News-Record.com

Charles Warner, the self-styled Media Curmudgeon, hypothesizes that music-playing radio stations that took bribes are dragging the entire radio industry down with them from a business standpoint.

Shorter version: Ad revenue is down. Because audiences of music stations (which, in the aggregate, outnumber audiences for news, sports and talk stations in many, if not most, markets) are down. Because the stations took money from record companies (via "independent" promoters) to play crummy music. The industry's solution? Not "play better music," but "negotiate with the Federal Communications Commission to get its fines reduced."

Yeah. Good luck with that. Hard to believe, I know, but since I left the industry 21 years ago, it has only gotten dumber.

Not only did Tucker Carlson behave unethically, when he got caught, instead of 'fessing up and apologizing, he whined like Pete Rose.

And he deserves about as much credence.

Every time I feel justified in arguing that the newspaper industry is too understaffed/underfunded and is too doing the best it can with the resources it has, I run into a newspaper story like this.

Lemme help you out here.

• Nobody but Lindsay Lohan and the people she sleeps with should care whom Lindsay Lohan sleeps with.
• Nobody outside the entertainment bidness and her family and close friends should care about Lindsay Lohan, period.
• Anybody who does care about Lindsay Lohan, whether or not he/she ought to care, almost certainly has better places to check for information on her than the Arizona freakin' Republic.

Yeesh. It's hard enough tryin' to keep this bidness alive without its trying to kill itself all the time.

I'm not what you'd call a blogging triumphalist, but I figured this was worth noting.

Within the last hour or so, John Brady, the national political editor of The Washington Post, was asked during a live chat session whether he knew yet which lobbying firms might have been involved in the decision to sell U.S. port facilities in six cities to a company owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates. (Scroll down to the question from Pasco, Wash.)

Blogger Holden at First Draft posted that information at 7 p.m. Monday.

The info won't surprise anyone who has followed U.S.-Arab relations post-9/11.

UPDATE: But this will: CNN is reporting that former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole has been retained by the UAE company to lobby Congress in support of the deal. That would be the same Bob Dole who's married to North Carolina's senior senator. (Note: I can't find confirmation of this on CNN's Web site. At least, not yet.)

Mercy. While I was on vacation, things have heated up in the discussion about newspaper chain Knight Ridder's financial and journalistic future.

Tim Beyers at The Motley Fool has a perfectly practical solution: Knight Ridder should take itself private.

That wouldn't create a perfect world, of course. The company has about $2 billion in long-term debt outstanding (against $4.5 billion in assets) and going private would certainly involve additional debt. And those bond payments would have to be made somehow ... probably by shedding some assets and laying off more employees, albeit fewer than a public takeover would cost.

But going private, even by incurring more debt, would give the company (and its struggling large newspapers) a bit more breathing room in terms of profit margin, which in turn would buy its papers a bit more time to make up for the company's overall slowness to respond to the challenges of the Internet. That, in turn, would make layoffs less likely in the future.

The News & Record is owned by privately held Landmark Communications. I don't own stock, so I'm not privy to our financials. And Landmark certainly is a for-profit business. But my sense is that its margins aren't quite as high as the 20 percent or more that is common in publicly held papers. My gauge is this: We've now been through two recessions in my 18 years here without laying off any News Department employees, and with only one round of buyouts, in 1993. I don't know many publicly held newspapers that can say that. Indeed, particularly at KR and Tribune Co. papers, buyouts are continuing as we speak.

If there's a real-world "least bad" scenario for the nation's second-largest newspaper chain (and employer of some of my friends and relatives), perhaps this is it.

Via Poynter, I see that the Federal Communications Commission plans to fine three Washington-area TV stations a total of $40,000 for failing to include closed-captioning in their May 25, 2004, broadcasts about impending tornadoes. That's an average of about $13,333.33 apiece.

For perspective, the FCC fined each CBS-owned station that unwittingly broadcast a brief glimpse of singer Janet Jackson's bare breast during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show $27,500 (for a total of $550,000) -- more than twice as much.

So Janet Jackson's breast is more than twice as dangerous as a tornado. She must be so proud.

... Tribune Co., which owns, among other things, Newsday, the Chicago Tribunea and the Los Angeles times, reported a 9% drop in circulation revenue in the first quarter.

Co-worker: "You'd better hurry up with that saving-newspapers thing, Lex."

Dude. I'm hurryin'.

Google has added to its repertoire a search of closed captioning on TV shows, with "hits" returning both caption text AND a video screen capture from the moment in the show at which the search phrase appears. It's not exhaustive -- co-worker Dick Barron and I found no hits on "Neil Neill McNeill" or "Cameron Kent" -- but it could well be helpful and/or entertaining.

Here's the hit list for the phrase "Shut up!".

(Info via Poynter.org)

So Paxton, which bought the Herald-Sun newspaper in Durham, walked in yesterday and promptly fired 80 of 350 staffers, including the photo chief, a 50-year veteran.

Now, don't get me wrong: The paper's owner has the right to do what it will with the paper, including screwing over the employees. But to give that many people instant dismissals tells me a number of things about Paxton, including but not limited to the following:

You might or might not be surprised to know that the number of complaints to the Federal Communications Commission about allegedly indecent material on the broadcast networks has grown astronomically in the past couple of years. But I'll bet you'll be surprised about why:

In an appearance before Congress in February, when the controversy over Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl moment was at its height, Federal Communications Commission chairman Michael Powell laid some startling statistics on U.S. senators.

The number of indecency complaints had soared dramatically to more than 240,000 in the previous year, Powell said. The figure was up from roughly 14,000 in 2002, and from fewer than 350 in each of the two previous years. There was, Powell said, "a dramatic rise in public concern and outrage about what is being broadcast into their homes."

What Powell did not reveal -- apparently because he was unaware -- was the source of the complaints. According to a new FCC estimate obtained by Mediaweek, nearly all indecency complaints in 2003 --99.8 percent -- were filed by the Parents Television Council, an activist group.

In politics and activism, this is what's called an Astroturf campaign -- a campaign that looks like a grass-roots effort but is really organized by a relatively small group of people, usually a group with an agenda, frequently an agenda about which the group is being, well, less than fully forthcoming, shall we say.

This year, the trend has continued, and perhaps intensified.

Through early October, 99.9 percent of indecency complaints -- aside from those concerning the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" during the Super Bowl halftime show broadcast on CBS -- were brought by the PTC, according to the FCC analysis dated Oct. 1. (The agency last week estimated it had received 1,068,767 complaints about broadcast indecency so far this year; the Super Bowl broadcast accounted for over 540,000, according to commissioners' statements.)

The prominent role played by the PTC has raised concerns among critics of the FCC’s crackdown on indecency. "It means that really a tiny minority with a very focused political agenda is trying to censor American television and radio," said Jonathan Rintels, president and executive director of the Center for Creative Voices in Media, an artists’ advocacy group.

PTC officials disagree.

"I wish we had that much power," said Lara Mahaney, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles-based group. Mahaney said the issue should not be the source of complaints, but whether programming violates federal law prohibiting the broadcast of indecent matter when children are likely to be watching. "Why does it matter how the complaints come?"

Indecent programming is programming that deals with sexual or excretory organs or functions in a manner that is "patently offensive" by "contemporary community standards." It is constitutionally protected -- yes, you read that right -- but limited by the FCC to broadcast between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., when children aren't likely to be in the audience.

Now, Lara, to answer your question: When 99.9% of the million-plus complaints are coming from one group, and that group has demonstrated from the sheer volume of its complaints that it neither understands nor cares about the legal definition of indecency, then your group is wasting the taxpayers a ton of money in a time of record-breaking deficits.

Even given that the definition of indecency is broad enough to drive a truck through, does anyone really think that the broadcast networks air close to 1,000 indecent segments per year (outside the 10 p.m.-to-6 a.m. window)? Even if there are, on average, 1,000 complaints per segment -- which is a fantastically high estimate -- there would still be more than 1,000 such segments airing on broadcast TV every year based on current complaint numbers. If you watch any over-the-air TV programming at all, you know that's not the case.

So, Lara, you and your group need to stop wasting my tax money. Also, you need to know that Title 47, Section 326 of the U.S. Code forbids the FCC from censorship, so stop trying to make the FCC play national nanny, mmkay?