Category: media

“When National Public Radio decided to create its first new news magazine program in almost 20 years, it turned to Slate, the Microsoft-owned online journal. Not only is it an unusual media partnership, the NPR/Slate production, a one-hour weekday program called ‘Day to Day,’ is the first programming collaboration NPR has had with a commercial outlet in its 33-year history.”

Canadian TV is in a crisis, but you’d never know it from a new report on Canadian television. The McQueen Report “smacks of a contrived and unworkable pseudo-solution to a crisis. ACTRA, the organization that represents Canadian actors and performers, has already dismissed McQueen’s report as ‘all carrot and no stick’ for private broadcasters. The time for intricate therapy is long gone. In the past four years, the number of continuing drama series airing on Canadian TV has dropped from 12 to 4. That figure screams for action now, not for the prolonged prodding and nudging of broadcasters.”

The Australian Broadcasting Company has shut down two channels aimed at children, saying that the government had not funded the broadcaster sufficiently and that cuts needed to be made. “ABC managing director Russell Balding told a Senate estimates committee in Canberra that apart from the children’s channels, up to $25 million in programming or jobs would be be cut by mid-year. “I don’t cry wolf. This is very serious. The ABC needs to be properly funded, and when we put the arguments to the Government that we needed additional funding for content it was not a matter of crying wolf – it was serious.”

Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant” wins the grand prize at Cannes. “It was certainly exceptional for an American film, the first ever submitted for the festival competition by HBO, to be acknowledged in such a way. ‘Elephant’ is a documentary-like examination of an ordinary day in a mostly white, middle-class high school in which the calm is splashed with a corrosive burst of violence: two boys arm themselves and begin shooting.”

Was this year’s Cannes a bust, as many critics have been suggesting? “This year’s Cannes is only ‘wretched’ (in the words of one major American critic) if you compare it to the best recent Cannes fests and ignore all the movies shown out of competition – like the restored versions of 20 Federico Fellini films, Charlie Chaplin’s ‘Modern Times’ and a number of rediscovered classics – as well as the best of the new films.”

As Cannes winds down for another year, Desson Howe writes that one thing is clear about this year’s lineup: “Someone was saving the really great movies for another year.”

The finale of Fox’s “American Idol” averaged 33.7 million views. “That was a bigger audience than the 33.1 million who watched the Academy Awards in March, traditionally the most-viewed entertainment event of the year, according to Nielsen Media Research. During the last half hour of the 8 to 10 p.m. special, when the winner was announced, viewership climbed to just under 40 million people.”

The final numbers are in, and this season’s TV ratings champs can be declared. Wanna play “who are the big winners?” Okay – a hint – that series about the guy who was supposed to be a millionaire looking for a wife, only he wasn’t rich but the women didn’t know it? He landed at No. 2 for the season. Need to know more? Didn’t think so.

“Over the past eight years, Federal Communications Commission officials have taken 2,500 business trips to global tourist spots, most of which were paid for by the media and telecommunications companies the agency oversees, according to a study to be released today. The report, released by the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, comes as the FCC is poised to relax or eliminate key media ownership rules, a step that has been criticized by some as putting too much power in the hands of a few media giants.”

Everyone seems to agree that, for one reason or another, this is not Cannes’s best year. In fact, things are so slow that many critics are finding themselves writing not about the movies on display, but on the ‘system’ of Cannes, and why it is the way it is. Elvis Mitchell seems to be a bit sick of the commercial side of the fest, which is seldom reported on, but dominates the scene: “Many of those pictures won’t even see the light of day on the lowest rung of cable TV. Scanning the ads here in the trade papers like Variety and Film Français, several things are immediately evident. The saddest is that American violence is still one of our most exportable products.”