Al Gore’s Current TV channel in the UK is facing closure after BSkyB – part owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation – axed it from its pay-TV lineup.
Cue whining:
Joel Hyatt, chief executive of parent company Current Media and co-founder of the channel with Gore, said: “Sky is shutting down an intelligent alternative to mass market programming.”
He added: “By doing so, Sky is once again discriminating in favour of the networks it owns and the points of view News Corporation agrees with.”
Joel Hyatt, Al Gore.
If Hyatt wants to blame someone for discrimination, someone point him in the direction of a mirror. It’s discriminatory to his liberal audience to broadcast Grade Fecal content and expect people to be attracted to it. What, liberals don’t like good programming? (Don’t answer that.) Hyatt’s product is unappealing, as declared by the market, and here he demonstrates why progressive radio and television fails: instead of retooling his product, he decides to blame someone else for why he sucks at his job. Rupert Murdoch didn’t force Hyatt and Mr. Internet Inventor to create a company whose content is based on liberal web shows no one but the people who make them care to watch. Brilliant idea in the wake of Air America! To put it another way: it’s like if the makers of 8-tracks and 8-track players blamed Best Buy for not carrying their products. Conspiracy!
Sky’s response:
BSkyB’s commercial director Rob Webster said: “Content is at the heart of Sky’s business and we’re committed to investing in the cut-through programming that matters most to our customers.
“We already spend more than £350m a year with pay channel partners, but we need to make this investment work hard in delivering high-quality, pay-exclusive content that gives customers more reasons to subscribe.
“On the basis that Current TV hasn’t made the impact with our customers that we’d hoped for, we’ve decided not to renew our retail relationship.
Run that through the BS filter and you get: “Customers don’t want it.” So Current’s response is to blame Sky for the customers rejecting Current’s offerings. Murdoch conspiracy! Murdoch is a capitalist. Hyatt’s claim that this is a conspiracy presupposes that his content was good and made money, two premises which have been soundly rejected by a) Sky’s customers and b) Sky’s revelation that Current wasn’t cutting it.
The former MSNBC host has pulled out the big guns, bringing in Hollywood (and gaming) superlawyer Patricia Glaser “to ‘determine his rights’ in his five-year contract,” after his public spat with Current TV bosses, a source tells The Wrap.
Meanwhile, executives at Current TV said that relations – especially those with Current CEO Joel Hyatt – were at a breaking point after deteriorating over the past several months.
“I hope Keith is part of our future, but it’s up to Keith,” an executive with Current who declined to be identified told TheWrap. “Keith set us in the right direction and we’re on that path now … and as I’ve learned over the years, everybody is replaceable.”
Olbermann was conspicuously absent from special election coverage of the Iowa Caucuses at Current TV, where the notably cantankerous host has held the title of Chief News Officer since his abrupt departure from MSNBC last summer. After his “Countdown” program, which was migrated from MSNBC to Current TV, was pre-empted Tuesday night by the GOP primary coverage, sans Olbermann, details of a breaking point began unfolding to the public.
It initially appeared that the programming change came as a surprise to Olbermann. On Tuesday, he tweeted what implied the return of Countdown following its holiday hiatus, only to later tweet a correction, directing his 360,000+ followers to defer questions to his bosses.
The NYT reports that Keith Olbermann’s ego may cost him yet another job and his absences behind the anchor desk during the biggest political nights of the season aren’t going unnoticed.
In the television industry, Mr. Olbermann is well known for fights with his bosses; stories abound about his refusal to speak to managers and executives. At Current, this behavior has continued, according to four people with knowledge of the situation, one of whom described Mr. Olbermann as “disgruntled” …
… On Jan. 3, the channel is planning to have three hours of live prime time coverage of the caucus without Mr. Olbermann.
Just the other day Keith Olbermann fell over himself to defend Bill Maher’s controversial Tebow Tweet, which seems odd that the nave-gazing Ted Baxter of MSNBC would defend anyone but himself. Considering, though, that he’s on a fledgling network that no one watches and no one else wants him, he needs to keep his road to HBO — and to eyeballs — open.
- Forbes discovers that in addition to starving Gilad Shalit, the Red Cross didn’t get a chance to examine him before fame-seeking Shahira Amin shoved a microphone in his face for Egyptian TV in a likely forced interview:
This is no small detail: The issue of Shalit’s medical condition (physical and mental) lies at the very heart of why the interview should never have taken place. So does the fact that a masked Hamas soldier – from the group’s armed wing – stood with a camera in that interview room. Just how “released” could Shalit have felt at that moment – in an Israel-unfriendly country such as Egypt – to freely consent to an interview? Considering that masked Hamas men were the only people he could see for five years, did he feel he was in any position to say no?
Hasn’t this show already been on for nearly three years on all four broadcast networks plus FNC, CNN, MSDNC, CDNC and all three C-SPAN channels? Personally I never found it funny or interesting, and I can’t wait until it gets cancelled next November. (Although we’ll still be stuck watching the remaining episodes until the following January.)
Later,
Joe
While speaking during his “Hardball” show earlier this week, Chris “Thrill Up His Leg” Matthews waxed poetic about how wonderful the universe would be if only Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012. Well, almost — what he really said was how lousy things he would be if a Republican were elected. He created a paranoid litany of inevitable consequences to a Republican electoral victory:
Tea Partiers and neocons… celebrating the death penalty, elevating torture, ending environmental protection as we know it, breaking unions, punishing gays, starting more wars, and enacting one more giant tax cut for the rich – or worse.
Maybe Matthews has a point. While the list of horrors he mentioned are close to our agenda, Matthews is a bit off on every item he listed, but he has spurred me think maybe it’s time for the tea partying neocons like me to admit what we really have in store for this country should our candidates get elected in 2012. Since no one else is willing to do it, I guess it will be up to me to let the world know. Below is the secret Tea Partier’s list of what we will get done in the first year after we take over.
The Death Penalty- Matthews is wrong to insinuate conservatives celebrate death; we celebrate life and those who believe in a death penalty feel it is a necessary evil. That being said, we plan to add two crimes to the Capital Punishment list:
–Wearing too much perfume. You know those people who always plop down next to you on a train or bus who smell like they’ve basted themselves is “aire de cheapo perfume?” Sorry ladies (and fellows with cologne), but that is a crime against humanity.
–Cell phone abusers. You’re on the 6 a.m. train into Manhattan catching a precious few extra moments of sleep when suddenly, two rows in front of you a guy disturbs your slumber by talking loudly into his cell phone about his “conquest” the night before. Under a GOP/Tea Party administration, DHS agents will be on each and every bus and train car with orders to shoot and kill the loud public phone talker.
On July 26th, 2011, Adbusters posted a page on its website that asked the following question: “Is America Ripe for a Tahrir Moment?” Only days later, Al Gore appeared on CurrentTV’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann program to discuss what everyday, ordinary, non-astroturf Americans who happen to be angry can do to get involved.
Surprise! Guess what Al just so happened to suggest?
Here’s the transcript:
KEITH OLBERMANN:
“Obviously the first suggestion relevant to this would be to exercise every vote that one has available to one in the next sets of elections. What else besides that do you recommend to those of us who are angry, and who have been angry throughout this whole process?”
AL GORE:
“Well, I enjoyed your special comment last night, Keith, and I want to focus on one particular suggestion you had about using the wonderful tools that are newly available for the reinvigoration of democracy. Now, they’ve been around for a while and more and more people have been getting involved.”
“We need to have an American spring. You know, the Arab Spring — the nonviolent part of it isn’t finished yet — but we need to have an American Spring, a kind of an American Tahrir Square. Non-violent change, where people from the grassroots get involved again.”
“Not in the Tea Party style. There are people who are genuinely upset in the Tea Party, I understand that, but that movement was funded with seed money from right-wing billionaires, the Koch brothers, and promoted on Fox News and turned into a stalking horse for this right-wing agenda that a lot of people have been trying to push on this country for a long time. What’s sacrosanct for them is to have absolutely no tax increases on the wealthiest Americans — they are at a low level now — and to try to shrink down government so they can get it out of the way of powerful corporations and special interests, so that they can have free rein. And the Supreme Court has, of course, has now declared that they’re persons and make these secret contributions.” (more…)
Last night Keith Olbermann went off of Media Matters’s talking points and named me as his Worst Person in the World on my birthday. It would have meant something had more people actually watched it and it aired on something more prestigious than a D-list network. It is the gift equivalent of last-minute gas station carnations with an equal effort at thought.
Former TV host Cenk Ugyur claims he was canned from MSNBC because Washington types now run MSNBC’s newsroom. Apparently, his “aggressive body language and overall demeanor” made it difficult to book guests. If by “overall demeanor” they mean “inability to host a show” then OK. But “Aggressive body language?” What, was he waving a knife into the camera?
Considering how incredibly rare it is to find balanced global warming reporting in the mainstream media, Noel Sheppard’s 4/24 NewsBusters headline was worthy of a double-take: “Retired Anchorman Apologizes for Presenting Both Sides of Global Warming Debate.” Having written an American Thinker article last year where I quantified the outright bias at the PBS NewsHour to be a ratio of 3 “skeptic” to 200+ “pro-Al Gore/IPCC” going back to 1996, I was puzzled. Who could it be?
I was disappointed to see a name I didn’t recognize – imagine it being NBC’s Tom Brokaw. The bigger disappointment for me was in Sheppard’s third and fourth paragraph reproduction of the original Duluth Budgeteer article, where it said:
The TV newsman’s mea culpa about having misreported climate change came after of years of treating the story the same as he would any other, requiring the views of two opposing parties…
….climate change is not a pro or con issue; it’s a scientific fact. And journalists who work to “balance” a story present an inaccurate picture when they give equal weight to sources promulgating inaccurate facts.
The significance of that eludes most people, but I’d been researching the origins of the fossil fuel funding accusation against skeptic scientists for 16+ months, two of my articles about it are at Breitbart pages here and here, among a pile of others I’ve written. For me, the words “equal balance”/”equal weight” in reference to people pushing “inaccurate facts” jumped right off the page as yet another repetition of 15-year old talking points consolidated by anti-skeptic book author Ross Gelbspan and his associates at the Ozone Action enviro-advocacy group in 1996. For those not familiar with that group, just think Greenpeace because its founder John Passacantando merged Ozone Action with Greenpeace USA in 2000 and took over as its new executive director. (more…)
In their ongoing crusade to target and silence decent, everyday Americans as racists, some in the MSM love to use the term “dog-whistle” in order to ascribe racial motives to words like, say, “basketball.” Well, lately I’ve been hearing a dog-whistle of my own — a dog-whistle of the journ-o-list variety that tells me that in their relentless campaign to destroy Sarah Palin and undercut her as a serious political force, the MSM is preparing to up the ante when it comes to using the Governor’s own family and children as a political weapon against her.
First, a little background…
Why the Media Whips Up the Palin-Fury
Watching the MSM react to Governor Palin over the last few years has been an illuminating crash course in Alinsky 101. Like elite, elbow-patched community organizers, the media collectively targets, polarizes, demonizes and intentionally creates a perpetual storm of personal drama around the Governor in the hopes of exhausting even those of us who support her. I call it whipping up the Palin-Fury.
This is a common tactic from the Left, but one we usually see played out in the streets with the idea being to so toxify the atmosphere that decent people give up the fight and go home just to get away from the awfulness of it all. The last few months of ugly and relentless pro-union protests in Wisconsin — though a failure for the left — were a textbook example of this. However, when it comes to Governor Palin, what we’re seeing is this tactic practiced by almost every so-called “objective” news outlet in America.
Keith Olbermann, the former top-rated host on the news channel MSNBC, will announce his next television home on Tuesday, and people familiar with his plans pointed Monday to a possible deal with the public affairs channel Current TV.
Neither Mr. Olbermann, his representatives, or executives from Current TV would comment on the move, but they did not deny that the channel, which counts former Vice President Al Gore as one of its founders, will become at least one partner in Mr. Olbermann’s future media plans.
One of the people with knowledge of the plans said Mr. Olbermann would have an equity stake in Current TV.
I knew I was going to be whacked hard, but I didn’t know when.
On Thursday, July 15th, I warned NAACP president Ben Jealous to stop the race-baiting. I directed my ire at Jealous on the Scott Hennen radio show:
“I have tapes, a tape, of racism, and it’s an NAACP dinner. You want to play with fire? I have evidence of racism, and it’s coming from the NAACP.”
This was part of an ongoing defense of the Tea Party, and in particular, a volley back against the NAACP for creating a week-long mainstream media-enabled attack built upon the provably false premise that a “mob” of the Tea Partiers hurled racial epithets at Congressmen Andre Carson (D-In) and Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga).
“You are manufacturing this in a summer in which the economy is the No. 1 issue affecting blacks and whites in this country,” I said on Hennen’s show. “This country can ill-afford the schism of race to be exploited the way you are, based upon the false premise of the Tea Party being racist… This is absolutely manufactured for political gain.”
My warning to Jealous was received with modest coverage in the conservative blogosphere.
I strongly believed, and still believe, that I had irrefutable evidence that showed the NAACP caught in an act of racism far worse than anything the media and the Democrat Party had attempted to manufacture in a year and a half of relentlessly trying to destroy the Tea Party. (more…)
Al Gore’s much ballyhooed Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) has recently announced that it will no longer be engaging in carbon trading, an activity that was the sole purpose that it was created. This is an utter failure of purpose in global warming hysteria yet the Old Media is almost completely silent on this colossal failure.
Why has the media remained utterly quite on this abject failure after unleashing on the public an avalanche of stories that touted the creation of the CCX back in 2000 — and since for that matter? Roger L. Simon and David Thomson wonder just that.
The CCX was the brainchild of Northwestern University business professor Richard Sandor, who used $1.1 million in grants from the Chicago-based left-wing Joyce Foundation to launch the CCX. For his efforts, Time named Sandor as one of its Heroes of the Planet in 2002 and one of its Heroes of the Environment in 2007.
But as of the October 21 announcement that carbon trading would end, the Old Media is nowhere to be seen on the story.
Has the so-called global warming crisis been propped up in the media and on the internet as the result of a single phrase?
Astute Breitbart readers will know the IPCC theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is crumbling apart at an exponential rate, as can be seen in a daily roundup of the news at web sites like ClimateDepot.com, WattsUpWithThat, SPPIblog, and PlanetGore. That’s the skeptic scientists at work, exposing the faults of the IPCC and all the people surrounding it, but has news of this been seen anywhere in the mainstream media?
No. Why not? A single phrase made famous by an enviro-advocacy group and its anti-skeptic book author “star” may have been the primary reason the MSM felt a compulsion to exclude any news of, debates of, and discussions with skeptic scientists. What was this phrase?
“Reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.” Not exactly a smooth sounding sentence. If the average disinterested citizen was presented with compelling evidence that human activity is not causing global warming, and compared it to Al Gore declaring the debate over, he or she would probably say something more like, “We should show how the global warming debate isn’t settled yet.”
Back in late 1990, that is essentially exactly what happened, except that the specific people who wanted to counter-argue Al Gore’s surging rhetoric were members of a coal producers’ association. They formed the Information Council on the Environment (ICE) sometime around January 1991, and one of the documents used by its public relations personnel did not contain the more mundane sentence I have above. Instead, its #1 sentence on a strategies page was this verbatim version: “Reposition global warming as theory (not fact).” It’s #2 sentence was, “Target print and radio media for maximum effectiveness.” The #9 one was, “Use a spokesman from the scientific community.” Most anyone would interpret this paper to be what it is, pointers for PR workers to follow. A scan of the paper can be seen when you click on the page 10 thumbnail at Greenpeace archives here. (more…)
During the rise of the tea party Anderson Cooper called conservatives "tea baggers" on CNN and remarked about "teabagging." The network featured a multitude of guests and contributors who likened tea partiers to nazis, bigots, pick your poison. No pressure was ever brought about to censor the speech of those...
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