It was 20 years ago tonight. Not exactly. It was actually four days off, on Nov. 25, but what really matters is it was the night before Thanksgiving in 1998.
I had been producing the 11pm news at CBS affiliate WFSB-3 in Connecticut. It was my last newscast there, before moving to Philadelphia – and also the last weathercast for the legendary Hilton Kaderli, who retired that night.
In fact, Hilton and I just got off the phone. He and his family are doing great. He mentioned he had just been doing a bit of work in his study, and his wife is working on their Thanksgiving turkey as I publish this!
The reason for both of us leaving the same night was, back then, TV stations depended on Nielsen ratings. That company picked times around four months to measure viewership. Then, starting on a Thursday and ending on a Wednesday – every November, February, May and July – networks and stations would go all out to show you their best programming along with their sexiest, dirtiest, most dangerous and practically anything to get you to watch. No vacations were allowed, so the A-team would be on every newscast, every day and night.
In 1998 – for the first and last time, I believe – Nielsen ended the ratings period on the night before Thanksgiving rather than the week before, postponing or canceling news people’s vacation plans.
We were all turkeys in 1998!
Stations still use those times to have their on-air people announce retirements, reveal health issues, and more to get you to watch – even though Nielsen now realizes there are more than four months in a year, and doesn’t ask randomly selected viewers to fill out diaries about what they watch anymore. Old habits are hard to break.
The 11pm news was arguably most important (financially, why else?) because it followed the network’s huge primetime audience, and had 35 minutes to fill commercials, rather than the typical 30 for a half hour. Stations would then sell ads based on the ratings for at least the next few months, while also looking at year-to-year. People’s jobs depended on good ratings.
This was my first job outside of Florida, my first time in New England cold and my first time living away from home (except for college).
Downtown Hartford was basically a dead center of a doughnut, but not the night before Thanksgiving. (Why weren’t we live from outside?) The day before Thanksgiving was still busy with travel. (Yes, we had a live picture.)
Since then, the station moved from there, two towns south to Rocky Hill. (Yes, Weathersfield and Rocky Hill are towns, while Hartford is a city!)
These days, Al Terzi – the dean of Connecticut TV news, who actually spent some time in West Palm Beach – moderates a weekly political show on WTIC-Fox 61. Denise D’Ascenzo is still at it at Channel 3 after 32 years (and will always be my shiksa sister!), but gets to drive home at a decent hour. No more Nightbeat for her! We can all see and hear Joe Tessitore on ESPN’s Monday Night Football.
I thank Tom Lowell, Steve Sabato and Deborah Johnson for the opportunity. I followed Tom up from Miami.
Plus, my friend Megan Robinson who followed me up and started producing weekend mornings, before becoming an executive producer in Charlotte. We went to dinner every Sunday night in a different town so we could study the state we covered.
Reporters Dennis House (now anchoring and also blogging, so I get a weekly email to keep up with the area!), Jennifer Watson (in Atlanta), Melissa Francis (Fox Business) and Susan Raff (still there!) found news or followed up on developing stories, sometimes live so late and further away than they would’ve liked to have been.
Assignment editor Andre Hepkins left WFSB and returned as a reporter. Now, he’s a big-time anchor in Baltimore. And Dana Luby kept getting promotion after promotion and recently went from long-time news director of the station to its general manager! Plus, Mike Guerrieri (Vice President of Creative Services at NBC’s Miami station) with the prime-time teases that kept so many viewers up longer than they would’ve liked.
Of course, I’ll never forget the late, great newscast director Jeff Bright. And I’ll never be able to mention everyone whose work went into making the newscast such a success, so please forgive me.
We were a #1 team. I should’ve made more of it. Come to think of it, I think I fought like hell with every one of the people mentioned at least once (except Gayle)! Every one of cared that much and made each other better.
I mentioned I ended up moving to Philadelphia. I stayed six years, returned to Miami for some time before getting back to Philadelphia (for Part B, as this post’s title suggests).
Click here for how The Hartford Courant reported that day.
Now, to the video!
1 of 3: Lots of touches I remember starting, the New England Patriots’ move to Hartford(!), Hilton’s memories, and perhaps a record number of municipalities mentioned in the first tease instead of the typical three
2 of 3: Michael J. Fox reveals he has Parkinson’s and Hilton’s final forecast
3 of 3: Sports, Hilton’s final good-bye and classic clips
(Why didn’t I get an on-air mention after 19-1/2 months?)
Bonuses:
Gayle King’s friend Oprah joins Hilton on weather in 1992
And click here to read and watch the most memorable moment in WFSB history (at least involving Hilton)!
Plus, thank you to Spencer Medbery for providing most of the clips!
If you like what you read here, subscribe with either your email address or WordPress account, and get a notice whenever I publish. Don’t rely on social media with its hacking issues and censoring like this, this and this. I’m also available for writing/web contract work. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennycohen
I don’t remember a seven-day period like the time since last Saturday. That’s when I woke up, turned on the TV, and saw what was happening in Pittsburgh. I got very angry and couldn’t stand to hear anything about it after two hours.
It took until Wednesday for the anger to turn to sadness. I had my class and other chores to keep me occupied, along with a lot of sleep. (I can never get enough of that.)
Only Thursday, did I watch a local newscast. I haven’t seen national news or cable in a week. I mostly got information from your comments and posts on Facebook. I know it’s not good, but I have reliable friends whose politics I know.
Last time, I mentioned my family in Squirrel Hill, how I’d been there several times, and showed you a tweet about my cousin Jordan (my father’s sister’s son) who helped provide grief counseling and relief.
Here he was on Tuesday, talking to CNN’s Anderson Cooper:
Later, he wrote,
“Such a horrible few days here. At least the media is giving us an opportunity to talk about the important work that JFCS does to help the community recover.”
Terrific job by Jordan and also the media.
So we don’t forget, the victims were
Joyce Fienberg, 75;
Richard Gottfried, 65;
Rose Mallinger, 97;
Jerry Rabinowitz, 66;
Cecil Rosenthal, 59, and his brother
David Rosenthal, 54;
Bernice Simon, 84, and her husband
Sylvan Simon, 87, who were married in the same synagogue in 1956;
Daniel Stein, 71;
Melvin Wax, 88; and
Irving Younger, 69.
JFCS’ website says you can support the injured victims of terror and loved ones of the deceased. Click here to help by credit card or mail a check, payable to Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh – Fund for Victims of Terror, to:
Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh
234 McKee Place
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Monday morning, I didn’t want to watch news from Pittsburgh. I got up earlier than usual and turned on a show I never do: one I figured would focus on politics alone. And they did. And it reconfirmed why I don’t watch.
I’ve grown up hearing, “Be safe on the campaign trail” – and generic stuff like that, which anyone should agree on – but nothing that would cause a viewer to think a supposed journalist has an opinion on a candidate for any office.
About Lou Dobbs: First, he puts his positions in the ring and openly takes sides. Second, I normally wouldn’t ask, but after what you just read and heard, are there any psychologists or psychiatrists – professional or amateur – who want to give opinions in the comments section at the bottom?
#VoteGOP – @RealDonaldTrump: This election will decide if we build on the extraordinary prosperity that we’ve unleased or whether we let the radical democrats take control of congress and take a giant wrecking ball to our economy and to our future. #TrumpTrain#MAGA#Dobbspic.twitter.com/1hALVgRVBw
I should say I’m not for anyone deciding they want to enter this country whenever and wherever they want. Every country needs secure borders, and not like the Communists kept people in. These people from Central America, who I showed Paul Krugman calling “unarmed desperate migrants” last time, are apparently walking all the way through Mexico – bottom to top – set on entering the U.S. I don’t know who they are; just supposedly where they’re from.
But I would suggest “real refugees” would go anywhere they could go if they were so desperate. I have relatives I never got to meet who would’ve done that, just less than 80 years ago. There are other countries around, and groups trying to make a point do not seem legitimate to me.
Individuals hoping to apply for asylum may not be doing themselves a favor by being part of that.
Feb. 6: Could this long-lost photo have derailed Obama’s 2008 campaign? (Photographer Askia Muhammad kept the 2005 photo for himself for 13 years. The image might have fueled the Obama/Muslim narrative, but we know he went to church and listened to Rev. Jeremiah “G-d damn America” Wright for 20 years.)
The FBI has been the worst enemy of Black advancement. The Jews have control over those agencies of government. #Farrakhanpic.twitter.com/DXKCRr1zpo
— MINISTER FARRAKHAN (@LouisFarrakhan) March 7, 2018
“You’ve mentioned your progressive grandmother took you to rallies when you were younger. Times are different, but I wonder what she would think these days.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), with Linda Sarsour at the left, as if she couldn’t rally with anyone else. Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) getting outsmarted by members of Netroots Nation. That group will be holding its next conference here in Philadelphia, July 11-13, 2019.
Sept. 10: Alan Dershowitz: Why did Bill Clinton share the stage with Louis Farrakhan? (At Aretha Franklin’s funeral, along with Jesse “Hymietown” Jackson and MSNBC’s Al “diamond dealers” Sharpton. Rev. Sharpton used that phrase about Jews in his eulogy of Gavin Cato, 7, killed in the 1991 Crown Heights car accident. He also said, “It’s an accident to allow an apartheid ambulance service in the middle of Crown Heights.” A banner displayed at the funeral read “Hitler did not do the job.” Riots followed and may have been the reason Rudy Giuliani beat Mayor David Dinkins in his bid for reelection. Giuliani said,
“You can use whatever word you want, but in fact for three days people were beaten up, people were sent to the hospital because they were Jewish. There’s no question that not enough was done about it by the city of New York. One definition of pogrom is violence where the state doesn’t do enough to prevent it.”
According to Wikipedia,
“Use of the word was rejected by Dinkins and his supporters, primarily on the basis that a pogrom needs to be state-sponsored.”
Brandeis University historian Edward S. Shapiro later called the riot “the most serious anti-Semitic incident in American history.” Unfortunately, it seems that has now changed.)
That and extreme left-wingers under her spell reminded me of the phrase “useful idiot,” which has often been attributed to Vladimir Lenin, but may not be the case.
“Haaretz’s inexplicable inclusion of Sarsour’s condemnation of the synagogue massacre alongside those of Israeli leaders is puzzling. Moreover, the paper’s failure to note Sarsour’s bear hug of (Louis) Farrakhan, ‘the pied-piper of hate,’ is downright reprehensible, and gives a false hechsher (kosher stamp) to a purveyor of anti-Semitism.”
These tweets are still up:
What is happening in our country?? Holding our Jewish communities all over the country but especially in Pittsburgh in our hearts. We are in this together. We have to be. We must protect each other. https://t.co/YMfsoxiIhr
Whomever did this is a monster. Our places of worship should be sanctuaries. We should all be free and safe to practice our faith in this country without fear of being targeted. https://t.co/w2zbYz7oaN
“guilty of espousing ‘white supremacy’ with her decision to support the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh.”
Senator Susan Collins is the mother & grandmother of white women in America who gave us a Donald Trump presidency. The 53%.
She is a disgrace & her legacy will be that she was a traitor to women and marginalized communities. History will not treat her kindly. #CancelKanavaugh
A white woman Senator is talking about presumption of innocence that is never offered to Black men in America. You are watching white supremacy live on the Senate Floor. #SusanCollins#CancelKanavaugh
“supporting BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) and tweeting that ‘nothing is creepier than Zionism.’ Unsurprisingly, she supports a one-state solution: all Palestine, no Israel.”
The point of the article was that
“When a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis was vandalized, Sarsour spearheaded a crowdfunding campaign with other Muslim activists to repair the damage. More than $125,000 was raised – more than necessary for the project – and Sarsour committed to donating the excess funds to other Jewish sites damaged by vandalism. Sarsour said that the project was intended ‘send a united message from the Jewish and Muslim communities that there is no place for this type of hate, desecration, and violence in America.’”
But at the same time, Sarsour
“declared that feminism and Zionism are incompatible.
“‘You either stand up for the rights of all women, including Palestinians, or none. There’s just no way around it,’ Sarsour said in an interview with The Nation.
“This came as quite a surprise to thousands of Zionist feminists. (And, of course, Sarsour singles out the country in the Middle East that has female ministers of Parliament, equal rights and reproductive rights, rather than any countries where ‘honor killings’ are overlooked, rape victims are executed for ‘adultery,’ and women can’t go out unsupervised or drive, but whatever.)”
The author compared Sarsour to a character in the Purim holiday story who switched sides, from evil to supportive, because he was an opportunist rather than an altruistic ally.
“We remember Charbonah for good because he actually switched sides. Even if it was self-serving, he came around. … Sarsour, on the other hand, is still the same. I’ll publicly thank her for fundraising to repair the desecrated cemetery – even if it was a PR stunt, it was a good thing to do.”
But she doesn’t get remembered the same way because she stayed the same person.
A few months later, the same author wrote an article in the same publication called Protest, But Protest Wisely. Sarsour played a minor role in that.
“Musician Courtney Love Cobain was in a Twitter war with Muslim activist Linda Sarsour, saying that Sarsour had raised $80,000 for the victim of an alleged Islamophobic attack that had been proven never to have occurred. According to Cobain, Sarsour had jumped all over a convenient hot-button cause, bringing her followers along for the ride, facts be damned. (The parallels to Reverend Al Sharpton and the Tawana Brawley case are evident.)”
In fact, Michigan’s August primary had her tweeting up a storm.
The first Palestinian American woman, first Muslim American woman IS heading to the US Congress. History has been made and will continue to be made. Thank you @RashidaTlaib for inspiring us all. #DoneWaiting#MichiganPrimaries
(“4. Palestinians keep turning down fair deals: This argument wrongly presumes that any deal that includes the sharing of stolen land with the victims of said theft could be fair. … 6. Israel has a right to exist! (His exclamation point.) This claim is a product of U.S. and Israeli hasbara, a term for propaganda.”)
And he tweeted out this:
Praying for everyone killed, hurt, or otherwise harmed in today’s synagogue shooting. Sending love, healing, and my deepest sympathy to my Jewish brothers and sisters around the world, but particularly in Pittsburgh.
But he also tweeted out and/or is featured in these:
TODAY Tuesday (10/23) at 7:00pm join @HarrabicTubman and @marclamonthill as they present a closer look at the diverse Black communities in the Holy Land including Sudanese and Eritrean refugees, Black Palestinian refugees and Afro-Palestinians. pic.twitter.com/0vIze0RxbD
Honored to have spoken at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights Conference. Had a great time listening to my comrade Reverend William Barber’s prophetic call for justice. I was excited to… https://t.co/ocsCZyyv74
There are journalists (or journalists-in-training) who don’t know how to cover a tragic situation. Take Royce Jones of WTRF in West Virginia, not too far from Pittsburgh, and the two tweets he posted.
FTVLive’s Scott Jones did a story on the first one, and I tweeted back to young Royce, with tips.
Then, I saw picture number two, let him know what I thought, and he blocked me from his professional Twitter account!
But I got in the last words about being a journalist, asking questions, accepting responsibility and learning.
Once again, blocking someone who can teach you is not what a good #journalist does. Ask around. @JonesWTRF, the picture you tweeted through the viewfinder looks dreadful after what happened. And blocking someone will probably get you more bad #publicity. Take the help! @WTRF7Newspic.twitter.com/lx1PUCb8yL
But he just started Aug. 31, according to his “official” Twitter feed. I know because he calls it @RoyceJOfficial.
He’s expecting to graduate from college sometime in 2020. That’s a long time away. More than a year. It shows. He has a lot to learn, like not blocking people with experience from encouraging and teaching him.
For now, he reminds of the person who wrote to the WCYB Facebook page while I was digital media manager and asked:
Just don’t go to his website. There’s something wrong, and it looks like it’s coming from the Far East.
I’m going to offer you links to other pertinent articles I’ve been collecting since even before that dreadful day, for an election post. Hopefully you’ll find an article or two that speak to you. Some have themes I discussed in the last post. Some are news and some are opinion.
Please don’t blame the messenger if there’s something you don’t like. Just let me know if you see something you think needs to be corrected IN THE COMMENTS SECTION BELOW. (In fact, if you saw this on social media or someone sent it you, PLEASE subscribe to the blog. I always update posts in the comment section – check around! – and I’m the only one commenting there.)
Aug. 26: America Soured on My Multiracial Family (When my wife and I adopted our daughter from Ethiopia in 2010, we did so full of hope. In the years since, we’ve faced ugliness that has robbed us of our optimism—and left us fearful for the future of our country.)
Oct. 27: Shaking My Faith in America (NY Times opinion piece by Howard Fineman, NBC News analyst and journalism lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, who grew up attending Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue.)
Oct. 29: On a very dark day, KDKA-TV news shined with its coverage (Notice the headline didn’t say it was better than the other two local news stations. The newspaper may have gotten details because it has a partnership with this station. Still, it’s a very good look at how TV news works. I should point out Pittsburgh is the largest TV market where the Fox affiliate, which happens to be owned by Sinclair, doesn’t produce its own news. Instead, it carries a 10pm newscast produced by the competition. Also notice how the most reliable people have been at this station – or any other – for many years and have the best sources. They should be respected and valued as they age, and not get pushed out the door by cheapskate companies.)
Oct. 29: On Social Media, No Answers for Hate (Despite efforts against hateful and false content, those posts and videos are thriving. One Instagram search produced nearly 12,000 posts with the hashtag “#jewsdid911.”)
Oct. 30: Anger At Media Spreads Into Local TV (While President Donald Trump’s attacks on the media are usually centered on national outlets like CNN and The New York Times, the attitudes unleashed have filtered down to journalists on the street covering news in local communities across the country.)
Had a hell of a night in Fort Myers. This man apologized for giving me the finger at a rally earlier this year in Tampa. Really. We had a moment. pic.twitter.com/Kfm0J0TbsC
Nov. 2: FNC’s Ainsley Earhardt Gets Heat for Comment On Trump And Press (The supposed journalist said President Trump is suggesting, if the press doesn’t want to be called an enemy of the people, it should report the news the way he wants it. Yeah, politicians editing the news, rather than journalists keeping tabs on the politicians!)
Nov. 3: Here’s what Trump can expect if the Democrats take the House (Most pollsters expect the US House of Representatives to slip out of Republican control with the election of a new Democratic majority, while the Senate, they say, will remain in the GOP’s hands.)
I’d be remiss if I didn’t show you yet another email I got Friday afternoon, thinking I’m a Florida voter and telling me “How to vote for Florida’s Jewish community.” That was the subject line, and Florida’s Jewish community should be insulted this “goody two shoes” thinks he knows better than everyone else. How about a debate?I wrote about this less than a month ago and can’t stand people telling me how to vote, especially if it’s in their own special, narrow interests.
It looks to me he’s getting desperate, because besides rejecting free public school, he’s not sticking to his issue. He wrote less about the cost of education, more about foreign affairs, and for the first time, the state’s economy!
Yes, these are tough political times and would be even if the Pittsburgh massacre hadn’t happened. People are finding out what their supposed “friends” really think and are dropping them from Facebook. It especially hit home when friends of mine, who don’t even know each other, got personal over I post I’d written. In one case, I had to delete some uncalled for remarks on both sides.
But even I got a little touchy and had a moment I felt I had to apologize to a stranger on a mutual friend’s post, about a Florida synagogue’s invitation to a gubernatorial candidate. (So glad I don’t have to decide down there!)
That was on Oct. 26. I underlined what had set me off, and added that last article link days later. In fact, I linked to it in last week’s post.
So maybe a kinder, gentler Lenny will come out of all this, or maybe not. Always gotta learn and improve, but stay true to myself.
I’ll end by reminding you to “fall back” this weekend (turn the clocks you still control back an hour), but we can’t afford to fall back to old times – whether in this country or elsewhere – anymore.
Please leave your comments in the section below, and don’t miss out. If you like what you read here, subscribe to CohenConnect.com with either your email address or WordPress account, and get a notice whenever I publish. Don’t rely on social media with its hacking issues and censoring like this, this and this. I’m also available for writing/web contract work. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennycohen
President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh will be giving the Senate Judiciary Committee calendars from 1982 to back up his continued denial of sexually assaulting Christine Blasey Ford. That’s according to The New York Times, late Sunday afternoon.
The year 1982 was 36 years ago. Do you have your calendar from back then? Heck, were you even alive back then? (I was and I remember, but my calendar situation was mainly my parents’ responsibility at that time.) At least Judge Kavanaugh can’t say his was accidentally deleted from wherever we keep our calendars, these days. On the other hand, looks like we’ll be keeping our calendars forever!
Photo by rawpixel.com on Pexels.com
I explained in a lawsuit about 17-18 years ago (half the time since 1982?!) – when I mentioned plans and the other side immediately asked for my calendar – they’re good for some things and not for others. Calendars will tell what your plans were when you wrote (or saved) them. They were your intentions. Calendars won’t tell whether you actually followed through with the plans or changed them. Maybe you got sick.
(“So as I told you, despite what my old calendar said,no, I didn’t go to a movie with my friend Harry, that night!”)
Judge Brett Kavanaugh
Anyway, the calendar is supposed to help with Judge Kavanaugh’s denial, at least to some degree.
Let’s see. He was born in 1965. (Damn! All these “old” people’s birth years are getting closer and closer to mine!)
During that clerkship, he worked alongside Neil Gorsuch (born 1967!). He and now-Justice Gorsuch attended the same prep school! Small world.
SIDEBAR: Remember, Justice Gorsuch’s nomination came after President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland, who remains Chief Judge of the Federal Appeals Court, DC Circuit, where Kavanaugh has been a Circuit Judge since 2006! Again, small world.
But the Republican-controlled Senate never took up Judge Garland’s nomination.
BACK TO THE STORY: You’ll remember, President Donald Trump nominated Gorsuch to succeed the late Antonin Scalia. He was 49 and the youngest (successful) nominee to the Supreme Court since none other than Clarence Thomas! Justice Thomas was 43, back in 1991. You may remember, his nomination proceedings to replace the retiring Thurgood Marshall (quota?) were contentious from the start over the issue of abortion and Thomas’ conservative political views.
Then and now: Clarence Thomas at the EEOC (1989–1990), and as a Supreme Court Justice
Whose name is missing from that last paragraph? Law Professor Anita Hill, of course!
She’d worked under Thomas at the U.S. Education Department and then at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It wasn’t until the end of Thomas’ confirmation hearings that her behavior allegations against Thomas were leaked to National Public Radio’s Supreme Court correspondent Nina Totenberg (still on the job!) from a confidential FBI report. I think we have déjà vu.
BACK TO THE STORY: Many of us actually learned the phrase “sexual harassment” during the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill frenzy. Hill – a Yale Law School graduate and University of Oklahoma law professor – testified a mutual friend introduced her to Thomas. Then, he asked if she’d leave a private firm and work as his assistant at the Department of Education. After being happy for three months, he asked her to go out with him socially and everything changed when she told him it wouldn’t be right, since she was her supervisor. (I’m summarizing her statement from that same link above, sure to bring back memories for us older folk.)
“I thought that by saying ‘no’ and explaining my reasons, my employer would abandon his social suggestions. However, to my regret, in the following few weeks he continued to ask me out on several occasions. He pressed me to justify my reasons for saying “no” to him. These incidents took place in his office or mine. They were in the form of private conversations which would not have been overheard by anyone else.
“My working relationship became even more strained when Judge Thomas began to use work situations to discuss sex. On these occasions, he would call me into his office for reports on education issues and projects or he might suggest that because of the time pressures of his schedule, we go to lunch to a government cafeteria. After a brief discussion of work, he would turn the conversation to a discussion of sexual matters. His conversations were very vivid.
“He spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as women having sex with animals, and films showing group sex or rape scenes. He talked about pornographic materials depicting individuals with large penises, or large breasts involved in various sex acts.
“On several occasions Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess. Because I was extremely uncomfortable talking about sex with him at all, and particularly in such a graphic way, I told him that I did not want to talk about these subjects. I would also try to change the subject to education matters or to nonsexual personal matters, such as his background or his beliefs. My efforts to change the subject were rarely successful.”
Then, Prof. Hill testified,
“During the latter part of my time at the Department of Education, the social pressures and any conversation of his offensive behavior ended. I began both to believe and hope that our working relationship could be a proper, cordial, and professional one. When Judge Thomas was made chair of the EEOC, I needed to face the question of whether to go with him. I was asked to do so and I did. The work, itself, was interesting, and at that time, it appeared that the sexual overtures, which had so troubled me, had ended. I also faced the realistic fact that I had no alternative job. While I might have gone back to private practice, perhaps in my old firm, or at another, I was dedicated to civil rights work and my first choice was to be in that field. Moreover, at that time the Department of Education, itself, was a dubious venture. President Reagan was seeking to abolish the entire department.”
There were no problems for her first few months.
“However, during the fall and winter of 1982, these began again. The comments were random, and ranged from pressing me about why I didn’t go out with him, to remarks about my personal appearance. I remember him saying that ‘some day I would have to tell him the real reason that I wouldn’t go out with him.’
“He began to show displeasure in his tone and voice and his demeanor in his continued pressure for an explanation. He commented on what I was wearing in terms of whether it made me more or less sexually attractive. The incidents occurred in his inner office at the EEOC.
“One of the oddest episodes I remember was an occasion in which Thomas was drinking a Coke in his office, he got up from the table, at which we were working, went over to his desk to get the Coke, looked at the can and asked, ‘Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?’
“On other occasions he referred to the size of his own penis as being larger than normal and he also spoke on some occasions of the pleasures he had given to women with oral sex. At this point, late 1982,1 began to feel severe stress on the job. I began to be concerned that Clarence Thomas might take out his anger with me by degrading me or not giving me important assignments. I also thought that he might find an excuse for dismissing me.
“In January 1983, I began looking for another job. I was handicapped because I feared that if he found out he might make it difficult for me to find other employment, and I might be dismissed from the job I had.
“Another factor that made my search more difficult was that this was during a period of a hiring freeze in the Government. In February 1983, I was hospitalized for 5 days on an emergency basis for acute stomach pain which I attributed to stress on the job. Once out of the hospital. I became more committed to find other employment and sought further to minimize my contact with Thomas.”
Hill ended up taking a job at Oral Roberts University.
“The dean of the university saw me teaching and inquired as to whether I would be interested in pursuing a career in teaching, beginning at Oral Roberts University. I agreed to take the job, in large part, because of my desire to escape the pressures I felt at the EEOC due to Judge Thomas.
“When I informed him that I was leaving in July, I recall that his response was that now, I would no longer have an excuse for not going out with him. I told him that I still preferred not to do so. At some time after that meeting, he asked if he could take me to dinner at the end of the term. When I declined, he assured me that the dinner was a professional courtesy only and not a social invitation. I reluctantly agreed to accept that invitation but only if it was at the very end of a working day.
“On, as I recall, the last day of my employment at the EEOC in the summer of 1983, I did have dinner with Clarence Thomas. We went directly from work to a restaurant near the office. We talked about the work that I had done both at Education and at the EEOC. He told me that he was pleased with all of it except for an article and speech that I had done for him while we were at the Office for Civil Rights. Finally he made a comment that I will vividly remember. He said, that if I ever told anyone of his behavior that it would ruin his career. This was not an apology, nor was it an explanation. That was his last remark about the possibility of our going out, or reference to his behavior.”
In case you were wondering (and who of a certain age wasn’t?), further discussions of pornographic videos Thomas had allegedly rented, including the now-famous Long Dong Silver, must’ve happened during questioning or cross-examination.
Anyway, members of the Judiciary Committee didn’t treat Prof. Hill very nicely. For reasons we don’t know and can only imagine, two women who made statements supporting Prof. Hill to Senate staffers never testified.
“Professor Hill, now that you have read the FBI report, you can see that it contains no reference to any mention of Judge Thomas’ private parts or sexual prowess or size, et cetera, and my question to you would be, on something that is as important as it is in your written testimony and in your responses to Senator Biden, why didn’t you tell the FBI about that?”
Déjà vu, once again.
“Professor Hill, you said that you took it to mean that Judge Thomas wanted to have sex with you, but in fact he never did ask you to have sex, correct?”
And then the former Philadelphia D.A. asked,
“What went through your mind, if anything, on whether you ought to come forward at that stage, because if you had, you would have stopped this man from being head of the EEOC perhaps for another decade? What went on through your mind? I know you decided not to make a complaint, but did you give that any consideration, and, if so, how could you allow this kind of reprehensible conduct to go on right in the headquarters, without doing something about it?”
You can see and hear some other lowlights in these clips:
Feb. 8, 2018: Prof. Anita Hill (by Gage Skidmore via Wikipedia)
Thomas denied everything and called the hearing a type of “high tech lynching.”
As we know, the nomination was moved to the full, Democratic-controlled, Senate, and Thomas was narrowly confirmed, 52-48.
Despite the Déjà vu, those were accusations of sexual harassment. The allegation against Kavanaugh is attempted rape.
Kavanaugh denies it happened, but he has had confirmation trouble before. In 2003, when President George W. Bush (#43) nominated him for his current job – Circuit Judge for the Federal Appeals Court, DC Circuit – it took him three years to get approved! He was considered too partisan and wasn’t sworn in until 2006.
Let’s not forget Judge Kavanaugh already has a job for life. Every federal judge does. It says so in the Constitution.
In fact, I got called for federal jury duty back in 1995, while producing afternoon and early evening coverage of the O.J. Simpson murder trial for WSVN in Miami. This was just before the L.A. jury was going to deliberate the verdict and we potential Miami jurors were warned, our case could last weeks.
I was angry after waiting a whole day in the courtroom doing nothing. Finally, we were questioned and I told off a federal judge using the line, “You have a job for life but I have to earn mine every day!” (You’re welcome again, Patrick and Alice!)
At the end, they divided everyone up into groups. Those in my group were very happy to be there, even though the judge hadn’t announced which group would get to go home, have to come back, etc. (Yes, we got sent home for good.) What I won’t do for a job!
So Judge Kavanaugh will not get any more job security if he is confirmed. He will just get more publicity as a justice on the nation’s highest court. (Would you still want that?) And the opportunity to influence the entire country. Also, don’t forget the ability to sell more books further into the future. Plus, maybe a movie, The Notorious B.M.K. (His middle name is Michael.)
Nina Totenberg (NPR)
In 1987, President Reagan’s nomination of Judge Douglas Ginsburg (no relation to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, of the movie mentioned in the last paragraph) to the High Court ended with his withdrawal nine days after it was announced. Judge Ginsburg, 41, was President Reagan’s second choice after the Senate refused to confirm Judge Robert Bork.
That was a big deal at the time. President Reagan ended up nominating David Souter and not long after, President George H.W. Bush (#41) nominated Anthony Kennedy, who – again – is retiring now. But the way the FBI conducted background checks changed forever, causing a lot of other people to have to answer questions about whether they’d experimented with smoking pot.
Judge Ginsburg continues to serve as a Senior Circuit Judge in that same Federal Appeals Court, DC Circuit, I’ve already mentioned twice. No more ‘small world’ reference. It’s getting late and two pieces of more important news just happened.
Of course, a background check is different than investigating a person who is under suspicion of a crime, but the FBI does that for the president, in order to avoid an embarrassment like the Judge Ginsburg incident. Investigations are not left to people appointed by the Senate Judiciary Committee, as was recently suggested, because that’s obviously political.
Rachel Maddow
Maybe this will again change the questions that candidates for high positions, who will need to be confirmed by the Senate, will have to answer. The questions will have to be more specific than whether somebody sniffed glue in high school, which was one of the additions after the Judge Ginsburg incident, as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow showed!
Let’s stop for a moment and recognize the stories uncovered by these two female journalists.
Perhaps new questions to be asked as soon as the Kavanaugh case ends will include dates of every “base” achieved ending in loss of virginity, as the analogy has gone, which could be a threat to the privacy of willing and non-willing second parties.
Perhaps it will be the height of the #MeToo movement because it could uncover old crimes committed by men who are supposedly upstanding citizens these days. That would be an important lesson to young men with high career hopes, but probably not amount to anything because no president would nominate anybody so much more prone to rejection rather than confirmation.
And we’d never know who they are.
Besides, how many men, in addition to more women these days, would be considered 100 percent innocent of any coming-of-age antics that has probably been around since just after the introduction of the world’s oldest profession?
That brings me to a point somebody – I forgot who – brought up on Facebook last week, probably in a meme.
What about the thousands of victims of priest sexual abuse, just the ones right here in this country? They didn’t speak up right away, for obvious reasons. Should their stories not be heard, even if there’s a statute of limitations to prevent criminal charges?
Then why are people calling for a vote on Judge Kavanaugh before hearing from Dr. Blasey Ford? Should Prof. Hill have not been heard, all those years ago?
According to the York (Pa.) Daily Record, last Monday – less than a week ago – a Pittsburgh-area man and Catholic school kindergartner filed a class action suit as lead plaintiffs,
“seeking the full disclosure of all Catholic dioceses’ records concerning sexual abuse by priests. …
“The complaint notes that the recent grand jury report that identified 301 predatory priests in Pennsylvania (click here to see all 1356 pages) ‘emphasized it did not believe the report identified all predator priests and that many victims never came forward.’
“‘Lack of a complete accounting and disclosure … constitutes a clear and present danger,’ the suit concludes.”
So while Dr. Christine Blasey Ford gets ready to testify against Judge Kavanaugh this Thursday, I’ll close with two pieces of news just in and can’t be ignored as I was about to publish:
“The second accuser, Deborah Ramirez, claims that Kavanaugh waved his penis in front of her face while she was inebriated at a dormitory party during the 1983-1984 academic school year. She told Farrow and Mayer that she believes an FBI investigation of Kavanaugh’s actions is warranted.”
Judge Kavanaugh’s response:
“This alleged event from 35 years ago did not happen. The people who knew me then know that this did not happen, and have said so. This is a smear, plain and simple. I look forward to testifying on Thursday about the truth, and defending my good name — and the reputation for character and integrity I have spent a lifetime building — against these last-minute allegations.”
And from White House spokesperson Kerri Kupec:
“This 35-year-old, uncorroborated claim is the latest in a coordinated smear campaign by the Democrats designed to tear down a good man. This claim is denied by all who were said to be present and is wholly inconsistent with what many women and men who knew Judge Kavanaugh at the time in college say. The White House stands firmly behind Judge Kavanaugh.”
On the Judiciary Committee: Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)
“The office of Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley released the unredacted initial letter” Dr. Blasey Ford “sent to Sen. Dianne Feinstein in July detailing her account of the (alleged) incident” that both Dr. Blasey Ford and Sen. Feinstein expected to remain confidential.
To me, it looks like another alleged victim has just been betrayed.
Folks, will this ever end?
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There are just 69 days until the midterm elections (for those of you who really explored all around this all-around great blog to see what’s new and what it has offered for so long, like relevant countdowns) and Florida held its primary yesterday. The ballot was packed and perhaps the biggest race was for Democratic nomination for governor.
Mayor Andrew Gillum (D) defeated former Rep. Gwen Graham (D)
According to the Sun-Sentinel, Andrew Gillum defeated Gwen Graham for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. It was an upset for the 39-year-old Gillum, who has been mayor of state capital Tallahassee for the past four years. He beat Graham, a former congresswoman who had name recognition all over the Sunshine State as daughter of former U.S. senator and Florida Gov. Bob Graham. Gillum could now become the first black Florida governor ever.
Rep. Ron DeSantis (R) beat Comm. Adam Putnam (R)
I’ve written about the Republican side before, here and here. Congressman Ron DeSantis beat state Agriculture and Consumer Affairs Commissioner Adam Putnam by a wide margin. Things to note: DeSantis – a military man (Navy) and also 39, coincidentally – has President Donald Trump’s support; DeSantis appeared on Fox News many times while Putnam wasn’t given chances to be seen by Florida Republicans before the primary, except for a debate; DeSantis’ job as congressman has had him in Washington as chairman of the National Security subcommittee and member of committees on foreign affairs, the judiciary, and oversight and government reform; while Putnam was already in Tallahassee dealing with Florida issues.
Big Election Wins last night! The Republican Party will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Actually, it is happening faster than anybody thought possible! It is morphing into KEEP AMERICA GREAT!
What’s not unusual is that DeSantis said on Fox News (again) how well Gillum performs in debates, but that he has far-left views and problems governing Tallahassee – and how the state needs to continue building off its success of the past eight years.
What’s unusual is the way he put it, in this 45-second clip:
“The last thing we need to do is to monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state.” – Rep. Ron DeSantis
Later, Fox News returned with a clarification from DeSantis’ campaign and also an apology.
This afternoon, on Fox with Shepard Smith, Gillum accused DeSantis of
“taking a page directly from the campaign manual of Donald Trump”
and said he believes Florida voters are “sick” of the division from DeSantis.
Gillum also said,
“Well, in the handbook of Donald Trump, they no longer do (racist) whistle calls. They are now using full bullhorns.”
For his part, President Trump said he didn’t hear the remark.
“I believe that Florida and its rich diversity are going to be looking for a governor who’s going to bring us together. Not divide us. Not misogynists. Not racists,” Andrew Gillum said after Ron DeSantis warned Floridians not to “monkey this up” by voting for his black opponent. pic.twitter.com/UogaVORFWG
There’s no excuse for what DeSantis said, whether racial or not, and I’m not making that claim. I will say it was pretty dumb.
You would expect DeSantis – whose House biography website says he graduated magna cum laude from Yale, graduated with honors from Harvard Law School, earned a commission as a JAG officer in the Navy, and deployed to Iraq during the 2007 troop surge as an adviser to a U.S. Navy SEAL commander in support of the SEAL mission in Iraq and also served at the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – would be more disciplined.
DeSantis – a lieutenant commander in the reserve component of the Navy who has won the Bronze Star Medal (meritorious service), the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal (gold star in lieu of second award), the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal, and the Iraq Campaign Medal – must not have been aware of the TV show that starred his supporter Trump’s big supporter Roseanne Barr.
ABC and its parent company, Disney, quickly pulled the plug on the new, highly-anticipated Roseanne after Barr wrote a series of derogatory tweets. One equated President Obama’s adviser Valerie Jarrett to an ape.
ABC
ABC Entertainment cancels Roseanne Barr's show, calling her comment on Twitter "abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values." https://t.co/2HJA1onFiw [Corrects link] pic.twitter.com/XEdNA8RLft
Most of the cast and support staff publicly condemned Barr and quit the show. She lost a lot of entertainment industry friends.
Roseanne’s recent comments about Valerie Jarrett, and so much more, are abhorrent and do not reflect the beliefs of our cast and crew or anyone associated with our show. I am disappointed in her actions to say the least.
This is incredibly sad and difficult for all of us, as we’ve created a show that we believe in, are proud of, and that audiences love— one that is separate and apart from the opinions and words of one cast member.
Bob Iger of ABC called Valerie Jarrett to let her know that “ABC does not tolerate comments like those” made by Roseanne Barr. Gee, he never called President Donald J. Trump to apologize for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC. Maybe I just didn’t get the call?
Wow amazing. Congrats @therealroseanne. If you’re not too busy already maybe work in a late night show too… seems there’s some demand for an alternate viewpoint. #Rosannehttps://t.co/JNaLjxS0fs
Since then, ABC picked up a spin-off called The Connors that’ll focus on the rest of the family.
Yesterday, TVLine confirmed grandkids Emma Kenney (Harris), Ames McNamara (Mark) and Jayden Rey (DJ’s daughter Mary) agreed to be series regulars. It’ll be a promotion for Rey, who had been just a recurring guest star.
They follow Goodman (Dan), Sara Gilbert (Darlene), Laurie Metcalf (Jackie), Lecy Goranson (Becky) and Michael Fishman (DJ), who will also be returning in October.
According to CNN, Goodman seemed to either confirm or speculate the rumor the new show would kill off Barr’s character could be true.
“I guess he’ll be mopey and sad because his wife’s dead,”
Goodman guessed about his own character’s future.
Roseanne has reportedly settled with and separated from ABC, and now has her own YouTube show.
THIS IS WHAT YOU GET TO DO when you own your show. You're not a production company's employee or at the whim of a network. Think @Oprah. #RoseanneBarr's son says guests include fmr campaign manager Thomas Muhammad, who is black & Muslim. #entrepreneurshiphttps://t.co/oCpr6BFBzR
Gov. Rick Scott (R) will try to knock off incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson (D) in November
Two-term Gov. Rick Scott easily won the Republican primary for U.S. Senate. He’ll face three-term incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson, who ran unopposed in the Democratic primary. Wikipedia notes Nelson is the only Democratic statewide elected official in Florida.
Also, Donna Shalala, 77, won her Democratic primary for Congress in the 27th District to replace retiring Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R). Shalala was President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Health and Human Services for eight years and then president of the University of Miami for 14. Notably, the Miami Herald wrote Shalala
“knows how to ‘win friends and influence people’ — and raise money. All vital skills.”
But at the same time, it said she’s too close to
“the establishment political machine” and her “long-time friend Hillary Clinton(’s)” … “sometimes maligned foundation hired Shalala after she left UM.”
“88 acres of critically endangered Miami pine rocklands”
to a Palm Beach County-based developer
“for $22 million — a complete steal for the developer in light of the relative worth of nearby property.”
Now,
“One of the last shreds of an ecosystem that does not exist anywhere else on Earth will soon become an apartment complex with a Chili’s, LA Fitness, and Walmart attached.”
Instead of endorsing Shalala, who The New Times wrote
“hopes to paint herself as a progressive, environmentally conscious Democrat,”
The Herald endorsed state Rep. David Richardson.
It said, among other good things, Richardson “made an impact … as a Democrat outnumbered in the Republican-majority state House .. reforming Florida’s broken prison system.”
Too bad Florida Democrats didn’t agree.
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First, happy Mother’s Day to everyone to whom that applies. I hope you’re having a great day!
You’ll have to excuse them. Casey and Frisky are still learning their colors.
Second, today is also the celebration of Yom Yerushalayim, or Jerusalem Day. It’s the Hebrew anniversary of when the Israelis recaptured the eastern/holy part of the city in the Six-Day War of 1967. It’s where no Arab country’s leader had visited except Jordan’s King Hussein, who’d “occupied” it 19 years earlier in 1948.
But then it suddenly became so important to them.
There is lots and lots to say about President Trump, but this post isn’t about him. Still, he is making the embassy move from Tel Aviv happen and no other American president has done so, despite being able. So thank you, President Trump.
Shapiro, who is much more liberal, described the situation with a question:
“Why hasn’t the US ever recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital? Some people date it to the controversy that arose in 1967, when Israel captured East Jerusalem from Jordan in the Six-Day War and unified the city, describing it as a US protest against the Israeli ‘occupation’ of East Jerusalem. That’s wrong.
“The truth is that US policy on Jerusalem derives from events 20 years earlier, when the United Nations passed the Partition Plan for Palestine in November 1947.”
The two differ on many things but as my friend Andy, who pointed the article out, published:
“Good to see President Trump’s ambassador positively sharing an article by President Obama’s ambassador. Let’s keep support for Israel bipartisan.”
In the article, Shapiro described a day in the life of a U.S. Ambassador to Israel:
“Jerusalem had always been Israel’s capital, and we have always treated it functionally, if not formally, as such. When I served as the US Ambassador at our embassy in Tel Aviv, nearly every day I would be driven to Jerusalem to conduct affairs of state with the Israeli government at the Prime Minister’s office, the Foreign Ministry, and the Knesset.”
Then, he goes into a brief history of the complicated situation with Jerusalem at the center of it, describes a possible step towards solving an issue that has been delayed too many times over too many decades, and then how the embassy move could help end the century-old conflict. Let’s hope!
Also, Donald Trump’s face is featured on a ceremonial Israeli coin marking the 70th anniversary of the country’s rebirth.
Why does the other side try to claim there’s no Jewish history in Jerusalem? Who are they trying to fool? The answer is gullible haters who don’t want to believe it.
And onto the subject at hand, since I rarely write about myself and even more rarely write about personal subjects rather than professional ones.
Last week, I got a message on Facebook from someone I hadn’t seen in at least 30 years, and probably more like 40.
Technically, I’ve seen him on Facebook. We have several mutual friends, so we’ve seen each other commenting on their posts. (I’m speaking for myself, but can’t imagine the opposite not being true.) We were never really friendly growing up, even though we certainly knew each other.
The message went:
“Hi Lenny, I’m not sure of you remember me, but we grew up together. My memory may be off here, but I feel like I wasn’t always the nicest person to you and I really just want to apologize If I ever did or said anything to make you feel bad. You may not even recall this and maybe it’s more in my head. Anyhow, I just wanted to reach out and say hello. I hope you and your family are doing well. I remember your father very well. … He was always a really nice guy. Again, I know this is very random, but I saw your comment on _____’s post and just to reach out and say hello. Regards, _____”
Wow! Takes guts and a good person to write something like that. Very impressive!
I responded with a quick,
“No worries. I only remember good things. Hope you’re well. Thanks for writing!”
And we connected a few more times.
The truth, as I remember it, is I was not happy growing up in Florida. Early on, I felt most of the people simply couldn’t make it in civilization, like New York.
You know what Frank Sinatra sang:
“If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.”
It was almost always too hot and humid. I wanted to stay inside and watch TV. I was a loner until high school.
Meanwhile, more people moved in to die. The area got more spread out and there was still traffic everywhere. Just Thursday, a friend posted this picture. It’s not downtown Miami but west of the airport.
The goal was to move to New York, which luckily – thanks to my parents – I didn’t do during college and never took on debt.
And instead of moving to New York, once I had enough career experience, I lived on both sides of it: almost two years in Connecticut and eight years in Philadelphia.
When I visit Florida, which hasn’t happened in more than a year, I feel even more like an outsider because of the language barrier. It’s a right-to-work state. Wages are low. So are taxes, even for people work in much better places and spend just 183 days a year there. On the other hand, insurance rates are sky high because of hurricanes and the water level will soon be, too.
Looking down from the 5th floor of my South Beach condo, at 11th and Alton, after about an hour of rain.
Plus, having the career I had and never letting up, I’ve become more of a homebody in recent years.
The writer, who was nice enough to contact me on Facebook, was not a jerk or bully or anything like that. There were some people like that and always will be, even though the world has changed and adults are supposed to be looking for more signs, these days.
And count on the politically-correct police, out in force, to make sure nobody ever feels bad, ever:
A friend found this article from New Jersey, last week, which you can click here to read and watch parts of the meeting.Chris Christie would’ve never put up with that!
People are going to feel bad. That’s a fact of life. It’s not fair. I suggest you fight for what you believe most and try not to sweat the less important stuff. Forget about it, especially if you’re not sure it actually happened decades ago.
And I thank Facebook for the information above. I would not have had it otherwise.
But if it helps you reconnect with people from your past, parents see pictures of their kids in college, grandparents see pictures of their grandchildren, and lets people celebrate their moms on Mother’s Day, and see the excitement of Israelis thrilled about their capital city being reunited and what’s to come this week, then get on board and sign up.
You don’t have to use every function or app, or even a few – but you’re missing out if you’re too stubborn to say you won’t miss good things if you’re not on Facebook.
Please, if you like what you read here, subscribe to CohenConnect.comwith either your email address or WordPress account, and get a notice whenever I publish.
I’ve avoided writing much about Sinclair Broadcast Group trying to buy Tribune Media because I’ve been busy and I don’t want to jinx any possibility the merger will fall through.
But there has been some news, and the biggest for a local TV market could be Miami/Fort Lauderdale (of course!).
Of course, I’m referring to Sinclair Broadcast Group doing everything it can to spread its conservative information campaign to most of the U.S. that the company doesn’t already reach.
But the deal announced in May, 2017, still hasn’t happened.
To follow through, it would need government approval: from the Justice Department for antitrust worries and the FCC to approve ownership limits. (And Sinclair may have already gotten “help” from FCC chairman Ajit Pai, who was selected by President Trump. Pai is now under investigation by his own agency’s inspector general. Keep reading.)
— UPDATE: The FCC inspector general cleared Chairman Ajit Pai of being unfairly biased in favor of the Sinclair Broadcast Group–Tribune Media merger. —
Ajit Pai (Wikipedia)
The $3.9 billion deal would still require a number of stations to be sold. The questions partially responsible for holding things up were how many, and in which cities? About six weeks ago, I explained TV ownership limits are very complicated, with four rules in play: 1. national TV ownership, 2. local TV multiple ownership, 3. the number of independently owned “media voices” – 4. and at least one of the stations is not ranked among the top four stations in the DMA (that’s the “designated market area” or city, and ranking based on audience share), and at least eight independently owned TV stations would remain in the market after the proposed combination.
Plus, there have been literally thousands of complaints from activists who know how important this is. Click here to see 4,497 total FCC filings since July 5, 2017, including 891 in the past 30 days. THANK YOU if your name is on the list! Keep reading for directions on how to say no.
Now, click here to see some of the “33 concurrently filed applications on FCC Form 315 that seek the Commission’s consent to a transaction,” back in July, 2017, and what the companies consider “Public interest benefits of the transaction.” You’ll soon know better if you actually believe there are public interest benefits! You’ll also notice the companies fighting for every last station they could, to grow even larger.
These are the stations currently owned by Sinclair that would be divested only if the merger goes through…
and these are the stations currently owned by Tribune.
So now we know who is expected to own the stations a Sinclair-Tribune combination would not be allowed to keep. Unfortunately, it’s not as clear as the charts above that list call letters and cities.
First, the official licensee could have a different name but we know we’re dealing with stations owned by Sinclair and Tribune.
Cunningham Broadcasting Corporation is the most controversial. It calls itself “an independent television broadcast company that, together with its subsidiaries, owns and/or operates 20 television stations in 18 markets across the United States.”
“The Smith family, which includes brothers David, Robert, Frederick, J. Duncan and a flurry of family trusts, is worth a combined $1.2 billion, Forbes estimates, based on the family members’ ownership of stock in publicly traded Sinclair Broadcasting, share sales over the past 15 years, dividends and some private assets,” it read.
“Revenues have increased 281% over the last decade to $2.7 billion in 2017, while Sinclair’s share price has increased 367% over the same period, pushing its market capitalization up to a recent $3 billion. All of this growth has occurred under the control and oversight of David Smith, 67, the chairman and former CEO of the company, as well as the son of the company’s founder Julian Sinclair Smith,” it continued.
Forbes quoted Daniel Kurnos, an analyst at Benchmark Capital, as saying, “Sinclair plays some of the hardest ball of anyone,” from acquiring stations to negotiating advertisement pricing and retransmission fees, which are some of the highest in the business.
SIDEBAR: Wednesday, The TV Answer Man Phillip Swann reported PlayStation Vue removed Sinclair-owned local stations affiliated with Big 4 networks from its streaming lineup without an explanation. Just Tuesday, subscribers got an e-mail that live channels would be replaced May 1 (that day) with an On-Demand version.
Sinclair said it pulled the stations and blamed “Sony (for) failing to comply with certain contractual provisions.” It didn’t elaborate but urged Sony subscribers to consider other video distributor options, including Sony competitor YouTube TV.
Sony hasn’t commented.
The Baltimore Sun reports, “Sony describes PlayStation Vue as a live streaming TV service for up to five devices at once that offers sports, news and other programs along with premium channels and a cloud DVR.”
BACK TO THE STORY: Under David Smith, who wouldn’t comment for the article, Sinclair went from three cities – Baltimore, Pittsburgh and Columbus – to what it is today.
Sinclair today, without Tribune
“To ‘purely make money’ in a scale-oriented business, David bought up as many broadcast stations as possible. First he concentrated on secondary markets, like Memphis, St. Louis and San Antonio, where operation costs were cheaper than in places like New York or Chicago.
“‘I believed that certain things were going to happen in the television industry, the most important being consolidation,’” David told Forbes in 1996.
So much for public service!
But then came the controversial Cunningham, arguably rigging the system.
“In the 1990s, the company pioneered a technique to circumvent an FCC rule limiting ownership of more than one TV station per metro area. David’s mother, Carolyn Smith, started another business, Cunningham Broadcasting. Following Carolyn’s death in 2012, most of the ownership of Cunningham Broadcasting shifted to a family trust, which is included in the overall Smith family valuation.”
So Cunningham really isn’t independent, as its website claims!
“The Rainbow/PUSH Coalition is raising questions at the FCC about whether Sinclair Broadcasting is exercising control over a minority-headed TV group with which it has struck a series of local marketing agreements (LMAs).
“In a July 1 filing at the FCC, Rainbow/PUSH said it plans to study whether the LMA deal between Sinclair’s KABB(TV) San Antonio and Glencairn’s KRRT(TV) Kerrville, Tex., violates the commission’s prohibition against common ownership of two local stations. (The rules were more strict then.)
“‘Rainbow/PUSH has not had an opportunity to fully research this matter, and thus preserves here the question of whether Glencaim is the alter ego of Sinclair,’ the group told the FCC.”
“Sinclair Broadcasting exercised illegal control of business partner Glencairn Ltd., the FCC found Monday after three years of investigating the companies’ relationship.
“Each company was fined $40,000 but escaped tougher sanction sought by civil rights groups-a government rejection of Sinclair’s request to buy 14 stations from Sullivan Broadcasting.
“The commission’s three Republicans judged that the companies were liable for misinterpreting FCC policies, but found they did not intentionally mislead the agency about compliance.
“Democratic Commissioner Michael Copps wanted the FCC to pursue a tougher sanction and voted to designate the station sales for hearing in front of an administrative law judge.
“Sinclair has repeatedly ‘stretched the limits’ of FCC ownership rules, he said.”
So we know Cunningham, set to buy Tribune stations in Dallas and Houston, appears to be a shell company, and we can make bets who will operate and control it if the Sinclair-Tribune deal ever comes to fruition.
“Cunningham Broadcasting owns the FCC broadcast licenses and operates through various management agreements with Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc. WNUV-TV in Baltimore, Maryland; WTTE-TV in Columbus, Ohio; WMYA-TV in Anderson, South Carolina; WRGT-TV in Dayton, Ohio; WVAH-TV in Charleston, West Virginia; WDBB-TV in Bessemer, Alabama; WBSF-TV in Flint, Michigan; WGTU-TV in Traverse City, Michigan; KBVU-TV in Eureka, California; KCVU-TV in Chico-Redding, California; WEMT-TV in Greeneville, Tennessee; WPFO-TV in Portland, Maine; WYDO-TV in Greenville, North Carolina; and KRNV-TV & KENV-TV in Reno, Nevada.”
Looking at its list of stations — something the Fox Television Stations Group never posted on its own website despite me calling them out for it here, here, here, here (so far in no particular order, although I may have missed a couple), and my favorite, here — you may realize Sinclair recently bought Bonten Media Group (Disclosure: I used to be Digital Media Manager at the former Bonten’s WCYB but left before the sale.) but Cunningham bought the stations Bonten operated. Notice those stations listed on the website have no websites of their own. And I’ll get back to Fox later. I’ll bet they can’t wait!
Another dead giveaway is that Cunningham is based at 2000 W. 41st Street, Baltimore MD 21211 and coincidentally, Sinclair flagship WBFF-45 (Fox affiliate) has the same address!
Deerfield, with apparently no website of its own (so see Wikipedia’s take), is another of the shell companies, formed in 2012 but not involved in the proposed Tribune transaction.
“For years (before 2012), Fox Television Stations’ WUTB Baltimore gave Fox considerable leverage in its sometime contentious affiliation negotiations with Sinclair Broadcast Group.
“If Sinclair ever got out of line, Fox could threaten to yank its affiliation from Sinclair’s flagship station WBFF Baltimore and move it to WUTB.
“But last May, Fox relinquished that leverage when it extended its affiliation with WBFF and 18 other Sinclair stations for five years starting Jan. 1, 2013, and granted Sinclair an option to buy WUTB.
“Sinclair is now exercising that option by assigning it to a third party, Deerfield LLC.
“According to an FCC filing seeking approval of the deal, Deerfield is buying WUTB and allowing Sinclair to run the MNT affiliate through joint sales and shared services agreements.
“The deal gives Sinclair a virtual triopoly in Baltimore where it also operates CW affiliate WNUV, which is owned by Cunningham Broadcasting, Sinclair’s longtime duopoly partner that is controlled by trusts for the children of Sinclair’s controlling shareholders.”
But Sinclair and Deerfield were already in cahoots.
“to buy six television stations from Newport Television LLC for $412.5 million and agreed to buy Bay Television Inc. for $40 million. … Sinclair also agreed to sell the license assets of its San Antonio station KMYS and its WSTR station in Cincinnati to Deerfield Media Inc. Sinclair will also assign Deerfield the right to buy the license assets of WPMI and WJTC in the Mobile/Pensacola market, after which Sinclair will provide sales and other non-programming services to each of these four stations under shared services and joint sales agreements.”
“Sinclair Broadcast is getting six stations in five markets for $412.5 million:
— Cincinnati (DMA 35) — WKRC (CBS)
— San Antonio, Texas (DMA 36) — WOAI (NBC)
— Harrisburg-Lancaster (DMA 41) — WHP (CBS)
— Mobile, Ala.-Pensacola, Fla. (DMA 60) — WPMI (NBC) and WJTC (Ind.)
— Wichita, Kan. (DMA 67) — KSAS (Fox)
“Sinclair is also acquiring Newport’s rights to operate third-party duopoly stations in Harrisburg, Pa. (CW affiliate WLYH), and Wichita, Kan. (MNT affiliate KMTW). Those rights include options to buy the stations. …
“While Sinclair was buying, it was also selling.
“It said it would spin off its CW affiliate in San Antonio (KMYS) and its MNT affiliate in Cincinnati (WSTR) to Deerfield Media Inc., presumably to comply with the FCC ownership limits. In the deal, Deerfield also picks up an option to buy two of the stations it is acquiring from Newport, WPMI-WJTC Mobile, Ala.-Pensacola, Fla.
“Sinclair said it intends to ‘provide sales and other non-programming services to each of these four stations pursuant to shared services and joint sales agreements.’
“In yet another deal, Sinclair said it is buying WTTA Tampa-St. Petersburg from Bay Television Inc. for $40 million. Since 1998, Sinclair has operated WTTA pursuant to a local marketing agreement.”
And that was the start of the Deerfield connection!
Even more telling is that Deerfield’s WUTV moved from Channel 24 (24.1) to 45.2, which is a subchannel of Sinclair’s WBFF! The website doesn’t tell why. It just explains to viewers watching over the air with an antenna how to rescan, but the reason is really the FCC’s recent spectrum auction.
BACK TO OUR STORY: So for those of you in Baltimore, do you need to reach the newsroom, are you looking for a job (Would they hire me for my investigative work?), or interested in inspecting the FCC public file of any of the three stations? All the information is the same, from address to phone numbers, and we already established three stations in one city are not allowed!
“its broadcast ownership rules every four years. …
“This is one of the reasons why my company, Howard Stirk Holdings, LLC (HSH), has sued the FCC. As an African American licensee of two television stations, I believe that by refusing to complete its 2010 quadrennial review, the FCC has unlawfully withheld taking an action required by Congress and the law, and thus is arbitrarily and capriciously retaining burdensome regulations that are no longer in the public interest.”
Williams was angry the FCC “adopted a new rule restricting joint sales agreements (JSAs) between television broadcasters in the same market.”
He claimed, “It effectively slams the door shut on an important gateway to enhancing localism, viewpoint diversity, and opportunities in broadcast television ownership by minorities and underrepresented groups.”
But there’s more.
“Armstrong Williams talked about the impact of a March 31, 2014, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruling that television station owners cannot control more than one station in the same local market via the use of joint sales agreements and shared services agreements, often known as “sidecar” deals. Mr. Armstrong, who owns two TV stations through a sidecar agreement with Sinclair Broadcasting, argued that the ruling could cause minority owners, and small station owners more generally, to be forced out of existence.”
“The FCC, backed by the Obama administration Justice Department, argues that broadcasters have used the shared-service, or “sidecar,” arrangements to circumvent long-standing rules against owning multiple television stations in a single market, allowing them to raise ad prices and weaken market competition.”
Williams and his supporters suggest a more partisan motive: his conservative views.
In fact, it seems every article in HSH’s News section mentions Sinclair or those joint sales agreements designed to get by without abiding by the FCC’s ownership rules!
In other words, he was a great partner for Sinclair since he’s a minority (but without the views of most other minorities) and they’re both making money by using each other!
Howard Stirk Holdings’ website’s Content Creation page calls it “a leading broadcast television company” but have you heard of it before starting this article? The page doesn’t say how many TV stations it owns or operates on its own. Even the page to search job openings offers no links (except the top navigation which doesn’t say much), and that includes its Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
Then I went to Wikipedia and read Williams helped Sinclair buy Barrington Broadcasting in late 2013, so he got stations in Flint, MI, and Myrtle Beach, SC, but they remain operated by Sinclair. They’re actually his only stations run by Sinclair and remember, at the time, his company was accused of “acting as a ‘sidecar’ of Sinclair to skirt FCC ownership rules.”
But that was then.
A year later, he actually, really bought three stations from Sinclair: one in Charleston and two in Alabama.
“Howard Stirk Holdings, run by Armstrong Williams, has agreed to acquire WCIV Charleston for $50,000. Sinclair picked up WCIV, an ABC affiliate, when it acquired Allbritton. While Howard Stirk is acquiring the license, among other assets, it and Sinclair will share some aspects related to the station, and Sinclair will provide services.
“‘We’ll continue some of the wonderful business relationships we have with them,’ said Armstrong Williams, principal at Howard Stirk Holdings.”
WCIV’s services came up because of a tangled web of local marketing agreements. There were ownership conflicts over licenses and other assets of three stations.
Sinclair owned MyNetworkTV affiliate WMMP-36 for years. Then, in 2001, it bought and spun off Fox affiliate WTAT-24 to Glencairn (to become Cunningham) and crafted a local marketing agreement between the two stations. That got Sinclair fined Sinclair $40,000 for illegally controlling a duopoly.
But in 2013, Allbritton sold its entire television group, including ABC affiliate WCIV-4, to Sinclair, which intended to sell WMMP’s license but still control it. Thus, three stations!
Unfortunately for Sinclair, WMMP had that local marketing agreement with WTAT. So Sinclair decided to cut ties from WTAT, keep the more established WCIV and sell WMMP.
But Sinclair told the FCC it couldn’t find a buyer for WMMP, so it would shut down WCIV and keep WMMP because its facilities were better — but move WCIV’s affiliation and all its programming to WMMP. Then, WMMP’s programming including MyNetworkTV would move to a subchannel.
Instead, Sinclair filed to have WCIV’s license sold to HSH to avoid shutting it down. Thus, the low price of $50,000. Then, the two stations swapped licenses, Sinclair let Williams’ WCIV share studio space at WMMP’s facilities and Williams explained he hoped to “continue some of the wonderful business relationships we have with [Sinclair]” through the deal — but operated independently from Sinclair.
“Howard Stirk Holdings has agreed to acquire KVMY, the Las Vegas MyNetworkTV affiliate, for $150,000. Armstrong Williams is the principal at Howard Stirk, which is closely aligned with Sinclair. The price reflects $25,000 for the equity assets, including the FCC license, and $125,000 for the transmission assets.
“According to the following, Howard Stirk ‘acknowledges that it is not buying the Business of KVMY-TV as a going concern.’” (There was a call letter and affiliation change, but Howard Stirk Holdings runs several digital subchannel networks on the signal.)
“In September, Sinclair agreed to acquire NBC affiliate KSNV Las Vegas for $120 million. It also owns CW outlet KVCW.
“Last year, Howard Stirk Holdings acquired the license and other assets to WCIV Charleston from Sinclair for $50,000.”
So they’ve been in business several times, and it may not be over.
Some more about Williams: In 2004, the Bush administration paid him $240,000 to promote the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law on his nationally syndicated TV show and urge other black journalists to do the same. USA Today reported the campaign was part of an effort to build support among black families and Williams was “to regularly comment on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts” and interview Education Secretary Rod Paige for TV and radio spots that aired during the show. Williams said he understood critics could find the arrangement unethical, but “I wanted to do it because it’s something I believe in.”
Two years ago, The Washington Post reported Williams settled a sexual harassment and retaliation suit filed by a former salesman at a DC Jos. A. Bank. Court records reportedly showed the complaint alleged Williams had sought sexual favors after befriending and mentoring the other man. That man did get jobs at the Washington Times and then at a Howard Stirk Holdings TV station, but he lost that job.
It wasn’t Williams’ first such situation.
In 1997, Williams’ former personal trainer-turned-producer sued him, contending he “repeatedly kissed and fondled him for almost two years,” before being fired. Williams claimed he was fired for incompetence. That case was also settled.
Bottom line: As of now, Howard Stirk Holdings owns seven stations. Two are in the same Anniston-Tuscaloosa-Birmingham, Ala., market, and Williams’ first two are still run by Sinclair. Now, after other purchases, he’s expecting to buy three more if the Sinclair-Tribune merger happens.
Then there’s Standard Media Group.I hadn’t heard of them either. Its website says Standard General was founded in 2007 and is pretty much an investment advisor, but getting into the broadcasting business. We’ll see how long that lasts. Investment firms are more likely to sell than others with broadcasting in their blood, especially ones who invest in their communities.
Now, if the deal goes through, it’ll fulfill its “goal of swiftly building a substantial broadcast television group with a strong and diverse voice” that includes four state capitals.
The stations are Fox affiliates except where noted: Oklahoma City, Grand Rapids, York PA, Greensboro NC (ABC), Richmond, Sinclair’s role in a Wilkes Barre Fox-CW-MyNetworkTV triopoly, and Des Moines.
You may have noticed Meredith Corp. on the list of buyers. TVSpy noted Meredith “has signed a deal to acquire KPLR (CW) from Tribune for $65 million, pairing it with KMOV (CBS) which Meredith has owned since 2013. … Sinclair already owns KDNL (ABC) and will also own KTVI (FOX) in the market.” Great for owners’ synergies. Bad for the number of independent voices in such a big city. Which do you care more about?
Of the other big city stations, Tribune’s legendary WGN-TV9 is supposed to go to WGN TV LLC but that’s really code for Steven Fader, a Maryland auto dealer and business associate to Sinclair chairman David Smith, for a mere $60 million. Sinclair would also have an option to buy WGN-TV outright within eight years and you know it’s counting on the FCC to relax its ownership rules even more within that time frame!
Sinclair Broadcast Group, which for months has denied any interest in challenging Fox News while awaiting approval of a merger with Tribune Co., is gearing up to do just that https://t.co/HF2hpT7j05pic.twitter.com/kCE7iUCa4J
“Sinclair Broadcast Group, which for months has denied any interest in challenging Fox News while awaiting approval of a merger with Tribune Co., is gearing up to do just that.”
“Even though Sinclair CEO Chris Ripley has said a 24-hour national news network is not in the works, his boss (David) Smith seems to like the idea of a few hours of prime time opinion programming to challenge Fox News.”
Fox News is carried in more than 90 million homes, compared to 80 million for WGN America which Sinclair would own if regulators approve, and 55 million for the Tennis Channel which Sinclair already owns.
If your cable or satellite company doesn’t offer either of those last two, then expect it to get a call when any deal with Sinclair is about to expire.
Politico quotes “a person familiar” saying “Smith has been holding meetings with potential future employees, including former Fox News staff members, and laying out a vision for an evening block of opinion and news programming that would compete with Fox’s top-rated lineup.”
So, the discussions are over “a block of at least three hours, but also potentially up to six. Smith is settled, though, on basing his new operation in Washington, D.C.” That’s because the company already owns local station WJLA-7, where it produces some of its national content.
Wikipedia
One apparent Sinclair target is former Fox News host Greta Van Susteren, who left the network in Sept., 2016, and then had a short stint at MSNBC before signing on with Voice of America. Van Susteren wrote in an email she has spoken with Smith.
“If the Sinclair deal happens, I might talk to him further. … but it would have to be something that would not take me from VOA,” Van Susteren said.
“Other potential hires are former Fox anchor Eric Bolling and reporter James Rosen,” who both left Fox under sexual harassment allegations. Neither admitted whether they met with Smith or other Sinclair executives.
Eric Bolling, via Twitter
James Rosen, via Twitter
Bill O’Reilly, via FoxNews.com
Talks with former Fox host Bill O’Reilly reportedly fell apart.
The slant of a national news block hasn’t been decided. We know where Sinclair stands, politically, but TVNewser notes, “There are already national challengers from the right, including Newsmax TV and OAN.”
And in the nation’s largest market, Tribune’s WPIX-11 is now off the market. It was supposed to go to Cunningham for a mere $15 million. That’s pennies on the dollar, and it would’ve been run by Sinclair. Now, it’ll just go to Sinclair so it’s not on the list.
But what about those TBDs (to be determined)? They are all owned by Tribune: the Fox affiliates in San Diego, Seattle/Tacoma, Cleveland, Sacramento, Salt Lake City and Denver, and the CW affiliate in Miami/Fort Lauderdale.
And you may have noticed Rupert Murdoch’s Fox conglomerate was not listed as one of the buyers, but that’s sure to change.
Jessell of TVNewsCheck was more direct, saying all Sinclair
“has to do now is wrap up its negotiations with Fox. I don’t know what’s delaying that deal, except that neither Fox nor Sinclair is famous for making concessions. Once Sinclair does that, it can finalize its application and the FCC can complete it long-stalled review.”
Those greedy bastards are going to end up screwing everything up for themselves (which I’d love to see happen), and you’ve only read about half of the plans, so far!
First, Fox actually used to own the Cleveland, Salt Lake City and Denver stations but sold them to a company called Local TV which sold itself to Tribune. So much for Fox — selling stations and then buying them back later — caring about communities. IMHO, that company can’t make a case for a second chance at ownership.
But now, 21st Century Fox plans to sell off most of its assets like its studio, cable networks and regional sports networks to Disney – keeping just its Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network, its FS1/FS2 cable sports channels, adding to its TV stations, and its network, which will focus on live events, especially NFL Football. The new, smaller company is being referred to as New Fox.
That’s the reason Fox has tried to own stations in cities that have NFC conference football teams since it got the rights to most of their away games in 1994 – and even trade or sell other stations for them – despite the fact a regular season of 16 games could mean the home audience would see its team play about 12 games a year on its local Fox station, unless the team makes the playoffs.
Fox even got its hands on Cox’s KTVU in San Francisco (with an NFC team, the 49ers, and the AFC Oakland Raiders across the bay will now be moving to Las Vegas in 2020) and give Cox its own stations in Boston (the New England Patriots are AFC) and Memphis (no NFL team).
What has changed is Fox bought the rights to Thursday Night Football, which should split games between NFC and AFC teams. That means Fox has become more interested in AFC team cities, even though there’s no pattern as to which teams play on Thursdays.
Football teams have moved, but the cities Fox wants are Seattle (especially because it’s NFC), and Cleveland, Denver and Miami (because they have AFC teams). San Diego and St. Louis no longer have teams, so Fox isn’t interested in Tribune’s Fox affiliates in those cities.
Seattle, Cleveland and Denver should be easy. The stations are already Fox affiliates so prime-time programming and the amount of news shouldn’t change. And Fox has leverage because it can threaten to take away its affiliation from those stations, lowering their value, if they’re sold to another company.
Remember what Fox did in Charlotte? It dropped a good affiliate, WCCB-Channel 18, because it wanted to own a station where the NFC Carolina Panthers play. Instead, it bought a nothing station, WJZY-Channel 46, and started it from scratch. And it had to do that a second time when it tried to be too different and less traditional the first time! (And, for disclosure: It got a great new news director who is a former colleague.) Remember, Charlotte pretty much sits on the North Carolina-South Carolina line. Old timers are pretty traditional. Was the move worth it for Fox?
Miami is a different story. Fox has a very good affiliate, WSVN-7, owned by Ed Ansin’s Sunbeam Television. (Disclosure: I got my start in journalism there.) It gives Fox great coverage of breaking news in South Florida. Several people at Fox News Channel used to work there. The ratings are great. So what’s the problem?
The Miami Dolphins play there, and as an AFC team, they show up on Fox on a few Sundays and may now also be seen on Fox on Thursdays.
But the station that’s available is Tribune’s WSFL-39, a CW affiliate without a news department despite a few morning attempts. WSVN owner Ansin has shown he’ll probably take the station to his grave, with or without any affiliation, so there’s no realistic possibility there.
Should Fox dump WSVN and start from scratch with WSFL? Would it be worth the effort?
Unlike Charlotte, WSVN is a #1 station. And Miami is a very different place. There’s big news regularly and the two main Spanish stations do better than most of the English! People who aren’t bilingual can’t watch all the available stations, which really limits its size, making it actually smaller than the 16th largest market. We’ll have to see who wants WSFL, since a Sinclair-Tribune merger can’t include it due to FCC ownership rules.
One thing I’d say for sure is that WSFL loses its CW affiliation because CBS and Warner Brothers (Time Warner) own the network, and CBS doesn’t only own WFOR-4 (CBS station) and but also WBFS-33 (MyNetworkTV affiliate) and the CW does better.
Staying with this possibility, WSFL could become the new MyNetworkTV affiliate, and MyNetworkTV is owned by Fox.
It’s not so unusual for a network to own stations but not air the network on them.
Let’s take CBS, for example. It owns independents in New York (WLNY-55) and Los Angeles (KCAL-9). In Dallas, WTXA-21 is also independent.
In Miami, WBFS ended up with MyNetworkTV to please Tribune since CBS got the CW in so many other cities when the WB and UPN combined. It’s similar in Boston where WSBK-38 airs MyNetworkTV, but that’s expected to change since Sunbeam’s WLVI-56, which used to be owned by Tribune, airs the CW.
Single CBS-owned stations in Atlanta, Seattle and Tampa air the CW while affiliates owned by other companies air CBS programming.
And in Indianapolis, CBS’ WBXI-47 airs Decades, while the actual CBS affiliation changed from one outside company to another. CBS dumped a strong WISH-8 and went to half of Tribune’s duopoly, independent WTTV-4, over a disagreement with the former Media General.
A last possibility if Fox is determined to buy a Miami station is ABC affiliate WPLG-10. That station, stable under Post-Newsweek (now Graham Media) for decades, was sold to Berkshire Hathaway as its only broadcast property. We’ve talked about synergies (BH, as an “only child,” has none) and know Warren Buffett wants to turn a profit, so we can imagine Fox dumping WSVN for WPLG, but can’t assume ABC will take its affiliation to WSVN. Remember how CBS didn’t do that in 1989? But that’s highly unlikely.
Deadline noted, “For decades, the maximum reach by one single owner has been 39 percent, but the Federal Communications Commission has been re-evaluating the cap.”
More specifically, rather than gutting rules like a good conservative would ordinarily do, the FCC under Pai brought the UHF discount is back. That rule started because it used to matter whether a local TV station was VHF or UHF, due to antennas and how old TV sets were not made for the UHF band. So the FCC decided the amount towards a company’s ownership cap should only be half for those stations, compared to VHF stations. It was ended because today’s technology means it doesn’t matter anymore.
Regarding the UHF discount’s revival, The New York Times wrote, “A few weeks later, Sinclair Broadcasting announced a blockbuster $3.9 billion deal to buy Tribune Media — a deal those new rules made possible.” (Oh, and led to Pai’s investigation. But luckily, Harry Jessell of TVNewsCheckwrote critics of station consolidation say it “now serves only to allow groups to circumvent the intent of Congress, which was to limit groups to 39%” and they’ve “challenged the perpetuation of the UHF discount in court (D.C. Appeals Court), and seem to have made some headway in their oral arguments.”)
“Sinclair’s top lobbyist, a former F.C.C. official, also communicated frequently with former agency colleagues and pushed for the relaxation of media ownership rules. And language the lobbyist used about loosening rules has tracked closely to analysis and language used by Mr. Pai in speeches favoring such changes.”
An FCC spokesman representing Mr. Pai countered the allegations of favoritism were “baseless,” and
“For many years, Chairman Pai has called on the F.C.C. to update its media ownership regulations. … The chairman is sticking to his long-held views, and given the strong case for modernizing these rules, it’s not surprising that those who disagree with him would prefer to do whatever they can to distract from the merits of his proposals.”
However, “Pai said he would factor the potential court decision into the FCC’s decisionmaking.”
Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL) told Pai the spin-off of WGN-TV Chicago to the owner of a car dealership owned by Sinclair’s executive chair, “stretches the definition of divestiture under the plan to something unrecognizable” and the planned divestitures make a mockery of FCC rules.
Pai denied Rep. Quigley’s request to hold off on a decision on Sinclair until the UHF discount court decision, saying that was a case of clashing hypotheticals — both what the court would do with the discount and what the FCC would do with the proposed merger.
“Sinclair is telling the FCC that its coverage after spinoffs from its merger with Tribune will be just 58.7%. But that’s for regulatory purposes. (In other words, with the revived UHF discount that only counts channels 14 and up as half the audience of the market.) In the real world, where it matters, Sinclair’s national reach will be 66.3% — a full two-thirds of TV homes.”
But he said Sinclair is telling the FCC
“the coverage of the group will be just 58.7% and, with the UHF discount, below the statutory 39% cap. But those percentages are for regulatory consumption, not the real world.”
So there’s a 7.6-point disparity, the difference between 58.7% and 66.3%. How’d that happen? And don’t forget about the part, “with the UHF discount, below the statutory 39% cap.”
Jessell explained Sinclair
“is claiming 58% because it is not counting stations in three big markets — WGN Chicago, KDAF Dallas, KIAH Houston — that it is spinning off to closely affiliated companies. Without those markets and the discount in effect, Sinclair’s reach will be just 37.39%, safely below the 39% cap.”
Plus, with Dallas and Houston (but not Chicago), “Sinclair has put additional distance between itself and Cunningham” but will “have an option to buy the stations should the FCC ever ease the rules to allow it.”
So this is Jessell’s bottom line:
“So, again, for regulatory purposes, Sinclair’s reach will be 58.7% without the discount and 37.39% with it.
“But I don’t think that is reality. Those are not the numbers that Sinclair will be showing national advertisers, MVPDs, vendors and others with which it does business.
“In the real world, Sinclair will have a lot of control over Chicago and some control over Dallas and Houston, and its effective national reach will be 66.3%. (For the record, its reach with the UHF discount will be 41.1%, two points over the cap, but that will not matter because regulators will not be counting the three markets.)”
Then Jessell questioned Fox’s counting, assuming it’ll buy Miami, Cleveland, Sacramento as well as Seattle, Denver, Salt Lake City and possibly San Diego.
He calculated Fox reaches 36.8% of homes, but just 24.3% with the UHF discount. If it buys up all seven stations, its reach will grow to 45.9% but, well below the cap at just 30.4% with the discount.
But where will Fox find the money to buy the stations it wants? That’s another story!
Last year, Disney made a $52.4 billion offer to buy most of Fox, including its stake in the European pay TV company Sky.
But The Hollywood Reporter said on Wednesday, “Back in 2004, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts bid $54 billion to acquire The Walt Disney Co.” At the time, Comcast hadn’t bought NBCUniversal but Disney did own ABC. It was a 22 percent more than Disney was worth then, but former CEO Michael Eisner said no anyway.
Now, even though NBCUniversal has performed well, some say Roberts wants revenge by offering the same $52.4 billion as Disney for most of 21st Century Fox.
There could also be a bidding war overseas. Sky had agreed to let Fox, a 39 percent shareholder, buy the portion it doesn’t already own – and that Disney agreed to buy from Fox in December. Comcast could ruin those companies’ plans.
Then, in January, a UK regulator advised the government to block Fox’s bid to buy the remaining 61 percent of Sky because it would give one family – the Murdochs – too much control over media in Britain.
So Murdoch had preferred Disney as the buyer, afraid the Comcast offer came with more regulatory risks. Then, Disney offered to buy Sky News just to help Murdoch buy full control of Sky News’ parent company, the broadcaster Sky. But CNN reported Fox made a new pitch to win approval for Sky by selling Sky News to Disney, and another proposal that would’ve legally separated Sky News from the rest of Sky to ensure its editorial independence.
Then, last month, The Hollywood Reporter reported, “The U.K. Takeover Panel … ruled that Walt Disney must make a mandatory offer to buy full 100 percent control of Sky if and when it completes its planned acquisition of large parts of 21st Century Fox, including Fox’s stake in Sky.”
Then, according to Deadline, “Disney will have 28 days from the completion of its $66 billion acquisition of Fox to make a $15 offer for all the shares of Sky if Fox’s own $15.7 billion takeover of Sky is not complete by then, or if Comcast’s rival offer has not been accepted. It also (decided) this would not be required if another third party has acquired 50 percent of Sky by then.”
But last week Comcast made its $31 billion bid for Sky official and that’s 16 percent higher. Deadline reported that caused Sky directors to withdraw their recommendation of a Fox takeover bid.
This all comes along with many mergers and acquisitions across the industry.
In fact, a decision on this may not come until a judge determines whether to let AT&T buy Time Warner. The Justice Department has been fighting against it with an antitrust case. Closing arguments just finished and a decision is expected June 12.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, last week Fox said it’s “considering its options” on Sky and is believed to be prepping a sweetened bid. But Comcast is known for (usually) getting what it wants.
But back to Sinclair, which hasn’t been doing itself any favors.
So much for localism at a company that already owns or operates an astounding 193 TV stations, in 89 cities, covering a huge part of the American population. (You’ve read the different takes on the numbers.)
This is criticism from The New York Times…
from the PBS NewsHour…
from USA Today…
and even Russia Today…
and Al Jazeera English.
But Sinclair fought back against CNN’s criticism (and banned comments from YouTube!):
FTVLive’s Scott Jones showed a memo from Portland, OR – I’m sure one of many around the country – ordering employees not to complain.
Notice KyAnn’s name. KyAnn Lewis was the news director until Scott reported today she was fired. No details why, especially in the middle of the May ratings period.
“many TV local news stations are focusing more on national politics and have taken a rightward slant over the past year. And that move is stemming from ownership of the stations, not the demands of a local audience.”
Poynter noted, “The study comes just as many are raising concerns about a coordinated effort by one major owner of TV stations that forces its anchors to record a segment about ‘the troubling trend of irresponsible, one-sided news stories plaguing our country.’” And you know who that is.
The researchers examined 7.5 million transcript segments from 743 local news stations and saw huge differences between other stations, and outlets owned by the nation’s largest local broadcasting chain, Sinclair Broadcast Group.
“The authors found Sinclair stations, on average, carried about a third less local politics coverage and a quarter more national politics … (including) commentaries the stations are forced to run by former Trump official Boris Epshteyn.”
Researchers warned,
“The ‘slant scores,’ based on repetition of ideologically linked phrases, increased by about one standard deviation after acquisition by Sinclair as compared to other stations in the same markets. … And this programming could spur nationalistic and polarizing movements, ‘be expected to reduce viewers’ knowledge of the activities of local officials’ — and hurt accountability, especially “given the decline of local print media.”
So while everything plays out, from fighting the UHF discount in court, to negotiating spinning off stations, to Fox getting money to buy stations (while keeping its Sinclair affiliates), to counting how long the deal has taken (since May, 2017), to counting how long the steps still to be taken will last, the two companies’ bosses have no public complaints or worries.
Sinclair president and CEO Chris Ripley:
“After a very robust divestiture process, with strong interest from many parties, we have achieved healthy multiples on the stations we are divesting. …While we continue to believe that we had a strong and supportable rationale for not having to divest stations, we are happy to announce this significant step forward in our plan to create a leading broadcast platform with local focus and national reach. The combined company will continue to advance industry technology, including the Next Generation Broadcast Platform, and to benefit from significant revenue and expense synergies.”
Tribune CEO Peter Kern to employees:
“There is no reason to assume that this change won’t be for the better. … So try to focus, as you have always done, on the business at hand—delivering outstanding local journalism and great content for our audiences and communities, collaborating with your colleagues, and driving results for our customers.”
Enough of big media controlling everything from corporate headquarters! This is what happens when it does. Locals should be in charge of local programming, following the rules of the FCC for using OUR public airwaves!
OK, since you read everything, I’ll give you John Oliver here!
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Ever heard anything so absurd? It’s not “Follow the Leader” because there is no leader. There are local TV news anchors. I don’t think one of them wants to be on the air reciting the crap their corporate bosses ordered them to do. Not even their managers on the job site.
But these local TV news anchors around the country, along with many others, are now reading those nonsense marketing scripts the rulers of Sinclair Broadcast Group demanded, and I’ve written about here and here. Of course, there are plenty more references to Sinclair on this blog, since they’re so awful and there’s so much to reveal.
That left many – myself included – wondering why some of the company’s journalists with credibility didn’t just quit.
Sinclair owns or operates an astounding 193 TV stations around the country, in 89 cities, covering about 38 percent of the American population. It has been trying, unsuccessfully so far, to buy a smaller giant, Tribune Media. Let’s hope it stays that way until they fail.
And it seems most of the Sinclair anchors, among the highest paid employees at their stations – which isn’t saying much, depending on location – are angry over the whole thing. They don’t want to do it.
So why are they doing what they’re told, despite the fact they hate everything about it, personally and professionally? Wouldn’t you have more respect for someone who uses their conscience and just says no, regardless of the consequences?
Bloomberg reports,
“The short answer is the cost may be too steep. According to copies of two employment contracts reviewed by Bloomberg, some Sinclair employees were subject to a liquidated damages clause for leaving before the term of their agreement was up: one that requires they pay as much as 40 percent of their annual compensation to the company.”
Can you imagine?
And that right to enforce the liquidated damages clause isn’t just a scare tactic.
Bloomberg says last Oct. 13, it sued former reporter James Beaton of WPEC-West Palm Beach, Fla., for breach of contract, asking for $5,700 in damages as well as other related costs, according to a copy of the complaint filed in state court.
He “quit in 2015 to start a public-relations firm, leaving the news industry entirely,” after being “ordered to do ‘man on the street’ interviews that he felt were politically biased.”
The company’s bias is well-known. Add breach of contract penalties and that says to me, don’t work for Sinclair!
Bloomberg followed up.
“He said Sinclair offered to settle its lawsuit three months ago for $1,700 but demanded he sign a gag order promising not to talk to the press about Sinclair. ‘I told them to go jump in a lake,’ he said.”
Good for him!
As for the damage clauses, Bloomberg cited several employment lawyers as saying they’re rare for regular employees but
“more common in the broadcast industry, specifically when dealing with on-air talent. The clause serves to protect companies from costs associated with replacing an anchor who suddenly leaves, for example. Yet at Sinclair, at least some employees who never appeared on television were still required to sign such contracts, the former employees said.”
On top of “the potential financial penalty,” there are forced non-compete clauses in contracts that mean employees must sit out and cannot go to the competition. In other words, they will have to move to a whole new city if they want to collect a paycheck. Luckily, states like California, Montana, North Dakota and Oklahoma ban them for the most part. I believe Missouri did a few years back, and Utah took action over the past few weeks.
Furthermore, there is forced arbitration which means no sympathetic jury for the employee.
Typical Sinclair! No reasonable person can feel anything but resentment if they know how the company operates.
But there’s no shortage of information.
Journalists, as natural storytellers, have put Sinclair under major scrutiny by having them share the same scripted, anti-media talking points around the country.
Mediaite reports in Portland, Ore., the general manager issued an internal memo instructing his staff not to answer questions from anyone contacting them! FTVLive’s Scott Jones has a copy of the memo, which says most callers “likely haven’t actually watched and don’t have full context on (sic) due to social media, etc. I will also remind you that giving statements to the media or sharing negative information about the company can have huge implications.” Click here to see it.
So much for communications! If a Sinclair reporter wants to talk to you, then don’t talk to them. If there is negative information about the company, shouldn’t it come clean? Not in this business!
And, a month after the presidential election, President Trump’s son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner said Sinclair executives worked with the campaign to spread pro-Trump messages in Sinclair newscasts. Sinclair vehemently denied that and claimed it offered equal amounts of airtime for in-depth interviews to Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton, and she declined the invitation.
“In 2004, Sinclair barred the ABC affiliates it owned from airing the episode of Nightline that profiled American soldiers killed overseas. (It owns stations affiliated with all of the networks.) The same year, it tried to get its stations to carry a pre-election film that bashed presidential candidate John Kerry. (Some might even say the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech is only for station owners, not employees nor the public.)”
So you decide on Sinclair’s push to conservatism, based on what you’ve seen here, or if you live in a market where there’s a Sinclair station. By the way, that’s a whole lot of the country!
Sinclair territory, before it buys Tribune
It also fits nicely with what President Trump tweeted about the networks yesterday:
The Fake News Networks, those that knowingly have a sick and biased AGENDA, are worried about the competition and quality of Sinclair Broadcast. The “Fakers” at CNN, NBC, ABC & CBS have done so much dishonest reporting that they should only be allowed to get awards for fiction!
So funny to watch Fake News Networks, among the most dishonest groups of people I have ever dealt with, criticize Sinclair Broadcasting for being biased. Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke.
Actually, this isn't funny at all. None of it. When media giants gobble up local news stations, there are repercussions. And since you brought it up first this morning, will your admin green light the Tribune buyout? https://t.co/9Udm54LLOx
More props to another Sinclair station, WMSN in Madison, Wisc. They were dealing with record snowfall (even for them!) and an important state Supreme Court election. Sounds a lot more local, important and even life-saving than the bullshit Sinclair demanded.
In response to the Sinclair message aired: "WMSN/FOX47 Madison did not air the Sinclair promotional announcement during our 9pm news this weekend. Rather, we stayed true to our commitment to provide our Madison area viewers local news, weather and sports of interest to them." pic.twitter.com/9rcpliT7tD
And thanks again to FTV Live’s Scott Jones who found this gem from WGN-TV executive producer Jeff Hoover, whose Tribune station is technically not supposed to be bought by Sinclair, but instead by the chairman of Baltimore-based Atlantic Capital Group who’s a business partner of Sinclair executive chairman David Smith.
Oh, the price? A mere $60 million, rather than hundreds of millions for a highly-rated station in a big city like Chicago!
Re: Sinclair – There is NO WAY any of our on-air anchors and reporters will read their scripted messages on our show. Chicago's Very Own, not owned.
Who do you think will pull the strings? Same story in so many other cities where shell corporations, some almost entirely owned by the Smith family, hold the licenses that let Sinclair operate more stations than the rules allow.
Ethics? I think not. Overly controlling from the home office? Absolutely!
“Some employees have spoken out about their frustration at having to parrot the conservative politics of their employer,” but also, “Others say they’d like to do more, but they’re wary due to what they say is Sinclair’s policy and practice of closely monitoring its employees.”
“Labor lawyers tell HuffPost such language is common in workplace handbooks and contracts. But Sinclair employees say the company’s culture and behavior have made them particularly mindful of such policies.”
Also, “There’s a lot held over us,” a journalist at a Sinclair affiliate told HuffPost on the condition of anonymity. “They pay attention to what websites we’re on.”
Plus,
“Sinclair employees say their parent company often pays especially close attention to its affiliates’ editorial activities, meddling in how they present their stories and graphics, and sometimes going so far as to delete offensive comments on an affiliate’s online articles before that station’s own web editors have a chance to do so.”
And so many of the anchors who have to read the propaganda say they feel awful.
In Rochester, Norma Holland of WHAM-13’s Good Day Rochester wrote about her dilemma on Facebook:
“The Sinclair message you saw me and my colleagues in has damaged the trust you place in us — a trust that’s taken, me in particular, 22 years to build. That hurts. … I could have chosen to quit, but who among us has an alternate career in their back pocket ready to go? …I have a family to support. That’s not an excuse — that’s reality.”
(Full disclosure: Her boss wanted to hire me in Detroit in 2000 or 2001. Nice guy. This isn’t his fault.)
“He dislikes and fundamentally distrusts the print media, which he believes ‘serves no real purpose.’ In emails to New York, Smith said that print — as in newspapers and magazines — is a reality-distorting tool of leftists. Print media, he said, has “no credibility” and no relevance.”
Yeah, so his company’s newscasts are where Americans should get their information about current events? Not newspapers with bigger staffs and specialists? Not TV or radio networks with people with decades of experience, some whom even covered Martin Luther King’s assassination 50 years ago tonight?
Today, there will be no shortage of encomiums to Dr. King. But I fear what will be lost is the quality of his character and the fierceness of his beliefs. Many who now pay lip service to his legacy would be demonizing his rhetoric if he were alive today. #MLK50#WhatUnitesUs
No, he forces his TV stations to go off on everyone else. What a bastard, who inherited the company from his daddy!
His earlier experience was as a partner at Ciné Processors, a bootleg porn manufacturer owned by his father Julian Sinclair Smith’s company, the Commercial Radio Institute, according to a 2005 story in Rolling Stone. Like father, like son.
David Smith even goes beyond Trump when it comes to not wanting publicity.
“New York communicated with Smith in mid-November, after requesting an interview.”
“Appreciate the interest in your wanting to do a story but we don’t talk to the print media as a general principal as we find them to be so devoid of reality and serving no real purpose. Have a great holiday,” Smith said in response. Later, he added, “Again my experience has consistently been that even with an interview it’s of no consequence in terms of spin, facts or distortion, political bent etc. The print media is so left wing as to be meaningless dribble which accounts for why the industry is and will fade away. Just no credibility. see ya.”
Then, “When New York asked Smith if he’d be open to meeting off the record at least, he replied, ‘I have also learned that there is no such thing as off the record. Bye.’”
The Baltimore Sun reported David Smith was arrested “and charged with committing a perverted sex act in a company-owned Mercedes” in August, 1996. It happened “in an undercover sting at Read and St. Paul streets, a downtown corner frequented by prostitutes.” Smith and Mary DiPaulo “were charged with committing unnatural and perverted sex act.” Police said “they witnessed the two engage in oral sex while Smith drove north” on Baltimore’s Jones Falls Expressway. Neither Sinclair nor its local flagship station WBFF-45 would comment.
People in the media have lost jobs over less. It looks like Smith used his power and influence to keep most of the media quiet. How do you think Sinclair would have handled another company’s executive in a similar situation?
Jones concluded sarcastically, “But I’m sure that has nothing to do with his thoughts on how print does their job.”
Personally, I’d call his role in programming over the public airwaves into question.
Last year, you saw Last Week Tonight With John Oliver go off on the problems with Sinclair and how it shouldn’t be allowed to buy Tribune. You can watch it again here.
Now, HBO’s Oliver is at it again. (Parental warning about language!)
So Sinclair Senior Vice President of News Scott Livingston sent a memo to staff:
“There is a lot of noise out there about our company right now, and what is lacking in that analysis is something we constantly preach; context and perspective. The critics are now upset about our well-researched journalistic initiative focused on fair and objective reporting. … We are focused on fact-based reporting. That’s our commitment to our communities. That’s the goal of these announcements: to reiterate our commitment to reporting facts in a pursuit of truth. A new Monmouth University Poll out today says Americans are concerned, in fact, 77 percent of the respondents believe “fake news” is reported at least occasionally in mainstream media. https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_us_040218/. This is a concern that is shared by Democrats, Republicans and Independents. This poll underscores the importance of our journalistic responsibility effort. We hold ourselves to the highest standards of accuracy and fact checking.”
FTV’s Scott Jones has the rest of Livingston’s dribble here. I will say Livingston has a point about former Democratic political operative and advisor George Stephanopoulos anchoring on ABC, and NBC’s Chris Matthews’ past serving on the staffs of four Democratic members of Congress, as a presidential speechwriter during the Carter administration, and spending six years as Chief of Staff to longtime House Speaker Tip O’Neill (although he has said, “I’m more conservative than people think I am. … I voted for George W. in 2000.”).
I’m not a fan of anybody going from politics to impartial news anchoring (Stephanopoulos), although an analyst position is OK when the analysis is necessary to put the news into perspective.
Jones proves critics like him absolutely do “original journalism” (Livingston’s term) with a list of his own exclusives about the not-so-clean company here.
I doubt legendary KYW-TV anchor Vince Leonard of Philadelphia, who recently died, would’ve put his reputation on the line, reading what Sinclair is telling its anchors to do. He left town in 1980, but I’ve heard wonderful things from people who worked with him and are still working there today.
The Cincinnati Enquirer asked Nick Clooney, who used to anchor at WKRC in the Queen City, and he said, “I have no idea what these folks are doing for a living, but it isn’t news.”
He added the concept of a scripted editorial not identified as scripted wouldn’t have happened in the 1970s or 1980s when he anchored at that station, now owned by Sinclair. He said sure, station owners would give editorials, but they’d give the editorials themselves, not tell anchors to read it for them.
News anchors looking into camera and reading a script handed down by a corporate overlord, words meant to obscure the truth not elucidate it, isn't journalism. It's propaganda. It's Orwellian. A slippery slope to how despots wrest power, silence dissent, and oppress the masses.
How many of you have ever quit a decent-paying job over ethics? Care to share?
On a similar note are people at Philadelphia’s Fox TV station bragging about what a wonderful job they did, so high on themselves for working so hard covering snow, just like journalists were all over the region.
But where were they when the bigger storm hit on March 21? Too scared to be live on-air like the competition? (I did comment to that above post, asking where they were during the bigger snowstorm, but that got taken down. How dare someone question their collective news judgment? I don’t know if the poster was asked to take it down, or did so on his own. I know it was up for at least a few days and nobody can deny the truth simply by deleting it.)
I don’t know about “the best content in Philly” since I wasn’t watching four TVs at once. In fact, I was working and hardly watched anything but I’m sure every station had its exclusive, great, memorable reporting moments.
However, if I had my choice, would I want to work at the station that does news “at likely half the staff & budget of competitors” or a station that wants to win, and pulls out all stops to do so?
The fact is, there are some very good people there who are smart, experienced and connected, and out-report others. Too bad they’re hardly seen – a “distant fourth” and repeat it again like the newspaper did, compared to stations 1, 2 and 3 – because the bosses only pay for “likely half the staff & budget of competitors.”
I’ve always striven to be the best and encourage others. How the people in charge can be happy with their competitive performance and keep their jobs while not doing the best for the people of the region is a shame – but as I’ve said time and time again, it’s profits before people. Oh, and an office twice the size it had been when I started there!
Meanwhile, I hope they have to strain tomorrow to cover both the Villanova championship parade and Phillies home opener. They better hope no other news happens with “likely half the staff.”
I think I’m going to use those insider lines regularly!
The article says, “It’s unknown if the new owner influenced the change in programming strategy.”
“Many of you have told us that you want to see more of our trusted weather coverage and we’ve taken note,” viewers who subscribe to its newsletter read, Sunday. “Starting tomorrow (April 3), we will be extending our live coverage by up to 10 minutes per hour, giving you a chance to dig even deeper into the weather affecting you each day.”
That means collapsing “our Local On the 8s so that they run during our live segments. Where you use to see our traditional Local On the 8s segments, you will see the same weather information displayed on the right side and/or bottom of the screen.”
They had always run during breaks from the channel’s live coverage.
“In 2016, it had been 31 years since our last national championship for basketball, and now, just two years later, Villanova is once again the national champion! What a remarkable accomplishment for the players and for Coach (Jay) Wright and his staff, and what a wonderful time to be a Villanovan!”
It was around this time, two years ago, I was waiting for WTXF-Fox 29 to officially hire me. Of course, when you’re dealing with corporations, everything gets in the way.
I got this email from the news director, the day after the game.
Of course, the first line didn’t end with a question mark or exclamation point. Different people are held to different standards.
Of course, he didn’t let me know “either way by Friday,” as he said. Villanova won on Monday, April 4, 2016. You can see he emailed this the next day, April 5. That Friday would’ve been April 8. Instead, I did not find out until Tuesday, April 12.
That same Tuesday, I gave my two weeks at WCYB, leaving there after April 26, and starting at Fox less than a week later, on May 2. I had been given the option of starting May 9 but knew there was a ratings period and wanted to be as much help as possible, as soon as possible. So I quickly got mover and cleaner estimates, and my friend Scott found a temporary place for me to stay. The good folks at WCYB made sure to honor me with a cake. Lots of people involved with my departure and arrival!
I’m sure Fox management appreciated that move I rushed – just like I appreciated the imaginary transportation, hotel and lunch they provided during my interview! (What’s the best emoji for sarcasm that covers everything about them in that last, long sentence?)
My time at Fox was not pleasant because they seemed to care more about nonsense social media that would pull at people’s heartstrings, rather than real, relevant news. They also did not take the 11-page critique they had asked me for into consideration. (Click here to see it.)
They did take my advice to use Facebook more often, but never thanked or acknowledged me in any way. I remember being told during my one face-to-face interview (Feb. 29, 2016) that one Facebook post an hour may be too much! In other words, exactly the opposite. Some people can never be satisfied. Maybe they’re too insecure.
Note: I think I’ve kept every emailed promise, accusation, etc. Some people won’t look very good if-when it all comes out. That’ll be up to our representatives. Same thing when all the witnesses start talking about their experiences. I left that place in the middle of nothing short of an exodus.
I must make public I hope I’m not infringing on the NCAA’s trademark nastiness by using words like Villanova and phrases like national championship.
Wikipedia wrote this, not me. I don’t think the NCAA would consider it informal.
I also don’t think certain lawyers would agree there are “informal” uses, either!
The Main Line’s Villanova University was named after Saint Thomas of Villanova. It was founded in 1842 by the Order of Saint Augustine. The other school
“traces its roots to the Universidad de Santo Tomas de Villanueva (Saint Thomas of Villanova), founded in 1946 in Havana, Cuba, by American Augustinians with assistance from European Augustinians. When the Castro government expelled the Augustinians from Cuba in 1961, several of the American Augustinians came to Miami where they founded Biscayne College. … When University status was attained (in 1984), the name of the institution was changed to St. Thomas University to reflect its Cuban heritage.”
Another thing, friends, is you know I have a long memory.
That last line I quoted isn’t exactly true. Biscayne College didn’t become St. Thomas University; it became St. Thomas of Villanova University, but folks on the Main Line didn’t like that competition, so the name – How did they put it? – was shortened. I found it didn’t take more than a few months, and the second change wasn’t even mentioned in The Voice, Miami’s Catholic newspaper. I checked the 1984 issues. Seems they went through a lot of trouble for nothing.
As for me, I’ve never been a college basketball fan. Growing up in Miami, the University of Miami didn’t even have a team from around the time I was born until I was in 9th grade (you look the dates up!), so I didn’t grow up with it. Also, if you blink, the players are gone – either graduating, dropping out, or a few going professional. There’s no chance to remember more than a few individual players, unless you’re a die-hard fan or journalist (or live in Connecticut, where any high school stars are remembered forever).
But I loved when somebody I consider a mentor – Miami news legend Eliott Rodriguez – put his live shot from Vilanova’s 1985 championship up on Facebook, this morning. It happened while he worked for WPVI’s Channel 6 Action News, during a break from the Miami market.
You’ll have to watch. I commented jokingly, “Full of information! But other things never change.”
He responded, “The pictures tell the story,” but couldn’t remember whether he or his photographer suggested doing the live shot from the top of the van. Turns out, maybe they should’ve! And Jim Gardner always had the perfect response.
Jim is still there today and still in first place, even against the Super Bowl and Olympics on NBC in February. Says something about stability and being true to yourself, and what you stand for.
See who was referred to as a “distant fourth” twice in the above article! Let’s just agree it was well-deserved. Heck, they changed their Facebook policy between the time of my interview and the time I started. That wasn’t much more than two months!
And to leave you on a much more pleasant note, here’s a much more recent picture Eliott posted: Two former Philadelphia folks, including one who worked at KYW-TV3. It was taken in March. Glad to see Eliott and Marc Howard looking happy! Goes to show there is life after TV news!
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It’s nice when Americans exercise their First Amendment rights (freedom of religion, speech, the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances) with good intentions, and that should be encouraged.
Last Saturday, many in the country were shocked after March for Our Lives rallies were held all over (more on that in a blog post coming up) and apparently caught Tiffany Trump making her political views known — and they were against her father’s, according to People magazine.
No, the daughter of President Trump and Marla Maples didn’t just support the thousands of students taking to the streets around the world, calling for stricter gun control in the U.S. after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman High in Parkland, Fla., in which 15 students and two teachers were killed.
That would be “relatively” easy.
Instead, People wrote, she “appeared to ‘like’ a photo from her verified Instagram account showing a protester holding a sign that read ‘Next Massacre Will Be the GOP in the Midterm Elections’ at the New York March.”
Ouch!
Tiffany Trump’s verified Instagram account
Look at the picture below. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find Ms. Trump’s ‘like’ there, and neither could others, but People showed somebody apparently did on Twitter and put a red rectangle around her name.
It appears to be true because Ashley Feinberg, with a verified Twitter account, posted the picture from Julia Moshy’s Instagram account (above).
Anyone can see Ashley Feinberg’s Twitter page. I know because I did and I don’t follow anybody I’m writing about here, on any social media.
I also figured out Tiffany Trump follows the picture-poster Julia Moshy’s Instagram account (above), so she must’ve really seen the picture on the account. I didn’t know who Julia Moshy is, but she has 18,500 followers!
You’ll also notice near the top Tiffany Trump’s Instagram account is tiffanytrump — one word, all lowercase — and the same after “liked by” in the red rectangle. (You should see who else she follows on Instagram! Click here, and then click where you see the number of accounts she’s following.)
As for Ashley Feinberg, her verified Twitter account says she works for The Huffington Post and I can see she tweets a lot. (What looks like the latest tweet is really pinned to the top.) I clicked on her website that’s listed, which is a WordPress blog like this one, and got to the most bland page I’ve ever seen — especially for somebody whose Twitter account says “Graphic design is my passion.”
She described herself on her website: “Ashley is a Senior Reporter at HuffPost. Before that she was at Gizmodo Media Group’s Special Projects Desk, and before Gizmodo Media Group’s Special Projects Desk she was at Gawker.”
There are several Ashley Feinbergs on Instagram but I got lucky. She was listed first and her web address was a dead giveaway.
I wondered how Feinberg saw Moshy’s picture on Instagram that Tiffany Trump liked there. We established the connection between Moshy and Trump, but noticed as I’m writing Feinberg follows Trump but not Moshy.
That may not have been the case earlier in the week. Also, don’t look into Jeb Bush on the list. Feinberg, as a journalist, follows people and groups from both sides of the aisle, and Bush just happened to follow this Trump. (To see who else Feinberg follows on Instagram, click here for her account, and then click where you see the number of accounts she’s following.)
So if Instagram is anything like Facebook (and earlier this week we discussed the repercussions of Facebook owning Instagram), then you will see that friends/connections liked something a stranger posted — which may be how Feinberg saw Trump liked Moshy’s picture. (Of course, Feinberg and Moshy may have dropped their direct connection this week.)
Back to the subject at hand, People wrote “Social media users were happy to welcome Tiffany to their side” and gave various examples. Tiffany, 24, is a Georgetown Law School student right there in Washington, DC, but has kept a relatively low profile. You know with law school and all.
Too bad she may have felt the need (or pressure) to remove her ‘like’ from that picture. It goes against her First Amendment rights but Peoplepoints out from one of its sources,
“She says she is not guaranteed anything (from Donald Trump’s estate when he dies), which is one of the reasons Tiffany and Marla have been so respectful of her dad and tiptoed around so much.”
I have stated my concerns with Amazon long before the Election. Unlike others, they pay little or no taxes to state & local governments, use our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing tremendous loss to the U.S.), and are putting many thousands of retailers out of business!
Let’s get a reality check, published Friday morning, from FoxNews.com of all places. The author’s bio on the site says, “Peter Morici served as Chief Economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission from 1993 to 1995. He is an economist and professor at the Smith School of Business, University of Maryland.”
Morici starts with, “President Trump’s claim that Amazon is a tax scofflaw, subsidized by the U.S. Postal Service and an unfair threat to small businesses and malls, is absurdly wrong and dangerous.”
He follows immediately with the details, “Amazon is an online platform that markets products for thousands of manufacturers and smaller merchants. It’s also a retailer in its own right by distributing directly from its own warehouses.”
Then, some background:
“The company has branched into brick and mortar groceries with the acquisition of Whole Foods and is also building out its own package delivery system and entering a host of other businesses.
“Amazon may not pay a lot of income tax but a good number of companies don’t because of how Congress chooses to write the tax code. That was a problem long before Amazon came along and will continue after it is gone.
“Generally, online retailers enjoy an advantage over brick and mortar sores by not collecting sales taxes on shipments to states where they don’t have a physical presence. However, Amazon has warehouses in 45 states and collects sales taxes.”
After that, Morici goes into the Postal Service.
“It’s congressionally granted monopoly on your mail box comes with a requirement that it deliver six days a week to every address. … No matter how remote the location, the Postal Service charges the same 50 cents to deliver a first class letter. This just about guarantee it will lose money on mail service. In recent years, the Postal Service’s salvation has been in providing the last mile to large package delivery companies on less than urgent shipments. This means that Fedex, UPS and others can drop packages at your local post office and the Postal Service sends those out with your letter carrier.”
His bottom line: “Taken alone, neither business would be viable. … Mail delivery can’t be viable without package delivery, and running the last mile for delivery services would not be possible without mail delivery.”
Finally, he goes off on “What makes Amazon so menacing is that it is so efficient” and describes situations including Amazon beating out other companies, how brick-and-mortar stores and local governments reacted by imposing costs, and how Amazon only has a 4 percent market share of retail sales, much less than Walmart, according to the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Don’t think Amazon treats its employees right? That thought has been around for years, while dozens of locations are competing to be the home of its second headquarters, and offering pots of gold (or rather huge tax breaks) among other things to win.
Are Amazon employees union members? Sure wouldn’t hurt if they’re not!
Look what West Virginia teachers got by striking. Now, teachers in other red states are noticing.
According to the Associated Press, “A teacher rebellion that started in the hills of West Virginia spread like a prairie fire to Oklahoma this week and now threatens to reach the desert in Arizona.”
Good for them, and America’s children! Bad for blindly cutting taxes.
Univision Communications owns satire site The Onion, and The Wall Street Journal reports editorial and video staffers there and and its sister sites, Clickhole and A/V Club, announced they’re unionizing while Univision “is exploring extensive cost cuts at its digital properties.”
According to Variety, the Writers Guild of America East announced “’an overwhelming majority’ of the staff, comprised of about 100 employees, have signed union cards and called on management to voluntarily recognize the WGA East as the collective bargaining representative.”
Good for them! From what I’ve heard, Univision isn’t known as one of the best employers out there. It may be having a huge presence in free-for-all Miami, or the prejudice of serving Hispanic and Latino Americans, or being non-union — at least for the most part.
“Univision’s first act on acquiring the company was to delete six true and accurate news stories from our archive, because those stories had been the targets of frivolous or malicious lawsuits. This decision undermines the foundation of the ability of Gawker Media’s employees to do our work. We have seen firsthand the damage that a targeted lawsuit campaign can do to companies and individual journalists, and the removal of these posts can only encourage such attempts in the future.”
Ah, money over journalism! How many times have I written about that on this blog? (Click here for a pretty good-sized list, just from the search box.)
I think we have an answer for Amazon employees who want more money and better working conditions from a growing company that will be making more money.
The same would be true for Sinclair Broadcast Group employees. (Notice how I didn’t mention that company AT ALL in my last post!)
On March 11, I wrote that awful company — the largest owner of television stations in the U.S. — trying to buy Tribune Media through unethical methods was forcing news anchors at its 193 owned, or not owned but operated local TV stations in 89 markets (at least the ones that actually produce news) to read a script that offered no news.
“Please produce the attached scripts exactly as they are written. This copy has been thoroughly tested and speaks to our Journalistic Responsibility as advocates to seek the truth on behalf of the audience.”
“I’m [we are] extremely proud of the quality, balanced journalism that [proper news brand name of local station] produces. But I’m [we are] concerned about the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country.”
“The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media. More alarming, national media outlets are publishing these same fake stories without checking facts first. Unfortunately, some members of the national media are using their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think’ … This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.”
Then the anchors are supposed to strike a more positive tone and say that their local station pursues the truth.
“We understand Truth is neither politically ‘left or right.’ Our commitment to factual reporting is the foundation of our credibility, now more than ever.”
“At the end of the promo, viewers are encouraged to send in feedback ‘if you believe our coverage is unfair’ and ‘Corporate will monitor the comments and send replies to your audience on your behalf,’ so ‘In other words, local stations are cut out of the interactions with viewers. Management will handle it instead.’”
Do you think anyone wanted to look into a camera and read that promotional nonsense during newscasts from the media company with must-run conservatively-bent editorials? I think a union would’ve helped the journalists keep the business people in their place, which is out of the newsroom.
Today, FTV Live’s Scott Jones showed this example of the anchors at KBOI in Boise following corporate directions.
Jones ended by writing, “How these anchors sleep at night after reading this crap, I have no clue.”
Jerry Springer
I wonder when it’s time to jump ship, like WMAQ’s Carol Marin did in Chicago in 1997 when Jerry Springer started giving commentaries on her newscast. The New York Times called her “one of that city’s most popular and respected television news anchors.” Her co-anchor also quit.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer — which properly discloses “KOMO News and SeattlePI have a content-sharing agreement” — calls that script “the next step in the company’s plan to undermine non-Sinclair outlets.” KOMO-4 is one of Sinclair’s largest stations, after Washington DC, and in a liberal city. Sinclair bought its parent company in 2013.
I’ve had my say in these posts plenty of times — especially here (with a whole lot more reasons and ending with directions on letting the FCC know the danger that Sinclair poses by its size, power and ethics) but also here, here, here, and a few more if you search — so I’ll let SeattlePI continue:
“The claim of balanced reporting is undermined by must-run segments like the one about the ‘Deep State’ that ran during KOMO’s 6pm newscast last week. In the March 21 segment, former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka parroted a Trump talking point regarding the existence of a ‘Deep State’ attempting to undermine the U.S. government.
“That segment was produced by Sinclair’s Kristine Frazao, who before coming to Sinclair was a reporter and anchor for the Russian-government funded news network RT, described as ‘the Kremlin’s propaganda outlet’ by the Columbia Journalism Review.
“Sinclair also requires stations to run segments from Boris Epshteyn, a Russian-born former Trump adviser who now serves as Sinclair’s chief political analyst. Epshteyn recently produced stories with titles like, ‘Pres. Trump deserves cabinet and staff who support his agenda, yield successes’ and ‘Cable news channels are giving way too much coverage to Stormy Daniels.'”
Also, “Sinclair was fined $13.3 million by the FCC in December for running over 1,700 commercials designed to look like news broadcasts without properly identifying them as paid content on its stations over a six-month period.”
It’s no wonder New York magazine wrote a piece titled “Local news is turning into Trump TV, even though viewers don’t want it” describing — without repeating what’s above — how “Trump’s handpicked FCC chair, Ajit Pai, spent much of last year dismantling regulatory obstacles to media consolidation — including two rules that stood in the way of Sinclair’s desired merger with Tribune Media.”
Then it presumes “Sinclair has repaid this favor with interest” and asks “Why has Sinclair’s programming become more right-wing, even as it has expanded into more left-leaning media markets?”
It answers by saying, “A new study from Emory University political scientists Gregory J. Martin and Josh McCrain suggests that both of these explanations are wrong: The ideological bent of Sinclair’s programming does turn off local news viewers — but broadcasting such unpopular, ideological content is (probably) a good business decision for the company, anyway.”
Specifically, “The researchers found that Sinclair-acquired stations became both more right-wing in their ideological orientation (as calculated by ‘text-based measures of ideological slant’) and more focused on national politics (as opposed to local politics) than their competitors did over the same period.”
And, “they discovered that the Sinclair-acquired stations did seem to pay a price for these programming changes — but not a terribly large one:
“In ratings terms, the shift towards national politics was costly to these stations: viewers appear to prefer the more local-heavy mix of coverage to the more national-heavy one. Nonetheless, there are very clear economies of scale for a conglomerate owner in covering national as opposed to local politics, thanks to the ability to distribute the same content in multiple markets. Given that the ratings penalty we document is fairly small, it seems likely that these cost efficiencies dominate in Sinclair’s calculus.”
“Sinclair’s commitment to substituting pro-Trump propaganda for local news reporting costs the company viewers — but that commitment does not (necessarily) cost the firm profits.”
It continues that this is happening while the United States is “suffering through a crisis of local journalism. Regional newspapers are either dead, dying, or hobbling along, shedding resources for local reporting with each step.”
And since “Americans increasingly view national events through an algorithmically customized, ideological filter — local TV news has assumed a heightened importance.”
Click here for the long list of Sinclair owned, or not owned but operated stations. The number would reportedly grow to 233 stations if the Federal Communications Commission approves its acquisition of Tribune Media. It should not.
Sinclair’s size without Tribune
And at the end of this post, let’s mark the end of Don Imus’ radio career. The shock jock left the airwaves after nearly half of a century on the radio, Thursday.
Imus — who himself left the Big Apple a year earlier, in 2015, to live on a Texas ranch — didn’t like it. (At least they have the Gulf of Mexico between them!) The rest of the crew worked in New York.
“I know in my heart there’s been nobody ever better on the radio than me,” the less-than-modest 77-year-old DJ declared shortly before signing off from his studio in Texas. “Nobody ever did this.”
Imus fought back tears while thanking his listeners and saying “You have no idea how much I’m going to miss you.”
The paper also said he “appeared to take subtle parting shots at past rivals including the Rev. Al Sharpton and the self-proclaimed ‘King of All Media’ Howard Stern.
“Imus in the Morning” aired weekdays on 84 stations around the country.
People who know me can never, ever say I’m not loyal to people I like and respect. You’ll see that in a moment, along with an example of the opposite. (Is your mouth watering yet?)
I’m going to give the writer the benefit of the doubt because reporters don’t usually write headlines, and the headline goes after the format rather than the person.
The article started by criticizing Mike Jerrick’s on-air behavior on International Women’s Day, March 8. It quoted Peter Jaroff – assistant professor of media studies and production at Temple University and a former WPVI-6ABC producer – who described the situation perfectly.
Jaroff told the paper,
“You’re supposed to chat and fill up time and be engaging to your audience, and that can get you in a lot of trouble.”
Let me repeat: “Fill up time and be engaging.”
He didn’t say for how long or how often. Let’s look at the situation.
WTXF-Fox 29 puts on a six-hour morning show.
(I mentioned people who know me. They also know I hate the phrase “show” rather than “newscast” because a newscast is special with the responsibility of informing people about important current events and controversies – even though they typically air too much crime and too many fires, often without putting any of it in perspective. A “show” can be anything.)
Jerrick is on the air for four hours straight, from 6 to 10am. His broadcast, Good Day Philadelphia, actually starts at 4. (Yes, it’s the same name as all the other local Fox stations call their morning shows because they copy.)
Speaking of copying: Today, were we supposed to look at this and know where St. Mary’s County is? No clues. The company itself owns three Fox 5s. That doesn’t include affiliates. But this didn’t cost a cent!
It begins with hard news. Certainly, a lot of the content is from the day before because very little happens between 11:30pm and 4am, except for the crime and fires.
Jerrick is as good as anybody when he goes on the air at 6.
But let’s start before 6.
Mike’s bio, but is it FOX or Fox? (Absolutely NOT Mike’s fault!)
I worked with him for 15 months. I’ve seen him at 5:30am daily, before the public at 6, telling producers and an executive producer his intelligent, educated, experienced opinion – usually right – on what stories he should be talking about and which shouldn’t air. Four hours, or actually six, can be a long, long time – and a lot can happen to change things.
There will never be a TV station that has the staffing it really needs.
Jerrick would start out doing the news, correcting mistakes in scripts based on what aired earlier, what has changed since then and what he knows is the truth. (In other words, somebody else’s mistake.) He won’t let a live reporter go without making sure viewers have all the facts they need.
That may throw off the time, and producers have to go almost by the second – which probably makes them crazy – but realize Good Day Philadelphia producers do two straight hours in the control room. That’s a lot, even for the most disciplined, attentive, anal person trying to get as much new material on as possible.
The producers can’t read every script before they air. Scripts are still being written moments before, especially in breaking news situations. Jerrick and his counterpart, Alex Holley, may be told a few quick points in their earpieces and given a line or two. Very few TV news anchors can do that as flawlessly as they do multiple times every morning, while keeping tabs on what the live picture is showing, or if the signal goes bad.
At 7:30am, there’s often a live interview with a newsmaker, victim, etc. Jerrick and Holley consistently show the right tone, depending on the situation.
I haven’t forgotten their great job with the return of a station intern, wounded in the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting, who lost a loved one. Or the controversial Philadelphia sugar tax that mostly affects soda. Or the superintendent of the School District of Philadelphia about needing 1,000 new teachers when the other teachers hadn’t gotten a raise in five years and put up a billboard on busy I-95, making sure everyone sees the claim Philadelphia doesn’t value its students. I remember Jerrick and Holley making sure to present both sides, playing devil’s advocate when necessary, and give everyone a fair shot – for journalism and conscience.
I know because in each of those situations, I took notes and when each was over, I quickly got in and out points to put the video on the web, and wrote stories that started with the new information Jerrick and Holley were able to gather. Often, they made the interviews memorable experiences and that’s exactly what TV goes for: memorable experiences involving people associated with your station. The bosses get credit, the station makes money, but it’s Jerrick, Holley and company who actually do the work.
I’ll tell you now, I have not watched for a moment since I left last Aug. 10. Too painful. And that personal story is far from over. The people I’m writing about may not know that but their bosses sure do!
So how can Jerrick and Holley go from being hard news people – bringing viewers every new fact possible while guaranteeing their accuracy, while sitting inside a studio – and suddenly become time fillers at 9? They’d have to be extremely talented and well-rounded, or bipolar!
Sure, they report breaking news the executive producer decides is important enough until 10:00, but the *show* transitions from hard news to arguably nonsense and no matter how slowly that process takes, and the audience changes, it still involves the same on-air people.
It’s very rare, but I remember the morning hero, reporter Steve Keeley, breaking three new stories live at three different locations one morning! It’s a combination of his sources and reading everyone’s social media (and I included every police and fire department’s tweets in three states when I wrote everyone’s).
The station is too cheap to hire other people.
STOP FOR A SIDEBAR: All I ever got from the station, other than hard times, was a green t-shirt and hat for the St. Patrick’s Day parade in 2017. Most other places give gift bags when you start.
But I got a Good Day Philadelphia Weekend shirt that one of the anchors, Bill Anderson, actually spent time and money to make all by himself! Don’t believe me? He did that to connect with viewers and increase ratings – and then the bosses took him off the show and gave him a reporting franchise, For Goodness’ Sake! Some thanks and appreciation!
Bill is still doing what he does, great reporting, substitute anchoring, and wardrobes.
Yes, folks. This is the fourth largest TV market in America and this is what a local native – great person, great at his job – obviously feels forced to do. Somebody should be ashamed, and it’s sure not Bill!
BACK TO THE STORY: At 9, one of the 4-6am anchors usually joins Jerrick and Holley. They’re given a list of topics to ad lib about. That means no real scripts for them or their director, who has to make sure the right video is playing. Reporters who were on the air earlier usually change stories – not because of news happening, but planned events. Everyone’s time is planned out so there’s no waste, or rest on a bad day.
There’s a lot for the anchors to keep track of while making small talk with weathercaster Sue Serio, the most open, genuine human you’ll ever meet – and traffic reporter Bob Kelly, who has to keep track of all roads and transit in the region, get all the facts as they change without getting confused, and then find the live shots or make the graphics you see without any help. Oh, and then it’s Kelly’s Classroom or Camp Kelly, depending on the season, and Breakfast with Bob weekly.
So there’s a hell of a lot that goes on that viewers don’t see, except for the same faces, over and over again. How they seem to know everything – and at that hour – is incredible! They deserve credit, not scorn.
Of course, the viewers want the local angle, rather than the network or cable morning shows. There’s a place for it but honestly, it’s not for me.
I’ve often thought of Mike Jerrick as Johnny Carson. Who except Dom DeLuise and Joan Rivers ever had a public spat with Johnny?
Wikimedia Commons
Wikipedia
Flickr
I mean, Jerrick is from the Great Plains (Kansas), smart, funny, and – yes – older. That’s valuable and lacking in too many places today. I wasn’t around when Carson (from Iowa) started on The Tonight Show in 1962 and wasn’t allowed to stay up late enough to see him until I was old enough, and still, a lot was over my head.
No, not everything goes as planned. That’s the nature of live TV. How the people on-air react is what separates amateurs from professionals. The anchors you see on that station I really don’t like are professionals.
So Mike and Alex’s job is basically to fill time, and it works because they’re often #1 in the later time periods. That means they do very, very well – especially because one of their competitors is the nation’s powerhouse station.
Something ironic: The article with the title about a format possibly being on its way out barely touches on history. It used to be a white guy doing the news. Or two white guys. Same with weather and sports. Then came Adam and Eve – a man and a woman. The article quotes University of Maryland journalism professor Linda Steiner as saying network executives see that “as the kind of ideal nuclear family.”
But this isn’t Leave it to Beaver. This is Fox. So you have to expect a little pushing of the boundaries, especially from a station with the brand We Go There.
Maury Povich
Jerry Springer
As seriousness turns to silliness, children have headed out to school. If they’re home sick, how would you compare Jerrick’s behavior to afternoon soap operas in the past? Or to the lowlifes too often seen on daytime talk and reality shows, these days? Do you want your kid watching Maury(a KYW-TV3 alum) orSpringer? The difference is, Mike is the serious newscaster, earlier in the morning. (I’ve never asked him which role he prefers, if either.)
And HBO’s John Oliver used Jerrick as an example of someone who spent “the entire day (International Women’s Day) acting inappropriately.”
Yes, times change. Jerrick – with daughters and grandchildren – would be one of the first to support #MeToo.
He also keeps colleagues on their toes and the audience interested. I give management and the parent company no credit for that. Absolutely none. It’s the people you see, and I don’t have a bad thing to say about any of them. And when the show is over, they clean up (if necessary), meet to discuss the good and the bad of the morning, plan the next show, and then go out to shoot all the special segments viewers see. It’s usually not far from 12-hour days.
Do you think all the pre-NFL Draft features happened on their own or by magic? It was big planning, changing clothes and going with the flow – just like at the newsdesk but with a little more wiggle room.
Kellyanne Conway, Wikipedia
So he said “bullshit” when President Trump’s assistant Kellyanne Conway – a local woman – used the phrase “alternative facts” about the Trump inauguration’s crowd size. WHO WASN’T THINKING THAT? And he took his punishment knowing he shouldn’t have used the word, and knowing the station had to pretend to care about Federal Communications Commission rules.
Tom Snyder – who anchored here at KYW-TV3 in the late 1960s – shot a bird on WABC in New York, in the early 1980s. This is how he remembered it, years later, on CNBC.
I can imagine the same situation here.
And who was totally honest about needing to take a few months off?
Nobody is perfect but Mike Jerrick – with the job he has – is pretty damn close. (I can say the same about Alex Holley who, among so much else, has made her own family out in Texas, our own family.) It has earned him promotions and made him a national figure. And I sure hope he’s not working for the money. (I’ve always said money is freedom.)
Ryan Lochte, Wikipedia
And don’t tell me Ryan Lochte (pre-2016, Rio) didn’t deserve to be laughed at after his interview,
I’d never put any of them on my show and I doubt Mike would either, unless they did something SO ridiculous that everyone was talking about it.
The article pretty much says Jerrick found his niche and compares him to the Today show’s first host, Dave Garroway, buried here at West Laurel Hill Cemetery.
So bottom line: Mike Jerrick is the right person for the job, the station is lucky to have him and I will blame any future fall in ratings with changes in front of and behind the camera, or the end of an era – not Mike.
(For the record, I was NOT in contact with ANYBODY associated with the station for weeks before, or while writing. The thoughts are completely my own.)
Speaking of people I like, I can’t say enough about the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre survivors outside Fort Lauderdale. They’ve spoken forcefully and eloquently about the need for stricter gun laws.
Just wait, but some of them and other high school students will be old enough to vote by this year’s midterm elections. Mark your calendar for Tuesday, Nov. 6. Every member of Congress will be up for (re)election, along with about a third of the Senate.
Plus, 39 states including Pennsylvania and New York (I’ll get to that one in a few moments) will be (re)electing governors, and there will be many state legislature elections. (If I remember correctly, in ancient times in Florida, you could register to vote at 17 but not actually vote until your 18th birthday.)
Then, in two (hopefully) short years, more than half of today’s high school students will be able to vote in the 2020 presidential election.
Anyone who dismisses the Stoneman Douglas student group over their ages is stupid because they’ll be voting before you know it, and are already convincing other voters! Same for that Fox News host, Todd Starnes, who was troubled by how Cameron Kasky took down Sen. Marco Rubio, the one-time presidential candidate, over whether he would agree to refuse further political contributions from the National Rifle Association during a CNN Town Hall. (Click here to watch and read it all.)
Cameron Kasky, CNN’s Jake Tapper (a Philadelphia native), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.)
The young people are absolutely right about the need to make gun laws stricter. As for what changes, there are many so I won’t be specific. However, as powerful as this group and their supporters become, I worry about all the federal judges President Trump is appointing, and at least one justice so far on the Supreme Court. The young people and 100 million other Americans may convince some legislatures to vote their way, but those bills-turned-laws will have to be upheld if challenged.
Wikimedia Commons
I’ve mentioned Kasky’s mother has been a friend for many years. Besides beating a sitting senator in a debate, he’s the one who had to leave the 60 Minutes interview that aired last Sunday for a family dinner. (Ask them, not me.)
TVNewser called that episode “on pace to finish with 10 million viewers, which would make it one of the most-watched episodes of 2018.”
It’s not my place to name Kasky’s mother because she has not spoken out publicly (nor does she have to, with her son doing the job much more than adequately), but for those who are getting over school shootings or need a reminder of how devastating the situation has been for not only the community but 17 families, his mother shared this post on Facebook on Sunday.
nor this self-proclaimed “physical education instructon and football coach” in an outer Atlanta suburb with whom I have two friends in common. He apparently feels it necessary to use some dumb “gun permit” that never expires, that somebody made up, as his profile picture. I’ve read his take on gun issues too many times. I think his priorities are off and he has too much time on his hands. I hope we never meet.
Before leaving the topic, a possible solution to the guns-in-schools problem.
“As schools around the U.S. look for ways to impose tougher security measures, … they don’t have to look further than urban districts such as Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York that installed metal detectors and other security in the 1980s and 1990s to combat gang and drug violence”
Also,
“Security experts believe these measures have made urban districts less prone to mass shootings, which have mostly occurred in suburban and rural districts.”
And,
“Officials in some suburban and rural school districts are now considering detectors as they rethink their security plans after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.”
Let’s hope tougher security measures including installing metal detectors is a solution to save lives.
Now, a slightly less vicious politicalstory (and I mean slightly):
Yesterday, I mentioned Sex and the City’s Cynthia Nixon running for governor of New York against fellow Democrat Andrew Cuomo. (I’m shocked this politician doesn’t have his picture at the top of his official webpage!)
People magazine reported she tweeted alongside a two-minute video,
“New York is my home. I’ve never lived anywhere else. … I was given chances I just don’t see for most of New York’s kids today. …Our leaders are letting us down.”
In the video, Nixon noted she grew up with her single mom in a one-bedroom fifth-floor walkup.
She has been a vocal critic of Gov. Cuomo’s educational policies. According to People, she accused the two-termer of being the main cause of the divide between the state’s “richest” and “poorest schools.”
Today, JTA reported, “Her two eldest children from her first marriage are Jewish and have both been bar- and bat-mitzvahed.” (I hate that phrase! You can’t simply add an –ed to a word that’s not English!)
It also said she’s
“an active member of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, Manhattan’s most prominent LGBTQ synagogue, and has spoken there multiple times”
including her June 2011 Friday night sermon, the same day same-sex marriage became legal in New York state.
Back then, she lavishly praised Gov. Cuomo for his leadership in making that happen. I wonder if she changed her mind.
Nixon is getting support from former co-star Kristin Davis…
I am so proud of @CynthiaNixon , no one cares more than she does about EVERY person getting a fair change and a good education. I know that she would be an excellent Governor ! https://t.co/xEAyRxFBb8
but now, the New York Post is reporting Nixon is being “denounced” by arguably the Big Apple’s most prominent lesbian politician, former City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.
Besides being the first openly lesbian governor in the U.S., I think Nixon would be the first governor in the U.S. to go topless. Just a thought, for those interested. Or would you have preferred to see Richard Nixon topless?
And rather than me leave you on that last note, there’s an update after I showed you:
“Data aggregator eMarketer … released a report indicating Google and Facebook’s (aka “the duopoly”) dominance of the digital ad market is about to be less dominant, as “smaller players” like Amazon and Snapchat are on the rise.”
“Google’s share is expected to decline from 38.6 percent last year to 37.2 percent in 2018, while Facebook could shrink slightly from 19.9 percent to 19.6 percent.”
So let these crypto companies call good ‘ol Rupert and advertise on 21st Century Fox and News Corp. websites. That’s even though Recode says,
“the crypto industry is still new, unregulated and fraught with fraud.”
Shouldn’t stop the mogul from accepting a dollar, or pound, you think?
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Plus, there have been literally thousands of complaints from activists who know how important this is. 
Another dead giveaway is that Cunningham is based at 2000 W. 41st Street, Baltimore MD 21211 and coincidentally, Sinclair flagship 
So is 
There’s still 
HSH stands for 
Williams and his supporters suggest a more partisan motive: his conservative views.
Sinclair owned MyNetworkTV affiliate WMMP-36 for years. Then, in 2001, it bought and spun off Fox affiliate WTAT-24 to Glencairn (to become Cunningham) and crafted a local marketing agreement between the two stations. That got Sinclair fined Sinclair $40,000 for illegally controlling a duopoly.
Some more about Williams: In 2004, 
A last possibility if Fox is determined to buy a Miami station is ABC affiliate WPLG-10. That station, stable under Post-Newsweek (now Graham Media) for decades, was sold to Berkshire Hathaway as its only broadcast property. We’ve talked about synergies (BH, as an “only child,” has none) and know Warren Buffett wants to turn a profit, so we can imagine Fox dumping WSVN for WPLG, but can’t assume ABC will take its affiliation to WSVN. 
Sinclair owns or operates an astounding 193 TV stations around the country, in 89 cities, covering about 38 percent of the American population. It has been trying, unsuccessfully so far, to buy a smaller giant, Tribune Media. Let’s hope it stays that way until they fail.
On top of “the potential financial penalty,” there are forced 
That same Tuesday, I gave my two weeks at WCYB, leaving there after April 26, and starting at Fox less than a week later, on May 2. I had been given the option of starting May 9 but knew there was a ratings period and wanted to be as much help as possible, as soon as possible. So I quickly got mover and cleaner estimates, and my friend Scott found a temporary place for me to stay. The good folks at WCYB made sure to honor me with a cake. Lots of people involved with my departure and arrival!
Just wait, but some of them and other high school students will be old enough to vote by this year’s midterm elections. Mark your calendar for Tuesday, Nov. 6. Every member of Congress will be up for (re)election, along with about a third of the Senate.
Anyone who dismisses the Stoneman Douglas student group over their ages is stupid because they’ll be voting before you know it, and are already convincing other voters! Same for that Fox News host, Todd Starnes, who was troubled by how Cameron Kasky took down Sen. Marco Rubio, the one-time presidential candidate, over whether he would agree to refuse further political contributions from the 
