Last I heard, jokes are only funny if no one gets hurt.

Geoff

Posted at March 4, 2008 12:13 PM in response to Conservatism's Joke On Us

I could join in the ranting about this communication failure, but instead I decided to make the effort to do a bit of research. If this station lost these 9 minutes for a reason other than equipment failure, they should be able to provide a reason. Otherwise, tthis just might be an actual incident of equipment failure; they do happen, especially in the current environment where maximizing profits means getting rid of your most experienced technical staff. So let's start with the most obvious line of approach: who at the station would benefit from this act? We might be able to hazard a guess if we knew who owned the station.

First roadblock: looking at the WNHT-TV website, there is no obvious statement about who owns this station; the logo at the bottom of the page to "World Now" is not to the company that owns WHNT, but to the company that runs the website. Although, in an obvious effort to provide a "balanced story", there is a link to the GOP of Alabama's response to the CBS story on the page apologizing for the lost feed. (You just need to scroll all of the way to the bottom of the article to see that this response is a paid advertisement.) I find this odd in this day where all corporations are very concerned about brand consciousness: why wouldn't a corporation want to admit that they own a given television station?

So I turn to an obvious source for information: Wikipedia. I'll admit that I've been a contributor to Wikipedia for over five years now, but this simply means that I know that the quality of its articles can range from the excellent to the problematic (attack pieces and articles dominated by corporate puffery) to the plain useless (e.g., single-sentence stubs which tell you nothing that you couldn't already guess about the subject). However, in this case, it provides the information I am looking for: WNHT-TV is owned by a company known as "Local TV". Never heard of them; maybe "Local TV" simply means that it is owned by somone living in Huntsville, so I click on the link in the infobox. This leads me to another useful article: Local TV is actually a privately-owned corporation that owns a chain of television stations in second-tier markets. (They seem to be too small to have attracted any attention; are they know to anyone else here?) Even more interesting, Local TV is awaiting FCC approval to buy 7 FOX affiliates owned by FOX broadcasting.

So would the Bush administration be so stupidly heavy-handed to "encourage" their contacts at Local TV to suppress this story? Or was this something that the people at Local TV simply assumed would help their request pass through the process with the least number of roadbumps?

Geoff

Posted at February 25, 2008 12:56 PM in response to Today's Must Read