Tag: posts

Network TV continued to take a beating in 2015, but audiences were up for cable news programs, online content, and podcasts, according to a new report on media trends from the Pew Research Center. Some of last year’s biggest media winners included CNN, which saw a 38 percent increase in prime-time viewers last year, and The Nation magazine, which saw a 68 percent increase in newstand sales. And some of last year’s biggest losers? The Today Show, National Review and Wired magazines, news magazine programs such as 60 Minutes and Dateline, and the newspaper industry as a whole. 

Last year was “the worst year for newspapers” since 2009-2010, according to Pew, with daily circulation falling an average of 7 percent, employment down 10 percent, and advertising revenue down 8 percent. And while digital advertising is up overall, newspaper websites haven’t been big beneficiaries. Rather, almost two-thirds of digital advertising spending last year went to just five companies: Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Twitter. For publicly traded newspaper companies, digital ad revenue fell 2 percent in 2015. 

Network news stations (ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC) also fared badly last year. While viewership for ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts was up one percent, overall “viewership data collected by Nielsen Media Research shows that in 2015 network affiliate news stations (ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC) lost viewership in every key timeslot–morning, early evening and late night,” Pew reports. Morning and evening audiences were down 2 percent, with late-night and mid-day audiences each down 5 percent. 

But cable news is kicking ass, with viewership up eight percent in 2015 over 2014. “Cable-hosted presidential candidate debates helped drive some of the surge in viewership,” notes Pew. Yet daytime cable-news programs also saw bigger audiences.

Of the major cable news networks, CNN saw the biggest audience gains, with viewership up 17 percent during the 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. hours and 38 percent for prime-time programming. Fox News audiences increased by 7 percent during the day and 3 percent during primetime. 

Smaller cable-news networks had a good 2015, too. Fox Business Network revenues were projected to grow by 15 percent in 2015, with CNBC revenues expected to grow 4 percent and Bloomberg TV revenues by 3 percent. 

Another media bright spot comes from podcasts and streaming radio. Around one-fifth of U.S. residents ages 12 or older said they had listened to at least one podcast in the past month, up from 12 percent in 2010, and 36 percent had ever heard a podcast, up from 23 percent six years ago. Meanwhile, the number of people who had listened to streaming radio in the past month jumped from 27 percent in 2010 to 57 percent last year. And “this growth hasn’t necessarily cannibalized the audience for traditional radio,” notes Pew. NPR’s major news programs attract around 12 million listeners, and 91 percent of Pew survey respondents aged 12 and up said they had listened to traditional radio in the past month. 

Digital content is doing okay, too, despite the lackluster status of ad revenues. It’s a major source for U.S. political news, with 65 percent of respondents in the Pew study saying they had learned about the 2016 presidential election from a digital source in the preceding week (48 percent from news sites or apps, 44 percent from social media). This is up substantially from 2012, when a mere 17 percent of U.S. adults said that they regularly turned to social media for election news and just 36 percent turned to any digital news source for campaign coverage. From Pew: 

Indeed, for each of the four sectors studied in this analysis–newspapers, news magazines, national television news outlets and digital-native publishers–a majority of outlets (77 out of 110) grew their average monthly total digital audience in the fourth quarter of 2015, compared to the same period in 2014. For the 50 newspapers studied, 33 grew their average monthly unique visitors, and for the 12 news magazines, nine did. Looking at the eight national television news outlets, including the major networks, cable channels and Hispanic broadcasters, six increased their traffic. Finally, 29 out of the 40 digital-native news sites studied here experienced growth.

It’s a mixed bag for print news magazines. Of the 14 magazines Pew studied, print sales figures ranged from a rise of 65 percent (for The Nation) to a loss of 37 percent (for National Review). Other losers included The Week (down 35 percent) and Wired (down 25 percent). Sales of New York magazine, meanwhile, were up 44 percent. The Atlantic experienced the biggest overall circulation increase: 2 percent.

On average, single copy (i.e. newsstand) sales for news magazines were down 3 percent in 2015 and subscriptions were down two percent. “All but four of the 14 news magazines studied experienced overall circulation decline,” Pew notes. And while web traffic for these magazines was up in 2015, the average time spent on the sites was down.

A few more interesting tidbits from the Pew report: 

The Brits are coming for our web traffic: American web traffic to dailymail.co.uk and theguardian.com would put these U.K. papers in the top five U.S.-based papers by web traffic.

Mobile trumps desktop: Desktop digital traffic fell for 39 of the 50 newspaper websites studied, but mobile traffic rose for 43 of the 50 papers.

Business booming for cable news stations: CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC were all projected to grow their profits in 2015, with Fox News profits up by about a fifth (to $1.5 billion), CNN up 17 percent (to $381 million), and MSNBC up 10 percent (to $227 million).

Mixed news for morning news programs: The Today Show viewership has declined 17 percent since 2008, but audiences for ABC’s Good Morning America and CBS’s This Morning are up 15 and 17 percent, respectively.

Face the Nation reigns on Sundays: Audiences are up for the Sunday political shows on non-cable stations, including CBS’ Face the Nation, ABC’s This Week, and NBC’s Meet the Press. Of these, Face the Nation is the highest rated, followed by Meet the Press, which had a 13 percent viewership increase in 2015. Fox News Sunday viewership was up 10 last year over the previous year.

“News magazine programs” falling out of favor: Combined viewership for six network news-magazine programs (60 Minutes, 48 Hours, 20/20, Nightline, Dateline Friday, and Dateline Sunday) were down 5 percent last year over 2014 and 16 percent since 2008. 

Alt-weeklies also floundering: Circulation is down 11 percent from 2014 to 2015 at the top 20 newsweeklies across America. “While much of this year’s change was driven by substantial drops at large publications like The Village Voice and LA Weekly, circulation did decline across the board,” notes Pew. Just two alt-weeklies saw an increase in circulation of more than 1 percent, and neither increase was more than 4 percent.

The City of Baltimore’s homelessness program has produced a pamphlet that shows where various services can be found. It includes a map, and it also includes a key explaining the symbols on that map.

Unfortunately, it isn’t immediately obvious that this is what the latter graphic is for. It’s labeled “legend,” but it appears on a separate, more prominent page than the map—and on top of that, it’s laid out in a rather bizarre way. The friend who passed it along to me compared it to the infamous butterfly ballot of the 2000 presidential election:

So men get training, women make food (or maybe the women are supposed to be the food?), you can launder your kids, the showers are gay-friendly, and drug rehabilitation leads nowhere? This is—how shall I put this?—not a triumph of graphic design.

Oh, well. At least the caseworkers appear to have phones.

The House of Representatives is set to vote later today on a provision that would outlaw the federal government’s routine collection of American citizens’ electronic information: emails, text messages, photos, etc. Supporters say the measure is popular with the public, and note that it was approved by the House twice previously (the Senate eventually spiked it).

But this time, the vote is probably going to be more contentious, coming in the wake of the terrorist attack in Orlando, where Omar Mateen—a U.S. citizen with parents who emigrated from the Middle East—murdered more than 50 people at a gay nightclub in the name of radical Islam.

The government is allowed to collect information from foreign persons’ electronic communications, but isn’t supposed to subject American citizens to the same level of warrantless surveillance. The Massie-Lofgren Amendment, sponsored by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-California) spells this out explicitly: federal authorities must obtain a warrant in order to collect data on American citizens.

Massie told Reason that intelligence officials have admitted to engaging in this kind of data collection, even though the Constitution already prohibits it.

“The amendment is redundant in the context of the Constitution, but it’s not redundant in the context of current practice,” said Massie.

Massie notes that his amendment doesn’t stop federal officials from investigating Americans—they just need to get warrants in order to do so. This isn’t particularly difficult, and only requires probable cause, says Massie.

“You can’t waive the Fourth Amendment just because it’s not convenient at any point in time,” he said.

The House approved Massie’s amendment last year, and the year before. Both times, it died during negotiations with the Senate.

But that was then. This time around, even the House vote looks dicey. That’s because plenty of politicians in both parties seem less deferential to the Constitution, due process, and privacy at a time of heightened sensitivity to terrorism. Republicans lose all interest in preventing warrantless data collection, and Democrats become obsessed with limiting gun rights.

Rep. Devin Nunes, a Republican and chairman of the House Intelligence committee, gave a typical response when asked about Massie’s amendment.

“At a time when jihadists are targeting Americans for mass murder, limiting the intelligence community’s access to a crucial anti-terror tool is the last thing we can afford to do,” he said in a statement, according to Bloomberg News.

It’s a reality that Massie—a principled, consistent libertarian—finds frustrating.

“The irony of my colleagues using the Orlando tragedy to erode the Fourth Amendment is they are castigating the Democrats for using the tragedy to erode the Second Amendment,” he said.

Watch Massie speak at Reason Weekend, below.

California looked as though it was going to seriously restrain the ability for police and prosecutors to abuse civil asset forfeiture last fall, but legislators ultimately failed at the end. The influence of police and prosecutor lobbying was too strong. Legislation that would have required police to actually attain convictions for crimes before attempting to seize and keep somebody’s money or property passed in the state Senate, but failed in the Assembly.

The bill, SB 443, is back for another push for passage. Sponsored by Democratic state Sen. Holly Mitchell, the legislation would require convictions before permanently seizing somebody’s property and would increase the evidentiary threshold required to connect the property with the underlying crime.

The previous iteration of the bill forbid law enforcement from bypassing state-level restrictions by participating in the Department of Justice’s “Equitable Sharing” forfeiture process unless a person was convicted of a crime. This was an important component of the bill, because the DOJ’s rules are laxer and allow police to keep more of what they seize than California’s laws permit. Because of the looser rules, use of the DOJ’s forfeiture process has skyrocketed in California, particularly in smaller municipalities, while seizures under the state’s rules have remained flat. During the recession, as municipal budgets suffered revenue losses in California, law enforcement agencies increasingly turned to asset forfeiture to fill gaps.

The conviction requirement remains in this version of the bill, but a section has been added to allow police to seek seizure without a conviction if the defendant doesn’t show up for court, flees to evade prosecution, or is deceased. One of the objections by law enforcement and prosecutors attempting to defend civil forfeiture is that they sometimes aren’t able to get a defendant in the courtroom to tie him or her to the assets. This would seem to help address those concerns. Nevertheless, according to the Los Angeles Times, police and prosecutors are still unhappy:

Law enforcement groups say the practice is an essential tool in combating drug trafficking. When police arrest low-level cartel members with large sums of money in their cars, the driver isn’t the primary target, Totten said.

“In many, many narcotics trafficking cases, we’re not able to actually identify some of the higher-ups in the organization whose money we’re seizing,” he said. “That’s just the nature of illicit drug trafficking.”

Law enforcement loves to present the idea that they’re seizing large sums of drug cartel money in their asset forfeitures, but the reality is that the vast majority of assets grabbed in any given seizure in California are worth less than $5,000, according to a report put together by the Drug Policy Alliance. The people often affected by asset forfeiture were poor and often spoke little English, and were unable to understand the process (and could not afford) to fight to keep their property.

Mitchell has support in her efforts from Republican Assembly member David Hadley, who points out that all the police really want here is to protect their revenue:

David Hadley, a Republican assemblyman from Manhattan Beach and a coauthor of Mitchell’s bill, said law enforcement is fighting hard against changes to the civil forfeiture process because of the hit to their budgets. It’s on the Legislature, he said, to boost funding for public safety so that police don’t have to rely on taking people’s property to pay for what they need.

“When you get outside of [the Capitol] you get a general consensus that something like this in its broad form should not be happening in the United States,” Hadley said.

Yes, polls show that citizens, once they understand how civil asset forfeiture works, are overwhelmingly opposed to the process. That it’s hard to get reform passed in states like California shows how overwhelming government employees have captured the legislative branch.

Reason is accepting applications for our FALL 2016 journalism internship through July 1.

The Burton C. Gray Memorial Internship program runs year-round in the Washington, D.C. office. Interns work for 12 weeks and receive a $5,000 stipend.

The job includes reporting and writing for Reason and Reason.com, helping with research, proofreading, and other tasks. Previous interns have gone on to work at such places as The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, ABC News, and Reason itself.

To apply, send your résumé, up to five writing samples (preferably published clips), and a cover letter by the deadline below to:

Gray Internship
Reason
1747 Connecticut Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20009

Electronic applications can be sent to intern@reason.com, please include “Gray Internship Application” and the season for which you are applying in the subject line.

Summer Internships begin in June, application deadline March 1

Fall Internships begin in September, application deadline July 1

Spring Internships begin in January, application deadline November 1

Internship dates are flexible.  

Looking for a full-time job at Reason? Go here.

I woke up to a puzzling local NPR story about the Atlantic Coast Pipeline earlier this week. The pipeline is supposed transport natural gas from the fracking fields of Appalachia. Lots of folks in central Virginia, especially in Nelson County are very much opposed to its construction. Some claim that it will be dangerous and will contribute climate change while others object to using eminent domain to acquire the land for the pipeline’s right-of-way. I have my own views about the controversy, but that’s not what has provoked this post. As part of the protest against the pipeline local activists have invited members of the Cowboy and Indian Alliance from Nebraska to offer them guidance and participate in public protests. The Alliance is part of the Bold Nebraska activist movement against the Keystone Pipeline. All to the good – just folks exercising their First and Fifth Amendment rights. What caught my attention was the following claim in the NPR segment …

…the Cowboy and Indian Alliance formed in Nebraska, their strategy of resistance to fossil fuels is to plant sacred seeds in the path of proposed pipelines.

“And I’m going to pray to the 4 winds, the 4 directions, asking the creator to help us with this fight that we’re taking on now; to give us strength to give us guidance.”

Mekasi Horinek, got those seeds certified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as officially sacred.  The hope and prayer is that reverence for that distinction stops transmission lines like the Mountain Valley Pipeline proposed for this narrow hollow here in Elliston, Virginia.

“I’m going to call the spirits of and ask the ancestors that were here before. I’m going to ask them to be with us today to help us and guide us.” …

When this sacred corn grows in a few weeks, it won’t be mistaken for just any breed. Its stalks will not look like the uniform rows of the modern varieties. Some will be tall, some short and their bright blue ears just as randomly placed. The Ponca Indians believe the creator gave this corn to them not only as food, but also as medicine.

Their last crop was already planted when they were removed from their land and sent west in 1876. But the saved seeds were found, planted tested and certified in 2014 as part of a plan to sow them before the all the proposed fossil fuel pipelines in the country.

Got those seeds certified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as “officially sacred”? Talk about seed purity standards!

Startled by the claim that federal government functionaries are now in the business of discerning and certifying the spiritual qualities of crops, I did a little digging around on the internet. It appears that the claim that the Ponca corn has been certified as sacred by the USDA stems from the fact that Nebraska farmer Art Tanderup first planted the seeds on his land. As part of the U.S. government’s crop insurance scheme farmers must fill out and send in a FSA Form 578. This report of acreage form merely tells the Farm Service Agency on how much land a farmer has planted what type of crop.

An article about the Ponca corn over at the Bold Nebraska activist website notes that Tanderup “certified the corn with the USDA to ensure that there is a formal record.” And sure enough, the article displays a copy of the filled-out FSA Form 578 as evidence (see above). On the form Tanderup has noted the field and tract numbers and characterized the planted crops as “Sacred Blue Corn.” In other words, despite the claims in the NPR segment, the USDA has no more certified Ponca corn as sacred than it has Roundup Ready corn varieties. The only official notice of the “sacred corn” that the USDA may take is if Tanderup files an insurance claim due to its destruction by an Act of God.

Still, the activists did plant Ponca corn on the right-of-way of the Keystone pipeline and where is it now?

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton say they have a plan for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), but it largely consists of fighting them “over there.”

Daniel Davis explains how not to fight radical jihadism:

I have spent considerable time on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq over a 25-year period in both a military and civilian capacity. I can categorically state that short of a Nazi-like genocidal wiping out of entire populations, it is militarily impossible to go to these overseas locations and destroy the ideology of violent jihadism. Our attempts to do so since 2001 in Afghanistan, 2003 in Iraq, and the numerous places we’ve used special forces and drone strikes to kill Islamic radicals of various stripes since then has succeeded only in expanding the threat.

Our efforts have been much like trying to put out an oil fire with water. It only makes the flames bigger.

Longtime diplomat and Middle East expert, Chas Freeman, recently explanied that using military power in this way “radicalizes and creates volunteer recruits for our worst enemies. We need to halt this, not double down on it.”

View this article.

There has been an outpouring of online sympathy for the parents of the boy who was killed by an alligator at a Disney resort in Orlando, which just goes to show that sometimes the internet has a heart, and sometimes it calls for blood.

The question is why.

In contrast with the half a million people who signed a petition against Michelle Gregg, the mom whose 3-year-old son got into the gorilla exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo, leading zookeepers to kill 400-pound Harambe, commenters do not seem to be going insane over the fact that officials have already “put down” four Disney-area alligators, without being positive which of them, if any, dragged 2-year-old Lane Graves to his death.

If you can believe it, even CNN managed to keep some semblance of sanity, running a chart showing that cows, dogs, and even venomous spiders kill more humans than alligators do.

It was with relief that I found far more comments castigating those who would blame the gator parents than actual parental castigation. It’s like the high road was the cool place to be, this time.  “It’s ridiculous to blame the parents who were sitting a few feet away and did all they could to save him,” read a typical online comment. And, on Twitter, “Pray for his family. Dont judge.” “The parents in #DisneyGatorAttack don’t need your harsh commentary during this awful event.” “People without children are so quick to blame the parents when in fact this attack could have happened to anyone.”

No charges are expected against the parents, law enforcement told the Associated Press, because, “there’s nothing in this case to indicate that there was anything extraordinary” about the level of child neglect on display.

Compare this response to the vast numbers of people demanding the heads of gorilla boy’s parents.

So, what accounts for the vast difference in response to these two incredibly rare toddler/animal tragedies that took place at family-friendly places?

Well first of all, of course, the 2-year-old died. There’s no way to say that the Graves haven’t suffered enough. Also, even as the story broke, we heard that the father desperately tried to open the alligator’s jaws and couldn’t. That is a horrifying image, and no one with a heart or head would dare accuse that dad of not doing enough.

Then there’s the question of racism—although I think many people were jumping on the Cincinnati mom before they knew she was African-American.  Lane Graves was white.

And there’s even the question of species-ism: Gorillas look like us. Alligators don’t. It’s easier to empathize with a primate.

But even more than all that, I think that so many people were eager to flog the Cincinnati mom because the mob needed someone to blame (that’s what mobs do),  and moms are a favorite target these days.

This is the era when we have come to believe that mothers can and must be in control of their kids at all times. Any mom who takes her eyes off her kids—and we hear about it—is automatically a public enemy. (Think of all those moms berated for letting their kids wait in the car a few minutes, or play at the park unsupervised.) And if anything bad happens to an unsupervised kid, it’s the mom’s fault. So Michelle Gregg got the public’s wrath, while the zookeepers, zoo designers, zoo guards, and fate, God’s will, etc., etc., did not.

But this time, with the alligator incident, the mob seems to be aiming not at the mom, but at Disney. “I say the Grand Floridian is responsible for not having signs posted about the gators!! What parent would ever think that Disney would allow kids or anyone to be in an unsafe area,” read one typical comment. Many others echoed the sentiment that Disney should have put “GATOR!” signs in the area, rather than just “No swimming.”

The similarity here is that if there’s any entity we love to blame more than moms, it’s corporate America. So if we truly believe a mom should be been thinking, “Well, I know this has never happened once in 38 years of the gorilla exhibit, but what if today my kid tries to get in—and does? I better be preparing for that!” then we are also quite capable of thinking, “Well, just because we are one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world and not once has a guest ever been killed by an alligator, nonetheless we should be constantly warning vacationers about that gruesome possibility.”

In both cases, the crowd has found someone it can second-guess after an exceedingly rare tragedy. That way it doesn’t have to contemplate the unpredictability of life, or the fact that there is no such thing as perfect safety.  It can simply sit back and blame, which might as well be America’s favorite coping device.

• According to a new poll, Hillary Clinton has the lead with 39 percent of the vote, followed by Donald Trump at 32 percent and Gary Johnson at 11 percent.
• Senate Democrats ended their 15-hour pro-gun control filibuster early this morning.
• Gun sales are reportedly surging among gays in the wake of the Orlando shooting.
• Orlando killer Omar Mateen worked briefly as a prison guard before he was fired from that job.
• Searchers have recovered the body of the two-year-old boy who was attacked by an alligator at a Disney resort in Florida.
• “French police used tear gas to disperse rampaging English soccer fans after clashes on Wednesday. It was the fourth time England supporters have been involved in violent incidents since the start of the European Championship tournament.”

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and don’t forget to sign up for Reason’s daily updates for more content.

As unspeakable and horrific as is the recent slaughter in Orlando, it has become just another example of the tragic consequences of government’s interfering with the exercise of fundamental liberties, writes Andrew Napolitano. After a while, these events cease to shock; but they should not cease to cause us to re-examine what the government has done to us.

We have a government here that is heedless of its obligation to protect our freedoms, suggest Napolitano. We have a government that, in its lust to have us reliant upon it, has created areas in the U.S. where innocent folks living their lives in freedom are made defenseless prey to monsters—as vulnerable as fish in a barrel. And we have mass killings of defenseless innocents—over and over and over again.

All these mass killings have the same ending: The killer stops only when he is killed. But that requires someone else with a gun to be there. Shouldn’t that be sooner rather than later?

View this article.