“We’ve got some explaining to do”: The hypocrisy of Shep Smith, Fox and 24 hour news.

It is odd despite the everyday nature of 24 hours news and the mass live broadcast  public murder/suicide of  September11, we remain shocked when ugly life happens in front of us. The latest outbreak of ugly life outrage occurred today, when Fox News apologised for showing a suicide from a live car chase in Arizona.

Shep Smith was the on air man providing explanation and context for Fox News viewers in the god voice from the point of view of the TV helicopter. As rhe chase ended on a dirt road, the hinted man went berserk  He staggered around like a hunted deer in the spotlights fleeing from police but unable to escape the glare of the helicopter.  Clearly cornered, this might have been the moment to end live coverage and let ;police do the job. Instead the camera kept rolling while Smith struggled with the interpretation for his viewers. “I would just- he is looking rather erratic, isn’t he?,” said Smith sounding less godlike by the second.

While Smith waited for re-assurance from somewhere, his filled pauses of ums and dunnos and oh mys questioned what was happening. Both cornered men were increasingly out of options. “Well, it looks like he’s a little disoriented or something…” Smith suggested about the other, desperate to re-assure viewers this could never happen to them "...It’s always possible he could be on something.” While Smith invented the news, the cameras rolled on.

Utterly helpless and hopeless, the man reached for a gun and killed himself. After a second, the video jerks back to the studio. There is the strange sight of Smith issuing repeated cries “get off” for six seconds. Each call is more urgent than the last, until he shouts one final “GET OFF IT”. He turns away from the camera before they finally break for an ad claiming to be for “mesothelioma families” - Call Now 1-800-444-Meso - but is actually for lawyers.

When he returned Smith didn’t apologise for the fake ad but there was extraordinary grovelling for airing the suicide footage. “We’ve got some explaining to do,” began Smith. With the “we” Smith spread the blame across the organisation. “While we were taking that car chase and showing it to you live, when the guy pulled out of the vehicle, they went on five second delay. So that’s why I didn’t talk for about ten seconds,” he said. “We created a five second delay as if you were to bleep back your DVR five seconds, that’s what we did with the picture we were showing you. So that if we would see in the studio five seconds before you did, so that if anything went horribly wrong, we’d be able to cut away from it without subjecting you it.” Smith paused before adding “And we really messed up.”

The mess up was not only the suicide but the strange editing error that followed immediately after it (36 seconds into the video) that makes a double-voiced Shep say incoherently “I am all very sorry”. Shep said the footage “didn’t belong on TV” but he didn’t explain why. Instead he worried about the internal systems that failed to keep the content out. “We took every precaution, we knew how to keep that from being on TV,” he said. “And I personally apologise to you that is what happened. “

Looking to the side rather than direct into the camera, Shep continued: “Sometimes we see a lot of things we don’t let get to you, because it is not time appropriate, it’s insensitive, it’s just wrong. “ He turned back to face the camera. “And that was wrong. And that won’t happen again on my watch and I’m sorry,” he said. “We’ll update you on that guy and how that went down tonight on the Fox Report.” Smith repeated he was sorry and then changed his voice to uplift for the next story: “Now, the attack on…” The show must go on.

A lot of people weren’t going to wait for the Fox report or Shep's watch to see “how it went down.” His audience protection argument might have worked 10 years ago but not any more. It wouldn't take long for someone to send the footage viral. Gawker were quick off the mark with a link with caution to the original footage via Buzzfeed as well as the strange apology.

The first Gawker commenter picks up an obvious problem: “I'm confused. If they went to 10 second  delay, how did the suicide end up on screen anyway? I don't understand Shep's explanation,” Scout’s Honour said. It was five seconds not ten, but the point holds up. Fox News overplayed its hand while Shep struggled and while it recovered in one second, it took the host six seconds to realise they had recovered. In panic, Shep did not realise for five seconds, someone has pressed “dump” button out of the broadcast. He was shouting at the delayed footage.

It was a category error on several levels that asked many questions of Fox and 24 hour news. Car chases are popular time sinks for the networks and easy to follow by helicopter.  When a chase unfolded on air in 2009, Smith quipped on air about the energiser bunny and how he had enjoyed this type of entertainment for many years. So after Buzzfeed, Gawker and others quickly pounced on the mistake, it was surprising to hear several journalists blame the messenger. The Columbia Journalism Review tweeted, “Who's worse? @FoxNews for airing the suicide, or @BuzzFeed for re-posting the video just in case you missed it the first time?” while Reuters social media editor Anthony De Rosa asked “Why is Buzzfeed sharing a suicide video?”

Al Tomkins in Poynter answered both questions saying the Fox hypocrisy deserved to be given the widest audience . Tomkins ask for the guidelines for broadcasting chases. Are they prepared to air the worst possible outcome from an unfolding story? What outcomes are they not willing to air? Why? How do they know know the worst possible outcome will not occur?   Broadcasters will ignore Tomkins' inconvenient questions about motivations and consequences and show them for the same reason they show the 1-800-444-Meso ads: They make money.

Tompkins acknowledged chase coverage could be is useful for people near the scene. But his unspoken argument was that they served mostly commercial ends. “These are humans involved, struggling with their lives as we transform them into “stories,” he said. “They are humans, they are not ratings points.” But as long as there are ratings points, we will have to put up with the occasional pious homily about live deaths.

Prime Television beancounters lose faith in regional Australia

In the same week as the smaller New South Wales cities launched a campaign to lure Sydneysiders out of the Big Smoke, one of the big television stations has kicked the regions in the teeth by closing studios in two of its major towns. The three-year $2 million Evocities campaign which kicks off next month was created by the cities of Albury, Armidale, Bathurst, Dubbo, Orange, Tamworth and Wagga Wagga, with the aim of promoting life in regional NSW. But two of those towns, Orange and Wagga, have just lost one of their main channels of information with the local news studio shutting down facilities to avoid the cost of digital conversion.

The guilty party is Prime Television, which is an affiliate of Channel Seven. They said the closure is happening because they cannot afford any upgrades after the News services move to Canberra. This seems like a spurious reason given that it only cost them $100,000 to upgrade their Albury studio to digital. The move is part of a growing trend to ignore the public affairs interests of regional areas in favour of cost cutting to meet bottom lines in an increasingly aggressive media marketplace. Prime’s studio facility in Tamworth which produces two news bulletins for North West and North Coast will also close in 2011. Little of the $240m bribe (disguised as a “rebate”) Stephen Conroy handed the industry in February seems to be making its way to country areas.

The two closing stations have almost 50 years of association with their towns. The Orange-based station is the former base of CBN8 which began in 1962 as one of the first regional stations in NSW. The Wagga studio is the former regional station RVN2 which began broadcasting two years later. RVN and CBN produced hours of local programming including quiz shows, children's programs and news until satellite and microwave links made networking possible in the early 1970s. Both were incorporated into the Prime Television network in the 1980s in the lead-up to aggregation, the process used to expand choice to regional viewers in the eastern states. Local services were reduced to a half-hourly news bulletin. Some of the big players now have an interest in Prime. Seven’s owner Kerry Stokes paid $20m in 2009 to take a 11.4 percent stake which Lachlan Murdoch’s Illyria also bought 8.9 percent last year. These men do not give a flying fig about local content rules and care only for the bottom line.

In March Prime announced services originating from Orange and Wagga would end in July to be replaced by a Canberra bulletin. Reporters will still be based in each local area but the half-hour bulletins will be compiled from the national capital. At least one full-time position will disappear from each centre. As Talking Television points out, Prime’s move will effectively mark the end of local television production as rival operators such as NBN, WIN and Southern Cross Ten already have centralised facilities for the provision of local news.

According to ACMA, new rules were introduced in January 2008 to cover local content on regional commercial television broadcasters. The licence requires broadcasters to show at least 1.5 hours of local content in any given week and a minimum of 12 hours over six weeks. Local content is defined as “material of local significance” which can relate to either “a local area, or to the licensee’s licence area.” There seems little doubt licensees will cling to the latter definition as they strip local towns of their ability to produce news.

According to its latest annual report, Prime made a profit of $175 million in the year 2008-2009. The document noted that while the changeover to digital transmission brings new growth opportunities they lost $5 million a year when the Government’s Regional Equalisation Plan rebates ended. The REP was the 2000 brainchild of the Howard Government to defray half the cost of digital conversion for the regional broadcasters. At the time it was thought Australia would be fully digital by 2004 but now it won’t happen until 2013. But Labor ended the rebate this year.

These are tough times for television. Prime wrote off the Orange and Wagga stations as “dinosaurs of the digital age”. But it wouldn’t have cost too much to transform them to survive the digital comet and it would have been a great act of faith in regional Australia. Sky News boss Angelos Frangopoulos, who cut his teeth at Prime in Orange, predicted what will happen in their absence. "The reality is that era of proper locally produced regional television pretty much ended a long time ago," he said."It's important that regional TV doesn't perpetuate the mistakes made by regional radio stations and remove so much localism that it has just become a network feed with 1800 numbers and weather inserts attached."

Cameraman takes the rap for Nine's shoddy practices

On Wednesday last week, Channel Nine Melbourne sacked one of its news cameramen Simon Fuller after an incident on the streets with a man named Gad Amr on 1 April. On that day Gad’s son Omar Amr, 19, was released by Melbourne Magistrates Court on strict bail conditions after being accused of a riot in the suburb of Oakleigh last month in which drag-race fans trashed a Bob Jane T-Mart store. Amr and two fellow defendants Hussein Alameddine and Aziz Elbayehare are due to reappear in court on 27 July. (photo: ABC)

The Oakleigh riot was instigated by the cancellation of a proposed Easter drag race at Calder Park which was sponsored by Bob Jane T-Marts. On 19 March Disappointed fans took to the streets to protest the decision but became violent when it came upon a Bob Jane T-Mart store in Oakleigh. The store was torched and looted and the owner was lucky to escape with minor injuries. Hundreds of drag racing fans trashed the store, broke windows and stole car parts from inside, forcing bystanders to flee for safety.

Although the three charged on 1 April were all middle-eastern, there was no suggestion the riot was in any way racially motivated. However it is likely the Amrs felt they were being unfairly treated as Channel Seven and Nine camera operators followed them down the street after their court appearance. Such behaviour by camera operators may be unedifying, but it is hardly unusual. The pedestrian parade is a staple of TV news court reporting usually with the suspect / victim covering their face as they walk away quickly from the camera.

It is difficult to say exactly why this case differed from the thousands like it that have taken place near Australian courthouses. Occasionally they turn violent if the victim feels the camera crews have taken too many liberties but mostly people just try to get away from the situation as quickly as they can. The situation is unlikely to change any time soon as news directors insist on footage from this charade as part of their court coverage. It was Channel Nine cameraman Simon Fuller’s job to follow the Amrs out of the court room and grab footage of Omar for that night’s news.

When confronted by Gad Amr and asked to stop filming, Fuller’s automatic reply was “I’m just doing my job”. Fuller was mostly right. In following Amr down the street he was doing his job. The question is whether he was “just” doing that. In the footage of the incident dissected by Media Watch Jonathan Holmes said “at most he needed a couple of shots of the pair. You'd think he'd have got enough by now.”

So why did Fuller keep shooting? It would appear from that moment on, it became personal for Amr and Fuller. Amr came close to Fuller as if threatening (this was the only footage of the incident shown by an opportunistic Channel Seven whose own camera operator was also following the action). Fuller became defensive saying “You don't touch me” and “You don't touch people” before retreating to his Nuremberg Defence of “We're just doing our jobs.” As Holmes said “You don't touch people. But it's fine, apparently, to stick a camera in their faces for minutes on end while they walk down a public street.”

As the argument continued, it degenerated further into a swearing match. The son Omar, called Fuller “a fucking knuckle” to which Fuller replied “you fucking terrorist”. It is likely that this insult cost Fuller his job. After Media Watch got hold of the footage and contacted Channel Nine, they were told Fuller was “stood down pending the completion of an investigation”. Two days later he was sacked.

In my view, Fuller was a scapegoat. There was much he did wrong. He filmed the Amrs for too long but probably figured his employers would love the image of the aggressive middle easterners attacking an “innocent” media person. (The irony is that this is exactly what rivals Channel Seven and Ten did with the footage while Nine did not show any of it.) His racist attack on the Amrs of “fucking terrorist” was incredibly stupid and unsurprisingly provocative though the Amrs' own behaviour (particularly the son Omar’s) in the incident was not beyond reproach either. However it could be argued Fuller's obscenity was heat of the moment stuff that could have been dealt with a rebuke and a personal apology to the Amrs.

I believe Fuller is now unemployed not because he did all those things but because his behaviour was publicly revealed. He besmirched Nine not because he overstepped the mark but because he was caught making a racial slur. I very much doubt Channel Nine no longer condone camera operators “just doing their job” when they invade the privacy of people walking down the street. Individuals need to be responsible for their actions, but their employers must be clear about what is expected of them. Fuller, in my view, is a scapegoat for rotten corporate practices. Nine will feel good about themselves but they will continue to harass members of the public in the interest of news ratings.

For a vigorous rebuttal of my take on this, I am indebted to Jo White, an American-based Australian journalist, critic and researcher who goes by the online name of Mediamum. When I called Fuller a scapegoat on Twitter, White said he got what he deserved and it was people like him that gave journalists such a bad reputation. “What he did was unethical, reprehensible and about as bad as journalism gets,” wrote White. “He should have been sacked fifty times.” White said he got involved in the story, abused his position and denied the “terrorist” slur was a heat of the moment offence. “The problem is each Journalist should take responsibility for their own actions and not hide behind employers,” she wrote. “Sacking Fuller won't solve the problem. But it gets rid of one albeit small representation of it.”

US State of the Media 2009 report paints grim picture

The latest American State of the News Media report shows a continuing and catastrophic decline in advertising revenue in online, newspapers, magazines, radio and network television. Cable television was the only sector not to decline and the overall picture leaves analysts wondering how much farther the industry has yet to fall. Amid the gloom, the Pew Project report says 2009 was the breakthrough year for Twitter and other social media which emerged as powerful tools for disseminating information and mobilising citizens.

But the uncontrolled nature of social media is not much consolation for major news media organisations. Their most immediate concern is how much revenue they will regain as the US economy pulls out of recession. Market research and investment banking firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson predicts that by 2013 newspapers, radio and magazines will take in almost half as much in ad revenues as they did in 2006.

The collapse so far has been extraordinary. Newspapers, including online, saw ad revenue fall by a quarter during the year bringing the total loss over the last three years to 43 percent. Local television ad revenue fell 22 percent in 2009; triple the previous year’s decline. Magazine ad revenue dropped 17 percent, network TV is down by 8 percent, while online ad revenue fell by 5 percent. Revenue to network TV news and online news sites weren’t broken out of the overall totals but most likely fared much worse.

Newspapers are in the worst trouble. The researchers estimated the US newspaper industry has lost $1.6 billion in annual reporting and editing capacity since 2000 - roughly 30 percent. They predict further cuts in what remains a $4.4b industry in 2010. This is a major concern because newspapers still provide the largest share of reportorial journalism. The report uses the metaphor of sand in an hourglass. “The shrinking money left in print, which still provides 90% of the industry’s funds, is the amount of time left to invent new revenue models online,” it said. “The industry must find a new model before that money runs out.”

But it is not just newspapers feeling the heat. Network news divisions are on a long slow curve of decline since their 1980s peak period and have since halved in size. Local television has not been hit as hard but is also feeling the pain. One estimate puts the losses in the last two years at over 1,600 jobs roughly 6 percent. Flagship magazines such as Time and Newsweek have also shed almost half their staff since 1983.

Life on the Internet paints a more complex picture. Almost three in five Internet users now use some kind of social media, including Twitter, blogging and networking sites. Citizen journalism is on the rise at local levels and rapidly filling niches vacated by undernourished news organisations. But the report says that despite the invention and energy of new media efforts, their scale is dwarfed by what has been lost. The J-Lab project estimates $140 million of non-profit money has been pumped into new media in four years but that represents less than a tenth of newspaper losses alone. According to NYU’s Clay Shirky “the old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.”

But this is not necessarily a bad thing. The motivation of news corporations over the last 20 years has been to cut expenses for the sake of profit eroding its sense of public good in favour of efficiency and profit. The researchers say the collapse of these ownership structures may mean a partial rebirth of community connection and public motive in news. But it warns unless someone can develop a system of financing the production of content, reportorial journalism will continue to shrink despite the new technologies.

The vexed question of a viable Internet revenue model is core to this problem. The researchers found that four out of every five online news consumers say they rarely click on online ads. Rupert Murdoch and News Ltd are moving to paywalls to address this problem but studies also show most people are “grazers” and only about one in five people say they would be willing to pay for online content - this number is likely to decrease with less voracious news consumers not included in the survey.

The upshot is a growing tendency towards niche operations. Most news organisations are becoming narrower in ambition and more specific in focus, brand and appeal. The researchers see the critical questions now as being: What collaborative models might work and under what ethical basis? Will there be more sharing of content and resources and what does that mean for fairness and accuracy? “The year ahead will not settle any of these,” they conclude. “But the urgency of these questions will become more pronounced.”

Government gives $240 million bribe to commercial TV stations

Channel Ten and Seven shares have soared in the wake of the Government’s cynical bribe of the free-to-air commercial channels yesterday. Ten Network Holdings gained 8.9 per cent to $1.65 and Seven Network rose 2.1 per cent to $6.86 after the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy Stephen Conroy gave hefty licence fee “rebates” to the three commercial stations.

Under the deal, the Government will cut licence fees paid by the networks, which calculated at 9 per cent of gross advertising revenues, by 33 per cent for the 2010 financial year and 50 per cent for the 2011 financial year. The move will significantly boost the earnings for media groups Ten Network, Seven Network and Nine (the latter is owned by private equity company CVC and not on the share market). Instead of paying $286 million in licence fees they will pay $192m in 2010 and just $143m in 2011.

The grubby deal has Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s hands all over it. He and Conroy brokered it with industry group Free TV Australia chair Wayne Goss, a close friend of Rudd and his former boss as premier of Queensland. The Australian says the deal is part of the post digital cutover negotiation. The government could earn a $1 billion when it sells the analogue spectrum after the digital cutover in 2013. Telecommunications companies want the spectrum to build high-speed fourth generation wireless networks.

But it is not hard to see a more immediate political agenda at work. As Glenn Dyer reminds us, this is an election year. Rudd has been toadying up to all the television networks of late in an effort to look good on what remains by far the more important communication medium available to him. It is unlikely the TV stations will be keen to give him bad coverage now that he has showered them in such largesse. Dyer said the deal is also a sweetener to keep the networks onside during the digital transition.

Fellow Crikey writer Bernard Keane (articled paywalled) is also deeply unimpressed. Keane says the free-to-air networks are already handsomely compensated for the transition to digital. These policies include a moratorium on competition until at least 2014, the award of free spectrum for digital take-up, the most restrictive sports anti-siphoning laws in the world, and a grant of $260m to regional broadcasters to offset digital transmission costs. There is also a 20 percent tax rebate for production costs. As Keane notes, “this is an absolutely wretched decision”.

However outrage has been relatively muted outside Crikey (with the honourable exception of Peter Martin). Needless to say, the television stations themselves are not going to badmouth the deal. On the contrary, the Free TV Australia consortium, which represents all of Australia's commercial free-to-air television licencees, welcomed the announcement. The body’s CEO Julie Flynn called it a recognition of the commercial’s key role in delivering Australian content. “Free TV broadcasters are the major underwriters of Australian content despite the challenge of competing media platforms and fragmenting audiences,” she said. “But it is clear that as we moved to a converged media environment the basis for the old system of licence fees needs to be reviewed".

Conroy himself also sought to sell the decision as content protection even though there was no new initiative in that direction. He said the rebate recognised the importance of ensuring TV audiences have strong levels of Australian programs. It also addresses problems with the digital cutover and the fact that licence fees in Australia are more expensive compared with other countries such as the US, UK and Canada. Conroy said the Australian Content Standard required commercial television broadcasters to produce and screen 55 percent local content between 6am and midnight, 7 days per week, and provides for the production of Australian drama and children’s programming. “Broadcasters have a unique role in preserving our national culture and the commercial television sector invests hundreds of millions of dollars each year in the production of local content,” he said. “New media platforms are bringing a wealth of choice to Australian viewers, but the Government recognises that Australian television broadcasters have an important role in ensuring that Australian stories remain at the centre of our viewing experience.”

The Pay TV peak body Astra called the tax-breaks anti-competitive and against consumer interests. ASTRA’s Chief Executive Officer Petra Buchanan said taxpayers were subsidising foreign-owned broadcasters to meet existing broadcasting obligations. “It is couch potato policy that reduces their incentive to invest compete and innovate,” she said. “By using taxpayers’ money to prop up the old players, innovation and competition in the television space will continue to be curbed.” Buchanan is right to be outraged. This deal is bad as anything extracted during the Packer era and stinks to high heaven. Labour and the Opposition (which also supports the deal) ought to be ashamed of themselves.

And that’s the way it is: Walter Cronkite dies

On the fortieth anniversary of humanity’s biggest feat – the first moon landing – the man who told his nation “and now we have two Americans on the moon” has died. Walter Cronkite died in New York aged 92. The man who anchored the CBS Evening News” from 1962 to 1981 died of cerebrovascular disease with complications from dementia. In July 1969, he was on air for 27 of the 30 hours of Apollo 11’s mission and his marathon live coverage brought the excitement and impact of the moon landing into the homes of millions of Americans and observers around the world. He remains the only outsider to have won NASA’s Ambassador of Exploration Award which he picked up in 2006.

That award was one of many in a lifetime of achievement. His name has become virtually synonymous with the position of news anchor worldwide. In Sweden anchors are known as Kronkiters whereas the Dutch called them Cronkiters. In America, Cronkite was not just an anchor he was also an honorary member of families he had never seen or met. “Uncle Walter” was voted the most trusted figure in American public life in surveys in 1972 and 1974. But Cronkite viewed himself as a working journalist and his title at CBS was "managing editor" of the Evening News. His way was to get the story, "fast, accurate, and unbiased".

Cronkite learned this credo during his days as a wire service reporter. Walter Leland Cronkite was the only child of a dentist father and homemaker mother who moved from Missouri to Texas when he was young. Walter attended The University of Texas at Austin in the 1930s and worked as a student reporter for The Daily Texan campus newspaper. Cronkite left university without a qualification. He worked at public relations firms, newspapers, and in small radio stations throughout the Midwest. In 1939 Cronkite joined United Press to cover World War II. He joined a unit fondly remembered as the "Writing 69th" a group of civilian journalists trained to take part in high-altitude bombing missions.

The breath of his war coverage was enormous. As well as flying many bombing mission over Germany, he went ashore in Africa and D-Day landings, he parachuted with the l0lst Airborne, he covered the Nuremburg trials, and ran the UP's first post-war Moscow bureau. His own view of his war record was characteristically modest. “Personally, I feel I was an overweening coward in the war. I was scared to death all the time,” he said. “I did everything possible to avoid getting into combat.”

True or not, Cronkite was certainly made for media combat. Fellow war veteran Edward Murrow recruited him for CBS Washington in 1950. "My first love was newspapering," Cronkite later wrote. "But as the 1940s drew to a close television was coming into its own, and it became evident that the young industry would eventually become the dominant form of entertainment and news."

His first job in front of the camera was as host of a historical recreation series You Are There. He briefly co-hosted the CBS Morning Show with the puppet named Charlemagne the Lion. Cronkite impressed with his anchoring of CBS's coverage of the l952 presidential nominating conventions. But it would take another ten years before he would finally take over the centre stage Evening News anchor role from Douglas Edwards. In October 1963 the broadcast was increased from 15 to 30 minutes and the first expanded broadcast included an exclusive interview with President Kennedy.

Barely a month later, Cronkite fought back tears when he reported to a shocked world that Kennedy had been assassinated. If that announcement was Cronkite’s apotheosis as a news anchor, it was the coverage of the Kennedy funeral that manifested the power of TV to involve an entire population in a ritual process. And Cronkite was ideally placed to benefit from that power. From 1967 through to his retirement, the CBS Evening News was the nation’s top rating television program. Americans turned to Cronkite to learn about the Moon landings, Vietnam, Watergate and the oil crisis.

Cronkite was acclaimed as an unbiased reporter but when he took sides, he was extremely influential. In 1965 he applauded the “courageous decision that Communism’s advance must be stopped in Asia”. But three years later he was not so sure. He visited Vietnam after the 1968 Tet offensive where his report advocated negotiations and the withdrawal of American troops. "We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds," he said. "We are mired in bloody stalemate." Though Cronkite’s 30 second TV grab was inaccurate, his report shifted public opinion and was crucial in Johnson’s decision not to recontest the 1968 presidential election. After the broadcast, he reportedly told advisors, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."

When Cronkite announced he was going to retire in 1981, there were signs of palpable public panic. A briefly popular T-shirt posed the half-joking question, "Oh, my God - what are we going to do without Walter Cronkite?" But he did not disappear from the public eye. His hosting of PBS's broadcast of the Vienna Philharmonic has become as much a New Years Eve tradition as the dropping of the ball in Times Square. He has also hosted PBS documentaries on health, old age and poor children. In l993 he signed a contract with the Discovery and Learning Channel to do 36 documentaries in three years.

Failing health finally crippled his output in the last few years. Tributes poured in from ordinary viewers after his death. “There is not one major (public) event in my life that Walter didn’t lead me through. Not one,“ said one. “I don’t believe Walter Cronkite has departed. Not until I hear it from him!” said another. Cronkite was at the height of his power (and powers) during an era of attributed-style journalism. There was no CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews or Al Jazeera. The Internet was still the plaything of military scientists. When he said “that’s the way it is” at end of his TV network news, America believed him, partially because of his aura and partially because there was so little choice but to believe what he reported. But the era of news that does no more than quote officials and experts is just as dead as the master broadcaster himself. And that’s the way it is.

Setanta’s little helper: The rise and fall of a satellite broadcaster

My initial reaction was to laugh on hearing Irish pay television operator Setanta was in trouble. After all “Satan-ta”, as I preferred to call them made me pay for sporting content I used to watch for free. In the late 1990s, football games such as Ireland’s world cup qualifiers and Old Firm derbies were suddenly hoovered up by a company that knew they had a captive audience of football-starved Irish and Scots in Australia and made them pay through the nose to watch them. They made a lot of money out of it as the only way of following the games was either Setanta’s way or the information superhighway. So when I heard they were on the verge of bankruptcy this week, my first reaction was “good riddance”. But I was wrong.

Setanta fill a niche. It’s not their fault that greedy game rights owners decided they could get better deals for their products with the television networks. The founders of Setanta realised long ago that there was a gap in the market that they could fill. Two young Dubliners in London, Michael O'Rourke and Leonard Ryan, got into the game back in 1990 when they filled a gap on British television. Ireland were playing a crucial game in their first World Cup against the Ruud Gullit-led Netherlands in which both sides needed to get a result.

But the thousands of Irish fans in England had no way of watching the game. England were in the same group and playing at the same time. Both the BBC and ITV refused to show Ireland’s game. So O’Rourke and Ryan bought the rights to the game cheaply and charged west London dance hall patrons £10 to watch. The pair broke even after 1,000 Irish fans turned up.

The experience made them realise there was money to be made from the Irish Diaspora. O’Rourke and Ryan spent the next 10 years slowly buying rights for sports fans living away from home, developing niche channels in Britain, America and Australia. Ryan called the early days a “fight to stay alive”. Their clients were Irish bars in San Francisco and Sydney to whom they sold All-Irelands, Six Nations rugby and Irish football internationals.

In 2005 they made their first major breakthrough in Britain by buying the rights to the Scottish Premier League. It then struck south of the border by launching a successful joint bid with ITV to get the rights to FA Cup matches and England internationals for four years from 2008, effectively knocking out all of the BBC’s live football in the process. Setanta also won a three-year contract to show live Premier League games. Suddenly Setanta was second only to Murdoch’s Sky Sports in the UK. By 2007 another Murdoch outlet, The Times, was saying the pair were worth £35m each.

But the Australian media magnate was not taking the cheeky Irish challenge for granted. Sky had the monopoly on the Premier League since its inception and did not take kindly to the EU competition ruling in 2006 that insisted it be broken up into six television packages and no one company could have all six. Setanta won two packages giving it the right to broadcast 46 live games every season. But when the packages were rebid earlier this year, Sky upped the ante and won five out of the six for 2010/2011 onwards. In the middle of a global recession, Setanta suddenly had just 23 expensive games a year and Sky had ensured the Irish company were left with the least attractive games. It also had 1.2 million customers when it needed 1.9 million to break even. It didn’t help Setanta were shortly due to pay the English Premier League £30m. They also missed a £3m payment to the Scottish Premier League last week. The knives were out.

On Wednesday Setanta were forced to post a message on its website telling customers that it is not accepting new customers as it "attempts to secure the future of the business". On the table are a range of options, including spinning off its profitable US and Irish subsidiaries. They need additional capital of about £100m to plug the funding gap. But its City backers including private equity houses Doughty Hanson and Balderton, have refused to make more than £50m available.

Setanta is now looking for other companies to buy into it and has held talks with BT and ESPN. At the moment, ESPN is officially ruling itself out as a potential buyer. However this is likely to just be a bargaining position as the American cash rich sportscaster is keen to expand its UK sports portfolio. ESPN also bid for the English Premier League rights beyond 2010 but lost out to Setanta and Sky. If Setanta does default, the Premier League rights will revert to the holders who will try to find other buyers. ESPN is owned by Disney which is an even larger media company than Murdoch’s. Their actions may be well worth watching in the next few weeks as the big guns fight over the likely corpse of an Irish player that got too big for its boots.

CanWest, bankruptcy and Channel Ten

The CanWest Global Communications Corp has extended a bank deadline to renegotiate a $243 million (all amounts in this article are USD) credit facility. On Tuesday its subsidiary company CanWest Media Inc (CMI) reached a deal with its main lenders to extend the waiver of certain borrowing conditions for two weeks to 21 April. The revised terms means that CanWest will get additional credit in the interim fortnight. Discussions will continue with lenders to look at terms to extend the waiver for a longer period to allow CMI to pursue a recapitalisation transaction. But a lot of hard wheeling and dealing lies ahead for the Canadian media giant to avoid bankruptcy in the coming months.

Lenders and hedge funds have been remarkably flexible so far over several missed deadlines to make various repayments on their massive $4 billion debt. However CanWest faces another crucial deadline next week on a $30m interest payment to hedge funds on risk sensitive 8 per cent senior subordinated notes it failed to re-pay last month. If CanWest does not meet this deadline next week, they could possibly be in default on $761 million worth of notes plus missed interest and associated default interest. This would leave the company in the precarious situation of trying to offload assets in a time when media stocks are virtually worthless.

As Boyd Erman points out, CanWest has two serious problems when it comes to selling assets to potential buyers. The likely prices are dwarfed by the debts tied to the assets, and the company’s convoluted corporate structure makes it almost impossible to make sales work. Erman says broadcasting assets would need to be sold for five times ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation) to meet the debt of those assets and such a deal would be extremely unlikely in the current market. “CanWest is almost like a landlord with a rental house that's fallen so much in value that selling it wouldn't cover what's left on the mortgage,” he says.

If CanWest does go under, it will provide a tasty meal for asset strippers. The Canadian company owns the Global Television Network, the cable network E!, the Southam newspaper paper chain, and is the majority shareholder of Australia’s Channel Ten. CanWest is controlled by the Asper family (CEO Leonard and his brother David) based in Winnipeg. Much of their debt was accumulated in buying the Southam chain in 2000 from Conrad Black's former company Hollinger International.

Here in Australia CanWest owns 56.6 per cent of Channel Ten and owns stations in the five mainland state capitals. The uncertainty over Ten’s parent company has affected the local share price and the bottom line. Last week, Ten posted a first half net loss of $57 million and cancelled its fiscal 2009 final dividend. Television revenue was down 12 per cent and the share of its key 16-39 demographic fell 5.5 per cent this year. This Easter local staff have been instructed to take extra leave and asked to restructure their hours to a permanent shorter working week.

Meanwhile CanWest have informally put the feelers out to sell its stake in the Channel. They hope to raise $280 million from the sale if they can sell out at 75c (Australian) which was the floor price in an unsuccessful capital raising project in February, and which co-incidentally was the closing share price going into Easter. CanWest have sounded out possible buyers who already have a stake in Ten including the Commonwealth Bank (6.5 percent) and fund management company 452 Capital (5.7 percent).

The wildcard in any bidding may be Ten’s second biggest shareholder Birketu. Owned by little known Bermuda-based Bruce Gordon (described by Margaret Simons as "Australia's forgotten TV mogul"), Birketu control 13.3 per cent of the network. The 79 year old Gordon already has extensive interests in Australian television. He owns Nine Network stations in Adelaide and Perth and the WIN regional network and is free to extend his interest in Ten in the wake of the 2006 loosening of Australian media ownership. While officially CanWest are saying they are not talking to Birketu, Gordon has long expressed an interest in increasing his stake. If CanWest’s creditors lose their patience in the next few weeks, expect Gordon to make his move and become Australia’s most powerful unknown television mogul in the process.

Clutter's underbelly: SBS and advertising

I’m trying hard to enjoy the new second series of Underbelly on Channel Nine but am finding the number of ads are making it almost unwatchable. As a general rule, I avoid watching the free-to-air commercial channels live - their ad breaks are too destructive to the momentum of any program. So I pre-recorded Underbelly. But even then, I was annoyed by the number of times I had to fast-forward through the clutter of fifteen second ads. Ad buying in such numbers is huge business for broadcasters, but has the potential to destroy audience by over-saturation.

Advertisers themselves are aware of the problem. The dilemma is that few of them are prepared to pay premiums of up to 40 per cent to ensure fewer ads. Nine also admits there might be a problem but are hiding behind the early success of Underbelly’s 2.4 million audience. “We may need to take a position on the price of 15-second ads to reduce the clutter, “ Nine's network sales boss, Peter Wiltshire told the SMH. “But judging from Monday night's [ratings] performance, people are not too worried about it." The question, Peter, is whether 2.4 million will be still watching after another two or three weeks of this over-exposure.

Over at the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), the marketers are convinced high clutter ads are counter-productive. The state owned station has regulatory limitations on how much commercial airtime and claims this makes it attractive to advertisers. Last week they launched a trade press campaign called “avoid the clutter”. The campaign urges advertisers to switch to SBS because their commercial breaks are the shortest on Australian free-to-air (excepting ABC), and therefore, claims SBS, the advertisers will “get 83% better recall and an audience that’s 45% more engaged.”

The press release does not reveal where those percentages are sourced from, but it is a clever ploy to turn a necessity into a virtue. SBS has become a much savvier commercially-aware network under managing director CEO Shaun Brown. While his innovations since taking over in 2005 (most notably introducing in-program ads) have divided the station’s audiences, he has been steadfast in his desire to reposition the station. Under his leadership, ratings have become a critical measure of the station’s performance - though they remain stuck in the five to six percent region. Nevertheless, as his publicity manager Mike Field said of him, “Brown likes numbers”.

Brown first arrived at the station two years earlier as head of television. He told the authors of “The SBS Story” that when he started he found an organisation captive to the “Anglo arthouse” camp. He criticised the station’s focus on documentaries and foreign movies. “I’ve got no problems with any of those programs, but they are not exactly defining of our charter,” said Brown in the book. Instead he wants an emphasis on locally commissioned content and a shift away from international acquisitions to meet its charter obligations.

The problem is that a major point in the charter is the need to “contribute to meeting the communications needs of Australia's multicultural society.” Firstly with radio and then with television, SBS has become the key cultural institution for ethnic communities in Australia for the last 30 years. But while movies, documentaries and sport have long been core multicultural programming on SBS TV, that type of content has been threatened by the new delivery platforms of the 2000s. New competitors in the form of Pay TV, broadband Internet, DVDs and digital TV have led to a general decline in television viewing (particularly among the young).

SBS has responded in three ways; by programming more populist, imported English language shows (Mythbusters, Top Gear, South Park), enhancing the brand’s online presence, and most crucially, giving greater prominence to advertising. Brown defends these measures by saying the channel must become more relevant “for all Australians”. As he said in his speech to the Press Club in 2007 (attachment of speech opens in document format): “How can we be relevant, justify the public expenditure and meet our Charter obligations if only a fraction of Australians are tuning in?”

The question of public expenditure becomes relevant again later this year as SBS Triennial funding comes up for renewal. The review has re-opened SBS’s whole raison d’etre. A couple of years ago, Paul Sheehan ruffled feathers when he called the station “an indulgence we don’t need”. He said the international news, sport and entertainment pay TV channels didn’t exist when SBS TV was conceived in 1979. Sheehan said the Government could raise billions by selling SBS and its digital spectrum. “SBS is now standing in the way of quality,” he said.

Brown disagrees and argues the new SBS model creates quality content. He says the advertising revenue generated by programs such as Top Gear cross-subsidises innovative locally commissioned content. For him, commercialism enhances the station’s public service mandate. But there is a tension between the two that must be negotiated. SBS’s core principles of difference and diversity remain valid. In-program ads not only increase revenue but also allow for effective cross-promotion of other SBS programs. The problem is that the station may sacrifice its distinctiveness in the search for all-encompassing advertising revenue. Perhaps the clutter argument is an acknowledgement is that less is more for a public broadcaster.

Note: article cross-posted at my new Wordpress blog

Digital TV cutover delayed in the US

The US Senate voted unanimously on Monday to delay the deadline to cut over to digital television until 12 June. The House of Representatives is now likely to follow their lead to confirm the delay. The original deadline of 17 February 2009 was set almost a decade ago. However survey company Nielsen Co estimates that over six million households are still without digital cutover boxes. Those affected are mostly poor and rural households who do not have cable or satellite subscriptions. The Senate took the vote after then president-elect Obama urged Congress earlier this month to postpone the date. His team were concerned the government was not doing enough to help those in rural, poor or minority communities to prepare for and navigate the transition despite spending $200 million on an ad campaign explaining the transition.

The issue occurred after the federal program that provides coupons to defray the cost of converter boxes hit a $1.34 billion statutory funding limit on 4 January. The year-long program allowed analogue television owners to receive up to two $40 coupons to buy converter boxes. The program is administered by the National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA) and it proved enormously popular. 25 million households requested 47 million coupons (despite the fact that 2008 Nielsen research showed only 13 million households did not have digital transmission).

Obama’s home state of Hawaii was the first to complete the cutover on 16 January. It went early to avoid the nesting season of the Hawaiian dark-rumped petrel which lives in the television transmitting towers. Authorities made the conversion there with minimal customer outrage. However on the mainland there are still 2.5 million people on the waiting list who won’t get a coupon until either unredeemed coupons are returned or there is an increase in the funding cap. Another four million people may not even be aware of the scheme or the cutoff date. The additional four months will give NTIA time to address the over-extended scheme.

But not everyone in the US is happy with the delayed cutover. The four-month delay will mean local television stations will need to keep their old transmitters turned on resulting in higher power bills and maintenance expenses. Telecommunication companies could also lose millions as they wait to take over the spectrum released by the analogue transmitters. Qualcomm paid $550 million in the government spectrum auction to roll out its MediaFLO mobile TV platform which transmits data to portable devices. Qualcomm COO Len Lauer wrote to Congress pleading for them to stick with the original timetable. He also told Dow Jones the delay “will cost us tens of millions of dollars in extra expense and lost revenue.”

Stephen Conroy and his mandarins in the Australia Federal Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy Department will be closely watching developments in the US. Here the vested influences of the free-to-air broadcasters succeeded in pushing back the cutover date to 2013. Australia has been slow on the uptake of boxes with only 42 percent cutover (pdf) as of 2007. There was considerable regional variation with 64 percent of Tasmanians cutover to digital compared to only 37 percent in Queensland and South Australia. Critically for the success of the program, 40 percent of people said that digital reception was not an important factor in the choice of a new TV.

Despite the low take-up, there are no plans at this stage to subsidise the cutover. Instead Australia will follow the British staggered-rollout approach (which started in 2007 and goes to 2012). To that end, Conroy set up Digital Australia and hired Andy Townend to lead it in 2007. Townend was formerly the 2IC at Digital UK, the body supervising the British digital switch. However he will have to make do with a budget of $17 million for the next four years, compared with a $488 million budget for Digital UK.

A Conroy spokesman told The Age that the government believes the process will be relatively simple. "For most people, switching to digital will be a relatively straightforward process and we will be supplying information to help people with this as part of our campaign,” he said. However he also admitted poorer sections of society may find it harder to switch and said the Government was considering “several policy options” to address the issue. This is likely to take the form of an education campaign and a help scheme for the elderly and disabled. The rollout begins in the Mildura region of northern Victoria in the first half of 2010.

National broadcast wars: ABC refuses to provide footage to SBS

Last Monday’s Media Watch reported a stoush between its host station ABC and fellow national broadcaster SBS. Australia’s two public television networks are involved in an ugly squabble over the rights to footage for separate documentaries on John Howard’s time in government to be aired on either channel in the next 12 months. The footage required belongs to ABC who have reneged on an earlier deal to supply SBS in order to protect the ratings of its own product. Given that the taxpayer pays for both channels, the stoush is all the more ludicrous and counter-productive, and the fault is almost entirely that of the ABC.

The SBS project was conceived in 2006 when Sydney documentary filmmakers Nick Torrens and Frank Haines approached the broadcaster to make a make a three part series called “Liberal Rules” on the Liberal Party over the last 30 years. The documentary would be presented by Gary Sturgess, journalist, lawyer and a fellow documentary maker. They then attempted to secure funding and approached ABC in April 2007 to acquire archival material for their show.

Media Watch obtained the email correspondence which showed that ABC offered to provide 60 minutes of footage at a discount price of $160,000. While the generous offer was half of ABC’s normal going rate, Torrens and Haines had not fully secured their funding. They thanked the ABC for the offer and promised to get back to them. Fast forward one year to May 2008 and the SBS team had their funding in place and were ready to activate ABC’s offer. But something had changed in the interim. Haines’s email to order the material encountered only a deafening silence from ABC library sales.

Finally weeks later, they responded. And the response was brief and to the point: “After discussion with our News and Current Affairs division we have decided that we cannot supply footage for your production at this time.” A stunned Haines wrote to ABC Managing Director asking for an explanation on the change of heart. Scott responded sticking to the line that the ABC maintained it had not agreed to licence the footage. The ABC library manager followed up with another email with a softer line that suggested ABC would be prepared to licence the material on the condition that the use of the material “would commence on date not before January 2009”.

As David Tiley points out in his excellent and scathing article on the stoush, the production company had no power over that question, which is the province of the broadcaster. And SBS were unhappy with the embargo, planning to show the series later this year. Torrens and Haines followed up on this point with Media Watch stating reasonably that as the ABC archive is a publicly funded resource it had no justification for placing an embargo on the use of its material by independent documentary producers.

When Media Watch addressed their questions to Scott and the ABC board, they were referred to ABC’s head of national programs, Alan Sunderland. Sunderland began his response by talking about the ABC’s own documentary called The Howard Years which ABC was now scripting and editing. He said the ABC would require exclusive access to the archive and claims no agreement was reached in 2007 with the SBS team. It was his idea to put in place the embargo. He claimed the use of ABC footage by outside parties was always of “secondary importance” and said SBS had its own extensive archive. According to Sunderland, the ABC was under “no moral obligation” to make the material available.

Sunderland’s reply was incorrect on many counts. Firstly he did not accurately state the nature of SBS’s reply to ABC’s offer (though in fairness, Haines email was ambiguous and he should have explicitly agreed on the spot, pending finance). Secondly SBS’s archive is nowhere near as extensive as ABC’s (as Sunderland would well know as an ex-SBS employee) and the broadcaster itself did not exist prior to 1980. Thirdly, it makes no reference to the fact that SBS is also a public broadcaster, whose primary responsibility is also to make programs for the Australian public. Tiley called the response “arrogant horseshit” and said the ABC has a responsibility to make available the heritage of its program making, as part of the Australian cultural fabric.

The SBS filmmakers were equally unimpressed and are now scrambling to find the material they need from the commercial broadcasters (at probably much higher cost). They released a statement saying the ABC had no justification to place the embargo, and turn down commercial opportunity of archive recoupment in the process. “For us, this is a clear and salutary reminder of Australia’s new and commercially competitive public broadcasting environment,” said the filmmakers. “The implications for filmmakers, audiences and taxpayers of these decisions and events are dire and of great importance.”

Tentative truce: Obama agrees to appear on Fox News

Rupert Murdoch has brokered a backroom deal that will see Barack Obama appear tomorrow on the Fox News show The O’Reilly Factor with its abrasive right-wing host Bill O’Reilly. The interview will end a long boycott of Obama appearances on the Murdoch-owned network. While many will question the wisdom of his appearance on a station that often appears to be a paid-advertorial for the Republican Party, the timing is crucial as it is designed to deflect attention from John McCain’s acceptance speech at the GOP Convention in St Paul. Fox news chief Roger Ailes confirmed the interview after a face-to-face meeting with Obama where he quoted the senator as saying "I just want to know if I'm going to get a fair shake from Fox News channel.”

Obama’s request for a "fair shake" was eminently reasonable as the station has been consistently hostile against the Democratic Presidential candidate. Fox has long been accused of conducting a campaign against him with frequent references to his middle name Hussein and their oft-repeated but incorrect allegation he was educated in an Indonesian madrassa. But with Obama still favourite to take the presidency, Murdoch was keen to broker a “tentative truce” between Obama and Ailes.

The three men met a couple of months ago at the New York Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. According to Vanity Fair’s media commentator Michael Wolff, who subsequently interviewed Murdoch, Obama was deferential to Murdoch but was highly critical of Ailes. "He said that he didn't want to waste his time talking to Ailes if Fox was just going to continue to abuse him and his wife,” said Wolff. “Fox had relentlessly portrayed him as suspicious, foreign, fearsome - just short of a terrorist.”

The question is now whether the interview means Murdoch is preparing to switch sides and support an Obama presidency. Such a move would not sit well with Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly or the many others that have given Fox such a Republican ideological slant over the last ten years. Fox News has been closely allied with the Bush Presidency and played a crucial role in his both his presidential victories in 2000 and 2004.

Such influence did not seem likely when Murdoch launched Fox on 7 October, 1996. At the time CNN was king of the news networks. Ted Turner set the template for 24 hours news coverage and CNN came into its own with viewers glued to its Baghdad-based reporters when the US bombed Iraq in 1991. But by 1996 Turner had sold out to Time Warner and the Republicans were complaining CNN stood for “Clinton News Network”. Even non-conservative viewers were finding its format predictable and no longer innovative. Fox News’s bright and sassy programming, modelled on the entertainment values of the Fox Network, began to slowly attract attention.

By 2000, it was regularly beating CNN in the ratings and Bill O’Reilly had overtaken CNN’s Larry King as the most popular presenter. Fox had charged ahead by changing the rules of news journalism. They were openly partisan, arrogant and pompous, sensationalistic, relied on style over substance, and openly supported the reigning government of the day and its wars. The station appealed to what the 2004 documentary Outfoxed called “the disgruntled, disillusioned and neutered male” by blaming everyone for his faults and failures except himself.

Fox also increased their popularity by vigorously attacking its critics. Bill O’Reilly became notorious for his on-air tactics. He yelled at guests whom he didn’t agree with, hectored and abused them, called them “idiots” and “boobs” and often cut off their mikes if they were becoming too “uppity”. But management never chastised O’Reilly for his heavy-handed tactics. On the contrary, Roger Ailes and his management team encouraged it. Ailes has deep roots in Republican politics (he was media advisor to three Republican presidents, Nixon, Reagan and Bush 41) and Murdoch drafted him in to run Fox News after he was sacked by rival station CNBC (now merged with MSNBC).

It was Ailes who recruited Bill O’Reilly to anchor Fox’s flagship show when the station started up. It didn’t take long for him to become the network’s biggest star. O’Reilly had been round the news traps, and was a multi-Emmy winning nomadic TV reporter and anchor of the syndicated show Inside Edition. When Inside Edition sacked him in 1995 he went back to university and got his second masters degree (to go with his earlier one in broadcast journalism) in public administration at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Ailes gave O’Reilly free rein to do what he liked on his show The O’Reilly Factor. He was successful by not sounding or acting like a journalist.

O’Reilly courted controversy as a self-styled “culture warrior” and became the cornerstone of the network. He was rewarded by huge ratings, a syndicated radio show and several successful books. He quickly became loathed by the left as he cleverly conflated liberals with rapists, child molesters and murderers. Despite taking the high moral ground, O’Reilly has no manners and regularly operates outside traditional journalistic boundaries of decorum. He regularly rides roughshod over progressive voices while giving conservatives an easy ride. His audiences lapped this up.

Ahead of tomorrow’s interview with Obama, O’Reilly is conciliatory but continues to show a distinct preference for McCain. On Tuesday he called Obama “a charismatic man, he'll win among minority voters, and his entitlement message is powerful.” But, said O’Reilly, the US media are overselling him, and the voters “want their family safe and someone who will get control of the economy.” O’Reilly left his viewers in little doubt which candidate he believed would be better on those two issues.

But McCain does not fit the Bush ideological template that Fox has so assiduously nurtured over the last eight years. He is a renegade Republican. More importantly, he may not win and Murdoch does not like backing losers. According to Wolff, when Murdoch met Obama he had just one simple message to share with him. He had met every American president from Harry Truman on and believed none of them got much time to make an impression. Leadership, according to Murdoch, was about what you did in the first six months. The truce the two men subsequently declared, said Wolff, could be of “vast historical significance”. But even if this is true, can Murdoch drag his ideologically-heavy network with him towards the middle? The O’Reilly Factor will be the first test. As the Scotsman says, it could be a short truce.

News and sport dominate Australian television production

New figures produced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) show news, light entertainment and sport dominate local television production. During financial year 2006-2007, $1.4 billion was spent on productions primarily for television. 30 percent of this was spent on news and current affairs, 22 percent on light entertainment and a further 20 percent on sport. Spending on drama, documentaries, comedy and children’s programs was well behind the big three.

However in terms of first release broadcast hours, sport led the way with 22,200 hours about two thousand hours more than news and current affairs. This breakdown not only illustrated the continuing (and mostly sedentary) Australian obsession with sport but also proves that news is a lot more expensive to produce than sport. The discrepancy may also explain the downsizing of television newsrooms as news production shifts to repackaging on other platforms and other networks and the use of video journalists who act as solo operators in the field.

The ABS study also showed that Australian commercial TV broadcasters generated $6.8 billion in income in 2006-07. This figure was split 65:35 between free-to-air and pay TV operators though they earned their income in different ways. The free-to-air operators earned 80 percent of their income by the sale of airtime to advertisers. However pay TV operators earned 86 percent of their income through subscription fees.

Between them, the two commercial TV sectors employ over 10,000 people in a 70:30 ratio between free-to-air and pay TV. A massive 42 percent of these employees live in NSW confirming Sydney’s role as the centre of television in Australia and the headquarters of all the major TV networks. Less than half that number lived in Victoria, while there was a slightly smaller number in Queensland with the remainder in WA, SA and Canberra (numbers were negligible in Tasmania and NT). This is reflected in the newsrooms of regional areas where there is often just the one journalist who must work on multiple stories as well as an increasing reliance on content sourced from capital cities.

Whether these numbers are sustainable in the longer term depends on the impact of the Internet. Free-to-air viewing figures have been in decline since the turn of the century as alternative forms of entertainment have become established. As well as pay TV, internet use has increased from an average 8.9 hours a week in 2005 to 13.7 in 2008 finally overtaking TV which has stagnated at 13.3 hours a week over the same three year period.

As audiences become increasing fragmented, the TV industry will need to innovate to survive. The ABC is in the early days of an experiment with Internet TV with its new product ABC playback. ABC launched the product in March claiming it would offer an “authentic, full-screen television experience” via the Internet. However the early adopter Stilgherrian is underwhelmed by its program selection, its hard link with broadcast schedules and the inability to save programs for later viewing. He is also critical of the fact that he has to go to a “special place” to view it rather than consume wherever he wants. “It seems more like the last gasp of old-style broadcast TV than a prelude to something new and wonderful,” he said.

Rating the ratings: a study of TV audience measurement

Ratings are the central means of mass audience measurement for the television industry. This post will define what ratings mean and then examine positives and negative aspects of ratings use. It will examine critical US research in the 1990s and conclude with a discussion of the ratings transition debate in Australia earlier this decade.

Ratings provide a quantitative measure of how many homes or people are viewing a program, advertisements, a station or the media itself. They are based on an audience snapshot using both geographical (multi-stage cluster) and characteristic (stratified) sampling techniques. Because of their feedback element, ratings largely control what is broadcast. The television industry uses audience ratings information to justify its broadcasting service performance as well as the cost of advertising spots and sponsorship deals. The ratings approach is based on “exposure” which measures a single audience behaviour: “open eyes facing a medium”. When counted and analysed, exposures allow the industry to predict audiences and pre-sell slots to advertisers. Ratings for a programme are compared against others in the same point in time to determine audience share. Ratings, therefore, create a manageable image of the public for television executives. It is the apparently neutral form of numbers that invest the ratings with so much power.

But there are issues with this blunt approach. Because ratings drive advertising revenue, broadcasters tended to treat audiences as commodities on the basis of their viewing consumption. The economic system of commercial television depends on the extraction of surplus value from an exploited audience. The pressure is therefore on broadcasting decision makers to pander to mass markets in order to continually win large portions of the audience share. Ratings are kept high by sticking to proven formulas. Therefore risk taking is rare because radically different programming may shift audiences in the opposite direction than intended. This means that specialist interests such as the poor, the aged, the intelligentsia and children are not catered for by commercial broadcasters because they know will get more advertising revenue from mass audiences. As a result, innovative programming remains the preserve of publicly funded broadcasters who are not as bound to ratings.

Audience ratings have been criticised from a qualitative perspective. Because exposure is the only data recorded for ratings, the industry only cares about the numbers involved in tuning in, staying tuned, changing channels and turning off. No other audience behaviour is relevant. This means ratings do not capture whether a programme is interesting to its audience. It also means that low ratings problems are generally solved by programming decisions rather than by audience research. Ratings, in effect, “take the side” of the broadcasters. Audience ratings measure only if the message is received and do not capture whether it has been registered or internalised. Broadcasters are not interested in the “lived reality behind the ratings”. The only problem that matters for broadcasters is how to get the audience to tune in.

In the 1990s, researchers such as Eileen Meehan and Ien Ang began to criticise the way audiences were manipulated by the ratings. Meehan noted that intellectuals simply didn’t count in decision-making due to their tiny numbers. TV programming reflected the “forced choice behaviours” of the masses. Ang argued the media didn’t want to know about their audience, but merely prove there was one. Ratings produce a ‘map’ of the audience which provides broadcasters and advertisers with neatly arranged and convenient information. This allows the industry to take decisions about the future what Ang calls a sense of “provisional certainty”. There inevitably follows the streamlining of television output into formulaic genres, the plethora of spin-offs and the rigid placing of programmes into fixed time slots. In a competitive environment each competitor will make its product more like the others rather than taking a chance on producing something different. The result is a remorseless repetitiveness at the heart of the American TV schedule.

The Australian broadcasting industry has also endured controversy as a result of ratings issues. In the early 2000s the apparent certainty of measurement provided by ratings was undermined by a change in the ratings regime. In 2001, OzTAM (and its Italian supplier ATR) won a lucrative contract to replace incumbent provider ACNielsen to provide Australian metropolitan TV ratings. Despite both parties using the same “people meter” technology in the six month overlap period, major discrepancies emerged between the two providers’ data. The discrepancies led to widespread unease in the $5 billion Australian TV industry. ATR boss Muir said the discrepancy was because that ratings were sample-based estimates and therefore subject to sampling and statistical error. But advertisers did not want to hear about sampling errors or issues with “psychological makeup” that a rating system cannot capture. What they wanted was certainty for their business decisions and demanded an unrealistic 100 per cent ratings accuracy. Eventually the two measurement systems came closer together to ease the fears of the advertisers. Nonetheless the controversy exposed the gulf between the questionable accuracy of ratings and the absolute faith put in the system by advertisers.

regulation of violence on TV: an essay

Television violence has been a public concern ever since the small screen first dominated living rooms in the 1950s. While the argument mostly bubbles under, it comes to the fore whenever someone apportions blame to television for a real life violent incident. What is the relationship between on-screen violence and brutality in real life? Does television require more regulation? Or is it merely a convenient target of blame? This paper will examine the arguments for and against more regulation of television violence and analyse some of the research done on the subject in the US, Britain, Canada and Australia.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is the American federal agency charged with consumer protection and competition jurisdiction. After the Columbine massacre, the FTC conducted a review of self-regulation and industry practices in the motion picture, music recording and game industries. Their 2000 study has implications for television as a transmission medium for these industries. The study acknowledged that exposure to violence in entertainment media is not necessarily the most important factor in violent crime but did find a high correlation between them. The commission examined the self-regulatory programs of the entertainment industries and found them wanting. It recommended three actions: 1) the establishment of a code to prohibit target marketing to children 2) increased compliance at the retail level and 3) parental education about ratings and labels. The report advocated strong penalties for non-compliance and continued vigilance by Congress to monitor progress.

The FCC findings corroborate research done by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. L. Rowell Huessman’s team examined the longitudinal relations between TV violence viewing at ages 6 to 10 and adult aggressive behaviour 15 years later for a sample growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. Their results suggested males and females from all social strata are placed at increased risk for the development of aggressive behaviour in adulthood if exposed to high levels of violent television in early childhood. The study argues that prevention programs aimed at reducing exposure are more easily targeted at the viewer rather than the production source due to society’s strong protection for free speech. It cited parental supervision, co-viewing, and commenting on programs as mitigating factors as they reduce children’s identification with the perpetrator. The study criticised the undermining of the V-chip technology to control viewing by producers of violent shows who scuttled a content-based rating system.

The V-chip was studied in a 1997 report by the Action Group on Violence on Television (AGVOT) for the Canadian Radio-Television and Communications Commission. It recommended the technology should be rolled out with a common classification system. But the encoding software is not always reliable and does not react properly to scheduling changes. Moreover, promotions and movie advertisements are not encoded. The study found a high degree of community support for the V-chip but it requires harmonisation with the US to be successful.

American studies are moving in a different direction. In 1998, the National Television Violence Study brought together the findings of three annual studies on violence on American TV. It had four components; a review of the scientific literature, content analysis of violence, analysis of ratings, and an evaluation of media campaigns targeted at adolescents. The study found TV violence contributes to three types of harmful effects on viewers. These were; the learning of aggressive behaviours, a desensitisation to violence, and increased fear of victimisation of violence. Factors such as attractive perpetrators or victims, or where violence was justified, extensive, rewarded or humorous, all contributed to greater harmful effects. The report encouraged more responsible TV programming and viewing. It eschewed censorship or content regulation and instead called on viewers to reconsider viewing habits and conduct a national dialogue about the cause and effect of violence.

Here, the Australian Broadcast Authority (now replaced by ACMA) did its own study on community attitudes to violence on Australian free-to-air TV in 1989 and 2003. The surveys examined whether a relationship existed between concerns about violence on TV and whether people changed their behaviour to avoid violent content. Its research showed community levels of concern about television violence had decreased in the intervening 14 years. In 1989 25% of adults spontaneously mentioned violence as a concern. This had reduced to 14% by 2002. The later survey showed a strong agreement that Australian adults should be able to watch whatever they like on TV.

University of Western Sydney professor Virginia Nightingale produced a monograph in 2000 about children’s views on media harm. Her research explored awareness and experiences of media regulation and how children understand harmful media materials. The majority of young people surveyed (70%) agreed children needed rules to protect them from harmful media. A substantial number said they used the classification information and viewer warnings. Some went so far as to recommend changes for increased specificity so they could use them more effectively. The study did not favour more censorship or stricter classification but rather desired more consistency in how classification decisions are made. It concluded that the impact of violence on children is determined by whether they believe the events ‘really happened’. Films such as Titanic and Saving Private Ryan made a huge impression because they were based on real events. Nightingale recommended community regulatory activity should take children’s own reports of their media experiences into account.

British psychologist Tony Charlton also concluded it was people not programmes that impact behaviour. Writing in the Observer, Charlton documented how television changed the remote Atlantic island of St Helena when it arrived in 1995. The event provided researchers with a rare opportunity to examine before and after effects of television in a real life setting. The project found that television does not adversely influence children’s social behaviour. The research team concluded social controls in the community were more persuasive in shaping behaviour. He cites factors such as the disintegration of support networks, urban apathy and lack of parental supervision as having greater impact than regulatory controls on television violence.