Category: Television & Radio

Why Do They Do This?

“During Thursday night’s Game 4, Fox cut to the crowd 222 times. It cut to the inside of the Detroit and St. Louis dugouts 153 times.

“That’s 375 images away from the field.”

— Richard Sandomir, New York Times

In many ways, sports television went downhill when they began to treat coverage like a television program rather than a sporting event. Damn Roone Arledge. “Ruin” Arledge, if you ask me.

But at least NewMexiKen didn’t have to watch all those crowd shots in high definition. Our local affiliate lost its over-the-air high definition signal midway through Thursday night’s game and still didn’t have it back before the World Series ended Friday night.

Oh, and while I certainly didn’t see all 222 crowd shots Thursday night, or as many Friday night, I saw enough to wonder why St. Louis didn’t permit any people of color to attend the games.

Why is it?

Why is it that Fox could have cheap, sophomoric jokes about sexual organs on any of its comedies, run Viagra and Cialis commercials 24 by 7, and still can’t discuss it openly when the catcher takes a foul ball in the nuts?

Ivan Rodriguez is rolled up in the fetal position, writhing in pain on the ground and Tim McCarver says it looks like it hit him in the thigh. In fairness McCarver did mention the “cup” twice, but even “groin” didn’t venture into the description.

Testicles — they’re called testicles.

(Which would be about the only word found in the dictionary that Joe Buck didn’t use several thousand times each during the nine innings.)

What to Watch

A summary of the early season from The New York Times:

Three weeks into the new network television season, three new shows are giving early signs of being winners: “Heroes” on NBC, “Jericho” on CBS and “Ugly Betty” on ABC. And some scheduling moves have worked brilliantly, like ABC’s shift of “Grey’s Anatomy,” now television’s hottest show, to Thursday night.

The Fox network had virtually nothing good happen with any of the shows it introduced; CBS has found scant interest so far for its expensive new sit-com, “The Class,” even though it is the creation of David Crane of “Friends” fame; and the new CW network, the combination of the old WB and UPN, has found viewers seemingly unaware that most of its shows are even on.

NBC is the only network showing overall growth from last season, bolstered by “Heroes” and the addition of N.F.L. football on Sunday nights. ABC has countered with the shrewdest scheduling gambit of the fall, its relocation of “Grey’s Anatomy” to Thursday night, where it has moved past the former titan, “CSI,” making ABC a new power on the most important night of the week.

NewMexiKen’s daughters watch television, it seems, exclusively via TiVo. Nights and times likes those discussed in the article excerpted here seemingly have very little meaning. Jill and Emily both claim, I think, that they watch more TV with TiVo, but in less time overall.

Six Things to Think About

1. According to a report in Automotive News, Ford and General Motors discussed a merger in July.

2. The price of gasoline has gone down 50 cents in a month. How much lower can it go before the election? (Thanks to mjh’s blog for focusing my thought on this one.)

3. Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez‘s favorite books include “Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo and “Don Quixote” by Cervantes. Also “Dude, Where’s My Country?” by Michael Moore.

4. Charles P. Pierce thinks the president is on the edge:

This all came back to me because, quite frankly, I think the president of the United States is getting ready to slug somebody. And, based on several recent on-camera performances, all of them readily available to anyone who wants to watch, you wouldn’t have to say anything about his momma, his wife, his kids, his dogs, or the fundamental legitimacy of his pedigree to get him to throw down on your ass like the genuine Earnie (The Acorn) Shavers. It appears that all that would be necessary is for you push a question about his policies beyond the limits of whatever talking-points he has on the subject.

… There are presidents who can rise above it, and presidents who can’t, but none of them ever looked like they were ready to toss hands because people questioned their right to torture. It’s become truly startling how close we seem to be coming to the “Because I said so, that’s why” moment.

5. John Yoo understands American history a little differently than I learned it.

But the founders intended that wrongheaded or obsolete legislation and judicial decisions would be checked by presidential action, just as executive overreaching is to be checked by the courts and Congress.

6. Path to 9/11 writer Cyrus Nowrasteh is even more delusional.

I felt duty-bound from the outset to focus on a single goal–to represent our recent pre-9/11 history as the evidence revealed it to be. The American people deserve to know that history: They have paid for it in blood.

… Fact-checkers and lawyers scrutinized every detail, every line, every scene. There were hundreds of pages of annotations. We were informed by multiple advisers and interviews with people involved in the events–and books, including in a most important way the 9/11 Commission Report.

Reality TV

It seems to NewMexiKen that this kind of thing is about what we have come to expect from tabloid news and the general coarsening of American pop culture. But C.W. Nevius thinks Nancy Grace has reached “a new depth of sleaze.”

Nancy Grace was in vintage form on her national talk show on CNN’s Headline News. Her guest was a soft-spoken 21-year-old mother named Melinda Duckett. Police in Florida suspect Duckett had something to do with the disappearance of her 2-year-old son, Trenton, on Aug. 27.

But Grace wasn’t satisfied with suspicion. She wanted to solve the case right there in front of a coast-to-coast television audience.

“Why are you not telling us where you were?” Grace demanded, pounding the table. “Miss Duckett, you are not telling us for a reason. What is the reason?”

As the woman stumbled over her words, trying to come up with answers, a small yellow text box appeared at the bottom of the screen: “SINCE SHOW TAPING,” it read, “BODY OF MELINDA DUCKETT FOUND AT GRANDPARENTS’ HOME.”

That’s right. Grace was interviewing a dead woman. Just hours before the taped interview aired last Friday, Duckett committed suicide at her grandparents’ house.

Given the circumstances, Grace’s grandstanding, badgering interview was bad enough. But the idea that her producers at CNN elected to go ahead and run the interview, even though they knew Duckett had killed herself, has veterans of television news shaking their heads.

Nevius has more.

Airline Could Pull Ads From ABC

American Airlines is prepared to pull its advertising from ABC in order to protest its portrayal in the network’s recently aired movie The Path to 9/11, according to a source. The carrier also said it is considering legal action against the network.
…

The airline spends $25 million annually on broadcast TV ads; it could not immediately determined how much is spent on ABC, but according to one source, “It’s extensive.”

— ADWeek

American should quit flying to Orlando for a while, too.

A great nation deserves the truth

Actually, though I doubt you’ll believe me, I really don’t care all that much about Path to 9/11 anymore — as I’ve said, nine out of ten Americans probably WON’T watch it (including me).

But the more one learns about it, the more one’s jaw just drops:

This from AMERICAblog, where the writer has seen the film:

Here’s what the “Path to 9/11” claims American Airlines did on the morning of September 11. According to Disney/ABC, American Airlines had Mohammad Atta at its ticket counter and a warning came up on the screen when he tried to check in. The AA employee called a supervisor who kind of shrugged and said, blithely, just let him through. The first employee, shocked, turned to her supervisor and said, shouldn’t we search him? The American Airlines supervisor responds, nah, just hold his luggage until he boards the plane. The scene is clearly intended to make American Airlines look negligent.

Only problem? It never happened.

First off, Disney/ABC got the airport wrong. The warning for Mohammad Atta’s ticket popped up in Portland, Maine, not at Boston Logan as the tv show claims (this is on page 1 of the September 11 Commission report).

Second, the security rules at the time said nothing about searching a passenger who has a “warning” pop up, they only required that the bags be held until the passenger boarded. The Disney/ABC tv show, on the other hand, clearly tries to imply that American Airlines violated the security rules in letting Atta go. This simply isn’t true. (This is also on page 1 of the report.)

But most importantly, Disney/ABC implicated the wrong airline. And I quote the Director of the FBI:

On September 11, at 6:00 AM, Mohamed Atta and Abdul Aziz al Omari boarded a U.S. Airways flight leaving Portland, Maine en route to Boston’s Logan Airport.

I think American Airlines is going to be very unhappy. [Update: They were. See my comment.]

Fully Prepared

Some background on Cyrus Nowrasteh, the screenwriter behind Path to 9/11:

He then graduated to the world of feature films – writing, producing and directing a 1998 comedy film titled “The Island” that put forward the hilarious premise that neither Marilyn Monroe nor JFK had died but were both actually living the wild life on a boozy island paradise. Portrayed on screen by Sally Kirkland and Michael Murphy respectively.

Martin Lewis: The Huffington Post, who has more.

What was ABC/Disney smoking thinking when they put this $30 million project in this guy’s hands?

Best line of the day, so far

“We’ve all become accustomed to a Congress that behaves as if it’s divided between Bloods and Crips rather than Republicans and Democrats….”

— Tim Rutten in a Los Angeles Times opinion piece titled ABC follows a path to shame. He also says:

“It’s well understood, of course, that docudramas are seldom documentary and only sporadically dramatic. As a rule, they’re basically devices to free unimaginative writers from the burden of having to make up characters’ names.”

Best line of the day, so far

“I once sat in a car forever waiting for my mom to come out of a grocery store. I thought that was the definition of ‘interminable.’ I had no idea ‘The Path to 9/11’ was in my future.”

— Chicago Sun-Times critic Doug Elfman in a review titled: Accuracy aside, ABC’s “9/11” deserves to bomb.

He goes on to say:

Controversy could boost viewership, except “Path” is the dullest, worst-shot TV movie since ABC’s disastrous “Ten Commandments” remake. It substitutes shaky handheld cameras and dumb dialogue for craftsmanship. It could not be more amateurish or poorly constructed unless someone had forgotten to light the sets.

An appalling secondary concern is the tone makes almost every pre-9/11 American look like a fool.

NewMexiKen hopes ABC pulls the plug on this piece of propaganda, but the simple fact is that a large audience would be 30 million and that means nine out of ten Americans won’t be watching it anyway — and Scholastic has already replaced its supplemental material for schools, a more important development than whatever ABC chooses to do.

Boycotting Advertisers

Michael Froomkin engages Miami ABC affiliate WPLG in a futile discussion about the crock-a mentary “The Path to 9/11.”

“So, left with no alternative, I’ve started by contacting ABC’s national advertisers whose products I currently use. But doing it on a local level would be much, much more effective. Anyone have a list of local WPLG advertisers?”

Don’t know about Miami, but it often seems as if all the local advertisers on Albuquerque’s television stations are car dealers and most of us are already doing a pretty good job of boycotting GM, Ford and Chrysler.

ABC’s ‘9/11’ Libel By Fiction Exposure

Michael Froomkin thinks ABC/Disney might want to be in discussions with their attorneys:

“[I]t seems to me that one aspect of ABC/Disney’s position has been missed: if the public descriptions of the show are accurate, then the people who made it and those who plan to show it have some serious libel exposure.”

According to Froomkin, while it’s difficult to libel a public figure, it’s not impossible. He explains.

Tell ABC What You Think

Bush AdvisersThe Democratic Party has a form that you can email to Disney President Robert Iger. Here’s the background:

The ABC television network — a cog in the Walt Disney empire — unleashed a promotional blitz in the last week for a new “docudrama” called “The Path to 9/11”. ABC bills the two-night production as a public service that is “based on the 9/11 Commission Report”. That is false – it is actually a bald-faced attempt to slander Democrats.

“The Path to 9/11” is a conservative attempt to rewrite the history of September 11th to blame Democrats. The Walt Disney Corporation could have given Americans an honest look at September 11. Instead, the company abandoned its duty to the truth — and embraced the fiction known as “The Path to 9/11.”

Tell Walt Disney president Robert Iger that you hold his company responsible — and that this community demands that ABC tell the truth.

It’ll take you a few seconds.

Here’s the text of a letter from President Clinton’s Lawyer to ABC.

Image of “Bush Advisers” from Daily Kos.

Update: Here in Albuquerque, call KOAT, 505-884-7777.

More on ABC’s mock-u-drama

This from reasonably neutral Editor and Publisher, which has reviewed the program:

The first half, to be aired Sunday, explores the terrorist threat starting with the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center, and there is little question that President Clinton is dealt with severely, almost mockingly, with the Lewinsky scandal closely tied to his failure to cripple al-Qaeda.

“The Path to 9/11” ends with a long segment on the day of the attacks and top officials’ response — though we only see President Bush in his speech to the nation, not in the Florida classroom with “The Pet Goat.”

Here’s that ‘liberal media’ acting out again

ABC has been aggressively advancing its inaccurate and politically slanted miniseries, “The Path to 9/11,” to the right wing. Big players like Rush Limbaugh have been provided copies, as have obscure right-wing bloggers like Patterico.

But ABC has refused to provide a copy to President Clinton’s office. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former National Security Adviser Samuel Berger have also requested copies of the film from ABC, and both have been denied. Both Berger and Albright are harshly criticized in the film in scenes that, according to former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, are “180 degrees from what happened.”

— Think Progress

Update: The Daily Howler sums up:

“This used to be called a “broadcast” network. Now, they narrow-cast to the intellectually challenged—and make a sick joke of our public discourse. Sorry, but the American system—indeed, the western experiment—simply can’t function this way.”

Best line of Wednesday, so far

The press had lots of commentary like the one by Lauren Stiller Rikleen, titled “Women need Katie Couric to succeed.”

Actually, the minute Katie Couric was given a $15 million paycheck to read from a teleprompter for 15 or 20 minutes a night, women won. Women have been doing that at the BBC and on American cable stations for years, and for a lot less dough. Jackie Robinson represented a revolution; Katie Couric represented a promotion.

— Maureen Dowd