News Watch: This may be the best promo I've ever seen

"In Season 2 he's changing everything up. . . .
Maybe he'll add a pony . . . a crime-solving pony."

Says John, "We were just really assuming the show was going to be basically the same." The good news: He gets to keep his glasses.

by Ken

This promo was actually first posted about seven weeks ago, and we're already three weeks into the season it was promo-ing. But it's still maybe the best promo I've ever seen for anything. I don't know how many times I've seen it, but it delights me as richly as it did the first time.

At the end of the promo John expresses speaks rather forlornly about his hopes for this "one more year." After Episode 2 of the new season aired, HBO announced that Last Week Tonight will be around not just for the season-in-progress but for two more, of 35 shows apiece, in 2016 and 2017. Let's hand it to the HBO programming people for getting this call triumphantly right. The Last Week Tonight team has consistently managed to make the show among the funniest and the most informative broadcasts we've had.

Of course John was a pretty thoroughly known quantity by the time the show debuted, thanks to his years remarkable work on Comedy Central's Daily Show with Joh Stewart, including his well-deserved stint as substitute host during Jon's leave. What wasn't known was just what sort of show he and his people would be putting together at their new address.

The format they came up with is simple but durable; it just depends on the huge amount of work and wit it takes to stuff it with content. First there's a roundup of relatively short items plucked from the week's strange-but-true events. Then the latter two-thirds or so of the show is given over to a really extensive look at a single subject.

I would think that even the most casual observer can see how much research and screening and writing and rewriting and materials collection that half-hour broadcast entails. Still, the point seemed to be lost on Charlie Rose, as I discovered when, in order to see John, I broke my standard no-Charlie-Rose rule (which can be stated roughly, in case the point needs clarifying: "No Charlie Rose!"). Charlie, apparently genuinely surprised to hear John say that no, there's no way he could do LWT on a = nightly basis -- like, you know, The Daily Show. Of course it's possible that our Charlie, for all his seemingly sincere aura of fandom, had never actually watched either The Daily Show or Last Week Tonight. The fact remains that he seemed sincerely confounded by the idea that the way the shows are produced is different in any way except the number of times a week each is produced.

The big challenge for the LWT team, obviously, is the "big" segment of each show: finding subjects that lend themselves to their kind of treatment at 18-or-so-minute length, and then putting together a segment that fills those 18 minutes at peak news and comedy value. I think it's pretty extraordinary how many such subjects they've imagined and executed so successfully, coming up with an astounding array of information, most of which is genuinely shocking -- and side-splitting, often at the same time. One obvious result is that each episode of LWT has enduring rather than merely topical value.

I can't think of a better example than the "Tobacco" segment from this season's Episode 2.

Ep. 26 Clip: Big Tobacco's Still At It

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If CBS had treated the Super Bowl blackout as "news," who would have been more upset, viewers or advertisers?

"CBS buys the rights to Super Bowl broadcasts to make buckets of money, not to serve the public. Yet there were an estimated one hundred and eight million Americans watching the broadcast. The network's obligations to such a vast viewership should have led it to privilege the imperatives of journalism over those of commerce."

-- Steve Coll, in "The Super Bowl's Journalism Malfunction,"
in newyorker.com's "Daily Comment"

by Ken

Even I, who paid about as little attention as it's possible for a citizen in these parts in A.D. 2013 to pay to the Super Bowl, know about the blackout. And the impression I've gotten from what has filtered through to me is that it became sort of all part of the show that was this thrill-packed 34-31 eventual nail-biter. (And exciting it may have been, but it's a hard sell to make as if a 34-31 football game was a good game.)

Steve notes that going back to the '70s there has been a tradition of imagining terrorist fun 'n' games at American premier fun game. He ventures that when the lights went out at the start of the third quarter last night, he wasn't the only one who flashed back to Thomas Harris's 1975 novel Black Sunday, probably the best-known of the thrillers that have used the Super Bowl as a backdrop for terrorist evil-doing.

But beyond the natural initial period of "disorientation and unease," Steve says, a journalist's natural response is: "Breaking news!"

Surely, I thought upon my couch, CBS, the network of Eric Sevareid, Dan Rather, and "60 Minutes" -- the network that had lately recruited Charlie Rose to anchor its morning show -- would tear into this story.

It did not. What followed was embarrassing and irresponsible. The blackout lasted thirty-four minutes. During that time, CBS acted as if it possessed no news division. It relied on James Brown, the congenial jock-wrangling anchor of "The NFL Today," to handle the story. He and his fellow commentators -- retired quarterback Dan Marino, retired N.F.L. coach Bill Cowher, and retired tight end Shannon Sharpe -- acted as if the unexplained loss of electricity in a stadium filled with seventy thousand-plus people during the most-watched American television event of the year was just a twist in the story of who would win the football game, and nothing more.

Surely there were other questions to ask as the minutes ticked by: Why did the N.F.L. fail, throughout the entire interruption, to provide an informed spokesman to explain the problem and the plan to fix it? Who was responsible for the stadium's operations? What did the local utility, Entergy, have to say? Could the mayor of New Orleans, who was surely in the stadium, be summoned on camera?

And yet, as Steve pieces it together from subsequent reportage, CBS never treated it as anything other than a sporting event. Why, he wonders, didn't CBS president and chief executive Les Moonves "throw the broadcast to his news division in New York for at least an interval, to signal to viewers that the network recognized that something unusual and newsworthy had just occurred, and to attempt to inform them, as best as possible, with reliable reporting?"

Moonves told the Times that he knew he had the option to switch to CBS News in New York, but "we were told it would be twenty minutes.…We knew it wouldn't be down for hours." Even so, why did CBS not immediately scramble its news producers to hunt down subjects for on-air interviews? Why was there no off-air reporting relayed from CBS News to James Brown about whether there was any indication of foul play, or any information at all available beyond the no-commenting, self-protecting public-relations arm of the N.F.L. juggernaut, to which we have become all too accustomed during its systematic campaign of denial about football-related concussions?

Even the sports banter on the "NFL Today" set was timid, seemingly self-modulated to give no offense to CBS bosses, New Orleans, or the N.F.L. What about the risk of hamstring pulls and the like to players who have an unscheduled thirty-minute cooldown right after halftime? We watched players stretching for dull minute after minute but heard little more than vague speculation about "momentum."

As Steve points out, though, "CBS buys the rights to Super Bowl broadcasts to make buckets of money, not to serve the public." And he suggests that the on-air coverage of the blackout, such as it was, was "public-realtions messaging" whose essence was:

"Everything worked exactly as it was supposed to do, and therefore the lights went out for thirty minutes." It was surprising that the joint statement [by Entergy, the utility company, and the operators of the Super Bowl] did not go on to chastise other Super Bowl hosts for failing to have blackouts of their own, since they are apparently signs of a well-oiled utility machine.

Steve recalls that Black Sunday was written "in the aftermath of the 1972 Summer Olympics at Munich, where Palestinian terrorists kidnapped and killed Israeli athletes," and that --

Munich's shadow has informed the planning of every network broadcaster responsible for Olympics coverage in the four decades since. Disaster and counterterrorism preparations are a staple of pre-Games coverage. Network planners take for granted that they must be prepared to convert sports broadcasts to breaking-news broadcasts at any time.

Which brings us back to CBS honcho Les Moonves's comments to the NYT's "Media Decoder." "It was like there was another event inside an event," he said. Which prompts Steve's suggestion: "Another term for that might be news."

"We heard everything from hackers to people who had bet on San Francisco to Beyoncé draining all the energy out of the place at halftime," Moonves continued. And yet his network made no effort on air to sort rumor from fact or to acknowledge the cacophony of questions and speculation coursing through Twitter feeds. CBS rehearsed Beyoncé's halftime performance to within an inch of her dance-step stage marks, but the network of Edward R. Murrow had no plan for the unexpected.

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Mike Wallace (1918-2012)

In a feature at the top of today's Face the Nation broadcast, Morley Safer remembers his longtime 60 Minutes colleague Mike Wallace. (Sorry about the commercial, but it should be only 15 seconds.)

"Mike took to heart the old reporter's pledge to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

-- Morley Safer

by Ken

Like everyone else remembering Mike Wallace, I suspect, Morley Safer refers early on to "the four dreaded words" that preceded his "visits" to an unsuspecting subject of one of his surprise interviews: "Mike Wallace is here." I wonder, though, how many eulogists are also remembering that "old reporter's pledge" Morley tells us Mike "took to heart": "to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." (Least of all, one suspects, his son Chris, who has made a successful career dragging the family name through the muck of Fox Noise as a thuggish right-wing liar-apologist-propagandist.)

Those of us who are old enough to remember way-back-when remember Mike Wallace as a not especially high-toned TV jack-of-all-trades, whose best-known role may have been that of cigarette pitchman. It was hardly the profile of a future crusading investigative journalist. Indeed he was hardly an obvious fit for CBS News when he signed on in 1963, as Adam Bernstein recalls in his Washington Post obit:

At the time, the so-called "Tiffany network" that had once been home to newsman Edward R. Murrow had the most prestigious pedigree. [Of course this is itself forgetting Murrow's rather various CBS broadcast career, including the celebrity gushfest Person to Person. -- Ed.] Mr. Wallace had a hard time getting anyone to take him seriously.

He later recalled: “The people at CBS said, ‘You mean to say that we’re going to have the fellow who’s measuring the quarter-inch filtered tip of the Parliament cigarettes? That's the same guy who's going to be measuring the missile gap? Not on CBS.' "

But Mr. Wallace said he was determined to change his image as a lightweight. He said he was motivated in large part by the accidental death, in 1962, of his teenage son Peter while hiking through Greece. The elder Wallace took a series of demanding assignments to prove his worth: a tour in Vietnam, on-air reporter for the "CBS Evening News" and questioner on the public-affairs show "Face the Nation."

Viewers who know CBS News only from its Village-friendly outlook of recent decades may wonder what standards Wallace could have been aspiring to when he joined the organization. It sure ain't what it once was, and 60 Minutes in particular ain't. It wouldn't be far off to suggest that the goal became to comfort the comfortable and further afflict the already-afflicted. The "scandals" it uncovers these days generally turn out to be affronts to the well-heeled and high-positioned, pillars of the Village elites and the status quo.

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It's worth taking note when David Sirota says MSNBC's "Up with Chris Hayes" is "one of the best television programs on the air"

"Up With Chris Hayes, which broadcasts Saturday and Sunday mornings, purposely rejects the manufactured red-versus-blue mallet that bludgeons every issue into partisan terms. Instead, the program's host is creating a space for more expansive discussions with voices typically deemed too unconventional, provocative or dangerous to be allowed anywhere near a television set."

-- David Sirota, in "TV That Finally Lifts Journalism Back Up"

"Arabs being asked for their opinion on events in the Arab world -- what a concept! . . . Even more incredible was the show's ideological openness. Just one example: We had a discussion about the notion of America as an empire."

-- from the same source

by Ken

How often do we get to share good news? I haven't had a chance to road-test this recommendation from our friend David Sirota, but when he declares MSNBC's Up with Chris Hayes "one of the best television programs on the air," I take that seriously, and with the next broadcast coming up tomorrow morning, I thought this would be the time to share his recommendation for the benefit of those who haven't seen his Creators.com column (which I saw courtesy of Nation of Change).

He explains how he came to have firsthand experience of the show.

Waking up at 4 a.m. is rarely enjoyable, and arising at that unspeakable hour to appear on a cable news show is particularly painful. In such situations, you feel as if you're dragging yourself out of bed only to be treated like a canine in a dogfight, with the typical show pitting you in a contrived death match against another guest who is your equally angry, equally mangy opposite. That, or you're simply asked to play the yes-man -- the Ed McMahon to the host's Johnny Carson.

Needless to say, I'm not a fan of most cable news because I find this format mind-numbing, uninformative and tedious (and cable news' declining ratings over the last year prove I'm not alone). So when I was asked to appear on MSNBC last Saturday morning, my initial thought was, "Thanks, but no thanks."

But then I realized it was a new show hosted by Chris Hayes, a journalist whose work I've long admired. So I said yes. And crack-of-dawn fatigue aside, I'm glad I did, because to my surprise, I ended up getting the chance to participate in one of the best television programs on the air.

As regular DWT readers know, Chris Hayes is held in pretty high esteem here too. Here's David's sampling from his experience on the show.

The panel I appeared on exemplified Hayes' effort. Out of five in-studio guests appearing to discuss the death of Moammar Gadhafi, the Iraq War and the Arab Spring, one was Iraqi author Zainab Salbi, one was Libyan author Hisham Matar and one was Palestinian-American comedian Dean Obeidallah. (Arabs being asked for their opinion on events in the Arab world -- what a concept!) Amazingly (and refreshingly), in a cable world dominated by crotchety Caucasians, NBC News' foreign correspondent Richard Engel and I were the only white dudes on the panel.

Even more incredible was the show's ideological openness.

Just one example: We had a discussion about the notion of America as an empire -- a concept pervasive throughout the globe that Engel nonetheless couldn't believe was being discussed on American television. He was right to be surprised. Though it should be standard, a cable program that both explores hugely taboo questions and includes a diverse set of voices is something you rarely see in this country.

Pleased as David is to be able to pass on tidings of this "terrific, better-late-than-never development" for American news consumers, he notes, "The fact that Up is groundbreaking is also something of a sad commentary on the larger media." I think he actually means more than "something of a sad commentary, though, as he goes on to explain:

For the most part, TV remains exactly as Hunter S. Thompson once described it: a "cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free ..." In that hallway's current cable form, "national news" is a euphemism for New York- and DC-focused content engineered primarily by a closed ecosystem of East Coast elites who believe the only things that matter are Manhattan gossip and Beltway games. This is why you almost always see the same vapid pundits and the same homogenized topics on TV — because this clique is hostile to diverse viewpoints and uses its privilege to make sure media debates represent only the elites' myopic perspective.

By contrast, Hayes' show joins a variety of programs, from Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now!" to Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" to Thom Hartmann's "The Big Picture," in rejecting this suffocating model. If "Up" succeeds, it'll play a huge role in creating a new model that will serve journalism and the citizenry far better than today's vast television wasteland.

As anyone who's tried to extract information from the MSNBC website knows, it's a tough pull. Apparently the idea is to keep what they're up to secret except to those who really, really want to know. This much I was able to find out, though: Up with Chris Hayes airs Saturday mornings 7-9am and Sunday mornings 8-10am. Don't ask me about time zones; I'm not a TV-schedule swami. Um, you could check your local listings, I guess.

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Which came first, the dim viewers or the dim teevee talking heads?

Remember, you heard it here last: NBC's election whiz Chuck Todd likes to tweet! (When these people open their mindless traps, do they realize the cameras are on?)

by Ken

Warning: By the time we're done with this dispatch from our "You Can't Make This Stuff Up" Dept., you may have a powerful impulse just to shoot the damned teevee to put it out of its and your misery.

It's an obvious chicken-and-egg situation: Which came first, the hordes of dim-witted viewers, or the dim-witted telepundits who pander to, or perhaps just wallow in, their dimness? If you haven't already read it, you owe it to yourself to click through immediately to Digby's post yesterday "Misinformation Superhighway," in which she tracks what she describes as, for want of a better word, a "conversation" on MSNBC on the housing slump and the economy, featuring three people you really want to hear on the subject: Chuck Todd, Ron Insana, and Melissa Francis.

Here's a sample:

Chuck said we are just now focusing on housing. Ron pointed out that it's been a problem since the bubble burst. Chuck then wondered if the new slump is the government's fault for propping up the housing market over the last 18 months when we should have "taken our medicine" earlier and allowed nature to take its natural course. (Presumably, Todd is not one who would be swallowing that medicine himself, being a well compensated television celebrity and all.) Melissa said that it depends on your political persuasion if you believe that, although she didn't explain why. Then she said it was terrifying that Nouriel Roubini tweeted that we are going into a double dip recession --- because of the tweeting not the prediction. Chuck said he likes to tweet.

I don't want to spoil the fun, but still to come is fun with consumer spending, and tax cuts, and people buying big-screen TVs instead of houses, and how small-business owners either can or can't (pick your "expert") get loans. Warning: It's only funny when Digby tells it. In real time, watching it must be like . . . well, let's let Digby wrap it up, after noting that Chuck thanked Ron and Melissa "for the kind of eye-opening conversation that everyone's having around their kitchen tables":

It was eye-opening all right. In the same way that watching a car wreck is eye-opening.

ON A SERIOUS NOTE, DO READ JANE MAYER'S
NEW YORKER REPORT ON THE "KOCHTOPUS"

Charles and David Koch

Speaking of preying on a colossally dim-witted public, David Koch, the front man for the operation, has called Koch Industries, the family-owned conglomerate run basically by his older brother Charles, "the largest company that you never heard of."

Thanks to the company's increasingly aggressive libertarian-themed political and "charitable" operations, which by miraculous coincidence happen to jibe uncannily with the financial interests its far-flung but petroleum-centered businesses, and have included just about bringing the Obama administration down, the Kochs and their panoply of front organizations (two in particular to watch for these days are the Mercatus Institute and Americans for Prosperity), are getting a lot more attention. And Jane Mayer's deeply researched and widely read discussed New Yorker report, "Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging war against Obama," has put them at least briefly in the limelight.

I'm trying to gather some thoughts about the subject, but I really do encourage you to read the piece itself. I can throw numbers at you, and some facts, and some eye-popping quotes, but to understand the scale of the Kochs' campaign to destabilize our nominal democracy, you really need the full accumulation of detail.

Just to give you a tease, Mayer writes about a study released last spring by the Political Economy Research Institute of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which found that "from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups."

Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies -- from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program -- that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus. . . .

Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, "The Kochs are on a whole different level. There's no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I've been in Washington since Watergate, and I've never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times."

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Can our side learn to do TV? If you know anybody at YK, make sure they know that Cliff Schecter's "Going On TV" panel tomorrow is at 9:15am

No, I'm not at the Yearly Kos "do," but this panel is something all progressives should care about. Amid all my inbox clutter regarding YK, one item that grabbed my attention was Brave New Films' announcement that among its people's YK activities is this Friday-morning panel, "Going On TV," led by BNF's blogmeister, our pal--a pal of all progressives--Cliff Schecter.

For years the right-wing noise machine has been pouring megabucks into grooming prospective media proteges to spread the RWNM gospel of ignorance, greed, and hate. Not only are our people at a hopeless disadvantage going up against the pampered right-wing media smoothies, they're hopelessly overmatched by the theoretically "neutral" referees of the mainstream media.

There's a desperate need to begin closing this media-preparedness gap, and I don't need to see a syllabus to guess that Cliff, who's gathered his share of right-wing scalps when the MSM have allowed him into TV combat, has some good ideas to get our team pointed in the right direction, no longer allowing the RWNM and its media allies to control the on-air agenda. One hopes that there will be BNF cameras on hand to record material for a first go at a "TV for Progressives" how-to video.

Meanwhile, alas, it appears that the main YK schedule has the time wrong. The word from Cliff is:

"The new fold-out schedule they are handing out has it right with the 9:15 time (room 10C)."

If you or anyone you know is at YK, please take note.