MSNBC and a Decade of Change

Chris Hayes, who begins a new prime time show on MSNBC next week, was interviewed on Fresh Air yesterday. When asked about his new time slot, airing opposite Bill O'Reilly, Hayes explained that he doesn't see himself in competition with O'Reilly:

"...When people say, well, you're up against Bill O'Reilly, I just - it's really unclear to me - it's genuinely unclear to me whether that's true in any real sense, which is to say if we are competing for the same pool of viewers. I genuinely don't think of myself as in competition with Bill O'Reilly or in relationship to him in any real way. I think of myself as in - having a relationship with the viewers, building a viewing audience that I have a relationship with and trying to grow that. I mean believe me, I want as big an audience as possible, but the conventional wisdom about this being a competition with Bill O'Reilly is not necessarily accurate."

I think Hayes's idea about not competing for the same viewers is right on and is a clear statement about how cable news has evolved over the past ten years. There are some casual viewers and waiting rooms that might just put Fox News on because it's the news or maybe even because of an interesting guest, but anyone with well-formed opinions about politics or public issues will likely have an ideological preference between Bill O'Reilly and Chris Hayes. And in that sense, there is no real competition between the two; however entertaining or informative Hayes's show is, much of O'Reilly's audience will remain uninterested.

Those in charge of programming at MSNBC know this and are using it as a business strategy. This is an evolution from a not-too-distant time ago when it seems the idea was very much to compete for a homogeneous audience. It was ten years ago that MSNBC fired Phil Donohue because, as a critic of the Iraq war, he was too liberal for prime time:

"An internal MSNBC memo leaked to the press stated that Donahue was hurting the image of the network. He would be a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war,” the memo read."

That passage is from a recent article by Chris Hedges, who isolates the day that MSNBC fired Donohue as indicative of "when commercial television decided amassing corporate money and providing entertainment were its central mission, when it consciously chose to become a carnival act."

I agree with much of Hedges's critique of corporate media and it is worth reading. It is true that the economic interests of giant media corporations constrain debate on television, limiting the topics of discussion and points of view to what can attract profitable audiences. Hedges's article misses the change that has occurred at MSNBC over the past ten years, though. While its prime time lineup remains cable news and corporate journalism, with all of its flaws, the change has been dramatic.

By counterprogramming Fox -- seeking a different audience -- MSNBC has expanded the range of debate on cable TV. Sure, the debate remains within corporate bounds, but Chris Hayes is editor-at-large for The Nation. Giving him a prime time slot -- as part of a liberal prime time lineup -- is quite a distance from removing the network's only anti-war host because of his views.

I Want to Believe

There's a lot of crazy stuff on Facebook, and much of it is wrong. The same is true of the internet generally, of course. And aside from factually inaccurate information you can find dark things in the internet's so-called dark corners. Like, say, a cannibalism forum.

Facebook, though, is much more accessible than a cannibalism forum, and thankfully more widely popular. But there is a phenomenon of passing along bogus information, whether because of political or religious motivations, or a general lack of skepticism or understanding.

My favorite that I've seen recently is the warning that Obamacare will require us all to have the Mark of the Beast implanted in our forearms. Some key points:

"The US Senate has passed the Obama Health Care' bill into law. The implementation would commence on 23/03/2013. This bill would require all Americans to be implanted with a Radio Frequency Identification(RFID) chip in order to access medical care. The device will be implanted on the forehead or on the arm. This is to fulfil the prophesy in the Book of Revelation 13:15-18 concerning the MARK OF THE BEAST!
[...]
(1) Why is the chip being implanted exactly where the Bible says it would be. Why on the hand and forehead. Why not anywhere else?(2) Why is it being connected to your bank account? Remember the Bible says you won't be able to buyor sell without the mark. And guess what! The chip is connected to your financial details."

I think I know the answers to those questions. 

Hoaxes are nothing new, and I know much of this is passed around because it's funny. It is likely that in many cases these posts are the work of spammers, who know the kind of content that will attract attention and use it to their financial advantage. Misinformation can be destructive though, especially in an environment where the only arbiters of veracity are the trusted friends and family who pass it along.

More destructive than belief that the President is Satan, I think, is the development of a culture where all information is dismissed as maybe true and maybe not. A healthy skepticism about what we get from media is, well, healthy, but a world in which Facebook hoaxes in a newsfeed are given as much consideration as journalism posts is troubling. After all, some things actually are true.

3D Printing and the Future of Stealing

So I didn't know this was happening, but just learned by way of an Ars Technica article that 3D printing files are available at The Pirate Bay. Turns out that the site's "physibles" category has been available for over a year.

I think this demonstrates the totally logical link between the possibilities of 3D printing and the anti-copyright ideal. Digital has technology allowed for the infinite and cheap duplication of music and video, and sites like The Pirate Bay have developed to help with the illegal distribution of those files. With such infrastructure and the norms of file sharing in place, 3D printing simply removes the limitation of reproduction that it remain in a digital space. Users could concievably download and print duplicates of vinyl records.

Of course, users won't be limited to duplicating copyrighted works in the already disrupted fields of music and movies, which means that viable and widely used 3D printing has the potential to disrupt just about any industry that makes and sells physical objects.

Nielsen's "Zero-TV" Homes with TV's

The Nielsen Company's new quarterly overview of American media habits highlights the increasing number of households that don't watch TV on a TV. Nielsen reports that these households -- many of which have a TV but don't use it to receive broadcast/cable/satellite signals -- represent about 5% of the country and have increased from about 2 million to about 5 million since 2007. They skew young and don't see the value in paying for TV service:

"Cost (36%) & lack of interest (31%) are the main reasons for "zero-TV" homes, with only 18% of these households considering subscribing to television services."

This trend has some sort-of obvious consequences for the future of content distribution, but what stands out to me is these households' lack of interest in free television. I can understand having a preference for Netflix or iTunes or illegal downloads over paying for cable, but Nielsen reports that 75% of these "zero-TV" households have working TV sets.

That means that unless these people are living in the mountains, in caves, or in nuclear test zones, they could plug an antenna into their TV and get a free over-the-air signal, but they do not. Based solely on people I know, I have the impression that a lot of people don't know it's possible to get an HDTV signal for free simply by plugging an antenna into a TV and turning it on. I think that says a whole lot about what is available on broadcast television.

The use (and underuse and poor use) of the television spectrum is a pet concern of mine, and the increasing number of people who want new media content but opt out of free broadcast TV is a pretty clear sign that this public resource could be better utilized.

Rand Paul and the Self-Made Media Event

Senate rules require that any journalist or media personality discussing the talking filibuster must invoke the 1939 Frank Capra film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, because that film serves as a shorthand for the romance and inherent Americanness of the political tactic. The film offers an ideal type of a"good" filibuster, where one man and his ideals are able to use the senator's privilege of unlimited debate to change the country for the better. The "bad" filibuster, which is now virtually practice on matters of importance allows a minority of Senators to prevent consideration of bills or nominations without putting their ideals on display or threatening embarrassing bladder or excretory problems.

Senator Rand Paul made news last week with a "good" filibuster, holding the Senate floor for nearly 13 hours in an (ultimately successful) attempt to get a straight answer from the Obama administration about how it interprets its power to use drone strikes on U.S. citizens within the country. Since Paul received a ton of media attention -- in what was regarded in some commentary as an attempt to establish his libertarian credentials for to the 2016 cycle -- why don't we see Senators do this more often?

For one thing, an essentially solo effort like Senator Paul's likely means not only a departure from the majority being obstructed, but also from the broader minority. We might expect senators to take such risks to comity or to their status within the body over issues about which they were especially passionate or saw a great political upside to championing.

How about, then, the routine filibusters that have wide support among the minority? Why do these senators prefer to block legislation and nominees without the media attention that might come with a talking filibuster? One possibility is that they would prefer to "quickly" delay or block some activity so that the Senate can get on to its other business. With the routine blockage of meaningful Senate activity, though, it's hard to believe that a properly functioning Senate is a major consideration. Another possibility, often raised by opponents of silent filibusters is that the obstructors do not want media attention focused on their efforts.

With cameras in the Senate chamber, along with the proliferation of cable news and of online news access and commentary, we might expect now more than ever that senators will need to see a lot of upside in order to engage in a talking filibuster. That perceived upside likely explains Senator Paul's actions last week.

Gently Used, Like New

The New York Times reports this morning Apple and Amazon are both planning resale markets for the digital media they sell. The systems reportedly under consideration would allow users to give up their access to digital books or movies and get (likely a cut of) resale profits.

Such a change would bring down prices, which music and book publishers wouldn't like, but the absence of a resale market is really an anomaly of the digital space. And if properly designed, a digital resale market could work well. As with physical media, some consumers would be motivated to pay full price for a new copies -- maybe to get them soon after release or when used copies available for sale are scarce. Those willing to wait or shop could get a better price.

So this all seems good, but the major problem with the plans of Apple and Amazon is that they remain the plans of Apple and Amazon. That is, these resale markets could (and it seems likely would) exist as products of license agreements with these vendors. That means that purchasers could be bound to resell their digital media within the terms set by Apple or Amazon, within their proprietary marketplaces, and with fees paid for the privilege.

Again, this could still be an improvement over the inability to resell purchased digital media, but this seems like an issue better resolved by public policy than by corporate policy. An independent digital music resale market called ReDigi is currently facing a lawsuit from Capitol Records. ReDigi allows resale of music purchased from iTunes by transferring rights from one user to another, and a court decision favorable to ReDigi could legitimize such independent marketplaces. In any case, Congress could act to clarify copyright law around digital media downloads and extend resale privileges to consumers.

Hip to be Square

Recently I wrote about the hour-long drama as a form that might last beyond the technology that required it. I think square-shaped art for music recordings might do the same thing.

With physical sales of music, the cover art has the obvious purpose of labeling the product, something that can be achieved with a simple line of text in digital space. But cover art does a lot more than label a product. In physical retail it is also designed to be compelling, or attractive, or somehow represent the music it's covering. I see no reason to stop attempting that as physical music sales disappear.

And, with only a relatively brief foray into rectangular media, music has been sold on circles wrapped in squares for about a hundred years. This means that the great back catalog of cover art is square, and with no  physical limitation on shape or size in digital distribution, there is no reason not to continue using square art. The only thing the digital space will demand is consistency, and Apple, Spotify and others have already nicely integrated square image files in their music apps and products.



(Are you kidding?) The Beatles Sgt. Pepper's on cassette by Dave_McGurgan, on Flickr

Why I Saw the Heat, Knicks, Thunder, and Clippers on Sunday

If you ever watch NBA games on TV (especially on ABC), you might have thought, like I do, that the same small set of teams play each other in different combinations each weekend. And it's only a matter of guessing whether the Lakers will be playing the Knicks or the Celtics, and if they aren't, whether the Heat will be. Being a Milwaukee Bucks fan, I'm especially sensitive to this kind of thing.

Broadcasters and the NBA can only show so many games, so there will invariably be some criteria applied to decide which games get nationally televised on a Sunday afternoon. A team's success or star power are two obvious criteria to consider, but perhaps most obvious is each city's television market size. Airing games with the L.A. or New York teams will attract audiences in the nation's two largest TV markets, in addition to whatever other audience those teams attract across the country.

The success of the Oklahoma City Thunder complicates that simple formula, though. The Thunder have one of the leagues biggest stars in Kevin Durant, made the NBA Finals last year, and have their home in the country's 44th largest TV market. A quick look at the broadcast schedule on ABC, ESPN, and TNT shows that the Thunder get as much airplay as any other team. The table below shows the teams with the most scheduled national TV games and their market ranks.

This data suggests that market size is a big factor, but a team's performance can earn it big TV time. Perhaps though, team success is correlated with market size so that bigger cities have better teams. If that were the case, broadcast decisions based mostly on performance would still result in the big-city teams getting more airtime.

A simple test of correlation shows that's not the case. The number of television households in a team's home TV market has no significant relationship with a team's wins in either the 2011 season (Pearson's r=.04, p=.83) or the 2012 season as of March 3rd (r=.18, p=.34). That is, being based in a big city does not generally mean winning more games.

So what are the relationships between team success, market size, and the number of nationally televised games?

I built a (multiple linear regression) model to test these relationships, and I included the total number of scheduled TV games for the 2012 season, the number of TV households in each team's home market, the total wins in the 2011 season, and two other variables as measures of team success. 

The first of these is an index of 2011 playoff performance. On this index, the league champion Heat get a 1, the Thunder get a 2, those eliminated in the conference championship round a 3, and so on down, including a rank for those who missed the playoffs. This might be a better measure of success than the win records from the shortened 2011 season. 

The other success variable is the number of wins during the 2012 season as of March 3rd. This is intended to represent the potential for success that each team showed when the TV games were scheduled before the season started. Of course, using this measure assumes some predictive ability of the TV schedulers, but some prediction of success based on trades and retirements is possible, and I think it makes sense to include such considerations in this analysis.

The results of this analysis show that the playoff performance rank index is the strongest predictor of TV games (b=-2.69 p<.01). A decrease of rank by one (e.g. from champion to runner-up or from first round loser to non-playoff team) means 2.69 fewer TV games. This relationship makes sense from a programming standpoint because the top-finishing teams got the most exposure during the 2011 playoffs and had the most momentum coming out of them. As the table above shows, the top-finishing Heat and Thunder are among the four NBA teams with 25 scheduled TV games.

The wins to-date for the 2012 season also have a significant relationship with the number of TV games (b=3.88, p=.018). The model shows that each additional win during the 2012 season relates to about 0.4 more TV games. This suggests that, in addition to the other performance measures, TV schedulers' predictions of 2012 performance have a strong relationship with teams' number of national TV games.

Finally, getting to audience size, the model initially showed significant relationships for both market size and 2011 wins with the total number of TV games. When I considered the interaction between audience size and 2011 wins though, the independent effect of each disappeared. That is, it is the combination of a team's TV market size and its wins last year that has a significant relationship with TV scheduling (B=.021, p=.056). In this sense, winning a lot of games or being from a big market is not as important as winning a lot of games and being from a big market. It is that combination that has a significant relationship with more nationally televised games.

So that's sort of a first hack at this. Some factors left out here are the specific networks and days on which games are aired. Another potentially important variable is game time, because the desire to air late games on cable might increase the air time for West coast teams. The model considered above is pretty strong though, and it is able to account for about 79% of variance in the number of TV games among all the NBA teams.

Why China Aired its Execution TV Special

So I didn't see the live Chinese television prisoner execution special this week, but I did read an account of it in the New York Times. It's China, so this can easily be interpreted as the powerful state putting its state power on display. And it's worth remembering that the regime has a history of public executions.

There are other factors here too. One is that people in many cultures like lurid television. NBC's Dateline, in case you didn't know, has gradually transformed from a newsmagazine into a program that focuses almost exclusively on the drama of men killing their wives.

Another factor is nationalism. The Times story describes the executed (who were convicted of murdering Chinese sailors) as representative of the safety threat that Chinese professionals face when working overseas. In that context, the program was, while both lurid and an exhibit of state power, also a demonstration that threats to the nation and its people are being dealt with, and perpetrators punished. That is not totally dissimilar to live broadcasts on U.S. TV of bombs raining down on Iraq in 2003.