Current (https://current.org/2008/10/page/2/)
Nearly a million more viewers tuned in for PBS’s broadcast of the vice-presidential debate last night than watched the first presidential debate last week, reports Broadcasting & Cable. According to Nielsen, 3.5 million viewers on average tuned in for the debate and the coverage that followed.
The media’s “subdued response” to the arrests of working journalists during the Republican National Convention in St. Paul sends the message that “we don’t care all that much when our watchdog role is threatened,” writes Adam Reilly in the Boston Phoenix. Scant coverage by mainstream news media was partly due to the “Goodman effect,” he writes, referring to the arrest and detention of Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman. The video of Goodman’s arrest quickly made her “a cause célèbre on the left,” and may have deterred by major news organizations from pursuing the story, he reports.
Robert Heck was reappointed to a three-year term on Baltimore’s school board, the city’s Sun newspaper reports. Heck hosts Bob the Vid Tech, a children’s show on Maryland Public Television.
At the Huffington Post, Judy Muller writes that moderator Gwen Ifill ought to have taken Sarah Palin to task during last night’s debate by pushing her to answer questions more directly. “… [F]or whatever reason, the debate got away from her and Palin got away with passing off folksy platitudes as substitutes for substance,” Muller writes. Meanwhile, PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler uses his column to address the controversy surrounding Ifill and her upcoming book about race and politics, which prompted some criticism that the moderator favors Barack Obama. Ifill and the Commission on Presidential Debates should have publicly discussed the book earlier, “in plenty of time to be discussed and explained, to have potential public perceptions considered, and to be checked with the candidates,” Getler writes.
“We started as more or less an extension of the television show, with a lot of the same philosophies in place,” says Charlie Jones, a producer of the Austin City Limits Music Festival that concluded its seventh annual run last weekend. A New York Times review declaring that ACL deserves recognition as a “first-tier rock fest, with a regional twist” includes this observation from Terry Lickona, booker and producer of the PBS series produced locally by KLRU-TV for three decades: “At the time the festival started, it not only rejuvenated the TV show but very well may have saved it,” Lickona says. “We were at a crossroads, struggling with funding, and we needed to shake things up. The success of the festival opened the doors to a new generation.”
NPR says today Boston Properties won a competitive bidding to develop its new headquarters near Washington’s Union Station — and to buy its present triangular, outgrown building. The company not only has D.C. development expertise but also streamlines the relocation by handling both transactions, says Interim CEO Dennis Haarsager. The network will stay put on Massachusetts Avenue until the new HQ is ready, late in 2012. Earlier this year, NPR bought a bigger, historic-landmarked but plain concrete warehouse on North Capitol Street (slideshow) with plans to replace part with a taller structure and keep enough of the remainder to satisfy the city’s historic preservation rulings. Boston Properties has its own media connections: It’s chaired by Mortimer Zuckerman, realty and publishing mogul (New York Daily News, U.S. News & World Report).Update: Boston Properties purchased NPR’s present HQ for $119.5 million, Bloomberg.com reported, citing CoStar Group Inc., a real estate data service.
Washington Week host Gwen Ifill rejects the accusations of blogger Michelle Malkin and other right-wingers that she is “in the tank,” as Malkin wrote, for Barack Obama and therefore unfit as moderator of Thursday’s Palin-Biden debate. “They can watch the debate tomorrow night and make their own decisions about whether or not I’ve done my job,” Ifill told the AP.Ifill’s book The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama is coming out on Inauguration Day, and Malkin says “Ifill and her publisher are banking on an Obama/Biden win to buoy her book sales.” (In a publicity video, Ifill says her book profiles the new generation of rising black politicians including Obama, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, Newark Mayor Cory Booker and U.S. Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala.). Kansas City Star columnist Barb Shelley dismisses the notion that tomorrow’s moderator would give an edge to one side: “Ifill is one of the smartest, most respected journalists on the scene. She would no more taint her professional reputation by slanting a debate than dance on a tabletop during the NewsHour.”
Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama joined his Senate colleagues in asking Arbitron to delay roll-out of its new electronic ratings measurement system, the Chicago Tribune and Radio Ink report. But, judging by a statement issued yesterday by Arbitron Chairman Steve Morris, the ratings company is proceeding as scheduled with the introduction of Portable People Meters into eight new markets on Oct. 8. Arbitron is also pushing back against a proposed FCC investigation [PDF] of the PPM’s impact on broadcast diversity. A second round of comments are due at the FCC next week, according to MediaWeek.