Category: media

New Zealand has launched the first Maori TV channel. “The government-funded station aims to preserve the culture of New Zealand’s indigenous people, who make up around 12.5% of the country’s four million population. Half of the station’s programmes must be in Maori, which is now spoken by fewer than a tenth of Maoris.”

National Public Radio is taking a public beating over its announcement that Bob Edwards is being replaced as host of Morning Edition. “NPR is suffering a severe credibility loss because of the inexplicability of this management move. There is no rational explanation to anyone else outside National Public Radio as to why this should be done.” And yet, NPR member stations have been criticizing the show for years. “You would not have been able to go to a gathering where representatives of member stations were present and not hear talk about how ‘Morning Edition’ could be improved. I think management has done due diligence on the whole thing.”

National Public Radio has been feeling the brunt of listener unhappiness over the announcement that Bob Edwartds would be leaving as host of Morning Edition. “NPR, based in Washington, has received more than 17,000 calls and e-mail messages from angry listeners, its officials said.” So why was the move made? “In recent years, several station managers confirmed, some member stations have voiced concerns to NPR management that Mr. Edwards, who has served as host of Morning Edition from its beginnings in 1979, often seemed less engaged on the air.”

“The television industry was shaken last October when the ratings from Nielsen Media Research showed that a huge part of a highly prized slice of the American population was watching less television. As the fall TV season began, viewership among men from 18 to 34 fell 12 percent compared with the year before, Nielsen reported. And for the youngest group of adult men, those 18 to 24, the decline was a steeper 20 percent.” And where did they go? They’re having fun with other technology.

A French judge has declined to ban the showing of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ in France. Opponents of showing the film argued that the movie would incite anti-Semitism. “However Judge Florence Lagemi ruled on Monday that the film, due to be released in France on Wednesday, was not a threat to public order.”

The movies had a good year last year. But the surprise in the statistics was that “the 50-59 demographic enjoyed the biggest increase in movie-going for any age group last year, with a 20 percent hike in attendance.” And what does it mean? You can expect to see more movies appealing to older people…

What’s up with the puritanical morality that seems now to be guiding American TV execs (and politicians)? “A return to the wholesome, old days when married sitcom couples slept in separate beds, Elvis could only be shot from the waist up and Liberace was merely a flamboyant performer who, for some reason, never married is surely upon us. And indeed, American broadcasters have already taken the hint and begun hastily trimming or rewriting any programming that could be construed as triple-X smut stuff.”

Pittsburgh’s WQED was a pioneering experimental TV station infused with loads of community pride when it went on the air in 1954. In a half century the station has enjoyed premiere status as one of the country’s best public broadcasters and sunk to underfunded depths.

Linda Winer wonders why the media obscenity crackdown currently underway in the US isn’t being objected to by more people. “The vise is tightening again on freedoms that, at this late date, a grown-up country should not be forced to keep defending. The FCC, temporarily distracted from efforts to allow even further consolidation of Big Brother media companies, is zealously pursuing the revival of standards-and-practice departments – you know, the old in-house decency police – for radio and network TV.”

“For years, media consolidation was one of those issues considered worthy of debate only by policy wonks and public interest groups. The general public rarely stopped to read sober-minded studies, such as the one done after the 2002 elections, which found that 60% of the top-rated local news broadcasts had failed to devote one second to campaign coverage. But after Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl antics shone a spotlight on Viacom’s MTV-CBS hegemony, people began to connect the Big Media dots. The Super Bowl had more of a galvanizing effect on the media and the FCC than it did on grass-roots America. Ordinary citizens were already upset. For the past three years, when I boot up my computer each morning, I see dozens of complaints about what was on TV the night before. We’re just catching up.”