presenting an award

Media Decoder: Resignation Suggests Rift Between CNET and CBS

2:23 p.m. | Updated A senior writer for CNET, the technology news Web site, resigned on Monday, less than an hour after a report suggested that CNET was barred from presenting an award to a company being sued by CBS, which owns CNET.

Greg Sandoval, a former Washington Post and Los Angeles Times reporter who has spent the last seven years at CNET, said he no longer had confidence “that CBS is committed to editorial independence.” Mr. Sandoval announced his resignation on Twitter and did not immediately respond to an interview request.

A spokesman for CNET also had no immediate comment on Monday.

Mr. Sandoval’s resignation stemmed from a decision made last week to disqualify a Dish Network ad-skipping product from a CNET tradition — the Best of C.E.S. Awards. Promoted as the official awards program of the Consumer Electronics Show, the awards were presented last Thursday in Las Vegas.

A tablet called the Razer Edge went home with the Best in Show award. But Dish’s Hopper could have won it instead — if CNET hadn’t taken it out of consideration.

The Hopper is a digital video recorder that allows users to skip all the ads on prime time network television shows, with a feature called Auto Hop. The CBS Corporation, the parent company of both CNET and the CBS broadcast network, and several other network owners filed suit against Dish last spring. Dish countersued at the same time and asserted that the feature “does not infringe any copyrights that could be claimed by the major networks.”

The litigation is pending. In the meantime, Dish continues to promote the Hopper and add new functions to it. At C.E.S. last week, Dish showed off a faster, spiffier version of the product with the ability to transfer recorded shows to iPads. CNET’s reviewer was impressed. But the Best of C.E.S. Awards became another battleground for CBS and Dish.

CNET attached a disclaimer to its awards announcement on Thursday that read, “The Dish Hopper with Sling was removed from consideration due to active litigation involving our parent company CBS Corp.” The Web site said that going forward, it would not review any products that are tied up in lawsuits with its parent company.

The outcry was instantaneous.

“We are saddened that CNET’s staff is being denied its editorial independence because of CBS’s heavy-handed tactics,” the Dish Network chief executive, Joseph P. Clayton, said in a statement. “This action has nothing to do with the merits of our new product. Hopper with Sling is all about consumer choice and control over the TV experience. That CBS, which owns CNET.com, would censor that message is insulting to consumers.”

CNET said it would continue to deliver “unbiased news” to readers. But new details about the controversy came out Monday morning and apparently influenced Mr. Sandoval’s decision to resign.

The Verge, another technology news Web site, reported that the Hopper “was not simply an entrant in the Best of C.E.S. awards for the site, it was actually chosen as the winner of the Best of Show award (as voted by CNET’s editorial staff).” When executives at CBS learned about this vote, they objected and ordered another vote with the Hopper taken out of contention, The Verge reported, citing anonymous sources.

The timeline “suggests a growing influence of CBS’s corporate interests in editorial decisions at its digital news subsidiaries,” the Web site added.

Mr. Sandoval’s resignation via Twitter came about half an hour after the Verge article was published.

“CNET wasn’t honest about what occurred regarding Dish,” Mr. Sandoval wrote, calling that “unacceptable to me.”

“I am not disgruntled,” he added. “CBS and CNET were great to me. I just want to be known as an honest reporter.”

On Monday afternoon a CBS spokesman released a statement that read:

CBS has nothing but the highest regard for the editors and writers at CNET, and has managed that business with respect as part of its CBS Interactive division since it was acquired in 2008. This has been an isolated and unique incident in which a product that has been challenged as illegal, was removed from consideration for an award. The product in question is not only the subject of a lawsuit between Dish and CBS, but between Dish and nearly every other major media company as well. CBS has been consistent on this situation from the beginning, and, in terms of covering actual news, CNET maintains 100% editorial independence, and always will. We look forward to the site building on its reputation of good journalism in the years to come.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/resignation-suggests-rift-between-cnet-and-cbs/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Justices Agree to Consider F.C.C. Rules on Indecency

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide whether the Federal Communications Commission’s policies banning nudity, expletives and other indecent content on broadcast television and radio violated the Constitution.

The granting of a hearing in the case, F.C.C. v. Fox Television Stations, No. 10-1293, puts into question whether the court will overturn its landmark 1978 ruling on indecency, F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation.

The Pacifica decision, which upheld the commission’s finding that George Carlin’s classic “seven dirty words” radio monologue was indecent, cemented the F.C.C.’s ability to police the public airwaves.

But in the subsequent 33 years, the media landscape has markedly changed, causing several justices to question in recent decisions whether those standards were still relevant in a world of unfiltered cable television, Internet, film and radio.

The case is an appeal by the F.C.C. of a ruling in 2010 by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that said the commission’s policy against “fleeting expletives” and other indecency, which it measures on a case-by-case basis, was “unconstitutionally vague.”

The Supreme Court reframed the case slightly, saying it would hear arguments only on whether the F.C.C.’s “indecency enforcement regime” violated the free speech or due process clauses of the Constitution.

At issue are two live broadcasts on the Fox network of the Billboard Music Awards. In the first, in 2002, Cher used an obscenity while accepting an award. In 2003, Nicole Richie, while presenting an award, used two vulgarities in explaining how hard it was to remove cow manure from a purse.

The Supreme Court will also consider whether the appeals court was warranted in overturning a fine against ABC stations for the 2003 broadcast of an episode of the then-popular ABC series “NYPD Blue” that included a naked woman.

The Fox case has previously come before the court. In 2009, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that the commission had followed proper administrative procedures when it invoked the ban on expletives during certain hours against broadcasters. But several justices, including at least one on each side of the decision, expressed skepticism that the ban on expletives was constitutional.

The Obama administration and the F.C.C. asked the Supreme Court to overturn the recent appeals court decision, saying it would keep the agency from effectively policing the airwaves.

“We are pleased the Supreme Court will review the lower court rulings that blocked the F.C.C.’s broadcast indecency policy,” a spokesman for the F.C.C. said in a statement. “We are hopeful that the court will affirm the commission’s exercise of its statutory responsibility to protect children and families from indecent broadcast programming.”

Fox said in a statement that it was “hopeful that the court will ultimately agree that the F.C.C.’s indecency enforcement practices trample on the First Amendment rights of broadcasters.” ABC also said it believed that the Second Circuit was correct and that the Supreme Court should affirm that decision.

The appeals court ruled that the F.C.C.’s policy was inconsistent, in part because the commission ruled that Fox stations violated its policy with the language on the awards shows while it allowed the use of the same language in a broadcast of the film “Saving Private Ryan.”

While the Pacifica case gave the F.C.C. the authority to regulate indecent speech like the Carlin monologue, which made deliberate and repetitive use of vulgarities, it left uncertain whether the use of an occasional expletive could be punished. The F.C.C. later said it could, and it has generally ruled that broadcasters could not allow indecent material from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. All of the incidents at issue occurred within those protected hours.

The F.C.C. case was one of 11 that the court accepted on Monday for its next term.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was a judge on the Second Circuit before being appointed to the Supreme Court, recused herself from consideration of the F.C.C. case.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=8876b0aeb7d1342e6edfcfe443115bbe

Media Decoder: Resignation Suggests Rift Between CNET and CBS

Justices Agree to Consider F.C.C. Rules on Indecency

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