Will, Charlie’s grandson and Jim sing That’s How I Got to Memphis
Stuck in my head ever since the end of The Newsroom, this song really seems to want to spend today with me, which would be fine if it didn’t make me so sad.
It won’t matter much if you didn’t like the show, or if music doesn’t carry you forward and back or if you don’t mourn the decline of integrity as a core value of journalism, but the use of it at a funeral for Charlie Skinner, (Sam Waterston,) the keeper of the flame, the leader who defended the honor of every journalist and story, is a spectacular metaphor. YouTube won’t let me embed it, but here it is if you have the patience to link, it’s worth it.
Aaron Sorkin says Charlie represented the loss of decency offered by each of us to the rest of us, but for me, as Newsroom closed down, he stood for the rules that made journalism credible and critical to our country*; rules eroded in surrender to commerce and coarseness and fear. Even so, The Newsroom closed with the first moment of yet another day’s show. As Sorkin said, “They’re going to keep doing the news.” It will, though, be with the loss of just a little more of the combination of honor and power, the Charlie Skinner, that had protected them, and us, for so long.
*The Atlantic called it a funeral for “old media” but I’ve lived in “new media” for decades now and the show wasn’t about that change – at least not to me.
We need to do something (HINT: #boycottNFLsponsors)
Why is it so hard to affect the NFL and its disgraceful responses to abusive players? After all, women are45% of the NFL fan base. It makes sense to care what we think.
Sadly, there’s that other thing. To see what we’re up against, follow the money.
Team owners make money from tickets and souvenirs but even more from TV contracts and the networks who pay for them. It’s all nicely divided up. In the 2011 9-year NFL-broadcast contract, CBS gets American Football Conference games – and is asking $500,000 for thirty second spots, according to Forbes, Fox carries the National Football Conference and NBC broadcasts Sunday night in prime time – with ads going for $628,000/30-second spot. Each network gets an exclusive crack at three of the nine Super Bowls and all the revenue that comes with it. (Bloomberg News)
Here’s what Forbes said this time a year ago, “Live appointment television—already extremely important—will only grow in significance in coming years, as television programming and audiences continue to fragment. On TV, the NFL is king.”
This morning (9/15/14) Joe Scarborough, never one for impulse control, lashed out at NYT columnist Alan Schwarz for his mention of the failure of broadcasters to acknowledge their own complicity in the shameful collaboration among the NFL, sponsors and the networks who charge them for their ads.
It’s like the story of the nail and the horse and the war*: Sponsors pay the networks, networks pay the NFL, the NFL divides the revenue among the teams and the owners combine these huge paydays with their ticket sales.
The auction was a sign of the NFL’s huge leverage over television networks, which are increasingly looking to the NFL to help fortify them against the rise of online video services, the stagnation of pay TV and other threats. “It’s almost like the networks are afraid to say no to the NFL,” says one senior TV executive involved in the bidding process for Thursday night games.
So. If the NFL is king and everyone, especially the TV networks who profit from ad revenue, ratings and football programming in general, are enablers then we have to make it scarier to continue than to take a stand. That means finding, and boycotting, NFL sponsors and letting the network brass know what we’re doing. (I boycotted Greece for years during the Junta years. Then an Amnesty International leader told me “If they don’t know why you’re not coming, it doesn’t do any good. You need to write to them and tell them why you’re not there.“)
That’s the other part of it. We need to be noisy and bold and brassy and (forgive me Ms. Sandburg) bossy about this – holler like hell in support of our sisters and put our money where our mouths are. Nobody needs any of the stuff that advertise on NFL games and there are alternatives for all of them anyway.
Women’s bodies should not be paying for the bad business planning of television networks; if they won’t take a stand with the NFL, let them find another way to make their money!
Here are a few major #NFLsponsors — MAKE SURE TO LET THEM KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND WHY:
What do you watch at 11:30? Are you even up? The Daily Show is over, but there’s still Steven Colbert. Or are you sucked away from basic cable to join one of the Established Hosts on those antiquated broadcast networks? And if you are, which one? The answer to that question probably depends on how old you are.
Last week’s Saturday Night Liveincluded this imaginary Larry King Show, mocking, as both hosts have, the ham-handed dismissal of the younger Conan to honor expensive contract obligations made to the older Leno. For many of us, this is simple: Jay Leno is old and grouchy (well not as old as I am but still…) and O’Brien younger, more creative and definitely holder of the “younger, cooler, hipper” mandate. (Yes I know there’s David Letterman (and George Lopez) but for now let’s think about NBC.)
Younger viewers have been up late watching Conan for years – after many of the rest of us had gone to bed – and they know and like his ironic, goofy, smart persona. The Harvard-educated O’Brien, (who wrote for the university’s humor magazine, the Harvard Lampoon,) and served as a long-time writer for Saturday Night live and later for The Simpson’s, is a perfect 21st Century personality.
Leno, on the other hand, is a real 20th Century man. He came up through comedy clubs and Tonight Show appearances and is a car collector and motorcycle freak. His humor is less subtle and, somehow, although less arch than Conan it’s also less friendly. Mostly though, it’s old-school. In my view, it’s for the dwindling older audience and not for the emerging majority of TV viewers (and of Americans) born well after we Boomers had finished college.
It’s funny, but as much as I loathe the idea of age discrimination, I also see this decision as a symptom of a generational division visible in the women’s movement, in life on the Web and in the politics that brought out so many younger voters for Barack Obama and then betrayed them with posturing and partisanship.
I first thought about all this when I saw an interview with the gifted and admired Dick Ebersol, long an icon of sports coverage who has led NBC Sports for many years and presided over several Olympics seasons on the air. In the Huffington Post, he called Conan’s Tonight show a “spectacular failure.” In his long career, in addition to sports, Ebersol was an executive in charge of the TODAY SHOW (full disclosure, I worked for him – and happily) and of Saturday Night Live so he’s no slouch. But it seems that seven months, preceded by a failing Leno show with ratings so bad the affiliates, bleeding audience for the local news that followed Leno, demanded a change, was hardly the best audience-builder for Conan, whose show followed that news. More than all of that though, Ebersol is far from the days when he had his finger on the pulse of the emerging audience, the Gen Xers and Millennials and those younger than they are. They want something different, something cooler, something more like — Conan.
I’ve written about, and been on panels about, the generational divide. The economic crisis has only exacerbated it as young people consider the disappearing Social Security benefits and their own futures in a world where job security and benefits is hazy history. They’re mad at the Boomers, blame us for more than we’re responsible for and often have no idea what we really accomplished in the 60’s and 70’s — for the better. Events like this one, however superficial and entertainment-based, are just another example of the disregard in which they are too often held. NBC will pay for that — in the PR game it already has (did you see the Golden Globes?) and, I fear, in a larger sense, so will the rest of us “older” Americans. We should be listening to them about more than product preferences and if we don’t, we’ll be sorry.
