Tag: asshole

Sinclair Broadcast Group nearing bankruptcy

Seth Anderson0 comment

Clear Channel is in a bit of financial trouble, and apparently so are their cohorts in “Republican-slanted news is the only news people want” category, Sinclair Broadcasting. Good, I hope they both become nothing more than a footnote to future histories of the George Bush administration.

Lonely Zenith

you’ll remember Sinclair Broadcast Group as the TV group that carried the anti-Kerry smear documentary in prime time, just before the November 2004 election. You may also remember them for the infamous “The Point” editorial segments during their stations’ newscasts — featuring the right wing rantings of corporate management.

Perhaps you even recall their experiment in “central casting” — firing most of the news departments at their local stations, and instead running “local” newscasts from all over the country out of a central studio in Baltimore.

Well, it now appears that Sinclair is on the verge of bankruptcy

…

Five years ago, Sinclair was also the darling of the right for running that anti-Kerry documentary on all 58 of their stations, and for conservative editorials on all of those stations as well. Those who saw ever greater consolidation as the road to maximizing corporate profits were enamored of Sinclair’s experiment with producing “local” newscasts for their stations from a central studio at corporate headquarters in Baltimore.

Unfortunately for Sinclair, viewers were unimpressed by “local” newscasts that were produced hundreds or even thousands of miles from home — and tuned out in droves. And the right wing editorials created negative publicity for Sinclair’s stations. Ultimately. the central studio for producing newscasts was shut down, and the right wing editorials were cancelled. And the group has, by and large, floundered in mediocrity ever since. So far as I’m aware, none of Sinclair’s 58 stations is a market leader, and few are even in the top three — when you run a group on the cheap and attempt to push a national agenda onto your local stations, the result is predictable: poor ratings and a weak identity in your local markets.

As a result, Sinclair was poorly positioned for dealing with the advertising downturn of the past 18 months.

[Click to continue reading Daily Kos: Sinclair Broadcast Group nearing bankruptcy]

Bwa-ha-ha! Couldn’t happen to nicer corporations1

Footnotes:
  1. and by nicer I mean of course the opposite. Sinclair Broadcasting is just scum, plain and simple. [↩]

Reading Around on July 3rd

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading July 3rd from 14:02 to 18:15:

  • Photos of Sarah Palin from RunnersWorld.com – “I used to joke around with John McCain during the campaign about coming jogging with me. And once I asked him what his favorite exercise was, and he said, ‘I go wading.’ Wading. He lives on a creek in Arizona, so he goes wading. That cracked me up.”

  • Matt Taibbi – Taibblog – Goldman Sachs is reeling under public pressure – True/Slant – That a company as rich and powerful as Goldman would stoop to peering through the web version of a locker-room peephole to make a few extra pennies either front-running random trades or somehow using visitor data “not for their benefit” shows how completely and utterly morally absent this company is. There is not an ill-gotten dollar they will not chase, no matter how small or insignificant the sums might be.

    Word should be spread about this and anyone who used the Goldman 360 portral for trading should seriously investigate this situation, as it is entirely possible you’ve been ripped off …

    More to the point, the fact that Goldman is getting enough public pressure that it feels it has to respond to these queries shows that the company is reeling. And the fact that their public statements have been so hilariously transparent and clumsy shows that they’re rattled and don’t know how to handle this kind of heat, which they’re not used to getting

  • Email Full-resolution Photos From the iPhone 3G S | Geek stuff – “What I found was, the photos contained in the email were full-resolution 2048×1536 photos, not the puny 800×600 photos that get sent via the “Share” method.”
    basically, use copy/paste

Reading Around on March 13th through March 16th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected March 13th through March 16th:

  • The NYT should just give Cheney a byline – “Dick Cheney isn’t Vice President any more, but the New York Times is still treating his comments as so newsworthy they must be presented without rebuttal. The Times devotes 558 words to Cheney’s appearance on CNN yesterday – 501 of which are devoted to simply quoting or paraphrasing Cheney. The 57 words that weren’t devoted to amplifying Cheney’s arguments didn’t include even a word of rebuttal:”

  • 25 Things I Learned at MIT – TrueHoop By Henry Abbott – ESPN – Last Saturday I filled most of a notebook with thoughts from the MIT Sloan Sports Business Conference. It’s all good fodder for TrueHoop. Pieces have made their way onto TrueHoop. More to come.

    But it has been a busy week ever since (there is no rest when you’re determined to write about Trevor Ariza every ten minutes!) and I don’t want to let those thoughts slip through the cracks.

    Some notes: