Posted on 06/22/2002 10:28:01 PM PDT by Cinnamon Girl
Communication Minister Reuven Rivlin said that he would not object if cable stations request to remove BBC and CNN from the basic broadcasting package, for economic reasons or due to viewers' requests, Israel Radio reported Sunday.
Rivlin said that the satellite broadcaster YES is planning to submit a request to the Cable and Satellite TV Council to cease airing the BBC. Rivlin told Israel Radio that if the request is submitted, BBC officials would be called for a hearing on the matter, and his ministry won't object to removing the station from the basic package, and offering it only as a paid station.
Rivlin's comments come against the backdrop of criticism in Israel of the coverage of the two networks, and recent comments by CNN founder Ted Turner who said that the IDF was engaged in "terrorism" against the Palestinians. Rivlin told Israel Radio that CNN's coverage was "not balanced."
Rivlin is due to meet CNN's chief news executive, Eason Jordan on Sunday, to discuss the network's coverage of events in Israel and the territories.
Jordan said the station has assigned reporter Wolf Blitzer to prepare a series of five programs on terror casualties in Israel, the radio reported Sunday.
Jordan's arrival in Israel comes after threats from cable and satellite companies to replace CNN with another all-news channel, because of its alleged biased coverage and the remarks by CNN founder Ted Turner.
In an interview published last week by The Guardian in London, Turner said the Israel Defense Forces are engaged in "terrorism" against the Palestinians that can be compared to the Palestinian suicide bombings against Israeli civilians. Earlier, Turner had said the terrorists who attacked the U.S. on September 11 were "brave" but later retracted the comment.
The satellite broadcaster YES decided over the week-end to give the pro-Israeli Fox News equal time with CNN. The cable companies are also looking into broadcasting Fox News in Israel.
Rivlin said he does not plan to intervene in the considerations of the satellite or cable companies but "if they decide to take CNN off the basic package offered to their clients, the ministry will consider approving it ... CNN's reports are not only anti-Israeli but also encourage terrorism. If Turner had made these foolish remarks in Israel, he would have been declared persona non grata, and we are considering what to do about the network's correspondents ... [Such reports] would not have been carried by CNN's American network because of the Jewish lobby," Rivlin said.
CNN is considered a relatively expensive item in the cable companies' packages. In the past, it was criticized by Arabs who claimed it was biased in favor of Israel. A lecturer in communications at Bir Zeit University, Ahmed Sief, said: "CNN covers the Israeli point of view and tends to ignore the suffering of the Palestinian people. The Palestinian side is considered less important from the news point of view and the language of the broadcast is pro-Israeli." CNN gives no coverage of the daily humiliations of the Palestinians at roadblocks, he said.
The director of the Government Press Office, Daniel Seaman - who in the past has voiced criticism of CNN - says the attack on them is exaggerated. "There is no need to take the network off the air or to interfere with the work of its reporters here. CNN is a responsible and credible network and we can demand corrections of it. It must not be compared with Arab satellite broadcasts. They apologized for Turner's remarks and clarified that he does not represent the views of CNN."
At the same time, Seaman says that from time to time the network shows a lack of sensitivity to Israeli pain and tends to empathize with the Palestinians. "Our attempts to get CNN to stop calling Judea and Samaria 'the occupied territories' have failed," he says, citing this as an example.
Which will air five consecutive Saturday mornings Israeli time.
I certainly would.
Yes it is. But at least CNN is consistent--unlike many who cheered CNN on when it was pro-Muslim during our bombing in the Balkans. Guess it all depends on whom Muslims are fighting, doesn't it?
Well, the simplest explanation is: If you don't know the answer to the question, then your household's TV viewing habits are NOT being monitored.
The more complex explanation: In most larger TV markets, the Nielsen company picks households at random and contacts them to ask them if they want to have their habits monitored for the next couple of years. If you say yes, they have to send in a technician to add an extra box to every TV in your house. This box monitors what channel the cable box is tuned to 24 hours a day. You're also given a special remote control. Whenever any member of your family leaves the room for any reason while the TV is on - say your wife goes to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee - she has to push the button assigned to her on the remote to tell it she's no longer watching, and then push it again when she comes back. It's pretty annoying, but Nielsen pays these familes quite a bit for putting up with it. No family gets to do it more than a year or two; they're always moving the boxes around (of which there are surprisingly few, perhaps 1000-1500 in the average major city) to keep the demographics statistically steady.
In smaller TV markets, I think they still send out diaries. If you win the luck of the draw, you'll just get a letter from them one day asking if you'll keep a little diary of everything you and the rest of your family watches on every TV in your house for one week. If you say yes, they send you one diary for every TV, tell you the start and end dates, and you just pencil it all in and mail it back to them at the end of the week. For this you are usually rewarded with a clean, crisp, freshly-minted, hot-off-the-press $1 bill. And then you're taken out of the potential pool of diarists for at least two or three years, after which you may or may not get another chance somewhere years down the line.
But as I said, obviously both of these methods involve a lot of personal participation on your part; if you were one of the families being monitored you'd definitely know it. So if you happen to flip past CNN and actually see something halfway interesting, feel free to watch it without worrying; it won't increase their ratings one tiny bit.
I think you're smart enough to know the two giant reasons this argument is false.
I don't know about this. The BBC and CNN channels they're talking about are BBC World and CNN International, channels aimed at a worldwide audience. But there's only one Fox News Channel: ours, the all-American version. I'm sure the Israeli viewers will enjoy some sane, balanced coverage when FNC is actually covering the Middle East, but the moment the next interminably long Elizabeth Smart segment or shark attack story comes on, they're going to be flipping channels like crazy.
Given this new development, now would be the perfect time for Roger Ailes to hit up Rupert Murdoch for the bucks to launch a Fox News International channel. They could work together with Sky News in London somehow to save costs. And since Rupert already owns pretty much every satellite cable service on the planet, no lefty Eurocrats or left-worshipping Euro cable companies could prevent the channel from being made available to the center-right citizens that would love to have it.
(By the way, the latest rash of shark attack stories prove that in the end, the US national news media learned NOTHING, ZERO, NADA from 9/11. For months after that day, both the the public and the media themselves were chastising their reliance on completely meaningless-but-titillating stories to get viewers. So what happens the moment things settle down for a while? More kidnapping and shark stories. The American news media is beyond repair. Only an entire new generation of reporters and producers that think differently are going to be able to revive it. Fox is a good start, but it doesn't go nearly far enough.)
I honestly don't know if they are or not. I suppose they probably can from those customers that have cable boxes, especially digital cable boxes ... but there's no way they can tell what channel a regular cable-ready TV is tuned to with customers that are only receiving basic service that doesn't require a box.
More importantly, even if the boxes can relay back what channel they're set to at any given moment, they have no way of telling WHO is in front of the TV at any given time, or even if the TV the box is connected to is turned on. (My cable boxes stay on 24/7; I simply turn the TV itself on and off when I want to watch something.) I don't know how they sell commercials to local advertisers, but I do know that without demographic information about local viewership (who's watching what shows on this local system? Are there four people in the living room ages 45, 44, 12 and 7 right now watching that channel at 7:45 pm? What are their genders? What's the annual income of the household? etc), the simple data as to how often how many boxes are tuned to which channels is of little use. And this shows in the way my local cable company sells local ads. If you buy an ad on our cable company, it will be blasted willy-nilly across every single channel that offers local advertising slots over and over, day and night, for weeks on end. So I can only presume the cable company simply sells time based on the number of channels and number of times the ads will run? "Okay, $500 and we'll run your ad 3000 times on every channel we've got over the course of the next 60 days. Even though we can't prove it, you know that'll guarantee that every one of our subscribers will end up seeing your ad at least 5 or 6 times."
And in any case, I do know that who's watching what channels has no bearing on how much the cable company pays a given channel for carriage rights. If a local cable company has 10,000 subscribers, and the XYZ Network charges 6 cents per subscriber per month, then the cable company has to pay them $600/mo regardless of whether a single user watches the channel for one second or all 10,000 customers watch it for 6 hours a day. Cable companies pay cable channels for the right to offer each channel to its subscribers, period. How many subscribers take advantage of the offer, and for how long, is beside the point.
In any event, none of this has any bearing at all on the Nielsen ratings, which is what I presume the original poster was asking about: "If I were to watch the occasional CNN program, would it increase their ratings, and thus their profits, even by the tiniest bit?" The answer to that is no.
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