commentary

In replacing Chris Licht with Mark Thompson, David Zaslav lost an opportunity to move the channel back towards straight news. The loss of reasoned debate among people who disagree, yet still respect each other, is the great tragedy of the 21^st century. CNN had a chance to build a small bridge over that chasm of partisanship, but the opportunity now seems to be gone.

Margaret Sullivan: U.S. news organizations have turned Biden’s age into a scandal and continue to cover Trump as an entertaining side show.

The Hollywood strike negotiations and the carriage dispute issues currently roiling the media industry are clearly intertwined. How the studios and networks negotiate through both will determine the future of news and entertainment.

Andrea Mitchell: “On Sept. 17, another milestone will be passed for women journalists. Kristen Welker is set to become the 13th moderator of Meet the Press, the longest-running show on American television. For the first time, every Sunday public affairs program will be moderated or co-moderated by a woman as Welker joins Dana Bash, Shannon Bream, Margaret Brennan, Jen Psaki and Martha Raddatz at the helms for their respective networks. Not that long ago, ‘woman journalist’ was almost an oxymoron, especially in broadcast news.”

TV journalists shouldn’t be forced to choose between their passion for storytelling and their need to support themselves and their families. The industry’s leaders need to step up to the challenge of improving their pay.

CHCO-TV relied heavily on social platforms to reach news audiences in vastly underserved New Brunswick, Canada. A recently enacted news ban on those platforms has had a chilling effect on democracy to which U.S. broadcasters need to tune in. (Shannon May Pringle photo)

Linear TV’s decline to less than 50% of all TV viewing was long in coming very long. No matter what label you put on it — “linear” or “legacy” —  audience erosion in TV’s older precincts has been going on for years, even decades.Indeed, it has been a recurring theme running like a thread through the history of television  and the coverage of the business by TV beat reporters since the 1980s.

Charles Jennings: “My years of work in AI have convinced me a huge AI dividend awaits if we can somehow muster the political will to align AI with humanity’s best interests. With so much at stake, it’s time we in the United States got serious about AI policy. We need garden variety federal regulation, sure, but also new models of AI leadership and governance. And we need to consider an idea that would have been unthinkable a year ago. We need to nationalize key parts of AI.”

TV stations should view last week’s raid on the Marion County Kansas Record by local police and sheriff’s deputies as a warning shot. Every newsroom should have a plan to deal with potential search warrants with the station’s attorneys squarely on board.

Restoring the journalism jobs lost over the past 20 years wouldn’t just be cheap — it would pay for itself.

Alex Thompson: “The traditional television broadcasting model is undergoing a massive transformation. Cord-cutting, once a niche trend, has become a tidal wave sweeping the industry, changing how content is consumed and monetized. No matter the genre, viewers are looking for (and finding) new ways to consume content across news, sports and entertainment. While this wave of change disrupts established patterns in the broadcast world, it presents a golden opportunity for those who are adaptable and forward-thinking.”

We need to explore greener, more efficient alternatives to cloud storage for video streaming, whose global emissions are rising dramatically.

Why regulating streaming services like traditional pay TV providers would stifle inclusion efforts.

The platform-as-a-service (PaaS) approach to broadcast infrastructure allows media organizations to take advantage of applications as consumption-based SaaS without the massive upfront capital investment or extensive integration work that SaaS entails.

Regulating streamers like old-school cable providers would ignore market realities and Congressional prerogatives, says former commissioner Michael O’Rielly.

With its seemingly boundless applications for news, AI is likely to deepen the divide between best-in-class and worst-in-class station owners. The better ones will recognize its capacity to augment and expand their reporting capacities.

Cory Treffiletti: Bob Iger is not a man who speaks off the cuff, so his recent comments and subsequent “damage control” about selling ESPN and ABC were not likely a misstep, but probably a more calculated means of generating interest and discussion over the state of traditional television. The larger question is not whether ESPN and ABC are valuable entities — it’s what format the two should be focusing on to succeed for the next 20 years.

The newly formed Coalition for Local News wants to convince the FCC that broadcasters must negotiate directly with vMVPDs to ensure their long-term fiscal viability. They’re smartly drawing a direct line between local TV news and democracy’s health to make their case.

Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch undermined trust in American democracy with their reckless propagation of Trump’s Big Lie, but Fox’s O&Os shouldn’t be in the FCC’s crosshairs to pay for it, as a watchdog group would have it.

In the first half of 2023, the biggest search need in TV news has been for meteorologists. So far this year, we at Talent Dynamics have conducted over 30 — that is right — 30 searches for weather people and/or meteorologists for TV stations and networks. By the time you read this, that number will likely be even higher. This is a crucial gap that needs to be filled — weather is important.

Between one-third to one-half of new CEOs fail within the first 18 months, and CNN’s debacle with recently ousted chief Chris Licht is only media’s most recent dramatic example. Here’s a guide to the most common C-suite pitfalls and how to avoid them.

Armstrong Williams: “The FCC should recognize that broadcasters make significant capital investments when adopting new technologies and prioritize promoting broadcast innovations with the goal of both improving service to the public and the competitive viability of free-to-the-home broadcasting.”

If the long-established law behind the FCC character clause has any validity, it must be enforced against Fox Broadcasting where internal documents from the cable news side of the corporation shows that profit comes before truth or the national interest. Based solely on the facts and the law, Fox does not deserve a license to own a broadcast station.

A recent study from RTDNA/Newhouse School at Syracuse University lays bare just how overwhelmed TV newsroom personnel have become. The bucks stops at the corporate level for this problem, and the C-suite is running out of time to address it.

Erik Wemple: “Fox News relies on a battalion of anchors, reporters, producers and assistants to generate its ratings-topping programming. Trouble is, some of those employees double as walking, talking, text-happy corporate risk centers, privy as they are to the making of the network’s rancid sausage.”

Fargo, N.D.-based Forum Communications has learned the hard way just how much this FCC hates broadcast deals of any size.

The threats posed by cyberattacks are a common problem for everyone in the broadcasting industry. The only appropriate response is to work closely together across media companies and vendors alike.

Preston Padden: “False news has consequences. Despite all the factual information available to the contrary, millions of Americans, including Fox viewers, believe that the 2020 election was stolen. The rioters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 were chanting ‘Stop the Steal.’ To the best of my knowledge, the FCC never before has been confronted with a judicial holding that a broadcast licensee knowingly and repeatedly presented false news. It is hard to imagine an issue that more directly impacts a broadcast licensee’s character qualifications.”

Travel across the partisan spectrum, and nearly every talking head will tell you in great detail that the country is splintered by fierce partisan loyalties and competing sets of “facts” while blaming their political foes for the current state of enmity. Which is why something of a miracle happened last week, during the 9 p.m. hour of Fox News of all places.

While AI has been a powerful tool for media across multiple functions, generative AI poses numerous threats that should give all companies pause as they assess its potential upsides.

Jeffrey M. McCall: “Licht’s failure is bad not only for CNN, which is now likely to remain saddled with historically bad ratings, but for the journalism industry as a whole. He was run out of town by the various forces that no longer see a value in information-based, serious, nonpartisan journalism, including the social media mobs who decried Licht’s strategy to reach a wider range of viewers than just the left-of-center audience CNN had catered to for years. Joining the war on Licht were CNN employees themselves, who savaged their boss in a recent magazine report.”

It’s possible – likely, even – that Chris Licht would have survived all of this if it weren’t for the one thing that really mattered: the numbers.

In the ousted Chris Licht, CNN had a leader who was not introspective enough to understand why he was failing. He leaves behind an organization in worse shape than when he arrived.

AI-based storage solutions are evolving, saving media companies substantial time and money.

The best general manages put in the hard work of learning sales processes and understanding the details. Those willing to make that effort are always rewarded on the bottom line.

Thwarted in his bid to buy Tegna by an overlong and deal-breaking FCC review process, Soo Kim (and his right hand Deb McDermott) is indeed a victim of prejudice and discrimination. Only it’s probably not the sort you may think.