Category: media

National Public Radio’s ouster of Bob Edwards as host of Morning Edition is still being discussed: “In public radio, no less than on the commercial dial, the search for younger listeners keeps executives at their desks deep into the night. And with overall radio listening in dramatic decline in recent years, programmers are constantly searching for something new. That led some station executives to conclude that Edwards’s ouster was all about catering to young listeners.”

Last week when word a deal the Canadian Telefilm was making with Hollywood leaked out, there was an outcry. “You may get the impression from this uproar that the Canadian content of our home-made movies, so cherished by our audiences that they account for something less than 1 per cent of the box-office take in English Canada, is about to be deeply compromised.” But it’s not. INdeed it might be a way to improve the Canadian film industry.

Ever since classical music station WFLN switched to a rock format in the mid-1990s, fans of classical music and jazz in the city of Philadelphia have had to share a single radio station, Temple University-owned WRTI, which attempts to please everyone with 12 hours of classical and 12 hours of jazz each day. It’s better than nothing, of course, but there’s been plenty of grumbling about the lack of seperate jazz and classical stations in the nation’s 4th-largest radio market. But now, WRTI is planning to begin splitting its signal into two different full-time streams – one jazz, one classical – offering listeners with high-definition receivers a choice of what they hear at any given time.

“As American courts and politicians wrestle over the legality of same-sex marriages, Canadian producers are embracing them. With Canadian courts recently allowing and recognizing same-sex marriages, filmmakers are documenting gay and lesbian couples heading to the altar wearing chocolate thongs beneath their tuxedos and placing femme-butch toppers on their white-icing cakes… But besides the frills, what Canadian filmmakers have stumbled on and are chronicling is a modern-day underground railroad of same-sex couples coming to Toronto from the United States to exchange marriage vows.”

The increasing paranoia among broadcasters over the FCC’s threatened crackdown on “inappropriate” on-air content has led radio behemoth Clear Channel Communications to declare a no-tolerance policy on risque talk and bad language for all of its stations. Last week, that policy saw shock jock Howard Stern yanked from six Clear Channel stations, and now, two Florida DJs have lost their jobs after accidentally leaving their mics hot during a commercial break, and allowing what they thought were off-air comments of a sexual nature to go out over the air of station WKLS.

Howard Stern’s problems may not end with being yanked by Clear Channel, and the New York Post’s research indicates that the self-styled King of All Media shouldn’t expect much support from his remaining affiliates. “Of 17 Stern affiliates contacted by The Post – there are now 35 altogether – only four station managers expressed unabashed support. Another is on the fence, and 12 more avoided all comment – possibly a bad omen, considering that big fines may be headed their way, too.”

In a move which surprised absolutely no one with any knowledge of the modern infotainment business, Sony Pictures has purchased the film rights to the book on counterterrorism penned by Richard Clarke, who has become the largest thorn in the side of the Bush administration during the hearings on the 9/11 attacks. Sony says it envisions an “All The President’s Men”-type approach to the film version of the former counterterrorism advisor’s account of the rise of Al-Qaeda and the failure of the U.S. government to properly address the danger. Clarke’s literary agent says that nearly every major Hollywood studio called to explore the concept of a film.

Where is the media protest about the government crackdown on “indecency? “That’s the most depressing and tragic aspect to this. The media, rather than standing up for the First Amendment, are giving into the people who want to trample all over it.”

“A federal judge in Denver has ruled that there is evidence that Clear Channel, the nation’s biggest radio broadcaster and concert promoter, abused its clout by threatening to keep artists off the air unless they performed at its shows.”

“Mel Gibson’s controversial movie “The Passion of the Christ,” is breaking box office records across the Middle East. With the approach of Easter, Arab Christians identify primarily with the religious message. But it’s the film’s popularity among Muslims – even though it flouts Islamic taboos – that’s turning it into a phenomenon.”