Did Sinclair buy WWLTV?

Yesterday morning we learned via the Times-Picayune that the conglomerate that owns Channel 4 has been bought by a private equity firm. 

Tegna Inc., owner of WWL-TV in New Orleans, its digital affiliate WUPL-TV and 63 other U.S. television stations, is being sold to a private equity firm in a deal valued at $8.6 billion, Tegna said Tuesday.

The buyer is Standard General L.P., which will take the publicly traded Tegna private.

"After evaluating this opportunity against Tegna's standalone prospects and other strategic alternatives, our board concluded that this transaction maximizes value for Tegna shareholders," Tegna Chairman Howard Elias said in a company statement.

“As long-term investors in the television broadcasting industry, we have a deep admiration for Tegna and the stations it operates and, in particular, for Tegna's talented employees and their commitment to serving their communities," Soo Kim, founding partner of Standard General, said in the statement.

This NY Post story says the deal might still be blocked by FCC because the combination of companies it involves could leave Standard General in possession of more than 39 percent of the nation's TV audience. But there are moving parts to that might get them back within compliance. Here is a Bloomberg article that goes into more detail.  

In 2020, Soo Kim acquired the Bally's casino brand partly in order to get in on the booming online sports betting business which, you may have noticed, pushes a lot of advertising and even straight up content through local media these days. He tells Bloomberg that he's going to fix "uncertainties" in the casino and media businesses by "injecting a level of technology and evolution."

“Bally’s and Tegna have one very common denominator, which is their core businesses throw off a lot of earnings today. Whether it’s gaming or TV, they’re both license driven and there’s limited competition in every market,” Kim said. “But both of them face a little bit of uncertainty due to the internet.”

Tegna shares were nearly flat Wednesday at $22.43 while shares in Bally’s were up 1.3% at $25.72. 

For Bally’s, it’s an aging customer base and online gaming, he said. For Tegna, it’s that those in the younger generation aren’t watching the 11 p.m. news the way their parents did, he said.

“So, how do these very strong but old franchises actually survive in the internet era?” Kim asked. “We think that injecting a level of technology and evolution into the business will be amazing.”

Can't wait to place all of my bets directly over the WWLTV app. 

Anyway, here is another detail about Kim's acquisition of Bally's. His partner is that deal was Sinclair Broadcasting. 

PROVIDENCE, R.I. and BALTIMORE, Nov. 18, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Bally's Corporation (NYSE: BALY) and Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: SBGI) today announced that they have entered into agreements for a long-term strategic partnership that combines Bally's vertically integrated, proprietary sports betting technology and expansive market access footprint with Sinclair's premier portfolio of local broadcast stations and live regional sports networks ("RSNs"), STIRR, its popular Tennis Channel, and digital and over-the-air television network Stadium. Bally's and Sinclair will partner to create unrivaled sports gamification content on a national scale, positioning Bally's as the premier omni-channel gaming company with physical casinos and online sports betting and iGaming solutions united under a single brand. The transaction is expected to position Bally's to capture a significant share of the fast-growing U.S. sports betting and iGaming market.

This is how it came to be that fans of the New Orleans Pelicans watch games over a channel with the Bally's branding. (For now, anyway.) 

It's not clear to me what Sinclair's role in the Tegna deal is. But if it does mean the Tegna stations purchased by Kim are going to be run like Sinclair stations, that's not great news for local viewers. 

Critics have claimed that Sinclair — a company with close ties to the Trump administration and conservative politicians — is pushing its stations away from local coverage and toward a partisan brand of political reporting on national politics.

In new research, we find evidence that that appears to be the case. Stations bought by Sinclair reduce coverage of local politics, increase national coverage and move the ideological tone of coverage in a conservative direction relative to other stations operating in the same market.

New Orleans is traditionally a highly parochial market. And I mean that in a good way. People in New Orleans are generally very interested in New Orleans. They can spot phonies and don't take well to outsiders who get key things about them wrong. On the other hand, as we've noted repeatedly, the city has changed greatly over the past decade. Gentrification has physically displaced people and disrupted a generation of cultural reproduction.  We're not sure what the long term consequences of that will be but it does often feel like nobody actually lives in New Orleans anymore. At least, fewer New Orleanians live here now. 

Couple this phenomenon with the degradation of local news media that's occurred at the same time and it's hard to deny that New Orleans in 2022 is a smaller, less informed and less locally engaged city than it was before Newhouse started its fire sale at the T-P ten years ago. Maybe you really could just flip all the TV stations to Trumpist propaganda and no one would notice.   

Or maybe it's not as bad as all that and Kim's Tegna deal isn't really about Sinclair programming. Maybe we'll just get more gambling everywhere.

QOTD

pic.twitter.com/NCqGa6xXt2

— skooks (@skooks) February 6, 2017

Here's a quote from President Trump, right? 

"I see Chicago and it's horrible.  I don't even want to go there. it's like a war zone. Something thas to be done to get the city under control."

It certainly sounds like Trump. After all, we know he recently threatened to "send in the Feds" if Chicago doesn't "fix the horrible carnage going on" there.  But, no, the above quote isn't another Presidential tweet. It's from Sidney Torres.

A new cop drama premiered on FOX Monday night. The show's premise, "loosely based" on Sidney's occasional dabbling in the faux vigilante business through a series of private "security" initiatives in the French Quarter, dares to ask us what would happen if a billionaire "partnered" with a big city police department and ran crime fighting like a business. Answer: The bad guys would finally meet their match, apparently.

In this promo piece run by the local FOX affiliate in Chicago (the show is set there) Sidney shares his above quoted comments about the Chicago "war zone." He also talks up the great success of his ventures in New Orleans.

Also on Monday, probably not by coincidence, an op-ed by Torres appeared in the Times-Picayune.  I guess I'll post the link  just for the sake of documentation.

 But here's the short version:

1) We gotta run our gubmint like a business.

Also, the success of the unique (and cost-effective) approach to crime we started in New Orleans -- the French Quarter Task Force -- showed that a business-like approach with a fundamental emphasis on accountability and transparency should be a key part of any plan to address crime.

2) There is "unimaginable bloodshed" in Chicago.

3) Drugs are bad. Education is the key. Community policing. Several other such empty cliches while also saying let's not talk in cliches.

4) Also this. 

I regularly speak to young people who have gotten into some trouble. Their eyes open wide when they learn, and I show them the numbers, that you can make more money as a chef than you can dealing on the street corners, and without any of the risks.  

This must be some sort of alternative fact.  Maybe Sidney means you can make better money if you are John Besh or something. For most of the "young people who have gotten into some trouble" a career in food service probably means putting in several years or decades as a line cook where wages in New Orleans peg somewhere between $11 and $13 per hour.

If Sidney has an innovative solution to this conundrum, he isn't sharing it. Not yet, anyway.  Maybe we'll learn more after he qualifies to run this fall.

It's Friday and there's no McLaughlin Group

Maybe we're past the point when that alone is a big deal. But it is strange.

John McLaughlin, a former Jesuit priest, speechwriter for President Richard Nixon and conservative provocateur whose pugnacious style as a host of a political chat show helped usher in the era of impolite punditry, died Aug. 16 at his home in Washington. He was 89.

There was a time, though, (in the very distant past) when McLaughlin's terrible little show was essential viewing in our house. Looking back at it now, the Group was really just a circle of mainstream press hacks shouting superficial conventional wisdom at each other. It was also an early manifestation of the "Fair and Balanced" trope in medial really being a hard tug to the right. Paul Glastris wrote this about it earlier this week. (link and key graph via Atrios)

The show had been on for only a couple of years when I first arrived in Washington, and among the young liberals I knew it was widely loathed, though universally watched. The lineup of regular panelists–Pat Buchanan, Robert Novak, Jack Germond, plus Mort Kondracke or Eleanor Clift—was supposedly balanced. But in fact it pitting three hard right ideologues (including McLaughlin himself) against two center-left journalists, so the left side of the panel always seemed defensive and outmatched—which is exactly how it felt to be on the left in Washington during the Reagan years. Roger Ailes, the Fox News president recently ousted on charges of sexual harassment, is widely credited as a genius for creating the “fair and balanced” cable network, but it was McLaughlin who first figured out the winning formula.

And it was loud and without much substance. And it was only half and hour. After it was over, you couldn't easily go read and learn more or strike up a discussion about it online. This crap was the last word of the week.  But today everyone says it's the internet that ruined the discourse.

Authoritarian zoo

What is even real anymore?

Fox is looking to put a new spin on the cop drama.

The network has handed out a script commitment to an untitled drama based on the New York Times story "Who Runs the Streets of New Orleans?"

The drama is inspired by the article and explores what happens when an enigmatic tech billionaire makes a deal with a bankrupt, dying city to provide a privately owned and operated police force.

Basically Fox is pretty high on the idea of Sidney Torres as Batman.  It's perilous to try to identify the point in time where we fell of the ledge of reality anymore.

Tomorrow the mayor wants some of you to approve a new tax on French Quarter hotels and retailers which will allow Torres to continue his superhero cosplay operation.  (That article says the sales tax pays for State Troopers. But it's part of a package of dubious special taxes for specific security measures in the Quarter.)  After that some state tax credits will subsidize a TV show about it.

Can't pay for hospitals or universities but this we can make happen.

Letterman

I don't mean to bore everyone by re-hashing what's been written all over the internet this week. I know it's just a network talk show designed to sell and celebrate pop culture. But because it was what was on at night when I was first old enough to stay up that late, I watched a lot of it. 

Of the various Letterman retrospectives this one struck the truest chord with me. 

Later in the hour, Bill Murray came out as the first guest and, after a long and characteristically weird interview, performed a sloppy rendition of Olivia Newton-John’s inescapable hit song of the moment, “Physical.” It was a much needed exorcism ritual. I know sorority girls of the 21st century like to dress up in Day-Glo leg warmers and declare it “’80s Day” (so fun!), but if you remember anything about the actual 1980s, then surely you remember how oppressively vacuous most of the mainstream culture was, especially on television.

Here at last, brought to us in the form of David Letterman, was a show that knew that there was a glory to be found in acknowledging the awfulness around us. “Late Night” was counterinstinctive art disguised as harmless filler.

I'm not sure you can appreciate, if you weren't there at the time, how valuable a little oasis of snark was.  It's easy to find and connect with subversive or "alternative" media and comedy now.  In the 1980s, for a kid in his early teens, this was about as edgy as it got. And it was useful. Probably Letterman, more than any other performer, informed my ideas about what is funny. I'm certain I'm not alone in this.

One example of "glory to be found in acknowledging the awfulness around us" was Letterman's (particularly during the NBC years) use of the grime and corruption and... well.. glorious awfulness of New York as a foil. Jokes like these would stoke my imagination about what it must be like to live there.  And I don't doubt it fostered my continuing appreciation for the glorious awfulness of New Orleans as I got older.

Anyway, that's it. You can go back to reading the ten thousand similar posts about this now. 

Why burnout happens

Here's a Guardian interview with Jon Stewart published this weekend. Why is he leaving the Daily Show just before the start of a new Presidential election cycle?

“Honestly, it was a combination of the limitations of my brain and a format that is geared towards following an increasingly redundant process, which is our political process. I was just thinking, ‘Are there other ways to skin this cat?’ And, beyond that, it would be nice to be home when my little elves get home from school, occasionally.”

"Increasingly redundant."  Remember, the dominant fact of life for Americans in their 40s or younger (Stewart's audience in large part) is that wages have been declining for as long or longer than they have been alive.  It doesn't really matter which faction of elites is running the government. Most of us are steadily becoming worse off regardless.

In light of this, it's really no wonder that politics has,  for most people, become a futile circus played for no tangible benefit.  Every election season brings with it another incoherent belching of grievances.  Nothing ever changes as a result.  And the cycle repeats. Even Stewart is burned out. And he's been getting rich off of the farce.

Anyway, here's Matt Taibbi explaining exactly what Stewart means by redundant.

Having watched this campaign-reporting process from both the inside and the outside for a long time now, I knew what was coming after the initial wave of "Hillary the Populist!" stories.

In presidential politics, every time a candidate on either the left or the right veers in a populist direction – usually with immediate success, since the American populace is ready to run through a wall for anyone who makes the obvious observation that they're being screwed by someone up above – it takes about two or three days before the "Let's let cooler heads prevail!" editorials start trickling in.

These chin-scratching op-eds arrive on time every time, like clockwork. They declare that populism is all well and good, and of course a necessary strategy for getting elected, but the "reality" is that once in office, one has to govern.

And since the people are a stupid, angry mob, these op-eds say, and don't know how to govern themselves, the politician will have to abandon the populism sooner or later.

Then there's another kind of "cooler heads" editorial. This one makes note of the candidate's populist rhetoric, and maybe even applauds it as good solid political strategy.


But then the editorialist quietly reassures us that these speeches are all a pose, and that once in office, the candidate will revert back to being the shamelessly bought-off creature of billionaire interests he or she always has been.

Maybe what you have now is bad and getting worse but the people producing and writing about these events are doing okay.  Change is scary, they tell us. Change is inadvisable too. And anyway change is not really possible so don't you worry your pretty little heads about it.  Here, watch us chase a van through the parking lot at Chipotle.  

It's the same script executed over and over. It is redundant. It is depressing.  It takes a great deal of stamina not to just let it burn you out.

Truthiness to power

We're losing "Stephen Colbert" this week.  There have been some fine moments but the ones that stand out are the times when he took the character outside of the show and said things that made people uncomfortable right in front of them. 

Presidents



Media blowhards



Congresspersons 


 

Mike Nichols' beer commercials

Varg went and found all the youtubes.

Duck and cover

Down goes Cantor

That's a link to a "quick take" listicle at TPM.  Most of which is fine.  Except when it comes to this part.

The resurgence of the GOP establishment just took a devastating blow. So far 2014 has been marked by entrenched Republicans wresting back control of GOP from the rambunctious tea party. Cantor's stunning loss disrupts that narrative and puts every incumbent Republican on notice that they may be next. Any comfort from the string of victories for establishment-favored candidates so far in the primaries will evaporate on Tuesday night. RedState.com blogger Erick Erickson wrote, "[Cantor] kept his attention off his district, constituents, and conservatives while he and his staff plotted to get the Speaker’s chair."

That line about "entrenched Republicans wresting back control" was mostly bullshit to begin with; the product of wishful thinking on the part of an establishment press who love "entrenched Republicans" like they do their own mothers.  We just watched 3,000 term Mississippi Patrician Senator Thad Cochran dragged into a primary runoff  last week.  There's no way anyone should assume this is a good year for "entrenched Republicans."

The bright side, if there is one, is that these results are an indication that democracy still actually kinda works... at least within the framework we've allowed it to work.  The House is badly gerrymandered in order to maintain a Republican majority. The same gerrymander also guarantees that the Republican party will always have to answer to its most radical elements.

All of that is by design. But it is a design predicated on the idea that the voters in the gerrymandered districts get to decide what matters.  Some of the things they think matter are pretty interesting.  These would include shooting down drones with rifles, hog castration, and... yeah..  reality TV.

Now, Jindal is embracing the reality TV craze and boosting his profile.

“Duck Dynasty” is back at 9 p.m. Wednesday for its sixth season. Jindal — who was born Piyush but started calling himself Bobby, after TV’s Bobby Brady, as a preschooler — joins the West Monroe clan in front of the cameras.

It should be noted that Jindal became a Duck Dynasty fan only after his hand-picked candidate for Louisiana's Fifth Congressional District was defeated by insurgent Vance McAllister. McAllister's campaign was boosted by an endorsement from Duck Dynasty star Willie Robertson.

In subsequent months, Jindal has taken pains to associate himself with Duck Dynasty also. Jindal stepped in to defend duckperson Phil Robertson when he was under fire for homophobic remarks. On tonight's episode Jindal will present the duckpeople with something called the "Governor's Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence."  This is the first time anyone has received this honor.

Jindal's office has not provided details about the specific criteria for the award or what other businesses have been considered for the honor. The governor said the award would be given out periodically to "homegrown Louisiana businesses" that are expanding.

Here is a preview of the award ceremony.



The point is the people like that Duck thing.  The Duck thing liked wildcard conservative Vance McAllister. Therefore, the people spoke and McAllister knocked off Jindal's guy. And so now Jindal has moved toward the Duck... um... wing of the party.

This is textbook political responsiveness. But it's still pretty calculated.  Jindal would prefer to give out a bullshit award to a TV show rather than cave to any of McAllister's other demands like accepting Louisiana's share of the Medicaid expansion that was supposed to come with the Affordable Care Act.

Will that satisfy the super-empowered GOP fringe base?  Eric Cantor (even Eric Cantor!) couldn't supply them with enough blood.  And so they ate him.  That's the deal the Republicans have made in order to keep governing even though they are a national minority party according to popular vote. Every now and then someone gets thrown to the beast they've created.

Policywise, it works out great for them.  Party discipline is maintained because everyone is afraid of the fringe. The party's rigid intransigence guarantees it wins practically every meaningful showdown with the hapless Democrats.  The whole national program lurches ever rightward. 

Theoretically it should always work like this.

David Brat: Channel your rage at Wall St into vote for me, and I'll punish Wall St by liberating it to shower you with prosperity.
— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) June 11, 2014

And usually it does. Keep the malcontents just riled up enough they'll support you even as you continue to screw them.  That's pretty much been the Republican formula for most of our lifetimes already. 

But still, there's an element of chaos involved that could always make for interesting mischief when a jerk like Eric Cantor has to crash and burn for the cause or when their wildcard candidates get a bit off-script.  Like, for example, McAllister on Medicaid. Or even this David Brat character here.

In his campaign against Cantor, Brat turned every issue into a morality tale about big business cheating ordinary Americans. He attacked Cantor for supporting the farm bill (“Do those billions of dollars go to the small American farmer? No, they go to huge agribusiness, right? Big business again.”), the flood-insurance bill (“Who does that go to? A lot of the money goes to gazillionaires on both coasts who have homes in nice real-estate locations.”), and the STOCK Act, an effort to stop insider trading by congressmen, which Cantor gutted by including an exception for spouses. In his Randall-inspired stump speech, Brat was more worked up about the STOCK Act than anything else. He promised, “If you tell your friends or neighbors about this issue, I will be your next congressman!”

Granted, at the core of Brat’s ideology is an unvarnished belief, one that does not maintain majority support in any recent national poll that I have encountered, that the government should return to its pre-New Deal roots. This is not surprising. He’s a libertarian. But his message, which today is being embraced by Tea Party candidates around the country, is also sharply different from the Romney-Ryan view of limited government celebrated by Republicans in 2012.

For the time being, though, Tea Party populism is boxed in in such a way that it only further serves the establishment cause. But, unlike the perpetually moribund and bought off left, the populists on the right are the only players with even  a slight chance of shaking things up. In many ways that's a frightening prospect but it might also be the closest thing to a hopeful prospect one can imagine right now. 

McAllister really should consider running for re-election.

"Where there’s no dredging, there’s hardly any land loss. It’s an inescapable conclusion."

The political battle over the SLFPAE's lawsuit was featured on PBS last night. Here's the segment.

Fuck it

Welp, it's been fun

The Colbert Report
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Colbert Report on Facebook

Movie time

Thirty years ago this week the World's Fair opened in New Orleans. The Fair was never a financial success but it left several lasting marks on the city and its riverfront. It's also a persistent source of nostalgia for the olds around here.

So gather 'round all you old folks and watch four (four!) freaking hours of fair coverage from 1984 Channel 6.

Hustlin'

The New Orleans poor have always lived by the hustle, eking out inadequate wages and suffering chronic underemployment with off-the-books make­shifts in the underground economy. -- Lawrence N.Powell



It's "Clean Zone" season out by the Fair Grounds.

Another Jazz Fest, another stern warning from City Hall for local entrepreneurs looking to cash in by selling parking spots, souvenirs or other goods.

Over the past few years, Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s administration has taken a strict approach during the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, enforcing laws that say anyone wanting to operate a parking lot on commercially zoned property must get a permit.

A city-issued reminder this week reiterated that position and also warned that police will be “aggressively” enforcing rules against transient vendors selling goods from cars or trucks within the festival’s “clean zone,” a wedge of territory bounded by Florida Avenue, North Broad Street, Esplanade Avenue and Bayou St. John. Signs have appeared near the Fair Grounds reminding would-be hawkers about the rules.

If you read NOLA.com on a regular basis, you'd get the impression that "Entrepreneur Week" lasts for at least six months out of the year.  It must finally be over.  This city of start-ups sure does enjoy sending mixed signals.

As Mominem notes in a comment to a previous post, New Orleans has a reputation for flexibility regarding "gray market" activity. Informal vendors have sold homemade art, crafts, food, hucklebucks, etc. out of their own homes or carts for decades while facing occasional but often light official restriction.

Long before the laws governing gourmet food trucks became a newsworthy controversy, mobile food vendors like this one were frequently found at or near the city's outdoor festivals, second lines, or Mardi Gras parades.



At Mardi Gras 2006, the pirate seen here acquired her bottle of pink wine from the smugglers pictured just over her shoulder in the background.



From time to time there are efforts to rein some of this stuff in.

Here are some guys being cited for unlicensed beverage sales outside of the Superdome last year in accordance with a stepped up enforcement effort.



I took a bike ride through the "Clean Zone" Sunday afternoon.  There were the usual offerings of "Ice Cold Water One Dollar" available but not much other street vending in evidence.  I did happen upon a "for display purposes only" set up of handicraft handbags.  Also there was a guy with a cart full of goofy political paraphernalia including even a "Cliven Bundy for President" T-Shirt.  It's hard to imagine much of that was selling but you never know.



Anyway, so in keeping with the entrepreneurial spirit that makes our city so great, I'm pitching some ideas for local TV production.  Everyone knows the Louisiana film tax credit is the surest get-rich-quick scheme going around here these days.. if you can stay out of jail, that is. Or until the interstate grifting competition finally catches up with Louisiana which could start happening any day now.

In the meantime we need to get these ideas up and available for immediate financing.

1) Name That Decibel.  Contestants walk the first eight blocks of Bourbon Street and guess the loudness at which they are hearing various house bands perform Don't Stop Believin' along the way.  Hosted by Drew Ward.

2) Amazing Race Uptown Teams have to perform a variety of tasks that require them to traverse the many Uptown construction zones. The degree of difficulty increases as afternoon thunderstorms begin to flood the side street detours.

Points may be awarded for ingenuity. For example last weekend our familiar four year old neighborhood sinkhole was finally filled in.



As you can probably tell, this wasn't accomplished through any official city agency. Instead, in keeping with the NOLA hustlin' tradition of improvisation, a free acting community fellow arrived and shoveled dirt into it from the back of an El Camino.



I'm not sure what's next for the sinkhole.  I've thought about putting up a Maypole there but Menckles  has already planted some sunflower seeds so we'll have to wait to see if those come in before anything else happens.

3) Project Fairgrounds Tim Gunn stands at the gate and scrutinizes Jazzfest attendees' outfits for controversial themes.

On Saturday (April 26), Greenpeace flew a banner over the New Orleans Jazz Fest with a message aimed at Shell, the festival's sponsor: "Love Jazz Fest; Hate Oil Spills." For 30 minutes, until several NOPD officers escorted the Greenpeace members out, the protest took place inside the gates.

Extra points deducted for protesters who don't even take the time to match their complaint to the venue.

The group passed out paper fans and post cards criticizing Shell's efforts to drill in the arctic. Two of them held Jazz Fest-style poles that featured half a polar bear's face and half of Shell's logo with a devil's horn added.

A dying Louisiana coastline and its inhabitants  might find that a little tacky.

Any contestant singled out by Gunn will be given a sun hat, Hawaiian shirt, and sandals to wear for the rest of the day.

4) Park That Bike Simple concept.  Much harder than you may think, though.



So those are my TV hustles. If you're in for financing any of these let me know and I'll get you in touch with my agent Kevin Houser.

Bye, Colbert

Yes, of course he can do that job. He'll be good at it. And more people will watch him and he'll make more money and such. So, yay Colbert.

But the job will be of a lesser nature than the one he has now which is probably the best thing currently on TV. That will be replaced with yet another clever guy who interviews celebrities with movies to plug every night.  So.. net loss for the audience.

Oh.. but, apparently, it also means CBS has "declared war on the heartland of America" so that's kind of nice, actually.

The "show about New Orleans for New Orleanians" that isn't actually for New Orleanians

Some of you, for whatever reason, may still actually think about the show Treme from time to time.  It's almost over now.  This means people will be slightly more likely to talk about it for a while.

Here's a short post by Brian Moore which touches on the, by now, familiar criticisms of the show; its slow pacing, its lack of a compelling narrative arc, its overwrought NOLAier-than-thou scenesterism. But this passage, I think, contains the most important point.

The final line of defense is it’s a show about New Orleans, for New Orleanians. There are all sorts of problems with that – since when is parochialism a virtue? – but based on the anecdotal evidence I see on New Orleans social media, it’s my guess Treme‘s not as popular in The Big Easy as some assume it to be. Stack it up against a Saints game and its local ratings would plummet to zero. Around 29 million households in the United States pay for HBO; with disposable income being limited in New Orleans and with all the complaints about a local “digital divide,” here’s doubting many of them are clustered in Orleans Parish. If the show is Simon’s gift to the city, then there’s a certain lack of gratitude.

Treme is not a show "for New Orleanians." It is a show for a very specific upper middle class slice of premium cable subscribers who harbor a romanticized fetish for non-threateningly exotic American vacation spots. 

Anyway Moore's post sparked a long-ish Twitter discussion the other day which caused me to go back and dig up my review of the pilot.  When I posted that a bunch of pissed off people told me to "trust the storyteller" and give the genius time to unravel his narrative or whatever.  But looking back, there's nothing in that post that isn't still true today. 

But, what about our dumb ads?

One particularly amusing aspect of the Saints being undefeated this far into the season is it's time for Tom Benson's TV station to start making little musical salutes to the unblemished record every week.

They're incredibly stupid and therefore hilarious. Especially if you're happy and a little tipsy after just after a Saints win. Some of them end up getting posted online.  Here, for example, is the one from midway through the 2009 season.



Or, if you prefer, there's this one from later that year which had a festive Holiday theme.



I noticed one yesterday for the first time this year and suddenly felt... nostalgia?... for 4 years ago.  I hope it's not the last one we see this season.  There's a fair chance the Patriots could put a stop to the nonsense this weekend.

OR  Benson could just sell the TV station.

NEW ORLEANS —The group that owns one of the nation's largest broadcast companies claims it is closing in on a deal to purchase WVUE TV from Tom Benson's Louisiana Media Co.

The Retirement Systems of Alabama October newsletter includes a short article that notes its subsidiary, Raycom Media, "is expanding with the proposed purchase of the Fox station in New Orleans for $55.6 million."

The article states that the transaction must still be approved by the Federal Communications Commission -- something that could happen by the end of the year.

Update: Benson is denying the story.

Caveat: Benson's word is pretty much worthless.

More Saturday TV

Friday was the 45th anniversary of the Martin Luther King Assassination. The Bill Moyers show this week looked at King and the struggle for economic equality. Below is a segment where Moyers interviews theologian James Cone and historian Taylor Branch. The conversation returns several times to just how much more severe today is the problem King was training his movement on just before his death.

BILL MOYERS: Let’s listen again to Dr. King, from the speech he made to those striking sanitation workers in Memphis just weeks before he was shot to death. What he said about poverty still rings true.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR: Do you know that most of the poor people in our country are working every day? They are making wages so low that they cannot begin to function in the mainstream of the economic life of our nation. These are facts which must be seen. And it is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis and a full-time job getting part-time income.

BILL MOYERS: Could anything be more current right now?

TAYLOR BRANCH: No. It's hard to imagine, and of course, it's chilling to think what the distribution of wealth was when he made that indictment compared to what it is now. It is much more skewed now than it was then and it was bad then.

Here's the rest.


Meanwhile, not helping at all is President Barack Obama who, one day after the anniversary of the abrupt ending to King's Poor People's Campaign, became the first Democratic President to propose cuts to Social Security. Nice going, there. And great timing, too.

Saturday morning TV

Last night, Zack did a good job making the Bill Maher show less of a bore than it normally is. HBO doesn't make the whole show available to the great unwashed non-HBO subscribers. But there are snippets out there. Gambit has one.

Stewart Fail

Actually happens more frequently than you may think. The Daily Show is very good at media criticism. Only fair to occasionally terrible whenever it has to deal with actual politics/policy. This is especially true when it's subjects lie outside of the immediate New York metro region.

More "entrepreneurial" OPP solutions

Andy Kopplin: Gusman wasted FEMA money by building a huge kitchen; he could have used that money to build a mental health facility. #nola
— The Lens (@TheLensNOLA) April 3, 2013

That's pretty sad to waste money on a kitchen like that. Why not make it work for you instead? Inspired by the fact that this weekend is NOFF's FilmOrama and also by OPP's fascinating entry in the festival I'd like to pitch an idea to the Sheriff which might turn into a future revenue source if the ad sales go well.

It's the Prisoners' Cooking Show staring Orleans Parish Prison inmates in their state of the art kitchen.  Fans of the movie Goodfellas will want to see a New Orleans take on one of that film's most memorable scenes. Our show (tentatively titled "Canned Food" or possibly "Can Goods") will run as a series of webisodes produced with a single cell phone camera.  It will explore culinary endeavors far beyond just cooking up the occasional hit of smack. 

Our pilot episode starts with the traditional prison recipe for nail file baked in a cake and "kicks it up a notch" by adding a Glock. Further down the road, we may do a home brewing episode but only after the inmates run out of Budweiser. Further concepts are still in development.