On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 3:47 AM, PGage <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sun, Jan 8, 2012 at 6:51 PM, Wesley McGee <[email protected]>wrote: > >> One of the benefits of following Keith Olbermann's twitter account is >> that you can see him gripe cryptically about the journalists who report on >> him and the stories they write, but without him ever elaborating further >> than "he's wrong" or "he's a hack" and so on. (He will then hide behind the >> excuse that he can't elaborate because the legal, even though if he really >> wanted to present his side, he has various options to accomplish this.) He >> threw a "you're wrong" to David Carr of the NY Times for his commentary >> about the whole thing: >> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/business/media/at-current-tv-keith-olbermann-is-trapped-inside-his-show.html >> >> (He lauded the Hollywood Reporter link I sent minutes earlier, which >> really didn't report much except KO and Current resolved their differences >> for the moment.) >> > > After a long self-imposed embargo, I have been inhaling House over the > last couple of months (I am now 3 episodes into season 7, so no spoilers > please, though I know I have passed the safe harbor for this show and have > no right to ask). It is now obvious to me (as I guess it long has been to > much of America) that House and Olbermann have a lot in common. Part of > what seems to have happened at Current is that Olbermann has lost his Cuddy > (though this is no comment on either Mark Rosenthal's cleavage or ass). > > I can give Olbermann some credit on his tweet to Carr - not so much that > the content of his piece is demonstrably wrong (I think everything in it > has been reported elsewhere, including THC) but the tone is unnecessarily > snarky, and in some cases seems to put the emphasis in the wrong place. > > The real unanswered question here it seems to me is what exactly Olbermann > means by his mantra: "I was not given a legitimate opportunity to host > under acceptable conditions,” (this is such a class Olbermann line). I > guess we can infer that he believes the current state of the physical and > technical facilities is unacceptable - and maybe further, that he has been > trying to get them to upgrade for many months, and thought he could coerce > them into doing so by refusing to anchor Iowa unless they did. What I would > like to know, now that he is doing NH, is have they agreed to upgrade his > facilities, or did KO cave in? > > As a sidenote to all of this, the UK version of Current TV is facing closure:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/jan/11/bskyb-al-gore-current-tv They make most of their money through subscriber fees from Sky - substantially owned by Murdoch. There's nothing to stop them going free-to-air, but without subscriber revenue, they generate little in the way of advertising. Current TV (UK) never carried Olbermann which I thought was a little odd. Certainly it'd have to go out in the small hours, but given that it probably eats such a lot of the mothership's budget, you'd have thought they'd share it around. We have to put up with Piers Morgan on CNN International (with prime time repeats), and we get a simulcast of Fox News (interestingly that's encrypted which suggests that Sky pays Fox some subscriber revenue for it). I suspect that the lack of Olbermann was more that they couldn't afford the satellite retransmission fees. Adam -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
