Category: media

PBS President Pat Mitchell told a gathering of the network’s managers this week that she will step down when her current term expires in 2006. “Under Mitchell’s leadership, prime-time ratings rose to the highest ever and PBS stations extended their reach for digital broadcasting to over 89 percent of the country. Mitchell also added diversity to the schedule – including the ‘American Family’, an emmy-nominated series featuring a Latino family, and ‘American Mystery!’ a special featuring Indians living in the Southwest.”

The third season of the terrorism drama, 24, currently running on the Fox network, has stirred up a lot of controversy with its depiction of an American Muslim family secretly made up of terrorist killers. Fox has acknowledged the sensitive nature of the plot, running a public service announcement featuring the show’s lead actor reminding viewers that most American Muslims are, well, still Americans, and don’t want to kill anyone. But the show has become much more than simply an envelope-pushing shockfest: in fact, for all its bluster, it’s a fairly decent depiction of all the unresolvable contradictions, moral quandaries, and societal soul-searching faced by a country at war.

The US House of Representatives has passed a bill that radically hikes fines for broadcasters charged with indecency. “The bill, passed by 389 votes to 38 on Wednesday, boosts the maximum penalty for firms and individual entertainers to $500,000. But the bill, supported by the White House, cannot become law until the Senate approves similar legislation. Legislators said stiffer fines were needed to force broadcasters to clean up their programmes and protect children from inappropriate material.”

Local American TV all but ignored last November’s elections, says a new study. In the month before November’s election, local viewers saw 17 minutes of candidate ads for each minute of local TV news coverage. That disparity was one of many striking findings in an intensive study, released yesterday, that found local political races were given short shrift by newscasts.”

“With attention focused on the Academy Awards, less than two weeks away, an alliance of four stunt organizations is petitioning the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to create a new Oscar category, that of best stunt coordinator. At a time when computer effects make ever more outrageous stunts possible, the stunt groups say, recognition is long overdue for the men and women who design and carry out some of the most thrilling moments on the big screen.”

Officials of the London Underground have objected to a poster advertising the movie Kinsey and insisted on changes. “When I first heard about the objections, I envisaged a robust image of, say, a youth coupling with a horse; after all, it was Kinsey’s research that revealed 17% of American farmhands had sex with their four-footed charges. But no, it was the naughty words that bothered the Tube censors. They demanded changes to the lettering that runs behind an image of Neeson as Kinsey: whereas once there was the legend “orgasms, masturbation and sleaze”, now the punters merely have to grapple with “pleasure” and “sexually”. Yuck!”

The actors union AFTRA has spoken out against a bill in Congress that would dramatically increase fines for broadcast indecency. The bill seems sure to easily pass, but the union says it “represents an unconstitutional threat to free speech that, if passed, would undoubtedly have a chilling effect on artistic freedom.”

Is music downloading going to kill traditional radio? A Berlin station thinks so. MotorFM, launched Feb. 1, “abandons on-air commercials in favor of generating revenue from MP3 downloads and targeted sponsoring of its programming. The next step will be streaming audio directly to 3G cell phones and letting listeners pay for downloads by SMS text message.”

“The Carib Indians of Dominica are upset over a Walt Disney film that would portray them as cannibals. The film is a sequel to 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, which starred Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom.”

“As Harvey Weinstein and Miramax prepare to go their separate ways – the Walt Disney Company, which now owns the company, has said it does not plan to renew the contract of Mr. Weinstein and his brother, Bob, to run the unit – more than a few power players in Hollywood have been tallying up their debt to a 52-year-old entrepreneur who often started them in the business, and sent many on their way with lessons that did not always come easy.”