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Turks Angry Over Dearth of Protest Coverage by Established Media

June 6, 2013 by Leave a Comment

As protesters took to the streets of Istanbul and other cities, confronting security forces wielding water cannons, plastic bullets and tear gas, the leading Turkish television channels stuck with scheduled programming: a cooking show, a nature documentary, even a beauty pageant. To find out what was going on — and, the government maintains, to fuel the violence — Turks turned to Twitter and other social media.

On Wednesday came the backlash. The semiofficial Anatolia news agency said the police had detained 25 people on suspicion of using Twitter to incite crime. The arrests underline Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s antipathy for social media, which he denounced on Sunday as “the worst menace to society.”

Mr. Erdogan singled out Twitter for what he called its role in escalating protests that began last week in Taksim Square in Istanbul and quickly spread to other cities, saying, “The best examples of lies can be found there.”

Critics of the government acknowledged that misinformation flourished on Twitter and other social media, with incorrect reports that the crackdown had resulted in large numbers of deaths, and digitally altered photos said to be of victims.

But they added that the rumors spread because the established news media were guilty of a lie of omission.

“Of course there is a dark side to Twitter,” said Asli Tunc, a media professor at Istanbul Bilgi University. “But if the mainstream media had done their job better, there would be less of this.”

As the protests escalated during the weekend, some demonstrators redirected their anger toward media organizations. On Sunday, hundreds of people gathered outside the offices of one broadcaster, HaberTurk TV; on Monday, a larger protest took place at another channel, NTV, with employees of the channel joining in.

On Tuesday, Cem Aydin, chief executive of Dogus Media Group, the parent company of NTV, apologized to viewers for the channel’s lack of coverage in the early days of the protest.

“Our audience feels like they were betrayed,” he said in a video of a speech to NTV employees, which was posted on the channel’s Web site. “Our professional responsibility is to report everything in the way it happens. The pursuit of balance within the imbalanced environment affected us, as it did the other media outlets.”

“We owe you and our audience an apology,” he added.

For a country with democratic elections, Turkey has a robust tradition of suppressing free speech, on the Internet and in the mainstream media. A World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders, an advocacy group based in Paris, ranks Turkey a lowly 154th among 179 nations.

From 2007 to 2010, YouTube was repeatedly blocked after videos insulting Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the first president of Turkey, were posted on the site. Dozens of journalists have been jailed in recent years, including many who have been accused of aiding terrorism by interviewing Kurdish separatists.

Still, there appear to be differences between the Turkish government’s response to the protests and the communications crackdowns employed by authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes during the Arab Spring, when several governments suspended Internet or mobile phone service in an effort to stop the spread of rebellion.

An executive of one leading Western Internet company, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that since the protests began in Turkey, there had been no sign of the government moving to cut off access to leading Web platforms like Twitter or Facebook, though some residents complained of sporadic outages of both.

Yet analysts say indirect censorship is widespread, with journalists operating in a climate of fear. Many of the leading Turkish newspapers and television broadcasters are owned by conglomerates with holdings in businesses like construction, where government contracts are an important source of revenue.

“If you are a company in construction that is trying to get government tenders, you are probably going to be careful about what you let your media company say,” said Didem Akyel Collinsworth, a Turkey analyst at the International Crisis Group, an organization based in Brussels that works to defuse international disputes.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/world/middleeast/turks-angry-over-dearth-of-protest-coverage-by-established-media.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Political Memo: Lines Blur in Populist vs. Capitalist Debate — Political Memo

January 15, 2012 by Leave a Comment

President Obama will seek re-election vowing to rein in one of them: Wall Street. Mitt Romney will focus on the other: Washington.

Mr. Romney made that clear Tuesday night in a forceful speech claiming victory in the New Hampshire primary. Before racing to South Carolina to continue battling his Republican rivals, his remarks outlined competing visions of opportunity, fairness and blame that could polarize the 2012 election. “The president puts his faith in government,” he said. “We put our faith in the American people.”

In some ways, that’s familiar partisan boilerplate; “trust the people” was a signature phrase of Bob Dole’s unsuccessful challenge to President Bill Clinton in 1996. But the tumultuous events of the last four years have lent new resonance to the debate, even as the evolving Republican and Democratic coalitions have made it more complex.

On the Democratic side of that debate, President Obama last month blamed “you’re-on-your-own economics” for allowing corporations to seek cheaper workers overseas, hold down wages at home, exploit consumers and fuel income inequality by lavishing compensation on top executives.

He called for a 21st-century version of Theodore Roosevelt’s progressive movement that would raise taxes on the wealthy to finance job-creating improvements in infrastructure, education and scientific research. Mr. Obama’s view draws strength from voters’ antipathy toward a Wall Street culture that prospered while Main Street struggled — and then received a taxpayer bailout.

Tuesday night was Mr. Romney’s rejoinder. “The middle class has been crushed,” he declared. But drawing on controversies over economic stimulus, bailouts and health legislation, he identified a dramatically different set of villains.

Mr. Romney blamed a “bigger, more burdensome and bloated” government that racked up debt and damaged the nation’s credit rating. He attacked “job-killing regulations,” “ever-increasing government checks and cradle-to-grave assurances that government will always be the solution.”

“President Obama wants to put free enterprise on trial,” he said. “I will offer the American ideals of economic freedom a clear and unapologetic defense.”

That contrast recalls fights from earlier generations pitting business-friendly Republicans against populist Democrats. But shifts in the political landscape have blurred some of those lines, potentially complicating the general election and Mr. Romney’s upcoming primary battles in South Carolina and Florida.

Democrats have made inroads in recent elections among affluent, well-educated voters. Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign captured the majority of voters earning more than $200,000 and raised more than $90 million from the securities, finance, hedge fund and banking industries.

Republicans have bolstered their support among the sorts of middle and working-class voters who call themselves conservative Christians and identify with the Tea Party. And in 2008 Senator John McCain got more votes among whites earning less than $50,000 than Mr. Obama.

That’s why Mr. Romney’s approach might pose a risk. A Pew Research Center survey identified financially-squeezed “disaffected” voters as a Republican-leaning constituency; just 21 percent of them agreed that “most corporations make a fair and reasonable profit.”

Those are precisely the sorts of voters that Mr. Romney’s rivals are appealing to in South Carolina’s Jan. 21 primary by attacking his career at Bain Capital. Newt Gingrich accused Mr. Romney of having “looted” companies that Bain acquired at workers’ expense; Gov. Rick Perry of Texas likened Bain to “vultures.”

Mr. Obama’s political team has offered overlapping attacks — with much more to come in the fall. And that’s why some conservatives see danger in Mr. Romney’s complaint on Tuesday night that Mr. Obama practices a “bitter politics of envy” marked by “resentment of success.”

“Careful, Mitt,” tweeted the conservative writer Ramesh Ponnuru during Mr. Romney’s speech. “Don’t want to insinuate that people only oppose you because they resent your success.”

Mr. Romney has reached out to such working-class Republicans by promising a crackdown on China’s trade practices and a tough stance against illegal immigration. He didn’t mention either in Tuesday night’s speech. But he did offer a cultural appeal reminiscent of the way another Republican patrician, George Bush, used symbols like the American flag to make patriotism a wedge issue in his 1988 presidential campaign.

“President Obama wants to fundamentally transform America,” Mr. Romney said. “We want to restore America to the founding principles that made this country great. He wants to turn America into a European-style social welfare state.  We want to ensure that we remain a free and prosperous land of opportunity.

“This president takes his inspiration from the capitals of Europe; we look to the cities and small towns of America.”

Democrats consider that formulation a device to suggest that Mr. Obama is somehow less than fully American.

Framing Mr. Obama’s goal as an “entitlement society” capitalizes on the sense of grievance among many middle-income voters that government takes their money in taxes to distribute it to others who don’t deserve it.

“There’s a bias against welfare for the poor,” said Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute. “The middle class largely believes they earned their benefits.”

Dramatic oratory aside, Messrs. Romney and Obama are seeking ways to position themselves as reasonable centrists in a general election. Mr. Obama on Wednesday announced that he will offer new business tax breaks for companies that return jobs to the United States. Mr. Romney has defended Social Security against Mr. Perry’s ideas for transforming it, and criticized Mr. Gingrich for suggesting a weakening of child labor laws.

As he straddled the divide between business and working-class Republicans in his speech on Tuesday night, Mr. Romney even echoed some of the unifying rhetoric that was Mr. Obama’s earliest political hallmark.

“In these difficult times, we cannot abandon the core values that define us as unique,” Mr. Romney said. “We are one nation, under God.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 14, 2012

A Political Memo article on Thursday about Mitt Romney’s speech after his New Hampshire primary victory on Tuesday quoted incorrectly from one of his comments. Referring to President Obama, Mr. Romney said, “He wants to turn America into a European-style social welfare state” — not “a European-style entitlement society,” which is how the statement was rendered in the text of the speech released by the Romney campaign.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=4ff8d1ff9c5dc37cdc96fcaf40e76658

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: , ,

Cable TV Fee Disputes Cause a Few Blackouts

January 2, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Viewers are being caught in the cross-fire as television stations argued for higher fees from cable and satellite distributors in a system called retransmission consent. Scores of distribution deals were set to expire on Saturday night.

On Sunday, however, there were almost no reports of station blackouts. As is normally the case, the warnings in public were superseded by successful negotiations in private.

But in New York, at least, there was one prominent blackout on Sunday, though it involved a cable channel, MSG, not a broadcast station. MSG Networks, which carries New York Knicks games and other sporting events, was taken off Time Warner Cable’s system at midnight as a dispute continued between the two companies.

“Other than MSG, a quiet New Year’s,” said Alex Dudley, a spokesman for Time Warner Cable in New York. He said of MSG Networks, “We’re waiting for them to come back to the table.”

MSG countered in a statement early Sunday morning, “We certainly hope Time Warner Cable returns to the negotiating table and reconsiders our good-faith proposals.”

Time Warner Cable also has a continuing retransmission dispute with a station in Corpus Christi, Tex. A Fox-owned station in Atlanta was blacked out in north Georgia on Sunday in a dispute with a small television operator there. In parts of rural Virginia, an ABC affiliate was blacked out in a similar dispute.

With millions of dollars at stake, such issues are not likely to go away quickly. If the online comments from customers are any indication, the lasting effect of these fights may be public antipathy for both the programmers and the distributors — potentially a costly outcome at a time when both sides are worried about the prospect of Internet alternatives to monthly TV subscriptions.

The retransmission consent system has come under scrutiny in recent years from lawmakers and regulators; the Federal Communications Commission signaled last year that it would consider making changes to the rules that govern the process.

The local stations that benefit from the process assert that the occasional blackouts that do happen overshadow the hundreds that do not.

“These agreements invariably get done because there’s enormous incentive for both sides to do a deal,” Dennis Wharton, a spokesman for the stations’ trade group, the National Association of Broadcasters, said Sunday.

“Yes,” he said, “there are often threats and overheated rhetoric, but you’ll find that almost every retransmission consent deal gets successfully concluded. Think of these as marriages and carriages of convenience.”

Television viewers have little visibility into the deals themselves. In fact, it is hard to assess how many such deals were struck last week because they mainly happen in secret.

“Just because ‘deals got done’ does not mean the market is working or that the market isn’t saturated with anticompetitive conduct by broadcasters,” said Matthew M. Polka, chief executive of the American Cable Association, which represents small cable operators. He noted that major networks were insisting on sharing in the fees that stations received from distributors.

“Instead of making investments in their news and public affairs programming, TV stations send their retransmission consent fees to the networks to help pay off the burden of extravagant contracts with professional sports leagues,” he said.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=29d01b8ddf52d6f2f1ea1773816b8731

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‘The Five’ Rises on Fox News, in Glenn Beck’s Shadow

December 26, 2011 by Leave a Comment

So, about a week and a half before Mr. Beck signed off, Mr. Ailes wrote the words “The Five” on a piece of paper. Looking to the ABC talk show “The View” and to the time of day as inspiration, he pictured five co-hosts who could argue about the day’s top stories without feeling antipathy for one another. When announced on June 30, Mr. Beck’s last day, “The Five” seemed to be a temporary fix — even to the co-hosts, who were initially told they were just trying out for a weekend show.

But the show has stuck and has become a permanent part of the network’s lineup. The show’s ratings, though generally not as high as Mr. Beck’s, are growing. And most important, the advertisers that had shunned Mr. Beck are coming back to the time slot.

Of Mr. Beck, Roger Domal, the vice president for eastern ad sales at Fox News, said, “I think that his ratings provided us, unfortunately, with empty calories.” In mid-2009, groups lobbied advertisers to boycott Mr. Beck’s broadcast after he called President Obama a racist, making the show “basically something that we could not monetize,” Mr. Domal said.

Now, on “The Five,” he said, “there are no issues at all; the program has a full complement of ads.”

The surprise success of “The Five” gives Fox News, a unit of News Corporation, a stable schedule in a presidential election season that has played out largely on its own airwaves. Fox remains the country’s most-watched cable news channel by far, with more than a million viewers at any given time, though it is down about 4 percent this year from its audience levels last year.

“The Five” is shown at a crucial time — 5 p.m. Eastern — that acts as a transition between daytime and prime time. Of the seven rotating hosts, the five regulars are Greg Gutfeld, who also helms the overnight show “Red Eye”; Eric Bolling, who also has a show on the Fox Business Network; the former Bush administration spokeswoman Dana Perino; the conservative columnist Andrea Tantaros; and the Mondale campaign manager and Fox analyst Bob Beckel.

Two others, Juan Williams and Kimberly Guilfoyle, sometimes sub in.

“We genuinely get along inside and out,” Mr. Gutfeld said in an interview last week. “When it gets too heated, you can tell that we feel bad about it afterwards.”

Said Mr. Beckel in a separate interview, “It’s like seeing a family at Thanksgiving come home and argue about politics, but you know that everybody loves each other.”

When Mr. Beck joined Fox in January 2009, he more than doubled the 5 p.m. time slot’s ratings, sometimes drawing as many as three million viewers. But love didn’t exactly radiate from the time slot. He spurred controversy — with the “racist” remark and many others — and eventually fell out of favor with Fox, so it came as no surprise when the two sides mutually agreed to split up. Mr. Beck is now hosting a daily show on GBTV, an Internet channel that costs $5 to $10 a month.

In his final month on Fox, Mr. Beck had an average of 1.6 million viewers; the following month, “The Five” had fewer than 1.3 million.

It has steadily gained audience share since then, and in mid-September Mr. Ailes made the show permanent. So far this month it had 1.6 million daily viewers, matching Mr. Beck’s final numbers for the first time.

“Not having a host, just in and of itself, is a departure for cable news,” said Mr. Beckel, who commutes to New York weekly from Washington to be on the show. Viewers, he said, “are looking all day long at cable news and they’re seeing guest, host, guest, host — and this is a departure from that.”

Conservative opinions and themes are front and center on the show, as they are on virtually all of Fox’s opinion programs. Blogs took notice this month when Mr. Bolling asked, halfway into the show, “Guys, why are we doing our third segment on, like, beating up Newt Gingrich or trashing Donald Trump? Where’s the segment on Obama’s socialist economy, isn’t working? Where’s the section on guns or unions?”

“You’re going through withdrawal,” Mr. Beckel answered, adding that “about every other segment on every other show is” about Mr. Obama.

Mr. Beckel said in an interview, however, that he did not feel outmatched on the show, in part because “a big chunk of the show is not about politics.”

Added Ms. Perino in a separate interview, “We’re very mindful about keeping the show fresh.”

Ms. Perino, who was commuting to New York like Mr. Beckel, recently decided to move to the city with her husband. She said she often gets stopped in public by viewers. “Usually,” she said, “I get asked, ‘Does Bob Beckel really believe those things he says?’ ”

Brian Krason, a grant writer who lives outside Boston and who calls himself an ex-conservative, watches the show in part for that reason.

Mr. Beckel, Mr. Krason said, challenges and sometimes even changes his views.

“The appeal of the show for me is that it is truly balanced in its reporting,” he said. “Although it is really four conservatives and one liberal, Bob Beckel keeps the others in line and corrects the facts when needed.”

Production of “The Five” has been assigned to John Finley, the longtime producer of Sean Hannity’s 9 p.m. talk show on the network, and there are some similarities between the two. On Mr. Hannity’s show, there is a segment called the “Great American Panel” with three rotating guests.

“The Five” and several lower-rated talk shows that started on MSNBC this year are representative of a continued shift on cable to talk about the news and away from actual news reports.

“People know what the news is,” said Mr. Domal, the ad sales executive. “You’re not coming to cable news for news anymore. You’re coming for either validation of your opinion or you’re looking to find out what the other side is saying.”

It is, he said, analogous to the debates that break out on peoples’ Facebook walls.

“It’s almost like we’re social media, live,” he said. “They’re just talking to each other. They’re just posting.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=6748536f33a44b10925f951c49b836b3

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Economic View: To Rethink Government, Start Close to Home — Economic View

December 11, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Some of the antipathy may stem from fancy economic theories that say free markets magically render government unnecessary. But much more of it surely results from the annoying experiences that many Americans have had in government offices.

High on many lists of miserable places to spend an afternoon is the local office of the department of motor vehicles.

For decades, people have complained of long lines and rude service at D.M.V. offices all over the country. There’s a widespread impression that D.M.V. employees consider their customers’ time worthless.

One blogger, for example, described a visit to a rural Ohio motor vehicle office where he ignored the “take a number” sign, since he was the only customer in the room. When he approached the counter, the clerk glared at him and sternly ordered him to take a number. He dutifully complied, adding that “as soon as I sat down, she called out, ‘One!’ ” “That’s me!” he responded, and only then did she deign to scrutinize his forms.

After countless experiences like these, is it any wonder that many people believe that government is the problem and not the solution, as President Ronald Reagan contended in his first inaugural address? In the years since, increasingly harsh antigovernment rhetoric has dominated American public discourse: All taxation is theft! Starve the beast! Or, in Grover Norquist’s memorable words, we should downsize government enough to “drown it in the bathtub.”

Yet no society can prosper without government. Without collective action, how could we defend ourselves, or enforce property rights, or build and maintain public infrastructure, or curb pollution? And if government is unavoidable, surely it is worth asking whether we can make it better. Some societies have demonstrably more effective governments than others, after all, and some of our government institutions function much better than others.

I stumbled upon an instructive case study close to home — in Ithaca, N.Y., at the Tompkins County Department of Motor Vehicles office. The Ohio blogger could have been describing the D.M.V. I dealt with when I first moved to Ithaca in the 1970s — surly service, endless waits, mindless bureaucratic rigidity — the whole litany. But these days, the local D.M.V. is nothing like that.

For example, when I was selling my car to an out-of-town buyer last March, he said he was excited to complete the transaction except for the fact that he would need to visit his local D.M.V. I suggested that he register the car in Ithaca, where he’d be in for a pleasant surprise. We went together one morning to a harshly lit, warehouse-like building that still seemed to scream “bureaucracy.” There were forms to fill out, and he found them confusing. Though he made several errors, an employee cheerfully guided him through the process. Much to his astonishment, we were out the door with his plates in 15 minutes.

Curious about what had caused this transformation, I called Aurora Valenti, the Tompkins County clerk, who’s been in charge of the local D.M.V. for the last 21 years.

Things were a mess when she first took office, she told me. Employee morale was low, and customers complained bitterly and often. One big annoyance was that they had to wait in one line to have their forms processed, then start all over again in another line to pay their fees.

She discovered that the reason for the separate line was technological: terminals used to process licenses and other forms couldn’t handle transactions involving money. So she negotiated with state officials in Albany to get what was needed to allow each clerk to do both tasks. Now customers wait in only one line. That may not seem like a big deal in itself, but the intelligent use of technology — which also sometimes allows customers to complete their forms online, and not even visit the D.M.V. — has contributed to a quiet revolution.

BUT that’s only part of the story.

Robert H. Frank is an economics professor at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=e82716f48f4c1b621dd66190d9ce27f0

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