Maynard Institute archives

BET Scales Back T.J. Holmes Show

by richard0787

Program to Air Weekly as Ratings Disappoint

Election Causes Sharp Rift in Conservative Media

Map Charts Where America’s Racist Tweets Originate

Obama’s Win Should Be Seen as “Profound Watershed”

AP Introduces Spanish-Language Stylebook

From the Editor: Free Coffee and a Redesigned Paper

Four Tips for Talking About Race

FCC Gets Resistance on Further Media Consolidation

Johnson Publishing to Sell Archival Photos to Public

Story Reports on 3,000 Homeless Female Veterans

Short Takes

T.J. Holmes with a bus promoting his show before its Oct. 1 debut. The bus went

Program to Air Weekly as Ratings Disappoint

BET announced Monday that it is scaling back its much-anticipated late-night, half-hour vehicle for T.J. Holmes, the former CNN anchor, from half an hour Monday through Thursday to an hour once a week.

The show launched Oct. 1. CEO Debra Lee said last month the show is “designed to be a mix of entertainment and news and commentary. We hoped it would have been a Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert-type show […]. To be honest, the ratings haven’t been great in the past two weeks. Our audience always says they want this kind of programming, but they don’t show up.”

A Nielsen spokesman told Journal-isms by email on Monday, “Don’t Sleep on BET in its normal 11 pm time slot [averages] 349,000 people [2 years old and older] tuning in to watch Live or that same day.” Stewart’s “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central, which also airs from 11 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. drew 1.6 million during the week of Oct. 29 to Nov. 2, though reruns aired on two of those nights were reruns because of Hurricane Sandy.

Lisa de Moraes reported Monday for the Washington Post, “Don’t Sleep’s” launch “averaged about 400,000 viewers on Oct. 1. And while the Oct. 9 episode approached 1 million viewers, it has never come close to that number since, and subsequent episodes have been known to slip as low as 203,000 viewers. Over its brief run to date, the show is attracting about 50 percent fewer viewers than BET had in the timeslot during the same period a year ago.”

BET built the show around the affable Holmes, who left CNN last December dissatisfied with his weekend anchor role. He told Akoto Ofori-Atta of the Root that month, “My role will be as a journalist. They brought me on because of my news background and for my news chops. I think many people in the black community would like to turn the TV on when they get home or even in the morning to see news coverage about things that matter to them, coming from people who look like them and talk like them. We have a great opportunity to do that next year, and I hope to play a huge role.”

In congratulating Holmes then, Gregory H. Lee Jr., president of the National Association of Black Journalists, likewise mentioned news. He said in a December news release, “NABJ extends our sincere congratulations to T.J. on his move to BET and [applauds] the network for reemphasizing the importance of news as part of its programming.”

However, Holmes’ show was guided by Stephen G. Hill, president of music programming and specials at BET Networks, and not by BET’s lower-priority news division, headed by David Scott. Writing about the show in the New York Times on Oct. 19, Jon Caramanica called “Don’t Sleep!” “a mélange of information and straight talk, with only a few labored punch lines strewn about.  . . . The show’s tone varies widely, from pedantic, especially when dealing with statistics, to rollicking during the conversations.

“. . . it’s building a set of social and political norms that could apply not just to this show, but also to a channel that’s looking to speak with one voice.”

A news release from BET Monday portrayed the change as a triumph for viewers. “The viewers have spoken and due to the overwhelming demand, DON’T SLEEP! will now be expanded to a one hour weekly format allowing for a more comprehensive discussion of the issues and events affecting the African-American community,” it began.

Holmes echoed that sentiment in the release and in a statement on his own website:

“We’ve received so many [comments] and so much feedback about our show.  Without question, the #1 comment has been that ‘Don’t Sleep’ is too short!  [Viewers] felt we needed more time to not only discuss issues but find solutions. I suppose we’ve been doing something right if people have overwhelmingly and consistently been saying that the show should be extended from a half hour to an hour.  So, starting this week, ‘Don’t Sleep’ will do just that.  We will now have an hour-long format to educate, empower, and engage.  This will allow us more time to delve deeper into topics and determine how we can all, in our own way, be agents of change.

“As part of being extended to an hour, the show will move to Wednesday nights at 11 p.m.  This will allow us to do on-location reporting from cities and communities across the country. . . .”

Hill remained optimistic that the show would find its audience. ”  ‘We are very proud of the show, and the platform it has provided for the nations’ brightest thought leaders,” Hill was quoted as saying. “We love the passion of DON’T SLEEP!’s dedicated audience and hope that the weekly appointment viewing of the show will grow that audience.”

(Credit: David Horsey/Los Angeles Times)

Election Causes Sharp Rift in Conservative Media

“Rush Limbaugh couldn’t have been more right,” Dylan Byers wrote Sunday for Politico.

“Months before the election, the conservative radio host made a prediction: ‘If Obama wins, the Republican Party is going to try to maneuver things so conservatives get blamed.’

“And that’s exactly what’s happening.

An “escalating civil war” is “playing out now between moderate and far-right-wing pundits,” Byers wrote.

“. . . But which path to take for the GOP toward broader appeal — doubling down on a core economic and family values conservative message that transcends identity politics or polishing the party’s image by recruiting more women and minority candidates and adopting more moderate positions, particularly on immigration reform — has exposed a sharp rift in the conservative media.”

A map of the location quotients for racist tweets: the darker-green the state, t

Map Charts Where America’s Racist Tweets Originate

“The day after Barack Obama won a second term as president of the United States, the blog Jezebel published a slideshow. The gallery displayed a collection of screen-capped tweets,” Megan Garber wrote Friday for the Atlantic.

She displayed three that used the “N-word” and continued, “There were, both shockingly and unsurprisingly, many more where that came from. And many of those tweets were geocoded: Embedded in them were data about where in the U.S. they were sent from.

“Floating Sheep, a group of geography academics, took advantage of that fact to turn hatred — and, just as often, stupidity — into information. The team searched Twitter for racism-revealing terms that appeared in the context of tweets that mentioned ‘Obama,’ ‘re-elected,’ or ‘won.’ That search resulted in (a shockingly high and surprisingly low) 395 tweets. The team then sorted the tweets according to the state they were sent from, comparing the racist tweets to the total number of geocoded tweets coming from that state during the same time period (November 1 – 7). . . .”

“Their findings?

“Alabama and Mississippi have the highest LQ [location quotient] measures: They have scores of 8.1 and 7.4, respectively. And the states surrounding these two core states — Georgia, Louisiana, and Tennessee — also have very high LQ scores and form a fairly distinctive cluster in the southeast.

“What might be most surprising, though, is the distribution of tweets beyond that cluster. North Dakota and Utah both had relatively high LQ scores (3.5 each), as did Missouri (3). And Oregon and Minnesota, though they don’t score as high when it comes to LQ, have a higher number of hate tweets than their overall Twitter usage would suggest.”

Obama’s Win Should Be Seen as “Profound Watershed”

“Aging white guys at some important newspapers have hit upon a bizarre interpretation of the election returns: nothing much changed,” William Greider wrote Thursday for the Nation. “Peter Baker of The New York Times: ‘When all the shouting is done, the American people have more or less ratified the status quo.’ Say what? Baker seems like a smart enough reporter but this analysis is so stupid, he must be in post-partum shock.

“. . . the 2012 election was a profound watershed in the life of the nation. Whatever else President Obama accomplishes or fails to accomplish in his second term, his re-election is in some ways even more significant than his initial triumph in 2008. He will be forever remembered as the president who opened America to a different future — more promising and fulfilling, more just and democratic than anything achieved in the American past.

“It may be easier to see this if you ask: Who lost? Forget [Mitt] Romney and the Republicans. The real loser was the bitter legacy of ‘white supremacy.’ That poisonous prejudice has endured in political reality and the national culture for two centuries. It still does, though it is now cultivated most zealously only by white Southerners who took over the party of Abraham Lincoln (who surely weeps for his Grand Old Party).

“In 2012, white supremacy not only lost the election. It was a crucial factor in explaining how Obama won. Good for Obama and really good for the American people. Whose ‘status quo’ are these pundits clinging to forlornly? Maybe their own. They have typically belittled the struggles by excluded minorities as ‘identity politics.’ Well, yes, these people intend to be identified as citizens, fully endowed with the rights any other American enjoy. This election confirmed their goal.

“The re-election of a black president is the most precious fact of 2012, perhaps even more significant than his original election in 2008. If Obama had lost, a wise history professor pointed out to me, it would have taken many years, probably many decades, before either major party would ever again dare to nominate a person of color for president. Black Americans understood this, probably better than most of us white folks. So did Latinos, Asians and a whole bunch of other ‘minority’ voters. African-Americans might have had quarrels or disappointments with Obama, but they understood their historic stakes in winning a second term for him.”

AP Introduces Spanish-Language Stylebook

“The Associated Press will launch a new Spanish-language Stylebook for universal use by publishers, broadcasters and readers from all Spanish-speaking countries, with an emphasis on Latin America and the United States,” the news cooperative announced on Monday.

“A small number of AP clients are beta testing Manual de Estilo Online de la AP, a Web-based, searchable, customizable stylebook with a comprehensive list of thousands of the most common standardized Spanish terms, some translated from the well-established English AP Stylebook and the majority written especially for Spanish writers and editors.

“AP will begin selling Manual de Estilo Online de la AP to customers of its Spanish news services beginning Nov. 19, and will mark the launch that same evening with a panel discussion in New York about Spanish writing style. . . .”

The idea came about after journalists from the AP’s Mexico City bureau realized they needed a Stylebook that addressed the complexities and evolution of the Spanish language, Mallary Jean Tenore reported for the Poynter Institute.

From the Editor: Free Coffee and a Redesigned Paper

The Philadelphia Daily News Monday launched what it called its most sweeping redesign in almost a decade.

To mark the occasion, the paper sent Editor Michael Days, columnists Ronnie Polaneczky, Jenice Armstrong and Frank Seravalli and photo contributor Reuben “Big Rube” Harley to breakfast spots around town, where they treated readers to a free cup of coffee and a Daily News.

At left, Days greets a reader at the Down Home Diner in the Reading Terminal Market.

(Credit: Rhett Hackett, Philadelphia Daily News)

 

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