Category: media

When Minnesota Public Radio announced that it was buying independent Twin Cities classical music broadcaster WCAL, music aficonados throughout the North Star State protested the move, viewing it as just more evidence of MPR’s secret plan for global domination. MPR took the criticism in stride, and promised to use the frequency to create a new type of non-classical music station (the network already maintains a round-the-clock classical service on another frequency) aimed at younger listeners. This week, the new format was revealed to be what MPR is calling “the antiformat”: progressive rock with an “adult” lean, drawing on a library of 500,000 albums.

American TV networks are still bad at presenting minority characters on TV says a new study. “Among the 16 shows set in New York, Hispanics and Asian- Americans made up a combined 9 percent of regular characters, researchers found – while the city’s population is 27 percent Hispanic and nearly 10 percent Asian-American.”

So why isn’t the FCC investigating some of the truly wretched TV fare out there, asks Tim Goodman. Ifr they have to investigate, go after stuff that’s just plain bad. But the Olympics? Really? We’ll be a laughing stock… “The Greeks did something, um, “arty” in the Opening Ceremonies to annoy prudish “guns-not-boobs” America. That’s how it’ll read to the rest of the world as the story gets media play. Of course, it does provide you with more fodder for counter-intelligence. Yes, you can rise up again, or for the first time even. Because you don’t need a lusty interpretive dance to tell you this nonsense is nowhere near over.”

Ursula Le Guinn hoped for the best when she sold the rights to her Earthsea books for a mini-series. But the deal quickly went bad. “When I looked over the script, I realized the producers had no understanding of what the books are about and no interest in finding out. All they intended was to use the name Earthsea, and some of the scenes from the books, in a generic McMagic movie with a meaningless plot based on sex and violence.”

British composers are complaining that UK broadcasters are taking royalties away from them. “Composers receive a single fee for their music to be used on television but they currently also have to sign a contract with a music publisher, representing the broadcaster, agreeing that a percentage of the royalties will go back to the channel commissioning the piece. Artists can lose as much as 35% of their royalties. The practice, dubbed ‘coercion’ in the music industry, can mean that if a composer does not sign the agreement they may find it difficult to secure future work.”

“In the last 10 years, film festivals have spread across the country. According to the Web site filmfestivals.com, there are roughly 2,500 worldwide. Withoutabox, a Los Angeles-based company that helps filmmakers apply to film festivals, estimates that there are 950 festivals in the United States alone, with 300 more in Canada; in North America, there are 100 Jewish film festivals, 30 gay and lesbian film festivals, and 279 festivals that either focus on animation or have animation categories.”

Public radio audiences aren’t exactly known for their embrace of cutting-edge pop music, but that didn’t stop Minnesota Public Radio from launching a cutting-edge pop show recently, with the aim of demystifying the genre for listeners who like the music, but are intimidated by the insider lingo and youth-dominated club scene. As it turns out, public radio stations around the country could not have been less interested in Pop Vultures, and the show, which was critically praised in the few markets in which it aired, has been killed off after only 22 episodes.

The FCC’s decision to investigate NBC’s Olympics telecast was apparently the result of no more than nine consumer complaints nationwide. The commission is still refusing to disclose exactly what was potentially indecent about the Games. Most of the speculation has centered on the opening ceremonies, which featured some nude dancers posing as classic Greek statuary, but that theory has one big problem: NBC never aired any of the nudity.

Hollywood movie studios are suing owners of computer servers that facilitate movie downloading. “The defendants this time run servers that use BitTorrent, now the program of choice for online sharers of large files owing to its immunity to industry attempts to confound file-swappers with bogus decoy files. ‘Today’s actions are aimed at individuals who deliberately set up and operate computer servers and Web sites that, by design, allow people to infringe copyrighted motion pictures’.”

FCC chairman Michael Powell’s recent illogical and contradictory pronouncements on the “indecency” battles he’s overseeing are indefensible. “Powell has got his responsibilities under the First Amendment backwards. Over tremendous public protest, he foisted upon the American public an excessively-concentrated media that restricts free expression. Then, when that excessively-concentrated media inevitably produces indecent material, he censors it. The public loses both ways.”