MMMM # 156-- Now the sets are REALLY empty.

      Friday was lockup day for APT in Montgomery. The final employees (except for one, an engineer needed to keep some of the nine stations on-air) left the building and locked the doors. Now there isn't a single APT locally produced program.

     Even On The Job, a business program, is produced by AIDT and handed over to the "network" for broadcast. The studios are silent.

     The Washington Post had a column on Sunday about PBS, from which a huge chunk of APT's programming now comes. The column says the PUBLIC network is exploring little, er, "breaks" during programs. If it sounds like a commercial and looks like a commercial and....yup, they're considering what looks for all the world like commercial breaks. The primary thing that used to make PBS different.

[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of this blog.]

MMMM #132 -- about PBS

Last Week, Ken Burns wrote passionately in the Washington Post about the need for a Public Broadcasting system:

"...we have never needed them more..."

     Burns made both a name for himself and a good deal of money by producing documentaries broadcast on PBS, programs that he argues rightly would never have made it in the world of commercial TV.

     His comments come as the GOP Majority U.S. House votes to remove all federal funding for the publicasters.

     As mentioned earlier on this blog, the Alabama network that carries PBS programs is facing a double threat. If the spending cutters have their way, funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting will dry up, and the state GOP, with super majorities in both the Alabama House and Senate, may have their eyes on that funding too.

     At least APT is under the Education Budget, not the General Fund, which is going to virtually kill some agencies because The Departments of Corrections and Medicaid are being protected from cuts, deepening the reductions for everyone else.

     When I first spotted the headline of the Burns column in the Post, I thought it read "Public broadcasting, a 'luxury' we can do without"...and I had virtually written this post in my mind before I blinked and saw it was "can't do without."

     He makes a good argument, but when the choice is between dinner or a new Television..and that's where Alabama's budgets are headed.

     I also have a great Ken Burns story to tell...but we'll save that for later.



[Photo: The last For The Record, two years ago this Month.]

Public Broadcasting = $0

     PBS and NPR have long been targets of conservatives because of what they perceive to be a liberal slant.

     Now in control of the House, the GOP members have proposed a budget that includes this broadside to funding for public radio and TV:

The amounts included under the heading ‘‘Corporation for Public Broadcasting’’ in division D of Public Law 111–117 shall be applied to funds appropriated by this division as follows: by substituting ‘‘$0’’ for ‘‘$86,000,000’’; by substituting ‘‘$0’’ for ‘‘$25,000,000’’; by substituting ‘‘$0’’ for ‘‘$36,000,000’’; and by substituting ‘‘$0’’ for ‘‘$25,000,000’’.

     Ouch. And when you consider the deep cuts in Alabama state spending that are ahead, my friends at APT are facing some very difficult times indeed. Maybe I just carried my ties out of the building a touch early?

     Then again, the Democrats still control the U.S. Senate.

MMM # 122 : Mistakes

 "McCarthy was acting like this was Selma, Ala., in the '60s and he was Bull Connor."

     That geographic misplacement occurred in an AP story in today's Washington Post about a small upstate New York town where a Muslim mosque and cemetery caused a fuss. The story was not wrong...they accurately quoted the town official who was wrong.

     But mistakes make it into broadcast and print media every day.

     The PBS News Hour once identified Birmingham as the Capitol of Alabama.

      I've personally made some doozies on air over the years, and been called on them.

      People aren't shy about calling a newsroom and complaining, but a study a few years ago found that TV News errors aren't always a simple matter of a fact being incorrect. Sometimes the facts are correct but the story is wrong because it is out of of context, or because the station made the story bigger than it really was.

     I maintain that the very fact that a story is included in a TV newscast makes it bigger, and perhaps bigger than it deserves to be.

     How many times have you seen a fire or accident story on the evening news, only to see it reported as a paragraph in the morning newspaper website?

     And it's the constant need for "teases" and promos for stories that frequently get stations in trouble.

     The drama in a promo for a TV news story is intended to build it up..sometimes beyond what the story deserves. And the tease "Coming up! Dogs on the attack in East Alabama!" is frequently going to go too far as well.

     Newspapers have a corrections column, in which misspellings and other errors are acknowledged. But there's no such regular place on TV...the error has to be truly significant to merit an on-air correction. And even then, the audience watching when the correction is made is usually vastly different from the one that heard the error in the first place.



[PLUS: Words matter. FOX News reportedly insisted on specific language on-air to describe the "Public Option" in health care in a way that would convince the network's audience not to support it.]



[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of this blog.]

NEW Freedom Riders Coming To Montgomery

     As a promotion for next Spring's airing on PBS of a documentary about the freedom riders who came from North to South to support the Civil Rights movement, a bus of college students and veterans of the original journeys will travel to Montgomery and cities in other Southern States.

     The "American Experience" program will air the program, and is soliciting college students to apply for the a seat on the bus.

     The documentary is being screened in New York City tomorrow.

See The Trailer in the post below.