Nice Above Fold - Page 976

  • Cartoonist Ted Rall has an idea for PBS’s next reality show.
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    June 4, 2003

  • NPR’s new deal with the online mag Slate to co-produce a daily newsmag uncomfortably smacks of commercialism, say Mark Glaser of the Online Journalism Review and others.
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    June 4, 2003

  • The Weekly Standard takes aim at Bill Moyers for failing to acknowledge that many of his Now interview subjects have received money from the Schumann Foundation, which Moyers heads. Moyers responds on the Now website.
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    June 3, 2003

  • Only NPR and PBS gave serious coverage to the FCC’s revision of media ownership rules in the weeks before the decision, says the Poynter Institute’s Al Tompkins.
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    June 3, 2003

  • Boston’s WBUR-FM dropped Fresh Air and has no definite plans for its reinstatement, angering some fans, according to the Boston Herald.
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    June 2, 2003
  • People

    Yankee pitchman, former GBH pres David Ives dies at 84

    David Otis Ives cultivated an eccentric Yankee image as a WGBH pitchman that endeared him to New England audiences and helped fuel the Boston station’s emergence as a national production powerhouse. His enthusiasm for the station seemed boundless as he demonstrated pledge premiums, performed songs and skits, and even rode an elephant on camera. Ives Beneath the madcap persona, WGBH’s fourth president was a stickler for good grammar, deportment and intellectual rigor — standards he set with “great humor and grace,” recalled Brigid Sullivan, VP of children’s, educational and interactive media. Ives, 84, died May 16 after becoming ill while visiting family in San Francisco.
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    June 2, 2003

  • Following Lou Rukeyser’s act

    It’s 8:30 p.m. Eastern time on CNBC, and four chimes are sounded. A series of images follow: George Washington in front of the New York Stock Exchange, the Statue of Liberty, the bronze bull in perpetual snarl at the tip of Manhattan. A few remote-control clicks away, four eerily similar chimes can be heard at the same time on PBS, ushering in a different flurry of stock footage. These images are less “top-down”: businessmen and businesswomen collaborating around a conference table and a spinning globe that morphs into the eye of a woman looking at her computer screen, as if to remind us of the hallucinatory effects of staring too long at stock charts.
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    June 2, 2003

  • Children’s TV producers for WGBH and Reading Rainbow have taken unusual steps to keep their programs on the air. For the first time ever, WGBH will produce a new preschool series for a commercial outlet. Reading Rainbow host LeVar Burton appealled publicly for outside funding to keep the award-winning series going.
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    May 28, 2003

  • Uncooperative Iraqi prisoners of war are being forced to listen to Barney’s “I Love You” song, the Sesame Street theme and heavy metal music, reports the BBC. [Via randomWalks.]
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    May 22, 2003

  • Chevron Texaco said May 20 that it will end its longterm sponsorship of Metropolitan Opera broadcasts next April, the San Francisco Examiner reported. The opera company vowed to find new sponsors. Texaco began sponsoring the broadcasts in 1940, according to a company press release.
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    May 21, 2003

  • Maryland’s Salisbury University is considering selling radio station WSCL, reports The Salisbury Daily Times.
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    May 20, 2003

  • “Public broadcasting’s super salesman” David Ives, who led WGBH as it became a national production powerhouse, died on May 16. “As the man who approved major projects at WGBH, he became linked with enduring national favorites,” such as Nova, Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery!, recalls the New York Times in an obit.
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    May 20, 2003

  • Race: The Power of an Illusion, a three-part public TV series, “could more aptly be titled ‘PBS: The Power of Self-Delusion,’ a study of how a publicly owned television network with a mandate to challenge the mind can instead put even the most caffeinated brains to sleep,” writes Alessandra Stanley in the New York Times.
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    May 19, 2003

  • The FCC has fined WCVE in Richmond, Va., $10,000 for illegally constructing and operating a new antenna site. The station started broadcasting from the site before it requested FCC permission to do so. The commission later denied WCVE’s petition. Read the FCC order (PDF).
    By
    May 15, 2003

  • Fortune magazine profiles Christina Cooks, the public TV show from Christina Pirello and her husband/partner Robert. Her combination of macrobiotic cooking and flavor makes a business that grosses $300,000 from underwriters and $350,000 from books, workshops and other sources. See also the Christina Cooks website.
    By
    May 15, 2003