beijing, broadcasters complained that the Chinese bureaucracy is cramping their style.

With time running out before the games open on Aug. 8, the minutes (of the meeting) hint that procedures broadcasters have used in other Olympics are conflicting with China’s authoritarian government. Some plans are months behind schedule, which could force broadcasters to compromise coverage plans.

In keeping with the bureaucratic traditions of communist countries everywhere, Chinese officials asked the broadcasters to put their complaints in writing.

They Were Considering "Beating Victim" and "Historical Footnote" But Decided Just To Leave the Space Blank

On the cast list for the second season of VH1's Celebrity Rehab, everyone has an explanation of what they did to become a celebrity except Rodney King.

Liberal Media Watch: He Ought To know

Former Bush Administration press secretary Scott McClellan notes that the media were too soft on the President during the run-up to the Iraq War:

“If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”

I'm leaving comments open so conservatives can complain some more about Dan Rather.

A Portrait of the Old Fart as a Young Man

In Which We Survey a Small Slice of Our Changing Economy, and Bid It Good Riddance

CNN and CareerBuilder team-up to provide a glimpse of jobs that are disappearing. Among those careers that appear to be disappearing, there is this:

8. Radio and television announcers

Why it's evolving:
New technology and advancement of other media sources like satellite radio and syndicated programming means less need for radio and TV announcers.
Salary: $36,120
Decline rate: 8 percent

With the exception of a tiny elite, radio announcing has always been a bad job. The pay is low, job security is non-existent, and climbing the career ladder requires movement to bigger markets every couple of years. The only people who thrive in that environment are heartless mercenaries, complete whores who will do anything for money and complain the whole time that life's treating them unfairly.

That's one of the reasons I hated dealing with voice talent. There were literally hundreds of people who were drawn to the trade by some imagined glamor. They all had professional training from the kind of schools that advertise on matchbooks, and were desperately looking for work. Almost all had other jobs and, if you cast them, you had to work around their schedules. And then they'd go all prima dona on you once you'd get them into the studio.

When I was working for the advertising agency, I landed a client who wanted a series of radio ads. I don't even remember what the ads were for; it may have been a political campaign. Anyway, it wasn't a big job, so I cast the thing from a demo CD the production studio provided, talent they'd worked with before and who would work cheap. The guy I eventually cast turned out to be a copywriter at another ad agency that had competed for the same commercial production deal. All through the recording he was bitching about the copy -- which I had written -- claiming that the spots they'd pitched to the client had been much, much better, and that we must have got the contract because we knew someone.

Another time, I cast a woman to do a series of radio spots for a chain of jewelry stores. The spots worked well, and the next thing you know the client wants to do television. So we cut a deal with the radio voice to do the TV commercials, and we hauled her and the crew out of town to a shoot at a mall in Ohio somewhere. She spent the whole day convincing the client that I was overcharging for the commercials, and that her brother's production company could do the job better and cheaper. Two weeks after we delivered the TV spots the client jumped ship, taking their half-million-dollars-a-year account to the announcer's brother's company. Three weeks after that the same woman showed up at an open casting call I was conducting, and got pissed when I wouldn't let her audition.

So, as you can probably guess, I'm not all that concerned about a shortage of radio announcing careers.

Liberal Media Watch: They'll Get To It As Soon As They Give the Teresa Heinz Kerry Treatment To McCain's Wealthy Wife, Who Refuses To Release Her Financial Information

John McCain is against government health care.

(It would) replace the inefficiency, irrationality, and uncontrolled costs of the current system with the inefficiency, irrationality, and uncontrolled costs of a government monopoly. We'll have all the problems, and more, of private health care -- rigid rules, long waits and lack of choices, and risk degrading its great strengths and advantages including the innovation and life-saving technology that make American medicine the most advanced in the world.

That's interesting, because John McCain knows a lot about government healthcare.

Born the son of a Navy admiral, he was cared for by Navy physicians during his childhood. After graduating from high school, he enrolled in the U.S. Military Academy, and the military's care continued until he retired from the service in 1981. In 1982, he won a seat in Congress, ushering him into the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program, and in 2001, he qualified for Medicare. When he says, "we have the highest quality of health care in the world in America," he is speaking as a man who has enjoyed a lifetime of government-run care.

McCain loves his government healthcare, but he'd deny it to others because it's so bad.

I await the media outcry over McCain's obvious hypocrisy.

The Pennsylvanian Era of Primary Coverage

Just a quick word about last night's primary coverage on the cable nets: Hands-down, MSNBC had the worst. Their dependence on in-house resources gave everything a familiar, redundant feeling. And every time they did a split screen with Chris Matthews and Tim Russert, I felt like I was watching one of those movies where Eddie Murphy plays all the roles. I'm still not convinced Matthews and Russert are different people. Whats' the chance that a single network is going to have two anchors with identical, enormous heads? Close to zero, I'd guess.

MSNBC's coverage is the most formulaic on television. It's like watching a bad sitcom pilot, where you recognize all the roles even if the actors are new. There's the zany friend. There's the whacky next-door neighbor. Here comes the love interest. Oh look! Tom Brokaw is playing Walter Cronkite!

Fox and CNN were both better. They took the same basic approach to coverage, which was to assemble a panel of interesting points of view and let their anchors talk to those people rather than to each other. Fox, of course, stacked the deck heavily with righties, but that's their marketing strategy: The Crackpot Network. They do it well, though I still marvel at how consistently wrong Bill Kristol is. Why does he work? Does he fill some kind of grinning gnome quota?

There is no question but that Fox has the best designers in the business. I hadn't seen the Time Tunnel set-up before, and it was way cool. (That's the virtual set where words stream to a vanishing point far behind the anchor.) And somehow everything on Fox just seems more vivid, as if they've juiced the color saturation to the point where it damages monitors. If I had a couple of hundred thousand dollars sitting around with nothing to do, I'd commission a study to see if the habitual watching of Fox burns out TVs faster than watching normal television. My hypothesis is that it does.

I give the overall edge to CNN, though to be honest I changed the channel every time Wolf Blitzer came on screen, so I missed a lot of their coverage. I seriously don't understand why Blitzer is even on television. Shouldn't he be in a back room somewhere, talking on a HAM radio? I bet he was 30 before he got laid, and that was an un-fulfilling coupling with the fat girl over in ad sales. She's out there somewhere today, watching Wolf on TV and thinking she can't ever, ever tell anyone she slept with such a nerd.

In the non-Wolf portion of the program, CNN outdid Fox with two panels, one slightly behind the other on the set. I guess there must have been some logic as to who sat on which panel (network reporters to the front, guest pundits to the rear!) but I wasn't able to figure it out. The panel keeper, whose name escapes me at the moment because I really don't care, would drift from one to the other kind of at random.

CNN can dish out a fair amount of conventional wisdom itself, but seemed the winner for the night if for no other reason than their choice of panelists. The MVP (Most Valuable Pundit) was Bill Bennett, who has impressed me all through this primary season. He seems to have understood Obama from the beginning, and it scares me now that he thinks Obama is badly damaged, that the various scandalous episodes have successfully separated the candidate from the middle class voters he's going to need. It's the same thing lots of other people are saying, but Bennett's been sensible all along and he's either gone back to the right wing Kool Aid or it's going to be a long fall for Democrats.

The reality is, primary coverage is hard because there's not a lot to talk about. Last night huge newsteams had to stretch a single state's results into five hours of coverage. Once a couple of things were established -- Hillary wins by ambiguous margin -- everything else is just chatter, and chatter, and chatter about exactly the same thing. It was like watching someone rewrite a technical manual, saying the same thing over and over again, slightly differently. And, given the dynamics of the Democratic race, it's the same conversation they've been having for the last four months.

So, to be honest, by 9:00 I was drifting out of politics and on to more important things: Comedy and attractive women playing golf. Tuesday night is my favorite television night, with reruns of The Office stacked up on TBS and The Big Break over on the Golf Channel. That, in my world, passes as excitement, and there was no way Wolf Blitzer was going to lure me away for long. 

Again, Tell Me Again About the Liberal Media Again

In reporting on the finances of the remaining candidates for the White House, supposedly liberal media outlet CNN used the combined incomes of Barack and Michelle Obama and of Hillary and Bill Clinton, but did not include in John McCain's income that of his wife, Cindy, who is chairman of a diversified holding company, her share of which is reportedly worth around $100-million.

It's impossible to say what Cindy McCain's net worth is with any real confidence, since she has refused to release financial records. When Teresa Heinz Kerry did the same thing four years ago, the media were in an uproar. As of now, the media's level of outrage with McCain is close to zero, because the media love John McCain and are blind to his foibles.

I look forward to Rush Limbaugh's repeated tirades about Republican's hiding their wealth from America.