From the bag today: – Comcast SportsNet announced it is splitting its signature sports news show SportsNite into two half-hours at 10 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. (Yours truly thought they were already separate.) – It looks like an Obama-led FCC could steer the focus away from indecency, which has been the focus of the agency over the last few years. […]
In a move that comes as surprising and shocking, The Tribune Co. – home to the Chicago Tribune, WGN-TV and WGN-AM and the Chicago Cubs, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It’s no secret Tribune has been under heavy debt load since the company was taken over by Sam Zell for $8.2 billion and was taken private last year. […]
Well, it’s that time of year again… It’s Thanksgiving… and it’s time for the third annual T Dog Media Blog Turkey Awards, celebrating the worst in media. Gobble, gobble… – Media Rights Capital’s Sunday lineup on CW. The network leases its Sunday lineup to MRC, and programs it with junk like Valentine and Easy Money. The results? CW’s ratings go […]
The week that was: T Dog’s Fab Four – Jay Mariotti leaves the Sun-Times. Yes! Oh God, Yes! -Barack Obama’s Acceptance Speech. Drew just as many viewers as the opening ceremonies of the recent Summer Olympics. – The U.S. men’s and women’s basketball team. The ladies brought home the Gold and the Redeem Team did likewise. Way to go! – […]
Sung to Loverboy’s “Hot Girls in Love”: I’m turning up the heat…. Round 2 Yes, your humble friend T Dog drops the gloves again with the Piss Turd Council for Round 2 and their latest nonsense. Click here to go to the show (Update: Another person has since weighed in against the PTC and like typical cowards, it looks like […]
Ding! Ding! Ding! Step right up for the fight of the century as T Dog takes on The Parents Television Council! An article at B&C’s website today regarding how Hollywood is dealing with the FCC rules in the wake of a lower-court decision throwing out the FCC fines regarding the Super Bowl halftime fiasco in 2004, and one of the […]
The merger between XM and Sirius is now official – the deal closed earlier today, with the new company being titled SiriusXM Radio (of course the Sirius name goes first…) The company will trade on Nasdaq under the name SIRI. With the two companies combining forces, the new entity has 18.5 million subscribers to start. The new company also plans […]
Much like what the New York Mets did in the cover of darkness (canning manager Willie Randolph after hours), those class acts at the FCC approved the XM-Sirius merger by a margin of 3-2 this evening when commissioner Deborah Tate and chairman Kevin Martin agreed on another of principles, including a $19.7 million fine for past FCC violations. The merger […]
Leave it to this joke of an agency to make something like the XM-Sirius merger a partisan issue… But that’s what we have so far as Republicans Kevin Martin and Robert McDowell have voted for the merger and Democrats Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein voting against the merger. Adelstein considered voting for the merger, but changed his mind after the […]
In a move that makes an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court all but likely, The Third Circuit Court Of Appeals threw out the fine against CBS-owned stations for the Janet Jackson Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction”. The court sided with CBS and found the FCC “capricious” and “arbitrary” in changing the rules in not holding fleeting nudity indecent, also concluding […]
Stop me if you’ve seen this headline before… But for a second time in thirteen months, the FCC has rejected complaints from Chicago Media Action regarding local and state election coverage from 2004. The complaint named every commercial station in Chicago. The FCC also rejected complaints from a related Milwaukee activist group regarding their stations. Chicago Media Action fired back […]
Every move you make, I’ll be watching you… Creepy! Hold the flag above your heads kids, because there is a network that will make you proud to waive the red, white, and blue this 4th of July. But it doesn’t have an American flag as part of its logo. And the programming (crummy as it is) hasn’t really changed. Yet. […]
A poster on Radio-Info.com wrote the following: Since most TV & cable networks have declined in morale & the liberal biases & the big corporations & the reality programming that are ruining quality television today, here’s how congress should act in the way we watch television or listen to the radio. Because 25 years ago, there was nothing but quality […]
The FCC will test how well the analog shutoff is going to do by enticing stations in Wilmington, N.C. to shut off their analog transmitters early and go all-digital in September. As some of you know already (or don’t know), the government will shut off analog television on February 17, 2009, and all television broadcasting is going to digital. To […]
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