Current (https://current.org/2005/03/)
The host of this year’s Input conference plans to go ahead with the international pubTV producers’ screening conference in San Francisco, May 1-6, despite a union boycott of the SF Hilton and 13 other large hotels, the Chronicle reported yesterday. ITVS, host of the event, said it favors good treatment for hotel workers but could not afford to lose $663,000 tied up in reserving the conference space. Groups of lawyers and historians have relocated events from the boycotted hotels.
DCRTV points to MPT Mole, a blog maintained by an anonymous someone claiming to be a Maryland Public Television employee. Note that it “should be viewed as fictional musings and unfounded speculation, not official truth.”
The Washington Post previews Nova’s tsunami special, “Wave That Shook the World,” scheduled to air tonight.
Louis Rukeyser’s Wall Street Week played a small role in the Internet speculation bubble, writes Jay Hancock, a Baltimore Sun business journalist, but its contributions were greater as originator of financial journalism on TV.
The plan was for a Public Television Act with no mention of dusty old radio. Not everyone signed on to the plan.
Iowa state senators have introduced a bill asking the nascent Iowa Public Radio network to consider playing “modern progressive musical content.”
In a new example of the creeping commercial- ization of PTV under- writing, spots plugging burrito chain Chipotle will spoof pledge drives and Masterpiece Theatre, the New York Times reports. The 15-second ads, er, credits will accompany American Public Television’s How to Cook Everything: Bittman Takes On America’s Chefs beginning in April.
This story in the New York Times suggests that Washington’s indecency crusade will only get tougher with the departure of Michael Powell from the FCC. It also contains the following quote, excerpted from a dissenting opinion penned by new commission chairman Kevin J. Martin: “Despite my colleagues’ assurance that there appeared to be a safe distance between the prostitute and the horse, I remain uncomfortable.”
“I guess once Rukeyser left, it was inevitable.” That’s what Douglas Gomery, a professor and media economist at the University of Maryland, told the Baltimore Sun in its story about the end of Wall $treet Week. Louis Rukeyser hosted the groundbreaking investment news show, which will air its final episode June 24, from its debut in 1970 through his firing in 2002. Maryland PTV President Rob Shuman tells Broadcasting & Cable that the show’s cancellation “signals the end of an era for us.”
Major unions of BBC workers say they’ll take a strike vote April 4 if management cuts jobs as threatened, BBC News reported. Unions asked for negotiations during a three-month moratorium on cutbacks, no layoffs and pay guarantees for workers whose jobs are being outsourced. BBC managers “have decided to beat themselves up before the government does so,” said Gerry Morrissey, a leader of BECTU, a major union.(BECTU meanwhile said production staffers at the commercial network ITV voted this week to walk out after Easter, rejecting ITV’s offer of a 3.3 percent pay raise.)Director General Mark Thompson aims to save 355 million pounds to reinvest in programming, especially drama, news coverage, regional broadcasts and on-demand news services. The public-service portion of the BBC staff would shrink by a fifth, dropping 3,780 positions altogether. These include 2,050 production jobs announced Monday and 1,730 nonproduction jobs announced in March.
Did NPR overreact in terminating its relationship with longtime freelance arts reporter David D’Arcy after his controversial December piece exploring the fate of artist Egon Schiele’s “Portrait of Wally”? The painting, seized from its original owner by Nazis in 1939, was loaned to New York’s Museum of Modern Art several years ago and has since become subject of a fight over its rightful ownership. D’Arcy’s story treated MOMA unfairly, according to NPR, which later issued a correction, and ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin, who defended the correction in a recent column. But nothing in D’Arcy’s report “seems particularly surprising or stunningly accusatory,” says this story in the Los Angeles Times, which says NPR’s decison to sever ties with D’Arcy “raised questions about how its news operation sets and enforces journalistic standards.”
Employees’ unions fear the BBC will lose up to 6,000 jobs overall, the Guardian reported. The latest round of cuts, to be specified Monday, may include 400 in the big-budget doc production unit, Factual and Learning. Director General Mark Thompson says cuts are needed to persuade the government that public money is being well spent. The head of the journalists’ union replies: “You can’t sack thousands and then ask hard-working staff to take on huge amounts of extra work and still expect to maintain high standards.”
Union leaders say they’ll fight massive layoffs at the BBC, Edinburgh’s Scotsman reported. The BBC is expected to announce a second wave of staff cutbacks on Monday, mostly in news and other program jobs. The first round made public last week affects 1,730 jobs — 980 layoffs and 750 jobs outsourced, mostly in finance, human resources and marketing, said the media workers’ union BECTU. The Culture Minister earlier recommended keeping the BBC’s tax on TV sets, but pressed for efficiency in the government’s Green Paper [118-page PDF] on the BBC’s future.
The FCC announced changes to its low-power FM service yesterday and asked for feedback on other possible tweaks. (Release and order, both PDFs.) It also froze granting of FM translator permits for six months, following the Media Access Project’s filing of a petition charging that shell companies have been acquiring and reselling the free permits, sometimes for hundreds of thousands of dollars. (PDFs of petition, releated release.) Coverage in the Los Angeles Times.
Anti-quack crusader James Randi criticizes Diane Rehm and public TV stations for featuring Deepak Chopra, Dr. Christiane Northrup and a psychic.
MJ Bear, former head of online at NPR, has co-authored a study of media coverage of the Iraq War. It found that many media outlets have self-censored their coverage to avoid offending their audiences. (Via Romenesko.)
“Twenty-four hours at KBOO reveals what potential listeners will find at Portland’s noncommercial community radio station: the bizarre, the political and, in the dead of night, even the ambitious,” reports the Oregonian.
“Topics about the arts, the environment, or identity politics seem overrepresented, while stories about business seem underrepresented,” writes a conservative columnist of public radio in New Hampshire’s Union Leader.
“To get any information at all from the Bush administration is a triumph, for it has become the all-time champion of information control,” said Bob Edwards in a recent speech in Danville, Ky. (Via Romenesko.)
Tom Church, founder of the Radio Research Consortium, died over the weekend at the age of 61.