Now, Dish is trying to make the TV commercial completely avoidable.  They are introducing a DVR that, among other things, can automatically skip all commercials — no fast forwarding necessary.  It’s called Ad Hop, and is part of their ‘Hopper’ (the subject of this great ad).  Sounds great, but the problem is, it will ultimately cost you money.

As Les Moonves of CBS asked (rhetorically):  ”How am I going to produce CSI for $4 million without ads?”  He can’t.  Neither can AMC produce Mad Men, nor ABC Modern Family, nor ESPN Sportscenter.  The vast majority of television content — even that on YouTube and Hulu — relies on ad dollars.  Broadcast of course, is in the unenviable position of being totally dependent.   In the short term, ad skipping tightens the noose on the traditional broadcasters especially, which generate almost all of their cash in ad dollars.  Less money for them means cheaper programming — hello even more reality TV!   the question is, if these ad dollars go away, or erode further, where will the money to produce these shows come from?

The answer, ultimately, is you.  The only other big source of dollars to underwrite big, quality TV programs is subscriber fees — the money that distributors like Dish, Direct, Comcast and Time Warner pay networks for the rights to air their channels (i.e. Comcast pays ESPN $XX to carry their channel).  So if advertising on TV declines, the likelihood is that eventually, subscriber fees will go up.  Then, the cable or satellite will pass along those costs to the consumer.  

So while skipping commercials sounds good, in the end, its likely going cost you money eventually.

Bowl-Bound Schools Spend Millions on Football
AP, 12/30/10

Lobbyists Won Key Concessions in Budget Deal
NY Times, 4/12/11

Elizabeth Edwards Leaves John Edwards Out of her Will
politico.com, 1/5/11

McConaughey Has Amazing Body
Denver Post Video Feature, 6/19/11

Columbia Student Admits Selling Cocaine on Campus
New York Times, July 20, 2011

Poll: Sharp dissatisfaction with D.C.
Washington Post, 8/11/11

UPDATED 10/31:
Kim Kardashian divorcing husband
Yahoo News, 10/31/11

We sent a team from HDNet World Report — the show I produce — to Egypt to see how the transition from dictatorship to democracy was progressing. Correspondent Maura Axelrod and cameraman Lucian Read were continually harassed; at one point they were literally chased by an angry mob of conservative Muslims threatening violence (Maura and Lucian were saved from harm by a group of more moderate Egyptians who gave them refuge in a mosque).

But that’s not the disturbing part. What is disturbing is that the new Egypt might end up being worse than the old Egypt in important ways. Religious tolerance and women’s rights, especially, seem to be moving backwards, and fast.

“It Will Continue … “

For centuries in Egypt, Coptic Christians, the largest religious minority, and the Muslim majority have lived in relative peace. But since the January revolution, there has been a troubling uptick in sectarian violence. Churches have been burned, young people on both sides killed. Some of the worst violence has taken place in Imbaba, a teeming Cairo slum where Christians and Muslims live in extreme proximity to each other. In May, a street fight broke out that left two churches heavily damaged and fifteen people dead. Longstanding tensions and animosity are bubbling up in this uncertain time, after being held in check for decades by the Mubarak police state.

The question is, who is inciting this violence? One thing that both sides agree on is that ‘outsiders’ were present during the riots. “There were huge numbers of people from outside that [local residents] didn’t know and didn’t recognize,” says Dr. H.A. Hellyer, a widely respected Egyptian expert on ethnic relations in the Middle East. “Why were they there and how did they come there? We have eyewitness reports that elements of what used to be the security apparatus in Egypt where there.” Hellyer speculates that members of the former regime may be seeking to foment sectarian strife, making the security situation so bad that Egyptian voters, who head to the polls in September, long for the ‘good old days’ of stability — if not freedom.

Is the Army complicit in an effort to strategically destabilize Egyptian society? Many we met believe so, since during the Imbaba violence and other riots, army units refused to intervene for hours, acting only after the damage was done, and lives lost. “They were just standing there as if useless. They are just useless I am sorry to say,” a Coptic woman who lost her son in the Imbaba fighting told us through tears. A human rights organization recently went so far as to blame the Army’s inaction for the deaths in Imbaba.

A local Coptic priest was asked if he worried the violence that killed seven of his parishioners would continue. He replied, “Yes, it will continue… the Muslim people promised us, ‘just wait, we will burn every christian house in the neighborhood.’

Women in the ‘New’ Egypt

Despite the integral role played by women and feminist groups in the January revolution, women are now largely being shut out of the nation-building transition. There are no women on the committee that is re-writing the constitution. “We feel we are betrayed,” Fatima Khafaghi, a prominent feminist, told us. During the January uprising, “it was the most positive gender relations that all of us have seen, how men respected women, how they work together,” she said. “We saw we are really entering a new era where the gender relations are different again with no discrimination, no differences.” How wrong she was.

A march in Tahrir Square, Cairo, for women's rights earlier this Summer

Egypt remains a deeply misogynist country. For women, being groped by strangers is a common occurrence. Female genital mutilation, long banned, is still common. However, under the Mubarak regime, women enjoyed more freedom than their Saudi or Kuwaiti sisters. Any hope that the modest progress made by women in Egypt might accelerate post-revolution seems a naive dream now, though. The Muslim Brotherhood, the dominant party in Egypt, is now seeking a rollback in the so-called “Suzanne Mubarak Laws” (so named for Egypt’s former first lady, the laws’ champion). These laws allow women to divorce their husbands, outlaw child marriage, and give mothers protection in custody disputes. The Brotherhood, however, says it needs no “imported” laws like these. Sharia law is enough to protect women, they say.

“Virginity Tests”

The level of brutality that Egyptian women can face was exemplified by the shocking attack on several women who were arrested during a peaceful march on, ironically, International Women’s Day, in March. More shocking is the lack of any consequences for those who did it.

As they marched on Tahrir Square, enduring the taunts and threats of counter-protesters (male and female), several women’s rights activists were arrested and dragged into the nearby Egyptian Museum by military police. There, they were restrained and subjected to so-called ‘virginity tests,’ which is simply a horrifying euphemism for a probing, sexual assault.

“Virginity tests alone are a form of torture. Of course I would doubt anyone would disagree with me there,” said Shahira Aboullail, an influential activist and blogger who spoke to many of the victims. “They told us they would keep the windows and doors open to further humiliate them… and these were veiled girls and they were… I can’t imagine what must have been going through their minds when they were taken to and in our museum of all places, in our sacred museum where people from all over the globe come to see, you know, the greatness of the ancient Egyptian culture! This is where you decide to torture people?”

Perhaps most troubling is the fact that no one has been arrested for these crimes, nor is there even an investigation.

Despite all this, Fatima Khafaghi isn’t giving up on improving the lives of Egyptian women. “It seems the military council only reacts when there is a million people in Tahrir; we’ll be a million women in Tahrir very soon. We’re telling them ‘No, we are powerful and you have to treat us with respect as full participants with full citizenship rights. We’re not going to take it anymore.’”

There is still a Revolution happening in Egypt. Its outcome, far from certain.

Below are two clips from our World Report stories:

First, the estimable Ted Koppel decries the undeniable fact that the TV news business, over the last couple of decades, has become a profit-driven enterprise. Because of this, ‘real news’ on television is dead, causing great sadness to Koppel, and, it would seem, everyone who values a free and open society.

article here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/12/AR2010111202857.html

The elephant in the room, however, is Koppel’s role in creating the very system he now decries. Koppel came of age in an era in which newsmen like him could become wealthy. Really wealthy. Why? Because they were the best at what they did, and they were in a business that was making money. With all due respect to Ted, and he is due a lot, it is disingenuous for him to simply neglect owning up to the fact that he was part of, and profited from, the very system which he now says is causing the ‘death’ of ‘real news.’

In many ways, the modern era of TV journalism began with Roone Arledge, the legendary president of ABC News, who reigned from 1977 to 1998. Roone built ABC News into a powerhouse by hiring, developing and promoting news ‘stars.’ The shows became vehicles for these stars, rather than pure news programs. At ABC News there was, by the early ’90s, the so-called Magnificent 7 — Roone’s stable of news stars that had begun making lots of money for its parent company, Capital Cities. They were an impressive group. In addition to Koppel, they were: Peter Jennings, Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters, Sam Donaldson, David Brinkley, and Hugh Downs. Roone also wrestled the hugely profitable Good Morning America away from the entertainment division in ’93-’94. He got Brinkley from NBC and put him on Sunday mornings, where he ended up dominating (and making lots of money) for years. After putting Barbara in primetime on 20/20, he launched PrimeTime Live (Sam and Diane) and Turning Point (with Diane, Barbara, and Meredith Viera).

Thus, ABC News became the envy of the broadcast journalism world.

This was all before Disney bought ABC News, by the way. Capital Cities, now largely forgotten, had long since recognized that news could equal profit, and Dan Burke and Tom Murphy, who ran the company, were willing to pay stars like Jennings, Koppel and Sawyer top dollar to keep it that way. The pressure to make money pre-dated Disney’s purchase of ABC, but it did seem to intensify thereafter.

Koppel recounts a visit to Nightline’s Washington offices by Michael Eisner, who deeply offended Koppel and his staff by comparing Nightline’s journalists to Disney’s ‘cast memebrs’ who worked at Disneyworld. Koppel vowed to fight any possible cuts to his staff tooth and nail. He indignantly quizzes Eisner, mentioning several names and asking the CEO if he had heard of any of them. He hadn’t. They were correspondents and producers who risked their lives, he said … did Goofy do that? At the time, Ted was making, I’d guess, at least $5 million a year.

Many of us at ABC wondered then, if Ted feels so passionately about this, how about taking a pay cut? Say, agreeing to have his salary reduced to $2 million — and pouring that money back into the show? Sure, Disney likely would have balked at such a suggestion, but we didn’t see any of the anchors stepping up to try to inject some sanity into the news division’s balance sheets by taking less money when their contracts came up. I’m not even saying they should have — after all, if the market can bear it, they should get theirs. Capitalism pure and simple. But to complain about the fact that news divisions being asked to be profit centers for public companies (whose loyalty by law must be to its shareholders) is not a little hypocritical.

The other Washington Post article was about checkbook journalism, which was an exercise in faulty conflation and astonishing naivete for a media writer for a major newspaper.

see the article here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/16/AR2010111606539.html

Paul Farhi calls the move into ‘checkbook journalism’ by mainstream media outlets as some brand-new phenomenon … another sign, presumably, of the decline of true journalism. Seriously Paul? This is a new trend?

No, this has been happening for many, many years. The broadcast networks have long made shady deals like the ones described … like paying for the use of personal photographs, and ‘coincidentally’ getting the interview along with the payment. Doesn’t make it right, but the nets have long been completely disingenuous about this, and anyone paying attention knows this already.

The second problem with this article is that it equates paying for interviews, either directly or indirectly, with paying for video or other newsworthy material. Farhi uses Gizmoto’s purchase of the lost iphone 4 as an example of this ‘questionable’ practice. Problem is, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with paying for video or other material, as long as the provenance has been established, and said material isn’t stolen, etc. Certainly, after 9/11, the networks spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying video from amateur photographers who captured the attacks on their personal cameras. This is common practice. In the age of ubiquitous cameras and so-called ‘citizen journalism,’ it will become more and more common. And it is totally different than paying for an interview, where the person being interviewed might be motivated to slant their testimony for $$.

Mark Cuban has written about this persuasively. (Yes, I work for Mark) After attending the Vimeo Film Festival and Awards in NYC a couple of weeks ago, I am more convinced than ever that individual content creators need to focus on to creating some kind of real value (monetary) for their work by insisting on posting / sharing only where the host will share real revenue, lest they be forever at the mercy of big companies that will simply take advantage of their unintended, and unrequited, generosity.

The Vimeo event was full of contradictions. Here are young artists celebrating the video democracy and egalitarianism at the curvaceous Frank Gehry-designed headquarters of IAC, Barry Diller’s internet behemoth. Here were the champions and creators of free content, young filmmakers, animators, graphic artists, etc., paying good money for a conference hosted by a company that is already making money from them — by aggregating creative works without paying for it, and selling advertising based on the traffic the content drives. The only value-added Vimeo provides is hosting (and their search engine stinks).

Here is Lawrence Lessig and DJ Spooky arguing for expansive interpretations of the fair-use doctrine, in the same building where Tina brown toils at the Daily Beast with her highly-paid writers, along with a myriad other copyrighted and trademarked web properties, who presumably would not take the lifting and re-use of their content kindly (the general counsel of Vimeo wouldn’t answer whether Vimeo’s liberal view of fair-use applies to other IAC properties).

Trolling through Vimeo, one is amazed at the quality of the work. Many filmmakers hope that their work will be noticed and they will get their ‘big break.’ The problem is, very few do, partially because the market for paid video content is being cannibalized by the very sites they are posting to! Some small number of creators will ‘win the lottery’ and actually get paid. Most of these payments will be pittances, and won’t be recurring. Meanwhile, Vimeo and its sister sites sell advertising and promotions in aggregate, on the back of material that they don’t even own the copyright to. How does this make sense for the content creator??

Some might argue that this isn’t a zero-sum game. Filmmakers get exposure, Vimeo makes money. The problem is that the more traffic that all the Vimeos of the world get, the less aggregate demand there is for paid content overall. So the people actually making the movies lose out.

Social Media, as Peter Kim points out here isn’t social anymore. It’s big business. Kim points out that even on line conversations between those in the know are being monetized. Content creators would do well to recognize this, and steer their output to those sites that are willing to pay (at least something) for it. Otherwise, more and more creatives will have a harder and harder time making a living … while big companies will make a killing.

However, when it comes to the United States and a group fighting Iran, this axiom definitely does not apply.

In the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, near the Iran – Iraq border, Iran is lobbing artillery shells into Iraqi territory with increasing, and troubling, regularity. Their claimed target? A Kurdish militant group called PJAK (the Free Life Party of Kurdistan). PJAK controls a broad swath of northern Iraq, beyond the reach of Baghdad and the the semi-autonomous Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq.

PJAK was founded officially in 2004 to fight persecution of Kurds in Iran. They launch attacks on Iranian military targets just across the border, and has operatives inside Iran, fomenting opposition to the regime in Tehran. They claim that the Iranian government persecutes and discriminates against Kurds, and most human rights advocates agree http://bit.ly/bNNVRr; http://www.hrw.org/en/node/79044/section/5.

The penalty in Iran for being a member of PJAK is death; four PJAK operatives were publicly executed in May.

HDNet World Report correspondent Willem Marx spent a few days with PJAK militants in northern Iraq earlier this Summer. Constantly on the move, they hide in some of the most rugged terrain in the world.

So targeting PJAK is very difficult for Iran. Their shells rarely hit PJAK camps, but rather rain down on local villages suspected of sheltering the group. Marx visited refugee camps where thousands of local Kurds have been driven from their homes, into makeshift tent cities which have no running water, medical care, or basic sanitation. The Kurdish regional government is unable, or unwilling, to do much to help them.

One wonders, then, why the United States isn’t doing anything to help these Iraqi citizens, and even PJAK, which, after all, is fighting the hated Iranian regime.

Instead, early last year, just 12 days into the Obama administration, the U.S. designated PJAK a terrorist group.

PJAK militants said that they had previously met with U.S. officials, hoping to garner support for their efforts to de-stabilize American arch-enemy Iran. Those discussions did not yield fruit, but at least one PJAK leader Marx interviewed was taken aback when the terrorist designation came down. They suspect this was a sop to Iran by the new administration; more likely it was a sop to Turkey.

You see, PJAK is affiliated with the PKK (the Kurdish Worker’s Party), which has waged a bloody 20-plus year insurgency against Turkey. Their leader, Abdullah Ocalan, has been in a Turkish prison since 1999, but their struggle against Turkey, and to a lesser extent Syria and Iran, continues. Many governments, including ours, have decided that there is no practical difference between PKK and PJAK. When World Report visited the militant camps, it was clear that PJAK is its own entity, but we did observe frequent communications between PJAK and PKK.

Now caught between the militant groups, Iran, and Turkey (which also has apparently been bombing targets inside Iraq) Iraqi Kurds, mostly subsistence farmers, are not being protected by anyone, and they are suffering.

Also troubling: the United States helps Turkey with intelligence on Kurdish militant groups. Turkey also shares intelligence with Iran, raising the possibility that U.S. intelligence is actually aiding the Iranian military. There are now reports, too, that Iran is actually establishing military outposts inside Iraq.

As the United States continues its draw-down in Iraq, these are issues that need to be watched closely.

Here is a clip from Willem Marx’s report from Northern Iraq / Iraqi Kurdistan, which airs Tuesday night on HDNet — 8pm eastern and again at 12am eastern.

http://blip.tv/file/3901755

Well, yes.  Governmental stupidity knows no bounds, nor borders.  As bad as things are in Washington these days, consider these boneheaded moves by foreign goevernments:

Canada

As the government launches austerity measures to deal with a growing deficit, PM Stephen Harper’s government decided to spend millions on a press center for the G8 and G20 summits.  They built a ‘virtual’ lake, lined the walls with hundreds of stylized canoes, and piped in the sounds of loons to, perhaps, lull the normally grumpy press corps into states of Canadian ecstasy, guaranteeing positive coverage.  No matter that the press center was no where near where the summit was happening, 0r that it was spitting distance from Lake Ontario.

Cue the Loons!

England

The new Tory government of David Cameron is pursuing a law that would require all non-Brits who want to marry a Brit to take an English language test.  This, presumably, to discourage people from marrying purely for citizenship.  Can you imagine the pressure of not only planning a wedding — registeries, guest lists, seating charts, in-laws — while studying for a do-or-die ESL test??

France

After the thoroghly entertaining collapse of the French World Cup Soccer team in South Africa, the French Parliament decided it should get into the act by calling Les Bleus coach, Raymond Domenech, to the carpet in a closed session, grilling him on what went wrong.  Apparently, he was about as forthcoming and contrite as BP’s Tony Hayward was before the US Congress, so French MP’s are threatening to bring him before the full Parliament, publicly.  Too bad that they’re not using the guillotine andymore, that would be quicker and certainly more satisfying for Gallic football fans!

Nigeria

Not to be outdone by the French, the Nigerian government has banned its team from international play for two years as a result of their abysmal World Cup performace (0-2-1), and for alleged corruption in their national soccer federation.  What?!?!?  Corruption in Nigeria??  Shocking.  Aside from the absurdity of a government getting involved in the inner workings of a sport, it seems a little counter-productive, to say the least, to ban your team from intl. play.  After all, how are they supposed to get any better?

So our politicians have their work cut out for them.  But I have hope.  I think the New York Assembly could be up to the task.  They are a month late delivering a budget again, after missing their final deadline and forcing local governments to complete their budgets without having any idea how much, or how little, aid they will get from the state.  So clearly that important work can wait, in favor of  several critical investigations:

> why Mets’ pitchers seem to lose velocity when they arrive in Flushing and why the team can’t win on the road;

> the disgraceful manner which the NY Giants have treated their loyal fans with their new stadium’s exorbitant PSL’s and ticket allotment policy (never mind that the stadium is in NJ);

> the utter incompetence of the Dolan family, ruining the once proud NY Knicks.

C’mon Albany, do us proud.

I wonder, though, why Goldman is repeatedly the target of the most vitriolic attacks — including the now famous description of the the firm as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,” by <em>Rolling Stone</em> writer Matt Taibbi.  http://bit.ly/1nmt8A

They’re also now the target of the largest SEC action of the financial crisis http://bit.ly/ch0zK1.  Which is amazing, when you think about it.  Goldman, which didn’t even want bailout money, has paid the government back, with interest for the funds it was forced to receive by Bush and Paulson.  This is a bigger action than has been taken against Lehman, Bear Stearns, AIG, Citi, B of A …

Are we really to believe that Goldman is the worst offender?  Or are they a convenient scapegoat?  Politically, nothing could be a safer bet than attacking Goldman.

I also wonder if something more insidious could be at work here.  Is it possible that attacking Goldman Sachs, in the press and in the political arena, is more palatable because there is an unconscious undercurrent of anti-semitism?

Founded by a German Jewish Immigrant Marcus Goldman, brought to greatness by Jewish-American Sidney Weinberg, it has long been known as the one white-shoe Wall Street firm that welcomes Jews … which less than a generation ago was a big big deal, since the other firms would only hire Ivy league WASPS.

I’m not suggesting that journos like Taibbi, or prosecutors at the SEC are anti-semitic.  But I do think that there is an atmosphere that can develop around an institution that makes it an easier target.

Is this just another version of scapegoating the “Jewish banker?”

Well, the New York Times is finally, belatedly, coming to their senses.  Take a look:

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/01/new_york_times_set_to_mimic_ws.html

Now, I still think that the Times has a lot of work to do to make this work.  I think they are a bloated institution and have an outmoded editorial strategy.  However, this is a step in a more realistic direction.

Shame!  Don’t all of you critics realize that they are ‘doing God’s work?’  (Gospel of Lloyd 1:1)

Want proof?  Just look at the generous outpouring of cash to help Haiti in its hour of need.  Goldman:  $1 million.  JP:  $1 million.  Morgan Stanley: $1 million.  BOA: $1 million.

When the chips are down, the banks step up.  I mean, $1 million is .006% of Goldman’s bonus pool!  It’s .0037% of JP Morgan Chase’s bonus pool of $26,900,000,000!!  I mean, like, wow!  That’s a lot!  If taken out of the bonus pool (which it surely won’t be thank God — (by ‘God’ I mean Lloyd and Jamie), your typical employee might have to forgo, what, a couple of thousand bucks out of a $1 million bonus!  The Goldman give is the equivalent of a guy making $50k giving $2.99 (well, sort of … it actually works out to a lot less than that when you consider that $1 means very different things, depending on what you make … but whatever).  What generosity!  (Morgan and BOA’s Q4 earnings aren’t out so we don’t know what their bonuses will be yet)

Those killjoys over at the Service Employees Union pointed out that you could give every man, woman and child in Haiti $9,000 with JPMorgan’s bonus money.  But what good would that do?  I mean, $9,000 only would last a week, tops.  $9,000 barely covers dinners and blow!  Sure, things might be cheaper down there … but come on!

People just don’t get it.  These banks have returned all the money the government loaned them, haven’t they?  Shouldn’t that be enough?  Sure unemployment is at 10%.  Sure a new small business has a snowball’s chance in hell of getting a loan.  Sure, foreclosures were at a record high last year (2.8 million) and will probably rise in 2010.  Sure all this has a lot to do with the financial crisis that the aforementioned banks got us into.  Sure, a whole Presidency has been hobbled (politically and fiscally) by having to try and triage the damage.

But our bankers, they’re ‘doing Gods work.’  The least we can do is thank them.  Now Obama wants to tax the banks with his so-called “Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee.”  Is he crazy?  It will hobble the banks!  It will hobble the whole financial industry!  Plus, like Jamie Dimond of JP Morgan Chase implied when he said “All businesses tend to pass their costs onto customers” … the tax ain’t coming out of their hide!  You think your credit card rates are high now???  Just you wait.