Culture Wars

[17thfabn]

1 hour ago, rmgill said:

Costs eh? Why'd CNN hire a bunch of dufuses like they did under Zucker? Why is Jeffrey Toobin back? Costs? He was seen jerking off on a zoom call. Why is he back? A LOT of what Warner Brothers and later Warner Brothers Discovery did was because of optics, politics and political pressure. 

Costs was a justification ALWAYS. But I saw the rampant waste and idiocy inside the company. Cost was NEVER the driver. They poured money down rat holes. 

At some point a corporation has to be in the black or go the way off K Mart- Sears.

A media company can have "passion projects" that don't pay off. Clearly the political commentators are some ones passion project. I would guess that the cost of a few lefty commentators is small compared to a major production such as "Rome". 

As far as "passion projects" I've wondered what the pay off has been for books by has been politicians, or the multi-million $$$ deal the Netflix gave the Obama's. 

[rmgill]

38 minutes ago, 17thfabn said:

At some point a corporation has to be in the black or go the way off K Mart- Sears.

Yes. And that means that they do what? How has CNN's reputation improved or degraded over the past 30 years? Does reputation tie to how much people watch your channels? Does that then relate to advertiser revenue? 

The More Woke CNN became, the more the company sunk into MORE woke reporting and policies internally. The more it slid in the ratings, the more it did more woke. 

Its like pulling back on the stick of an airplane that's stalling. 

 

38 minutes ago, 17thfabn said:

A media company can have "passion projects" that don't pay off. Clearly the political commentators are some ones passion project. I would guess that the cost of a few lefty commentators is small compared to a major production such as "Rome". 

Depends on if they garner viewership or not doesn't it? 

It wasn't just the political commentary, it was the entire shift of the news reporting to being more and more left and woke. That was specifically the objective of Jeff Zucker. 

CNN was entirely a passion project of Ted Turner. But when he owned it, if you published a story that didn't have 2 independent corroborating sources you were going to get fired. After Ted was sidelined by Warner Brothers in that larger 'merger' it started to slide. 

Again, I will note, I started there in 1996. I quit in 2023. I regularly bumped into folks who had been with headline News from the start. That was Chuck Roberts and not too long after, Lynn Russell. Both were regular people. Chuck Roberts left sometime after Ted was shoved out the side door (2006 was when Ted stopped with the board meetings).  Chuck ended up doing news locally on WYAY because doing the news in newslike fashion was what he was about. Headline News was transmogrified into HLN with more shock content and 

[Skywalkre]

And, in typical fashion for you, that's all irrelevant to what's being discussed.

I was actually off on the inflation adjustments.  Adjusted for inflation Rome was almost double in today's dollars what they spend (~$375 million for both seasons).  Contrast that with GoT, which, adjusted for inflation, spent half that for its first two seasons with better viewership.

No matter how good something is... a studio still has to be able to afford it.

[Ivanhoe]

[rmgill]

2 hours ago, Skywalkre said:

And, in typical fashion for you, that's all irrelevant to what's being discussed.

Only because you don't grasp a bit of the big picture. You're over there talking about that one tree. I'm pointing to the whole bloody forest floor and the roots that are rotten, the damage to the bark, the rings around the base of the trees and the beetles boring into the bark and further. 

I was integral in the move of technology and operations from CNN Center to the Techwood campus.

They compressed the entire CNN Center operations (3/4 of this building's square footage over 14 floors) into the same space that was ALREADY being used for production of TV Shows at the Techwood Campus (here), Some movie shoots and other Turner Property programming. WBD is in a contraction mode. But they Kept spending money hand over fist. 

CNN downsized from more than 6 floors of news room space and studios to 2 floors of news room in one smaller building on the Techwood campus. They've contracted operations from an entire 2 campuses to on campus that was NOT big enough for Turner operations when Ted bought CNN center. 

They ditched 5 Terminal Gear Rooms and 2 large data centers at CNN Center and compressed into extant facilities at TWD. They've moved ALL the tech they can into the cloud. They've got the "Move to the cloud, it's cheaper!" and the downsize everything and off shore it as much as possible, not realizing that they're taking ALL of their content and putting it in someone else's data center and paying rent 24/7/365 PLUS their profit margin. Content THEY own, they've taken the data and moved it to the cloud. Do you understand how Amazon S3 works? And they're paying stupid money for transport costs, dealing with latency and still doing as much as possible with old thick linear broadcast hardware that costs half a million dollars and HAS to be on prem so they're stuck in this weird hybrid model that costs twice as much as either cloud OR on prem. 

They also, in their move to be more woke, drove away all the good engineers and competent folks and are mostly stuck with engineers and staff who can't rub three braincells together. The decisions are on the same order as McD's leadership at Boeing getting rid of experienced builders and going for low cost cheap labor. Warner Brothers Discovery is doing the same thing. 
 

I was part of the lean organization that did more with less, ie the web division. The folks running the tech show are the old school broadcast folks who leverage the cloud in all of the worst ways and gain none of the cost savings from how they do it. 

Oh, but they have PLENTY of woke stuff they spent time and money on. Plenty of money for that. 

On the points of productions that have failed. 
How much has WBD failed on of late? Did you enjoy Batwoman? 

Edited September 19 by rmgill

[seahawk]

Well at least for CNN, this is something that hit every major "news" outlet, as they were big because they usually had the first clips from a scene. This changed with Social Media. Any small operation that will simply share videos from Social Media, will be faster in most cases.

[Rick]

I have not read this on any other major news outlet. The hypocrisy of the leadership of the Democratic Party has no boundaries.  No moral individual would vote for national level Democrats and probably no state and local ones also.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/democratic-operative-announces-party-exit-after-volunteering-dnc-impossible-unsee-what-ive-seen

[JWB]

Sedition

 

[R011]

2 hours ago, JWB said:

Sedition

 

Misleading headline.  The City of Dearborn isn't holding a memorial or fundraiser for Hezbollah, a private organization is.

[urbanoid]

Get rekt, ubisoftdicks

 

[Murph]

Yet another pervert cross dressing school "teacher" (GROOMER/CHILD MOLESTER) arrested:

 

[Skywalkre]

11 hours ago, Rick said:

I have not read this on any other major news outlet. The hypocrisy of the leadership of the Democratic Party has no boundaries.  No moral individual would vote for national level Democrats and probably no state and local ones also.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/democratic-operative-announces-party-exit-after-volunteering-dnc-impossible-unsee-what-ive-seen

To be fair that article spends a lot of time not saying all that much.  What it does say other outlets absolutely have been talking about (just not in the partisan, and frankly biased, way you and others here on TN see the issues).

Big money (either individuals or interest groups) effectively controlling politicians?  Umm... that's not exactly news.  As the woman points out both parties are beholden to these donors at the expense of the average American.  That story is absolutely getting covered and has been for decades at this point.

The Ds forgetting their roots and who their average voter is?  That's getting covered, too.  The pundits I watch have been talking ever since Harris became the nominee about polling that shows swathes of voters, who have historically supported Ds, who supported Biden back in '20 just don't seem to be lining up behind Harris.  At first it was thought, and many pundits still think this is the issue, that these voters don't know who Harris is.  Others are digging deeper and discovering there are pockets of historical D voters, exacerbated by inflation in recent years, who are tired of voting D and seeing nothing change (notably Black men as a group are showing fairly noticeable signs of not getting behind Harris and this is the reason often cited).  Now, this doesn't mean these voters are swapping to Trump.  Rather, the reality seems to be these voters are becoming frustrated and simply stepping back as they don't see any choice as one that will actually help them.  That's absolutely getting covered.

Seriously... all of you jump in and make comments like "THE MSM ISN'T COVERING THIS" and I sit here going... "umm, yes, it is... since you all don't watch it how would you notice?"  Folks need to start paying attention to what is and stop pushing what they want to believe...

[Murph]

This, and its so true:

 

[Ivanhoe]

https://unherd.com/newsroom/why-did-it-take-four-years-to-debunk-the-blac-baby-study/
 

Quote

 

A study published this week in a prestigious journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, makes a claim that’s almost unheard of on the pages of leading medical journals: systemic racism and implicit bias are not the self-evident explanations for a pervasive racial disparity. To be precise: black newborns aren’t dying at higher rates when they’re treated by white doctors.

The study, conducted by a Harvard economist and a Manhattan Institute researcher, purports to debunk a widely circulated 2020 study, also published in PNAS, which concluded that black newborns attended by a white physician suffer a “mortality penalty” and are twice as likely to die. That study garnered incriminating headlines in USA Today, CNN, Science News, NPR, and The Washington Post. It was also so influential that it was cited by Supreme Court Justice Brown Jackson in the high court’s 2023 affirmative action case, in which the American Medical Association and 44 other parties declared in their amicus brief: “For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician is tantamount to a miracle drug.”

 

As always, the demand for racism greatly exceeds the supply.

 

[rmgill]

St George in retirement. 

[Murph]

Well, it is a start:

 

 

[bojan]

Super easy to fake, but would be good if true.

[Murph]

Well the Sheriff shot the judge, and the law won?  But is there more to the story?  Apparently yes, the Judge is alleged to have been sexually abusing the Sheriff's daughter.  If that is the case I suspect it might be a justifiable homicide.

 

[Murph]

What happens when you have gun control:  

 

 

[Murph]

YAY! Go Team Israel!  Keep it up eliminating the evil scum.

 

 

[Mr King]

1 hour ago, Murph said:

What happens when you have gun control:  

 

 

Come on everyone knows that's only because they were racist, unlike the politicians now who threaten to nuke American citizens.

[Murph]

LOL!  Yes, the politicians are pure and altruistic.

[NickM]

14 hours ago, rmgill said:

St George in retirement. 

Is that anything like "Shaka when the walls fell"?

[rmgill]

1 hour ago, NickM said:

Is that anything like "Shaka when the walls fell"?

It more points to a shortage of Dragons For St George to kill, so what makes up a dragon is expanded to include things that aren't dragons....

The your reference is more comparable to "Hezbollah, when the pagers went off."

[NickM]

20 minutes ago, rmgill said:

It more points to a shortage of Dragons For St George to kill, so what makes up a dragon is expanded to include things that aren't dragons....

The your reference is more comparable to "Hezbollah, when the pagers went off."

Picard and Darmok at El Adrell