After a decade-long slide into semi-irrelevance, it's now being announced that the major television broadcast networks are considering leaving behind the "free TV/advertiser supported" business model in order to turn themselves into something more closely resembling a cable operation; the idea being that they could create a second revenue stream from the same "subscriber fees" that are paid by cable and satellite operators to all the other channels those operators carry.
This has become necessary, according to the networks, partly because the market has become so fragmented...which, naturally, is cable's fault-and presumably the fault of the disloyal viewer, as well.
Another reason driving the change is related to the desire of the networks to have a source of revenue that's more reliable in times of economic downturn, when advertisers often try to husband scarce resources by cutting back on all their expenses, particularly advertising dollars.
Will this new change in the business model reverse the fortunes of the networks?
Is it possible that the networks are simply poor business managers?
And what about...Krystal Carey?
Tune in for the rest of the story-and we'll find out.
(A COMPLETELY different view of the campaign--not as a debate of ideas, but as sit-com in which the candidates play typical sorts of roles to win our sympathy, identification and support. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Panic is not an option for everybody. If you are of modest means, the struggle to survive will not change that much under four more years of Republican rule. The global recession will change things for the well-off more than for me.
But the last two weeks, on balance, have not been good. I was one of Obama's earliest supporters. I have never criticized him. I have contributed and volunteered.
Now I think I understand why he might fall short. I think there's a new equation, and he must solve it.
(Direct netroots-to-public-eyeballs messaging. No consultant middlemen. This could be the future of activism--or at least reasonable chunk of it. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Get FISA Right (GFR), the internet based activist group begun on mybarackobama.com to alter Sen. Obama's stance on government surveillance and telecom immunity, has moved on in a big way. After losing the legislative battle on FISA the group faced a challenging decision: disband and look for ways to effect government action on illegal surveillance individually or find new causes to organize members around. The active members knew they had captured lightning in a bottle with their melding of dedication to a cause and mastery of internet based activism. What they decided was to take the fight for rule of law and protecting your constitutional rights forward by empowering you to fund their new television ad.
The country has come online, though the narratives are still coming from TV.
Pew has a new survey out on Americans using the political internet.. 6% have given online versus 2% in 2004, 35% have watched a political video online, and 10% have used Facebook or MySpace to get involved. Still, the Broder-esque argument about the internet has taken hold.
60% agree that the internet is full of misinformation and propaganda that too many voters believe is accurate
Republicans tend to believe this more than Democrats do.
John Wonderlich discusses Congressional member use of Twitter. Here's a debate between two members of Congress over the service.
@timryan I am glad we are having this high tech debate Tim - what is your source for this factoid? It is far too small to be believable 09:17 PM June 12, 2008 from web
Former Obama advisor Samantha Power and former Clinton cabinet member Richard Holbrooke debated neoconservatives Charles Krauthammer and Niall Ferguson on the question of whether a Republican in the White House makes the world safer. Somehow, the liberals lost. Jonathan Schwartz has more.
Stephen Mansfield, who wrote the bestseller the Faith of George W. Bush in 2004, is coming out with the Faith of Barack Obama due out this summer. According to Ben Smith, the tone ranges from 'gently critical to gushing.'
This post is a follow-up to a brief exchange between Paul Rosenberg and I last week (here, here and here) regarding how Democrats messed up. The TV issue was a side topic, but I thought I'd write a little more about it…
Those of us who do politics for a living are at a moment in history that feels similar to what political operatives must have felt like back in the late 1950's. The medium of television that had emerged a few years before was transforming the way politics was done. However, no one could imagine just how much it was going to revolutionize political campaigns, political organizing and the political dialogue across the United States. In the 1950's, it was television. Today, it's the rapidly evolving world of new media.
Television networks became owned by large corporate conglomerates, and as a result became steadily more cautious and conservative. As organizations and civic engagement waned and the power of money and symbolism gained strength, American political dialogue grew more and more unoriginal and steadily more conservative. Meanwhile, the progressive movement, dominated by single-issue organizations, grew increasingly weaker. The Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, the Bush presidency and their electoral successes in 2002 and 2004 were more evidence of the strength of the top-down corporate media and the weakness of progressive politics.
However, something new, generated by changes in media and technology, and fueled by a new generation of innovative activists disgusted by establishment politics, was bubbling up from the outside. The era of television-dominated politics is about to change. And out of these changes in media and technology, a new movement has emerged to challenge the status quo, the old ways of doing politics. This new movement- far more participatory, far more community-minded, far readier to push aggressively for change- has revived progressive and Democratic Party politics.
In the 1950s, the advent of the television era, Americans had greater faith and a more direct connection to their government. At that time, they were more likely to be actively engaged in PTAs, labor unions and local civic organizations. These groups were more likely to be involved in a substantive dialogue with politicians and political parties. Americans were much more likely to be active precinct captains or volunteers in their local political party organizations and were much more likely to read daily newspapers and weekly magazines that had in-depth articles covering local and national politics. I agree with Robert Putnam's compelling case in Bowling Alone that television played a dramatic role in the decline in civic participation, and I think that idea carries over even more into our political life.
Television played a major role in changing all that, making people more passive recipients of political information, and making 30-second ads the dominant way information was disseminated. Because politics shifted toward television advertising and away from grassroots organizing and direct voter contact, and because the expense of television advertising kept rising, campaigns became more and more dependent on big business and wealthy special interest donors. This added further distance between politicians and regular voters and it cheapened the political experience. Finally, as television became more corporatized (with the networks being brought up by corporate conglomerates), the quality, quantity and fairness of TV news coverage about politics, both national and local, slipped dramatically.
Organizing and communicating through the internet - and now increasingly through mobile media - has begun to be an antidote to this poison. Between MoveOn.org, the blogosphere, and other internet organizing, the progressive movement is revitalizing and transforming the Democratic Party and the country. Now, as new technology and new media continue to open doors for organizing, we just have to keep building on what we're already started.
