Meet the New Main Stream Media -- Same as the Old MSM, Only on the West Coast

"Silicon Valley is rapidly turning into Media Valley--and New York, NY should look out--the capital of the media world is shifting about 3,000 miles westwards." So says Tom Foremski, a former Financial Times reporter turned blogger for the must-read Silicon Valley Watcher.

As Foremski puts it, "Some of Silicon Valley's largest companies are media companies: Google, Yahoo, EBay, for example are media companies--they publish pages of content and advertising around it." In other words, they are media companies, even as we speak--they just don't want you to necessarily know it.

And of course, whenever one hears the word "media," one also hears "politics." Some Silicon Valleyites, such as eBay's Meg Whitman, are supporting Republicans--in her case, Mitt Romney for president.

But the vast majority of Silicon-ers, of course, are big bucks big Dems. Most notorious for its lefty partisanship is Google, which gave 98% of its political money to Democrats in 2006, and similar percentages in 2004.

So not surprisingly, politics are bubbling up out of Silicon Valley We might consider, for example, Sunday night's Oscar awards--there was Al Gore, who lives now in San Francisco, and is a top adviser to Google, among other high tech companies, receiving the biggest applause, and the greatest adulation, of anyone up on stage.

So a whole new cycle of lefty politics is coming, from the West Coast, not the East Coast. Some of it will be obvious, such as anti-global warming. Other instances of politicization will be subtler, such as the current fight over "net neutrality," which represents the effort of one side (Google et al.) to impose price controls on the the other side (the phone companies). And the fact that this "net neutrality" fight has been so slugged in favor of Google & Co. is just one indicator that the Googlers are winning--they are using politics to their commercial, as well as ideological, advantage. OK, so that's the American system, but it's happening without enough scrutiny, in part because the MSM haven't noticed.

As Foremski puts it, "New York's media industry doesn't see the shift that is going on because it feels as if it is master of its universe. It has noticed that its business models are under tremendous pressure but it hasn't noticed the shift westwards, the competition in Silicon Valley and in Santa Monica."

One of the reasons that the New York media hasn't noticed the shift, Foremski continues, is that the Silicon Valley outfits don't want them to notice: "Google, Yahoo, Ebay, etc, are keen to portray themselves as technology companies rather than media companies--it is much more conductive to establishing partnerships and ad network deals in which they benefit far more than their old school media partners."

He concludes. "If they were seen as more media company than technology company, I'm sure things would be different."

In other words, there's nothing wrong with the East Coast media except that it's liberal and also not very smart. They haven't noticed that the West Coasters are eating their lunch.

But come to think of it, the rest of us maybe aren't that smart, if we let another whole tranche of media companies go forward with their liberal bias. And the info on Google's liberal bias, on its own screen, of course, is legion.

Google reminds me a lot of CNN, circa 1995. Big and arrogant, that's for sure, but Google today is 100 times more powerful than CNN was then.

Fighting Yesterday's Fights

The Washington Post's savvy media writer, Frank Ahrens, has a brief but brilliant review of Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America's Media, written by Eric Klinenberg.

Liberals such as Klinenberg are obsessed with media ownership. That is, they worry that Time-Warner, Viacom, NBC Universal, the News Corp., etc. are going to impose "monopolistic control" on the rest of us. (Such liberals don't seem to worry about being propagandized by the likes of NPR and PBS, but that's a story for another time.)

But as Ahrens points out, any media monopoly, or would-be monopoly, is under extreme challenge from the endlessly proliferating new media. As the Postie puts it, "Citizens exercise their greatest power when they act as a market, which they did by choosing new media over old. Old-style media empires -- radio, TV, newspapers -- no longer have the eyeballs to support the kind of audience scale that justified '90s consolidation and so alarmed media activists. Why? Because of MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, satellite radio, XBox, iPods, et al."

Sorry, Mr. Klinenberg, but those companies--and another thousand to come--are the real solution to the alleged problem of media monopoly, not the standard leftist prescription of more bureaucrats and more red tape. As Ahrens explains in his devastating conclusion, "Imagine it's 1875 and a virtually unregulated railroad industry is crisscrossing the country. At the same time, Washington is busily crafting close and careful rules governing the canal business."

The Cable Game is about to become more exciting than ever, thanks to technology and entrepreneurship.

"½ Hour News Hour Starts Strong"

That's the headline atop Steve Donohue's
article in Multichannel News,, which reported that the Joel Surnow-produced comedy show for Fox News "gave the network a 69% increase in viewership and a 94% increase in the 25-54 demo compared with what ran in its time slot previously."

The Cable Game just got Joost

Everyone knows that Convergence is coming--but nobody knows exactly how it is coming.

That is, the strem of content coming from TV and from the Internet are going to be One, appearing on the same TV/computer screen--this much we know. What we don't know, of course, is what "channel" people will be watching: Will it be a broadcaster? Or a cabler? Or an Internetter? A little of all three--or all three zillion? Inquiring minds want to know, that's for sure.

This morning The Wall Street Journal offered a particularly insightful page one article on Google's vision for the future, which is breathtaking, indeed: "Google's gargantuan stated mission of organizing all the world's information into searchable form." The Journal's Kevin Delaney and Matthew Karnitschnig continued, "For TV executives fretting about the future of their business, YouTube [a recent acquisition of Google's] is both fascinating and terrifying."

Gargantuan. Fascinating. Terrifying. Those are all good words to describe the prospect that the entire world will be Googled.

That's right: every word, every image, every data point--all of them folded, spindled, or Googled.

The Cable Gamer doesn't claim to have the bandwidth to figure out all this Convergence biz. But she does know that there is going to be a Google-lash--a backlash against Google. The WSJ article, this morning, for example, cites the difficulty that Google was having in reaching a deal with Viacom--which includes such hot Cable Game properties as "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report"--over video content being displayed on Google's YouTube. It seems that the content-provider companies are worried about giving away their product for free on the note--and to the profit of Google/YouTube. Yet even so, Google CEO Eric Schmidt expressed confidence to the Journal that some sort of deal would be possible.

Or maybe not. Later on Wednesday, comes news from USA Today that Viacom has signed a deal with yet another online video service, Joost, which was founded by the folks who developed Skype. Which is to say, a pretty tech-savvy bunch, fully capable, one would think, of going up against Google.

And so the battle is joined. Stay tuned, because on one or another of these channels--maybe a million billion channels in all--you'll be getting your news, and your everything else, in the Convergent Future.

Dear John: You have "treated Fox News with such arrogant disregard that we do not desire to do any further business with you"

TCG will admit that she always liked Kiran Chetry. The Nepalese-American always seemed like a sweet girl on the air, and yet as this picture shows, she also had a grrrl-y quality.

So maybe I am naive, but I really think that she is more sinned against than sinning in this whole kerfluffle that led to her getting fired from Fox. That is, as I piece this story together from NYC sources, her newly hired self-declared "super agent," John Ferret--oops, I mean, Ferriter--convinced Kiran that she was destined to be the next Katie Couric (same initials, makes perfect sense!), and so got Kiran to go along with his sneaky plan, which he might not have fully spelled out to her.

That is, Chetry might not have really understood all of what Ferriter had in mind--as detailed here at TCG last night. Specifically, Ferriter wanted Fox to fire Gretchen Carlson as the weekday "Fox & Friends" co-host, and put in Chetry instead. The arrogance of Ferriter's plan is kind of breathtaking, although as Cable Gamers know, the idea that Chetry would pull an "All About Eve" on Carlson--who is herself adorable and popular--was stopped cold by Fox News chief Roger Ailes.

But of course, we are all ultimately responsible for our actions. Ferriter is Chetry's agent, after all, not her Svengali. At least that's what I think.

And now "Page Six" offers some more details, such as Dianne Brandi, the no-nonsense Fox lawyer, telling Ferriter, in a letter dated Thursday, that he had "Treated Fox News with such arrogant disregard that we do not desire to do any further business with you ...
You and your client's unprofessional demand that we include a clause in her agreement which would have been detrimental to other Fox talent, is simply not the way we do business. We had hoped that Ms. Chetry would have a bright future with the Fox News Channel, however this negotiation has now become more trouble than it is worth."

Pow!

And then, speaking of Chetry's new home at CNN, "Page Six" can't resist quoting a Fox insider about Chetry's fate: "Let's see what happens. Remember, the last one they took from us was Paula Zahn, and look where she went."

Oh, and one other question for the future: Why would anyone want John Ferriter as his or her agent?

Chetry Discovers Ferriter is a Ferret--After It's Too Late

So Kiran Chetry managed to wreck her career, thanks to an agent with the apt name of Ferriter--as in ferret. Ferret-er--oops, I mean, Ferriter--tried to play hardball with Roger Ailes and Fox, and ended up getting his client fired from the #1 cable news network. Talent should know that it's fine to have an agent, but agents have a way of going way beyond what's best for talent, in pursuit of their 10 percent of an ever-bigger number. Unfortunately, in getting greedy, agents often leave their clients holding the bag--the bag of you know what.

The best coverage comes from FTVLive, and it's worth considering in full:

TV Agent Demands Fox News fire Gretchen Carlson

William Morris Agent John Ferriter wanted Fox News to fire his client's main competition at the network and his client ended up getting the boot instead.
Sources say that Ferriter who had recently started representing Kiran Chetry asked Fox News to fire Gretchen Carlson so his client could have her job on Fox and Friends.

Fox responded with an angry letter and told Ferriter that they were terminating their agreement with Chetry.

Sources tell FTVLive that Chetry was making in the $300,000+ a year at Fox News. Fox offered to bump her salary to $400,000 in the next contract (not a bad raise at all). Sources say Ferriter countered with a salary north of $700,000 and that the network can Carlson and give his client her job.

At that point sources tell FTVLive that Fox News issued the letter saying that Ferriter was not bargaining in good faith and that Chetry was done at Fox News.
Insiders tell FTVLive that Ferriter claimed to Fox News that Chetry had offers at CNN and MSNBC for much more money than they were paying her. One source tells FTVLive that CNN has not made a commitment on Chetry and that MSNBC has made a low ball offer that would pay her much less than what she was currently making at Fox.
Looks like Ferriter tried to play hardball with Roger Ailes and now his talented client is unemployed.

And to think that some people say TV Agents are bad.

We know of one that certainly is.

So, according to FTVLive, Chetry is really shafted. She is on her way to CNN, with an agent who badly misplayed her hand for her.

Meanwhile, FNC movies on: Courtney Friel has joined Fox, effective immediately, it was announced on Friday, joining the Kelly Boys--co-hosts Kelly Wright and Greg Kelly.

Friel has been all over; from E! to Nickelodeon; most recently, at KPSB, the CBS affiliate in Palm Springs,

If Life goes to Second Life, then the Cable Game will Follow

John Edwards, the Democratic presidential candidate, has installed himself on SecondLife.com, where he will be carrying on his campaign in virtual reality, as an avatar.

As noted here at TCG in the past, virtual reality/avatars are the Next Big Thing in news, as well as politics--imagine Bill O'Reilly or Megyn Kelly, in avatar form, presenting news and commentary to you, 24/7--with you sitting right next to them, arguing or otherwise feeding back!

Stephen Battaglio's Take on "The Half Hour News Hour"

Stephen Battaglio, of TV Guide, is reliably one of the most interesting writers covering television today. So his interview with Joel Surnow and Manny Coto, of "24," and now, "The Half Hour News Hour," upcoming on Fox News, is a must-read.

Battaglio lets Surnow and Coto talk, and they cover everything from the left-right balance--or imbalance--of humor to that nasty Jane Mayer article in The New Yorker about "24."

Watch Out, Daily Show!

Fox News continues to move and groove. In addition to "Red Eye," FNC is also experimenting with a humorous-yet-knowing take on the news, "The Half Hour News Hour," produced by the ultra-hot Joel "24" Surnow--it premiers Sunday night at 10 pm ET.

Here's a sneak peek. It's quickly apparent that there's plenty of room on TV for such material. After all, "Half Hour" sits in a tradition that traces back to such topical comedy shows as "Laugh-In" four decades ago, as well as more recent shows, such as "Saturday Night Live" and, of course, "The Daily Show." That is, in this media-saturated environment, people know the news already--what they are looking for is a fresh take on the news. And if that fresh take is funny and irreverent--and something that people aren't used to, if it's coming from the right, as opposed to the left--then it's likely to be warmly received.

TCG predicts that "Half Hour" will be a big hit.

The Cable/Net Game

Remember the "500 channel universe" that everyone talked about 10 or 15 years ago? It's here, finally. But in fact, it's a five million channel universe, as everyone takes to the Net, with their own channel to peddle.

Som outfits, such as Indymedia, a lefty outfit, have been encouraging participatory "journalism" of a kind for years now.

And now, newcomers, such as You Witness News, from Yahoo, and even newer comers, such as Now Public.

The paradox of our time is that it's easier to start a Net-based channel than it is assemble an audience. And so branding is still key. That's why the strong and smart networks, that have built good brands, are likely to thrive--because even if people know that they have an infinity of choice, they will still want a reliable "go to" source for news and information.

That's going to be the future of The Cable Game. It will be the Cable/Net Game, but by any name, the key will be gaining the trust of the viewer/clicker.

Frist Blogs for Fox

Bill Frist has always been an inspiring figure. He wasn't always regarded as a great majority leader for the Senate Republicans over the past few years, but everybody agreed he was a nice guy.

More than a nice guy, in fact. Before, and now after, his Senate career, Frist took time out to do charitable work as a heart surgeon, in America and in Africa.

He has been back to Africa now, in conjunction with Franklin Graham's group, Samaritan's Purse. And in addition, he is blogging about it for Fox.

Here's a sample:

We met with Grace, a 40-year-old woman whose husband had died of AIDS three years before she discovered she was HIV positive. He had infected her, and before treatment she was disabled and diagnosed with tuberculosis.

She presented with a huge left flank mass and later had multiple abscesses drained from her right thigh. Her mother, with tears in her eyes, came forward to express her appreciation for the compassion Samaritan's Purse's staff, who had overseen her care at the local health facility and given her the moral support to pick herself up and return to a tolerable quality of life.

She smiled, expressed her joy at seeing us, and asked us to thank the many people who have reached out and touched her life. We met with the 30 or so HIV positive individuals who had come from the surrounding area to meet with us — all with a story of how they contracted and how they were living with HIV.

The Samaritan's Purse program there has trained and mobilized church and community leaders to increase awareness of HIV AIDS, reduce the stigma and decrease the impact on vulnerable families.

So let's hear it for Bill Frist, for Franklin Graham and Samaritan's Purse, and for Foxnews.com for giving us this window into such important work!

A "democratic" busines channel

Jon Friedman of Marketwatch had perhaps the most interesting take on the announcement--finally!--that Fox was going to launch its business channel by the end of this year.

Friedman recalled an interview he had conducted with Cavuto back in January, when Friedman asked Cavuto about his news philosophy. To which Cavuto answered: "Don't be pompous. Don't be an elitist. Many in our profession try to sound like the smartest guy in the room. Too many business journalists talk only to brokers -- democratize it. If I'm only talking to brokers, I'm limiting myself."

But of course, there's more to this story than Cavuto's small "d" democratic news philosophy. There's also his history, including his ten years at CNBC before he came over to Fox News in 1996. And of course, Roger Ailes was the chief of CNBC in its glory days, in the early-to-mid 90s, when Ailes turned a 9-5 business channel into something truly exciting: a 24-hour channel that did business news during the day, and other news, as well as talk, in prime time and at night.

Today's CNBC has spectacularly failed to pull together a prime time lineup, and meanwhile, the the daypart of CNBC is in the not-so-sweet throes of Bartiromo-gate.

Fox Biz Channel update

According to The Hollywood Reporter, "Fox Biz Channel buzz is back" Interesting piece from Georg Szalai and Paul J. Gough, both excellent ear-to-the-ground reporters.

And note the gallows-humor colloquy on CNBC between David Faber and Mark Haines.

Chris Matthews Ethnically Slurs Rudy Giuliani, and Nobody Seems to Care

Chris Matthews has never really been able to control himself. He wants everyone to know he's smart, and he wants everyone to know what a good talker he is. Except for one thing--two things, actually. He's not that smart, and he's not that good a talker.

And yet at the same time, there's a little bit of cunning in Matthews' plan. The MSNBC might yammer on about just about everything, but he abides by a few ground rules. And so for example, one recent object of Matthews' attack-yammering was Rudy Giuliani. It's safe enough to trash Italian-Americans, as opposed to, say, African-Americans.

If Joe Biden says something that's not 100% p.c. about Barack Obama, the Delaware Senator is clobbered, but if Matthews invokes "fascism" in discussing Giuliani, an Italian-American, the MSNBC anchorman gets away with it.

Happily, Newsbusters, at least, is keeping track of Matthews. Here's an exchange between Matthews and Rudy supporter and former congresswoman Susan Molinari from Tuesday night, as caught by Newsbuster Mark Finkelstein:

Matthews: "He got the pee smell out of the phone booths in New York. Even phone booths that aren't booths, they're just a place to make a phone call, had that smell about them before. I think I've been to New York enough times -- he did clean up that atmosphere in New York."

Molinari: "You bet he did. He stopped making excuses for people. . . "

Matthews, interrupting: "Was he a little bit of a Fascist?"

A fair question, don't you think? A fair question, that is, if you're trying to slime Giuliani, and don't care about offending someone named Molinari. And if you don't care offending any Italian-American, or any fair-minded American.

But that's Chris Matthews for you--no wonder he has such a following among partisan Democrats.

Update: as Rich Noyes notes, Matthews is at it again, this time, he's trash-talking George W. Bush. But again, nobody in the MSM seems to notice.

"A Death Struggle for Second Place"

Those were the cutting words of a Fox News spokesperson last month, describing the feud between CNN and MSNBC. And now Dan Abrams of MSNBC has accelerated the feud in an interview with Broadcasting & Cable magazine's Anne Becker. Abrams dished on FNC and CNN, taking credit for negative ads he is running on behalf of MSNBC (obviously Abrams is desperate for credit for what he can do, including spending GE's money), and then added,"Now it is a real three-way race out there, particularly between us and CNN. We are beating CNN in the key demographic with some regularity and on extremely important nights as well."

Well, OK, but if one were to decipher the spin, one would rightly conclude that MSNBC is still in third place most of the time.

Note also Abrams' diss-by-omission of Joe Scarborough.

Meanwhile, one wonders what Abrams has to say about Don Imus calling him "a moron," according to The Imus Show Blog.

Anderson Cooper: The Anchor on Top of the Wedding Cake

Remember when Dorothy Parker said that Tom Dewey looked like "the man on top of the wedding cake"? OK, probably you don't remember that "mal mot," since the legendary wit--the object of a so-so biopic, "Mrs. Parker and The Vicious Circle," starring Jennifer Jason-Leigh--said it back in the 40s. At the time, of course, Dewey was the Governor of New York when it really was the Empire State, and a very respected former crime-busting d.a. who was nominated for the presidency twice by the Republican Party. But when Parker slapped that label on Dewey, his reputation collapsed, because everybody knew immediately that Parker had really nailed something about Dewey's essence: for all his merits, he was also stiff, priggish, phony. And Dewey's rep never recovered; from the moment they heard Parker's line, they smirked a little when they saw him.

I think that Fox News has scored a similar direct hit on Anderson Cooper. For a couple of years now, CNN has been giving Cooper the big buildup, spending a fortune on advertising and promotion for their man. And it's worked, sort of, at least in the velvet-mafia confines of Manhattan and likeminded places.

But then Fox came along to burst his balloon. FNC called CNN on the promotion, dishing it with the "He's the Paris Hilton of cable news" line. It's a nasty zinger, but as with Parker-on-Dewey, it has the zing of truth to it. And so it's a meme that's destined to dog Cooper for a long long time.

NewsBuster's Noel Sheppard has a good wrap-up of the story, as it has played so far--although nobody thinks that this back-and-forth is over. The ratings stakes are too high--and the celebrity steaks are too juicy!

TCG is waiting, for example, for the "One Night in Anderson" video. We are sure that it's out there, somewhere, in this cell-phone-cam/webcam world.

"the lagging MSNBC channel"

Interesting LA Times article from Meg James on Bob Wright being pushed out, sooner than he wanted to be pushed out, as head of NBC-Universal. That's the good news for parent company GE. The bad news is that Jeff Zucker is taking over for Wright.

Ailes Comments on the "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" -- you might be surprised what he says!

Roger Ailes took me by surprise when he told the Boston Globe's Joanna Weiss that he chose not to criticize the top Turner Broadcasting execs, Chairman Phil Kent and CNN President Jim Walton for their ultimate responsibility for the Boston hoax. As Ailes put it, they're "Not the kind of guys who would do this. They're very classy guys." Although, of course, Ailes denounced the "guerrilla marketing" campaign itself.

That's nice of Ailes not to kick a competitor when they're down, so TCG will have step in to be not so nice: The incident happened, and it shouldn't have. If nobody big gets fired as a result of this incident, it will happen again.

Olbermann-ification Update: Or Scarborough continues to play useful idiot in Dan Abram's leftward-ization of MSNBC

Joe Scarborough is both loyal and useful to his liberal Bush-bashing masters at MSNBC. Here's the latest example, with the leading-the-witness headline of "Demise of GOP just took turn for the worse." Which doesn't even make sense--I mean, what's worse than "demise"? How can things get worse than that?

But of course, Scarborough doesn't care anymore. He is just desperate to keep up with the Bush-bashers who precede him, Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann. Scarborough knows that if he can't keep that audience of Bush-bashers, he'll suffer the same fate as Rita Cosby.

And Scarborough figures that he is valuable to MSNBC because he can pretend to be a Republican--which means that his seeming "dog bites man" criticism is all the more meaningful. But in fact, Scarborough is just a poodle, a lap dog for Olbermann, Matthews, and MSNBC string-puller Dan Abrams.