Comcast-TWC: Cutting the Cord

Logo of Comcast Latina: Insigne Comcast (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Comcast, the communications giant that owns NBC, has called off its $45 billion merger with Time Warner Cable citing too many regulatory hoops they had to jump through.  Really, it was all the opposition from government and consumer groups that they couldn't overcome.

Together, Comcast and TWC would have controlled nearly 30 percent of cable subscribers and 57 percent of broadband users.  That's why, to satisfy regulators, Comcast-TWC was willing to unload some of its territories (such as Minneapolis and St. Paul) on other cable providers such as Charter Communications.

When the proposed merger was announced, alarm bells rang in Washington and for those who cared about the future of the Internet.  If the government had approved the deal, the new company would have had monopolistic powers over who got on their broadband and how much they would have charged subscribers.  Which isn't a whole lot different from what's going on now, "net neutrality" or not.

Comcast already has the lowest customer service ranking of any American company, behaving in a way that's reminiscent of AT&T before the government broke up the phone company monopoly in the 1980s.  Well, that's also true of most cable providers whose exclusive rights to serve certain areas have been in place for decades.

Now that Comcast-TWC have severed ties, other possible unions in the communications have come to the forefront.  Charter is taking a second run at TWC, according to media reports.  AT&T is combining with DirecTV, once they can figure out how to explain to regulators how a phone company can coexist with a satellite provider.

But that won't change the fact that cable is becoming less and less popular with consumers, who are sick of paying through the nose for channels they don't want, opting for Internet streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Plus in addition to keeping an antenna for broadcast TV.  The thing is, though, they still have to go through a broadband service--most of whom are owned by cable providers. 

This is what providers like Comcast and Time Warner Cable are facing, and they are losing.  They must either adapt or die, and not be so arrogant about it.  They can't afford to.

Hillary Clinton For President, Take Two

Hillary Rodham Clinton (Wellesley College) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It must have been a slow news weekend.  All CNN and the Sunday morning news programs wanted to talk about was the forthcoming announcement about Hillary Clinton's presidential aspirations, and to speculate about how she would run her 2016 campaign.  That's what most of us were watching while waiting for the Masters TV coverage to start.

And there was Hillary, on a video release first shown on social media that looked like an insurance commercial.  The former First Lady, U.S. Senator and Secretary of State--the woman who's been in our lives since her husband Bill first campaigned for the White House--now wants to be the first person of her gender to serve as President of the United States.

This isn't Clinton's first trip down the campaign trail.  She was favored to take the Democratic nomination in 2008, until a guy named Barack Obama came along and beat her to it.

This time around, Clinton has a clear field for the Democratic nomination, with Obama's two terms in the White House almost up.  Thus far, she has yet to receive a challenge from someone in her own party, and that could be a problem prior to July 2016 in Philadelphia.

The Republicans have no shortage of challengers for Clinton.  Three U.S. Senators have announced their candidacies so far:  Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida.  They are (or were) Tea Party and Libertarian darlings until they decided they wanted to be President.  The GOP wants to prove that they really are an inclusive party, so long as their candidates don't stray from the conservative line.  At least not until a more mainstream candidate decides to jump in.

Unlike those other guys, we know plenty about Hillary Clinton:  The highs and lows of her husband's Presidency, Benghazi and those State Department e-mails that her enemies keep bringing up.  What we have yet to find out is what she wants for the country, and how she would govern it.  She can't just count on name recognition alone.

John Dickerson of CBS (who was just named host of "Face the Nation", replacing the retiring Bob Schieffer this summer) raised an important point on the April 13 "Evening News" broadcast, and it goes like this:  Since 1952, only one party has won three consecutive elections.  That was the Republicans with Ronald Reagan (twice) and George H.W. Bush (once) in the 1980s.  President Obama has won twice.  Will Hillary Clinton be third time lucky for the Democrats?  Or will voters decide to give whoever represents the GOP another chance?

Hillary Clinton: "Reply All" to E-Mailing It In

Official portrait of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In politics, as in anything else, your name is your brand.  It can be a blessing or a curse, especially if you are part of a family dynasty that's had a mixed record of public service and has had trouble escaping scandal (See:  the Bushes and the Kennedys).

Take Hillary Clinton, who has yet to announce her intentions about running for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, though most assume it's forthcoming.  We've known Clinton as a First Lady to her two-term president husband.  She's been a U.S. Senator, a Secretary of State, and a past presidential candidate.  An impressive resume, no?

But there have also been those missteps that put doubt in people's minds that Clinton could handle the most important job in the world (beyond answering that 3 a.m. phone call), which is usually planted by Republicans who have no use for her except as a punching bag for their supporters.

During the White House years, it was Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky, the ones that came close to torpedoing husband Bill's presidency.  When Clinton was Secretary of State, it was the terrorist attack at Benghazi and her seemingly nonchalant reaction to it, which got the GOP's collective undies in a bunch that persists to this day.

This time around, it's for something else Clinton did while she was at the State Department.  She had a private e-mail account on her own server instead of using the government's.  Out of the more than 60,000 messages she says she created, half of them that were deemed unimportant were deleted.

People do dumb things.  Downplaying the seriousness of your actions is one of them.  For Clinton, who said she used her own account for the sake of convenience, she must have forgotten that most people use at least two e-mail accounts, one for personal use and the other for business.  For obvious reasons, the business account should be the most secure one in Clinton's former line of work. 

Isn't it also possible that, with all the concern about the privacy of the Internet, Clinton's making a point about the vulnerability of government communications and how they could easily be hacked?

Clinton is the prohibitive favorite to win the Democratic nomination, should she decide to run.  So what happens if, for some reason, she doesn't?  The Democrats, who seem to have put all their eggs in Clinton's basket, seriously need a Plan B because right now they don't really have one.

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts?  A popular choice, but she's made too many enemies on Wall Street to be a viable candidate.  Joe Biden?  Sure, he's Vice President.  But he's also a loose cannon.  Maybe they could persuade Michelle Obama to run?

If Hillary Clinton wants to be the first elected female President, she has to stop making these stupid mistakes that do nothing but earn GOP ridicule and prompts everyone else to question her judgement.  Owning up to them is a start.  Because without her, the Democrats are in big trouble for 2016.

Random Thoughts 2015, Volume 1

Bill O'Reilly at the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia, September 30, 2010 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Hillary Clinton used a private e-mail account when she was Secretary of State.  What does this tell us about how the government handles its e-mails?

The Federal Communications Commission declares the Internet to be a utility and sides with net neutrality, which means that the Comcasts of the world can't push its favorite sites onto a faster lane than everyone else.  Be careful what you wish for, because this is the FCC we're talking about.

The same Republican Congress that held the Department of Homeland Security's budget hostage saw no problem in inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak before a joint session, without the White House's blessing.  Putting politics before public safety is just par for the course for these guys.

Groups who threaten to blow up civilian targets such as shopping malls, even if they're just bluffing, are enough to keep many potential customers at home.  Same goes for those who believe their Second Amendment rights allow them to carry weapons that have more firepower than the police has, defending themselves against those who are likely to be wearing their bombs.

President Obama has vetoed the Keystone XL oil pipeline.  So which would you rather have?  A pipeline drawing oil from Canada that might rupture and cause untold environmental damage?  Or having oil delivered from North Dakota on aging trains and rail lines, causing explosions resulting in deaths and even more environmental damage?  But hey, anything to ensure more jobs and cheaper gas prices, right?

Bill O'Reilly is not going to lose his TV job just because his telling of how he covered the Falkland Islands War of 1982 as a CBS correspondent differed from anyone else's.  O'Reilly works for Fox News, a trusted source for Republicans and anyone else who doesn't care about being informed.  To paraphrase an old ad slogan:  You expect less from Fox News.  And you get it.

In a new series of promos for WCCO-TV, anchors Frank Vascellaro and Amelia Santaniello sound like they're claiming their station to be the King of Local News.  They're more like court jesters.

We don't know if Dick Chapman, the former WCCO-AM personality who recently passed away, was the first local media person to pronounce the name of Bemidji, Minnesota as "BER-midji" instead of  "BEM-idji".  But now that we're hearing some local media yokels who didn't originally come from the Gopher State pronounce Bemidji the Chapman way, this really needs to stop because it's annoying as hell.  What has Bemidji done to deserve this?

A Little League baseball team from Chicago is stripped of its U.S. championship because they used players from outside its area.  A Minnesota high school won a dance team championship despite allegations of their plagiarizing the moves of another team in Utah, while their opponents stood to one side and refused to accept their consolation trophies.  We lay blame on the adults for manipulating the kids into situations like these.  But how much of it is the kids' fault, and why are they never blamed?  Is that how they think they can get away with anything in life, including murder?

Leonard Nimoy (1931-2015) played a pointy-eared scientist from a distant planet on a celebrated science-fiction TV series, and it defined him for the rest of his life.  Fortunately, Nimoy was talented enough to succeed in other forms of acting and directing so that he could live long and prosper on this planet without always being tagged as the guy with the pointy ears.  Now he belongs in another dimension.

Oscar Night Was For The Birds, Man.

English: Neil Patrick Harris at the 1st Streamy Awards in 2009. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The 87th Academy Awards, held Sunday night at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles, went on for nearly four hours, with a lower-than-usual TV audience sitting through three hours of minor awards and montages just to get to the major awards.  But it wouldn't be the Oscars without the bloat, right?

The big winner was "Birdman, or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance" (and we're only going to mention this once), which starred Michael Keaton as a washed-up comic book movie hero attempting a Broadway comeback.  It took home four Oscars, including Best Picture, director (for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu), original screenplay and cinematography.

The Best Actor and Actress honors went to two people whose characters they played had neurological issues:  Eddie Redmayne for "The Theory of Everything" and Julianne Moore for "Still Alice".  And there's your template for Oscar immortality, folks.  Play someone who has an incurable disease.  Better yet, play someone with a British accent who has an incurable disease.

Supporting Oscars went to J.K. Simmons for "Whiplash", and to Patricia Arquette for "Boyhood".  For Simmons, it means that the price of continuing to do Farmers Insurance commercials just went waaay up.  For Arquette, who can spend her newfound capital on working for laws that put women's pay on equal terms with men, she will be going back to TV as the star of the new "CSI" spinoff.

Much has been made of the failure of the Motion Picture Academy to include minorities in the Oscar nominations, giving the impression that there really weren't any noteworthy performances by "people of color" this past year.  To compensate. African-American actors and actresses (some of whom are currently employed by ABC) were used as presenters.  The Academy even threw a bone in the direction of "Selma", a movie about the 1965 civil rights march whose historical inaccuracies hurt its awards chances, with a Best Original Song Oscar for John Legend.  Nice try, but not good enough.

Neil Patrick Harris is a modern day song-and-dance man who has won praise for hosting award shows such as the Tonys and the Emmys.  But he struck out on the big stage.  Lame jokes, showing up onstage in nothing but his underwear, and his "prediction bag" gag all fizzled.  Those "predictions", when they were finally revealed prior to the announcement of who won Best Picture, turned out to be nothing more than what some comedy writer must have whipped up backstage in five minutes.

After Lady Gaga performed a medley of tunes from "The Sound of Music", it's reasonable to ask if she's at a career crossroads.  Gaga no longer has to resort to outrageous behavior for folks to see that she has the pipes to carry off jazz tunes (see Tony Bennett) and show tunes.  Maybe she no longer wants to be the next Madonna.  She might want to be the next Julie Andrews instead.  Or she can put the meat dress back on.

Someday, the Motion Picture Academy will get its act together and streamline the Oscar telecast.  Cut back on the musical numbers and montages.  Move the craft awards to earlier in the day.  Let the winners talk as long as they want without being rudely interrupted by an orchestra performing on the other side of town.  If they don't do something, the Oscars will be as passe as Bob Hope and Billy Crystal.

Brian Williams and Jon Stewart: A Matter of Trust

Jon Stewart (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: Brian Williams at the Vanity Fair celebration for the 9th annual Tribeca Film Festival. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Once upon a time in America, back when nobody had ever heard of cable and the Internet, a man named Walter Cronkite had the attention of millions of TV viewers as he and his team of CBS News reporters recounted the events of the day.  There was no time for embellishing the stories that were coming from Vietnam and during the Nixon era, nor could they be found hamming it up on the TV variety shows of the day.  At the end of the thirty-minute broadcast, Cronkite would say " and that's the way it is".  For this, Cronkite was considered the most trusted man in America.

In 2015, Cronkite's torch had long since been passed to Brian Williams of NBC News and Jon Stewart of Comedy Central.  An unlikely pair, yes.  Williams, until recently, was a network news anchor in the Cronkite tradition who occasionally appeared on late night comedy shows.  His "Nightly News" had topped the dinner hour ratings since he took over for Tom Brokaw in 2004, and has propped up a news division that is otherwise in disarray.

Stewart, who is a comedian by trade, is a self-admitted fake news anchor whose nightly takes on the world at large and the media that covers it became gospel for those who have been let down too many times by those same media.  He had been hosting "The Daily Show" since 1999, leading the way for Stephen Colbert and John Oliver to introduce similar shows.

But now, Americans are going to have to find someone else to trust.  Williams has been suspended without pay by NBC for six months because he's been caught telling different versions of what happened to him while covering the Iraq war in 2003, claiming that his helicopter was under enemy attack when it really wasn't.  When some of the soldiers who were with him on that trip complained about his story, Williams did an about-face and made an on-air apology.  There are also allegations that Williams "misremembered" tales of other events he covered, such as Hurricane Katrina.

Stewart, who had just mocked the media's coverage of Williams' troubles on Monday, returned the following night to make some news of his own.  Stewart has chosen to leave "The Daily Show" by the end of the year, giving the reason that his contract with Comedy Central was expiring and that he wanted to do something else.  Or maybe it was because the recent Charlie Hebdo massacre had driven home the point that satire is a lot more dangerous than it used to be.

Lester Holt, usually the weekend news anchor and "Dateline NBC" host, will take over "Nightly News" for the time being.  Who replaces Stewart is another matter.  Colbert will soon become David Letterman's replacement on CBS, and Oliver already hosts "Last Week Tonight" on HBO.  A better question is whether Comedy Central should go in a different direction.

Should Williams ever return to NBC, he's going to face a long road back from the huge hole he dug himself if he is to regain the trust of viewers who turned to him for a straight rendition of what happened today. And that should go for all media, because it is always a good idea to let the facts get in the way of a good story if you want to be taken seriously as a journalist.

That should be the way it is.

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On a somber note, Bob Simon of CBS News was killed in a car accident on Wednesday.  He was 73.  Simon had been with the network since 1967, covering wars, the Middle East and the State Department as a correspondent.  Since 1996, he was a "60 Minutes" correspondent.  CBS News has lost a familiar face and voice, and so did we.

UPDATE (6/2/15):  Stewart has announced that his final "Daily Show" will be in early August.  Trevor Noah will take over when the show returns in late September.  As for Williams, NBC is still deciding his fate.

UPDATE (6/19/15):  NBC has apparently decided Williams is sufficiently rehabilitated enough to go back to work for them, but not for "Nightly News".  Instead, he'll be the "breaking news" anchor at MSNBC, a cable network that has seen its ratings and credibility drop after Keith Olbermann left and took the channel's audience with him.  Lester Holt has been given the "Nightly" anchor position on a permanent basis, but he'll be looking over his shoulder at Williams should the ratings falter.

The 2015 Grammys: The Best That Could Be Found On Record.

Kanye West performing in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Back in the 1960s, before the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences began putting its Grammy awards ceremonies on TV, NBC used to air a yearly music special called "The Best on Record".  It was hosted by Andy Williams or someone like that, and featured performers of Grammy-winning songs that had been awarded weeks earlier.  It should also be noted that rock music was barely acknowledged by the folks at NARAS at that time.

Here in 2015, the Grammys have gone back to the future--sort of.  In a three-and-a-half-hour CBS telecast (hosted by LL Cool J, who's taken over Williams' job as the show's perennial host) that was chock full of performances--most of it consisting of made-for-TV collaborations that seldom made sense--nine awards were handed out, with the rest relegated to non-televised pre-show festivities.  What occurred Sunday in Los Angeles' Staples Center wasn't necessarily the best on record.  It was more like the best that could be found on record, or digital stream.

A fellow named Sam Smith took home four Grammys, including Best New Artist, which was more than any other nominee.  His "Stay With Me" also won for Song of the Year (a songwriters' category) and Record of the Year.  Smith, who could be mistaken for any male crooner with a less-than-distinctive voice, earned his trophies despite the following shortcomings:

• "Stay With Me" sounded an awful lot like Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down".  So much so that Smith was forced to add Petty and Jeff Lynne to the songwriting credits, which was part of a settlement of a copyright dispute.
• Smith was outsung on the Grammy telecast by Mary J. Blige, who did a better job on "Stay With Me" than he did.
• Smith has been mentioned as the "next Adele".  So where is his album full of Number One hits that's been played to death on the radio?  Or his next highly-anticipated project a couple of years from now?  That's a lot of pressure to put on a guy.

One major Grammy not won by Smith (though he was nominated) was for Album of the Year, which went to Beck for "Morning Phase".  Kanye West took great exception to the result, almost storming the stage like he did at the MTV Video Music Awards a few years ago, taking away Taylor Swift's moment of glory in support of Beyonce.  This time, West waited until after the show to unload on the Grammy voters for not recognizing that Beyonce, not Beck, deserved the award.  West is entitled to his opinion, but disrupting someone else's triumph is not cool.  Heck, we didn't even know that Beck had a new album.

As for the performances, they varied in quality depending on your tolerance for them.  A brief rundown on some of them:

• AC/DC, who opened the show, turned out to be the only rockers on the telecast.  Unless you count the Target ad featuring a live performance by Imagine Dragons.
• Lady Gaga hammed it up with Tony Bennett, but she wasn't half bad singing jazz.
• Annie Lennox stole the show from that "Take Me to Church" guy with her rendition of "I Put a Spell On You".
• President Obama and a woman who said she's a domestic abuse survivor brought the proceedings to a screeching halt, urging the rest of us to report bad domestic behavior.  Then Katy Perry sang a song that fit the theme.

Maybe someday, the Grammy Awards will simply stop handing out trophies on TV and reward the winners with a prime-time concert.  Those of us who actually care about who won could go online to NARAS' website to see who did, and spare themselves the task of watching the obligatory Taylor Swift reaction shots to almost anything at all.  Only then will the circle be complete.  "The Best on Record" is back on TV.