Splice Now

Turns out that there will be another Democratic debate — next weekend, Sept 9, in Miami. How do I know? It was buried in an article in Sunday’s NY Times — on page 18! A big 2-page “Election Calendar” (which wasn’t published online) didn’t even mention it. It took me ten minutes of Internet research to get the particulars.

It’s being broadcast — by Univision — but apparently won’t be aired in LA. Yea, I guess nobody’s interested in a debate from Miami. What a backwater! It sure has nothing to do with presidential politics.

We have a US post office today because our nation’s founders thought that an informed public was an essential prerequisite for democracy. Today, we’re supposed to get our candidate information from late night television, network pundits and 30-second spots.

Isn’t it self-evident that these debates should be aired live nationwide and should be on the Internet as soon as they’re over?

Technorati Tags: media and society

On Thursday, NBC indicated that it would not renew its contract to sell television episodes on the iTunes store. Though nobody is absolutely certain of the reasons, money is certainly one of them. Then, on Friday, Apple retaliated by dumping NBC shows ahead of the contract expiration date, but NBC disputed this.

The whole thing strikes me funny. Apple charges $1.99 per episode, and apparently, that isn’t enough for NBC. But if you look at what the networks make when you watch a show over the air, that sure looks like big money to me. If you divide the total commercial revenues for a typical prime time show by the number of people watching, you get a figure more like 50 cents per viewer. So when you buy a show for $1.99, you’re really being gouged. True, watching the network broadcast isn’t exactly the same as buying a digital file that you can look at over and over again, but you could easily Tivo or tape the broadcast, and thus own it, and, in any event, who wants to permanently own an episode of a TV show? How many times are you really going to watch it?

I’d love to buy my TV and watch it ad-free. But give it to me for a reasonable price — the same price the network is getting when advertisers pay for access to my eyeballs.

Technorati Tags: media and society

Judging from a promo for “Hard Ball” that I caught while grabbing a cup of coffee yesterday, the pundits are doing their best to amplify the irrelevant pseudo-disagreements that Mr. Stephanopolous tried so hard to create in yesterday’s debate and turn it into “must-see TV.” A huge “controversy” was what the Matthews show was hyping — something that bore almost no resemblance to the debate itself, let alone to any kind of substance.

And of course, since nobody actually saw the debate, nobody can say whether the little snippets that will be pounded on are representative. This gives the punditry and the networks much greater power to create a narrative — a narrative that has very little to do with reality.

When two kids in my junior high schoolyard would argue or play the dozens, a crowd would often form and try to get them to fight. They’d call out “you take that from him?!” and egg the parties on. Somehow it feels very old and pre-verbal — the tribe needs to establish the alpha-dog. So I suppose there’s nothing new about Stephanopoulis’ approach, as long as you assume that we haven’t evolved much in the last 10,000 years or so.