Current (https://current.org/2006/09/page/3/)
“He is the wrong man in the wrong job at the wrong time,” says Common Cause President Chellie Pingree, in a press release announcing an e-lobbying campaign against Senate confirmation of CPB Board nominee Warren Bell. The nominee’s lack of interest in the field and provocatively anti-P.C. sense of humor disqualify him for the appointment, Common Cause says in a report posted on its website today.
TV ratings juggernaut Nielsen Media Research is in talks with Clear Channel’s electronic ratings service about measuring radio listening, potentially threatening Arbitron’s control of the industry, Mediaweek reports.
A state agency has cited a tower service company for three violations of safety regulations involved in a fatal accident on an Iowa Public Television tower near Des Moines, TV Technology reported. Three workers, including the proprietor of the company, were being lifted to change light bulbs on the tower when they fell 1,200 feet and died in the March incident.
Two of PBS’s top technical officers are leaving this month: Ed Caleca, senior v.p. of technology and operations, and Andre Mendes, chief technology integration officer, according to TV Technology. Caleca leaves Sept. 15 and Mendes Sept. 29, the magazine’s website said.
King Features Syndicate will begin distributing a weekly current-affairs column by Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman on Oct. 24, Editor & Publisher reports. She predicts “Amy Goodman: Breaking the Sound Barrier” will bring out voices of the “silenced majority.” Goodman and her journalist brother David are co-authors of this year’s Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back, now available at Wal-Mart!
“When you see these kids, that’s better than anything you can create in your mind.”
This fall Public Radio International will launch Fair Game with Faith Salie, an hourlong evening program featuring interviews, political satire and in-studio musical performances. Host Salie has done standup comedy and appeared on TV shows including Significant Others and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
Beginning early next year, American Public Media in St. Paul, Minn., will produce public radio’s Performance Today and SymphonyCast. NPR will end production of the shows as it prepares an online music service, which will include the classical music shows and other offerings from APM. (Coverage in the Washington Post.)
The New York Times reviews recent research findings on what toddlers learn from television while Slate speculates on whether there’s a link between autism and TV watching in early childhood.
WNIT in Elkhart, Ind., plans to move to downtown South Bend in 2009, taking over a building to be vacated by the local CBS affiliate.
Of the two documentaries airing tonight that recall the fiery collapses of the World Trade Center’s twin towers, New York Times Critic Virginia Heffernan prefers Spike TV’s program over PBS’s. “Once you give in to the program’s pointy-headedness, though, the pedantry is not worthless,” she writes of Nova’s “Building on Ground Zero.”
Brent Bozell will step down as president of the Parent’s Television Council, the group that led the charge against broadcast indecency after Janet Jackson’s 2004 “wardrobe malfunction.” His successor is Tim Winter, a former NBC executive who wants to work collaboratively with broadcasters, reports the Los Angeles Times.
Researchers in Switzerland say they’re developing a nano technology that will allow future TVs to present every color the human eye can see, or roughly double the range offered by current plasma, LCD and projection screens, Wired reports. It will likely take at least eight years to get the technology, which uses an elastic, rather than fixed, diffraction grating that can be tuned to present additional colors, into commercial products.
The Los Angeles Times reports that the Parents Television Council filed an FCC complaint over obscenities uttered by two actresses during the Aug. 27 live telecast of the Primetime Emmy Awards.
Viewers aren’t complaining much about PBS’s online advertising practices, writes PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler, but criticisms leveled by media activist Jeff Chester are healthy. The objections are forcing “an airing about how this very important, and unique, public broadcasting service is gliding into a new source of revenue,” Getler writes.
Writing for The Nation, Amy Alexander examines the impact of Tavis Smiley’s The Covenant with Black America. “One doesn’t just read The Covenant With Black America,” she says. “Rather, to read this nonfiction manifesto-cum-workbook is to become part of a multimedia movement aimed at increasing black political and economic power.”