The King of Pointland

Ted Koppel is totally my new boyfriend.
Yeah, the consolidated media vampire whore that will not show Nightline over the entire country tonight is cold bitch and clearly has no respect for the American public.
Can you recommend a way for me to protest?
::fingers crossed, hoping you'll mention pallets of spray paint or an intimate wedding for me and my totally hot boyfriend::

That;s some fucked up shit to hear on the news right there, but I feel it kind of lags behind Dubya talking about how we really did accomplish a mission one year ago, which is to say, removing Saddam and securing an Iraq where Iraqis are no longer tortured.

Or the fact that the US Marines gave up on Fallujah (semper fi!) and handed it over to one of Saddam's old officers without running the decision by the provisional authorities or the actual extant Iraqi army.

[totally ripped from MarginalRevolution.Com]

Here is an interesting new paper by Andrei Shleifer and Sendhil Mullainathan, "The Market for News."

http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/shleifer/papers/marketnews.pdf

Abstract: We investigate the market for news under two assumptions: that readers hold beliefs that they like to see confirmed, and that newspapers can slant stories toward these beliefs. We show that, on the topics where readers share common beliefs, one should not expect accuracy even from competitive media: competition results in lower prices, but common slanting toward reader biases. However, on topics where reader beliefs diverge (such as politically divisive issues), newspapers segment the market and slant toward the biases of their own audiences, yet in the aggregate a conscientious reader could get an unbiased perspective. Generally speaking, reader heterogeneity is more important for accuracy in media than competition per se.

One more tidbit - someone pointed out to me recently that in the 70's, you could reach the majority of Americans with ads on just three networks.

Today, to reach a majority of Americans, you would need to have an ad on something like 10 different channels.

Anyway, I think the deal is that even if every television station was an affiliate and not part of a group like Sinclair, you still could miss Nightline in Columbus if the Columbus station decided to drop it.

Infact, knowing the prevelance of a lot of single-station editing of program content to meet "local standards", I'd argue that you are probably less likely to have a show dropped or edited for content if it is part of a multi-regional group like Sinclair, Hearst-Argyle, etc. because they'd lose more money dropping it across the group than they might lose from local advertisers getting pissed off in one city.

I wonder how many other places are as lucky as us. there's 2 of each here -
2 & 4 NBC
7 & 13 ABC
9 & 11 CBS

actually i have no idea if this is true anymore since comcast doesnt line up the local vhf stations at 2-13.

Anyway, I think the deal is that even if every television station was an affiliate and not part of a group like Sinclair, you still could miss Nightline in Columbus if the Columbus station decided to drop it.

True, but the real deal is that with a group like Sinclair, one person was able to censor Nightline in eight markets, instead of just one. And the more consolidation, the worse it gets.