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IWTV and Glenn Beck
to all of our well meaning friends, the article examines online internet versus classical Television.
read carefully and I would appreciate all the feedback.
thanks and g'mar tov,
Mike Wise in Jerusalem
0534288334
Beck Takes His Conservative Internet Shows to the Dish Network
By BRIAN STELTER
Glenn Beck is bringing his brand of conservative commentary back to the television set.
One year after embracing an Internet-only distribution model, Mr. Beck is repositioning his streaming network, TheBlaze TV, as an offering for cable and satellite operators — in other words, TV the old-fashioned way.
On Wednesday, he will announce an agreement with the Dish Network, the first of what his company hopes will be many such deals.
TheBlaze TV, an Internet television network, will remain available via the Web for its 300,000 paying subscribers, including those not subscribing to Dish. But the distribution deal with Dish gives Mr. Beck, formerly a host on Fox News, a new way to reach viewers that may be adopted by other Internet entrepreneurs seeking a way into traditional television.
“Our success over the past year has given us the ability to go on traditional television while maintaining complete creative control and freedom and remaining at the center of the Internet revolution,” Mr. Beck said.
Despite all the hoopla about online viewing and devices to connect the Internet to television sets — TheBlaze TV promised online subscribers it was easy to do — a lot of people still just want to see what is on TV the easy traditional way.
“We’d like to make that as simple for them as possible,” said Chris Balfe, the president of Mr. Beck’s media company, Mercury Radio Arts, in a blog post that will accompany the announcement on Wednesday. The channel will begin on Dish at 5 p.m. Wednesday.
Since Mr. Beck, 48, and Fox parted ways in the summer of 2011, the conventional take on Mr. Beck has been that although he was making more money online than at the cable network, he was reaching far fewer viewers than he was on Fox. There, he peaked at over three million viewers a night.
Mr. Beck, however, asserted in an interview that his company over all “now reaches more people across more platforms than ever before.” He hosts what continues to be a hugely popular syndicated radio show, free over the airwaves, as well as the nightly subscription-only show on TheBlaze TV. Mr. Beck said his company more than doubled its revenue over the last year and a half.
Cutting deals with cable and satellite companies was in the back of Mr. Beck’s mind when he adapted the streaming-movie business model of Netflix for his online network, originally called GBTV. He acknowledged that he was asking a lot of his fans to seek him out online at the outset.
Looking back a year later, he said his priority was control: both the “freedom to try new things” from a business standpoint and the flexibility to “do whatever show I wanted when I wanted” and program other shows from a creative standpoint. Online, he has done that. “Over the past year and a half, we have eliminated every disadvantage to being on traditional television,” he said.
Still, the deal with Dish Network may be interpreted as a sign that Internet distribution alone is not sufficient, at least not yet. And it will make the network more reliant on advertising revenue and less on subscribers.
TheBlaze TV, which revealed several months ago that it had over 300,000 subscribers paying $99.95 a year or $9.95 a month, said that number was still accurate. The online network noted that it had been spending less on marketing lately and more on programming in preparation for cable and satellite TV. Mr. Balfe wrote in the blog post that he had come to believe that the payment model used by cable and satellite companies would remain in place for some time, despite efforts by outsiders to chip away at it. “It’s smart for us to take advantage of that,” he wrote.
TheBlaze TV will seek full distribution in America’s roughly 100 million cable and satellite households, Mr. Balfe said in an interview. “We are in active discussions with other operators,” he added.
It is an audacious goal given distributors’ reluctance to add channels and given TheBlaze TV’s independent status. But Mr. Beck is a boldface name; he has clout, and several other small TV channels have associated themselves with celebrities for similar reasons, such as Revolt, a cable channel led by the hip-hop star Sean Combs.
Along with Mr. Beck’s show, TheBlaze TV also has a nightly panel conversation about the news, a reality show about survivalists, and a show called “Liberty Treehouse” for children — in total, 35 hours of original programming a week.
On Monday it added another Fox-esque talk show, “Wilkow!” hosted by the radio host Andrew Wilkow. The network was renamed this year to bring it in line with Mr. Beck’s other media ventures, including a Web site called The Blaze. “We have gone from a company of one voice to a company filled with hosts, writers, producers and editors,” Mr. Beck said.
Mr. Beck’s voice is still the loudest; he is still a strident opponent of President Obama. His online show on Monday was emblematic: “America should not be made to suffer four more years because some radical wants to experiment with their own Marxist utopian ideas in the hopes that maybe they’ll be the first one in all of history that can make them work,” Mr. Beck said.
Mr. Beck’s network is another way for Dish to distinguish itself with content that is different from that of its rivals, DirecTV and cable providers. This week, Dish announced a deal to be the first satellite provider of the college sports-related Pac-12 Networks. Separately, the company is in a protracted dispute with AMC Networks; AMC, IFC and WE tv have been off Dish’s channel lineup since July.
Joseph P. Clayton, Dish’s chief executive, said Dish had approached Mr. Beck’s company about possibly carrying a show about a year ago. TheBlaze TV will be the first online network to make the leap from the Internet to traditional TV on Dish. “The model works because it’s the right kind of programming — it’s topical, it’s entertaining and it has strong appeal to a devoted fan base,” Mr. Clayton said.
Dish is paying a small per-subscriber fee to carry TheBlaze.
David Shull, Dish’s senior vice president for programming, declined to comment on the details of the arrangement. “This is all about revenue potential, the strong demand we see for the service and the ability to offer our customers choice,” he said.
The network will be available to customers who have Dish’s 250-channel package; customers with lesser packages will be able to buy TheBlaze TV as a $5 monthly add-on, a step toward à la carte programming for people wanting more control over which channels they pay for.
Dish and other providers already sell channels like HBO and packages of sports channels separately. “You’ll probably hear more announcements to that end,” Mr. Shull said.
Sunday, July 29, 2012
Re: askthesource
On 7/29/2012 11:04 AM, Michael Wise wrote:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mju7pDBi_w
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mju7pDBi_w
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Fwd: themarker
-------- Original Message --------
| Subject: | themarker |
|---|---|
| Date: | Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:06:11 -0400 |
| From: | Michael Wise <mlwise@gmail.com> |
| Reply-To: | mlwise@gmail.com |
| To: | 'Joel H. Golovensky' <golo@netvision.net.il>, yuval gat <yuval_gat@yahoo.com> |
http://www.themarker.com/advertising/1.1740380
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media obsession with Israel
USA obsession: http://www.jidaily.com/NplmB/e
New Peer-Reviewed Academic Study Confirms Media Obsession With Israel
European obsession: http://www.jidaily.com/NplmB/e
New Peer-Reviewed Academic Study Confirms Media Obsession With Israel
There’s an article coming out in the next issue of Communication Research that tries to untangle how and why foreign countries get covered by U.S. news outlets in general, and by NBC and the New York Times in particular. The peer-reviewed piece is a collaboration between researchers spread across Washington state and two Dutch universities, and – like all good academic work – has a soporific title, Foreign Nation Visibility in U.S. News Coverage: A Longitudinal Analysis (1950-2006).
The long timeline means that even regional wars get pushed down the list by Cold War and global diplomacy coverage. So the USSR, China, Britain, and France are all prominent because they’re nuclear powers on the Security Council. Germany and Japan show up a lot because we had just finished fighting them and had troops on their territory.
And then there’s one other distant country with which the U.S. press seems to be preoccupied, above and beyond any country except the USSR:
The first step in our analysis was to examine which countries were most visible during each of the four geopolitical eras analyzed. Table 1 lists the top ten most mentioned foreign nations in the NYT and on NBC during the early Cold War era (1950-1973), the late Cold War era (1974-1991), the post–Cold War era (1992-2001), and the post-9/11 era (2002-2006). Notably, nine countries were among the top ten most mentioned countries in at least four of the eight series analyzed. Specifically, Russia (USSR) and Israel received the most consistent news coverage—followed closely by Britain, China, France, Japan, Germany, Iraq, and Mexico.
The authors go on to suggest coverage of Israel is so obsessive because the Jewish State is a close U.S. ally and has nuclear weapons. That’s historically a little dicey – certainly the U.S.-Israel relationship was rocky throughout the 1950s and 1960s – and it certainly doesn’t account for why coverage of Israel is greater than of Britain. But it’s also in direct tension with the study’s actual conclusions, which is that coverage is driven by distance, U.S. troop deployment, economic power, and population. To explain the media’s obsession with Israel, it seems, requires something a little more sociological.
The findings put into perspective the lame excuse trotted out by NYT public editor Arthur Brisbane, which is that the Times gets criticism from both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel advocates and so must be doing something right. Before getting to that though, here’s a sense of the Times’ coverage leading up to, and immediately following, Brisbane’s claim:
* In July, the newspaper published context-less Hamas positions about the history and purpose of Israel’s Gaza blockade, along the way ignoring the announced blockade-busting goal of the recent Gaza flotilla. The flotilla, of course, was the central Israel story of the month.
* In June ,the newspaper published an AP report about how two out of three Israeli soldiers were charged with taking inappropriate snapshots of Palestinian prisoners, a story that Times editors headlined “Israel: No Charges Over Prisoner Photos.” The degree to which Israeli courts punish Israeli crimes has recently become a focal point of anti-Israel delegitimizers, who are attacking the Jewish State’s judicial competence in the hopes of internationalizing trials.
* In May, the newspaper laughingly asserted that “Israelis see Netanyahu trip as a diplomatic failure,” which flew in the face of every Israeli poll but reflected a reality the Times really wanted to be true. Obama’s broadside of Netanyahu and the president’s agreement-abrogating 1967 borders position were, of course, the central diplomatic dramas of that month.
* Also in May, the newspaper editorialized that Hamas leader Khaled Meshal was “fully committed” to a two-state solution. That editorial was an echo of a news story, published just days before, which was from the previous week headlined “Hamas Leader Calls for Two-State Solution, but Refuses to Renounce Violence.” The second part of the headline was technically true in the sense that Meshal refused to renounce violence, but in that story the Hamas leader declared a Palestinian state would not prevent Hamas from continuing to try to destroy Israel – which is kind of the definition of a two-state solution.
And then of course there was the Times’ surreal coverage of the first Gaza flotilla, where the Newspaper of Record asserted that “angry Israeli commandos” had turned “a ship of protesters in international waters into a bloodbath.” That characterization – like the rest of the Times’ Israel journalism – crosses over into bias even if lunatic anti-Israel partisans complain that it’s not harsh enough.
But let’s ignore all of that. Even if the Times is balanced, that doesn’t justify their obsessive focus on Israel, something that has now been verified by an in-depth examination of their coverage spanning more than half a century. The newspaper, along with huge swaths of the media, doesn’t just indulge in anti-Israel propaganda on their editorial and news pages. They do so in a determined drip drip drip way that plays into the hands of delegitimizers. Maybe anti-Israel activists will complain it’s not enough, and then it’ll be alright.
European obsession: http://www.jidaily.com/NplmB/e
Contentions
The European Media Obsession with Israel
Anti-Semitic incidents in the UK have been on the rise, according to recent reports, and that trend has coincided with anti-Israel sentiment. Which is why a new study revealing the obsession that the often-hostile British media have with the Jewish state is worth noting. The latest report by media watchdog group Just Journalism compared the coverage of Israel to the coverage of the “Arab spring” countries—Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia—during 2010.
The group found that the attention given to the Arab spring countries (before the uprisings) was almost nonexistent. At BBC News alone, news coverage of Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia combined and doubled still amounted to less than was written about Israel. At the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph, news coverage of the Arab countries combined and tripled still amounted to less than was written about Israel. Meanwhile, the Guardian published 16 editorials on Israel in 2010 and not a single one on the three Arab countries that were on the verge of turmoil.
“It has been true for many years that so-called Middle East reporting all too often means daily news coverage and criticism of Israel and not a great deal else,” said Just Journalism’s spokesperson Michael Weiss. “Clearly, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is deserving of media attention, but the disproportionate focus on it to the near exclusion of the rest of the region has left journalists on the back foot in reacting to the current political earthquake shaking the Arab world. I hope that the British”
Israel was scapegoated as the root of Middle East unrest for years, while the oppression and corruption throughout the Arab world were largely ignored. Now that the uprisings have fully debunked this myth, news outlets have a chance to refocus their coverage on the rest of the Middle East, instead of obsessing over the single democratic state.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
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