Trump coverage elevates MSNBC to #1 for first time

MSNBC, the pride of liberals, ranked #1 for the first time in history in Nielsen ratings for the week of May 15, both in total viewers and in the 25-54 age group that advertisers salivate over.

Fox News, the pride of conservatives, finished third. CNN fit in above Fox and below MSNBC.

Rachael Maddow’s live show and repeats both were #1 in their time slots.

MSNBC has been hitting the Trump camp scandals hard. Fox News takes a more protective stance.

Fox News founder Roger Ailes is dead. His right-tilted cable channel is having health problems, too.

Re-direct your cable bitching to Spectrum

Well, we can no longer complain about our Time Warner Cable service, which seems to be a favorite pastime of BJ folks.

Charter Communications swallowed Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks and calls the three-way Spectrum, although all three are under the Charter Communications umbrella. I’m sure consultants/researchers were paid mucho dinaros to come up with that name.

Spectrum is the fastest growing TV, Internet and Voice provider in the United States -- #2 nationally with 24 million custmers from New York to California to Florida, which pretty much takes in all of America. Actually, 41 states. 9 states escaped.

So says the company press release.

Comcast, which we get at Paula’s home in The Villages, Florida, is #1, in customers and complaints.

Charter moved from St. Louis to Stamford, Connecticut. Maybe the City Arches cast too big a shadow onto executive office windows.

Charter began in St. Louis with three former Cencom Cable Television executives who decided to spread their wings.

In 1995 Charter gobbled up Cable South. In 1998 Dallas-based Marcus Cable. In 1999, Stamford’s American Cable Entertainment and nine other cable companies around the nation.

In 2002, four Charter executives were indicted for fudging subscriber numbers to look more attractive. It cost Charter $144 million.

In 2009, Charter filed for bankruptcy, reducing its debt by $8 billion and getting $3 billion more to play with.

In 2010, Charter paid $18 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over technicians’ wage and overtime claims.

Other acquistions were made in 2008 and 2013. Now it’s your turn, as a Time Warner customer.

No price change, Spectrum assures, “at the time of the merger.” A few days later, though, look out!

Plus, in 2007 Charter was labeled by PCWorld as having the worst customer service among the then-14 largest cable companies. Be forewarned.

Why Al Jazeera America failed

Why did Al Jazeera America news channel go belly-up, despite having less slant to its newscasts than Fox News?

The Qatar people pumping in the millions of dollars didn’t understand the American market. For one, the name alone put off cable companies and potential viewers, but Qatar was proud of it, and refused to change to something that wasn’t a buzzword for mistrust and hatred.

So major blocks of carriers refused to carry the channel.

At a time when CNN and Fox were drawing millions to watch the State of the Union coverage, Al Jazeera had about 70,000.

 

Slumping oil prices made the Mideast country that owned the channel nervous. They paid Al Gore $500 million for the channel but they couldn't fathom or overcome the inconvenient truths about America's cable news situation.

Lawsuits charging anti-Semitism and sexism didn’t help either.

As usual, when generals screw up, privates pay the price. About 700 will be out of work April 30.

To read the full article, click on  http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/22/media/al-jazeera-america-what-went-wrong/index.html

Al Jazeera America to fold

Al Jazeera America, the American cable news outlet owned by Qatar-based Al Jazeera, plans to shut down less than three years after its launch, a victim of low ratings, operational problems and a lack of advertisers.

The cable news network will be phased out by April 30, according to a memo that was emailed to staffers Wednesday.

The NewsGuild of New York, the union that began representing 46 digital journalists at Al Jazeera America last year, says it was told by the company that it has 291 employees.

Al Jazeera Media Network, which is funded by the government of Qatar, launched the U.S.-based network in August 2013 after buying Current TV, the cable news channel co-founded by Al Gore, for about $500 million earlier in the year.

The irony, for me, is that a cable news channel funded by an Arab nation showed less bias than Fox News Channel, which never met a story it couldn't slant so far to the right that it makes the Leaning Tower of Pisa look upright.

Farrow out at MSNBC

You know your days are numbered when your ratings are lower than Al-Jazeera America. So MSNBC canceled the Ronan Farrow Show.

And on the same day dumped the Joy Reid show, Farrow’s lead-in.

“Way Too Early” host Thomas Roberts will get Farrow’s 1 to 3 p.m. time slot.

On Feb. 4, Farrow had 22,000 viewers to 44,000 for Al Jazeera America. 

Also, Chris Hayes may be moved out of 8 P.M. to a better time slot.

CNN fires news editor over plagiarism

CNN fired a news editor that it said plagiarized at least 50 stories, mostly from Reuters, during her six months with the cable network.

Marie-Louise Gumuchian, who reported on Africa, Europe and the Middle East from CNN's London bureau, was terminated after one of her stories was flagged during the editing process last week.

An internal investigation uncovered "about 50 published stories" that contained plagiarized material, according to CNN.

Apparently, Ms. Gumuchian isn’t the only one who can Google stories by topic. A CNN copy editor did and found Ms. Gumuchian’s phrase verbatim in a Reuters story. Further Googles turned up more than 100 instances of plagiarized sentences/graphs.

And CNN still has editors. Unlike too many newspapers who slashed so many watchdogs of their stories.

To see the article, click on

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2014/05/16/cnn-fires-news-editor-marie-louise-gumuchian-for-plagiarism/