What’s hot/What’s not: 12/9/07
What’s hot:
NBC News job cuts - For the second week in a row the budget crisis at NBC News dominates the blogs’ news cycle. Though admittedly there wasn’t much in the way of competition this week to prevent that from happening. The New York Post provided more details on what’s going on with the NBC News cuts as did some of the blogs.
Citizens United vs. CNN - The group Citizens United wasn’t at all happy with the way it was portrayed in last week’s CNN documentary. In fact it was so unhappy that it has been making noises about suing the network. So far it hasn’t done anything more than sabre rattling and the longer this goes on the less likely a lawsuit will come out of it.
What’s not:
Ad refusal - Not that networks are refusing to run some ads, but that every time this happens it seems to get turned into a major media event. Nobody is under any obligation to air every ad that comes their way, yet when an ad gets refused it’s treated like a crime against humanity just occurred and charges of censorship ring out. It sounds more like gotcha politics to me though.
The MSM asleep on the NBC News budget story - When Dan Abrams stepped down and Phil Griffin assumed a larger role at MSNBC, it was all over the place. The New York Times did a story. Variety did a story. Broadcasting & Cable, TV Week, etc, etc…This time, outside of the New York Post and the Hollywood Reporter, the only ones writing about the cuts and changes to NBC News, which arguably could have a bigger impact on the news division than the Abrams/Griffin/Bassalik story did, are blogs like ICN, TVN, and Jossip. Nothing from the NYT, The LA Times,Variety, The Washington Post, The NY Daily News, TVWeek, Broadcasting & Cable, etc, etc.
This was a slow week
Comment by Aaron — December 9, 2007 @ 8:54 pm
I think we all forget about the ad item.
Comment by Chris (clind) — December 9, 2007 @ 9:41 pm
Spud, how can the NBC cuts be hot for dominating the news cycle, yet not hot cuz nobody is really covering them?
Comment by randy — December 9, 2007 @ 10:04 pm
Good question. I think I didn’t phrase that right. I should have said that it dominated the blogs’ news cycle…
Comment by Spud — December 9, 2007 @ 10:53 pm
That makes more sense. What dominated the news cycle (though not cable news related) was Obama-Oprah this weekend.
Comment by randy — December 10, 2007 @ 12:06 am
Spud NBC is in big trouble.The GE suits are running
out of patience for NBC Universal.It is not being
covered in depth by MSM because it is no big secret.
Everyone is placing bets to see how soon GE will
sale.They are trying to make the NBC look profitable
through cost-cutting.I am not sure they will wait until
after the Olympics any more.TV BY the Numbers says the
NBC network did not even have 3 milion viewers in prime
on Saturday.Heads are going to roll and it will not be
pretty.
Comment by future tv mogul — December 10, 2007 @ 2:14 am
Future tv mogul hit the nail on the head!Now the question is who will buy them?Let the bidding war begin.Good job mogul.
Comment by Shane — December 10, 2007 @ 5:40 pm
Spud,
I like the angle with which you approached the NOT HOT ad refusal issue. That’s pretty much how I feel about the whole ad issue but you summed it up much better than I could have. Nicely done.
Comment by STP — December 11, 2007 @ 10:39 am