A few thoughts on Twin Peaks

I don't want to spend a lot of time on this one, but a recent post by Ken Levine about declining television viewership numbers got me to thinking. The content bubble story is big and complicated and inextricably intertwined with other big, complex stories such as media consolidation. I have found that it is useful, when following such a story, to take at least brief note of major developments so that you will have a record of them when you go back and try to make sense of things.

With that in mind here are a few regarding Twin Peaks:

1. This was a hugely expensive undertaking. Between the length, the ambition, and the names of those in front of and behind the camera, we are talking substantial production cost. Add to that huge marketing numbers. In addition to the considerable advertising budget, Twin Peaks has gotten a vast amount of media coverage. At the risk of seeming a bit cynical, every time you see a story or read an interview about a major upcoming studio release, you should think of it as being paid for by the studio in some way. A few journalist actually receive some kind of compensation (monetary or otherwise) for running the story. Others are happy to let some PR flack write their copy. On the next level up you get journalists who are willing to trade favorable and extensive coverage for access. Then finally, there is the more subtle but still essential greasing of the wheels, having the people and resources available to keep the PR running smoothly. These things cost a lot of money.


2. Given this amount of money, the viewership numbers we are seeing are not good.

With that, 506,000 viewers watched the two-hour, two-episode 9 PM premiere of the David Lynch and Mark Frost series Sunday, according to Nielsen. Among adults 18-49, the return of Agent Dale Cooper, Laura Palmer and more of the mystery of the Pacific Northwest town snagged a 0.2 rating.

3. And don't give too much weight to all the talk about record setting sign-ups. You will notice a certain vagueness about this metric. For instance, there doesn't seem to be much if any discussion of absolute numbers. I don't believe that Showtime has ever had an event this heavily hyped. We cannot, therefore, assume that the previous record was all that impressive. Probably more importantly, many of these sign-ups are presumably for 30 day free trials. As far as I can tell, we have little idea how many people signed up and even less idea how many of those will become paying customers.

4. There is, however, some good news for the company. Supposedly at David Lynch's insistence, all but the first few episodes will be coming out one at a time. This means that anyone dropping after the first 30 days will miss most of the series. Furthermore, as best I can tell, Showtime's parent company CBS apparently has a large ownership share in Twin Peaks. I would need to do quite a bit of research to be certain, but CBS does own Spelling Productions, which was one of the companies behind the original series. I also noticed that CBS.com and the CBS streaming service have both offered original Twin Peaks for a while now. If the franchise is a CBS property, this means that all sorts of secondary revenue streams will flow back to the parent company. The investment in the new series makes the old show more viable. It also opens up the possibility of future movies and other projects.

5. That said, these numbers still do not look good and they raise real questions about the currently hot model of dusting off some old cult TV show. These programs have built-in name recognition and they are amazingly hype-friendly, but if this level of promotion brings in less than 1 million viewers, that is a very bad sign.

Immigration woes

This is Joseph

This story has some rather chilling implications.  Duncan Black makes the point:

I bet half the country would have a hard time producing clear evidence of citizenship, and 99.9% couldn't do it on the spot.

In a sense this new normal of detention seems to be most dangerous to US-born citizens, who really don't have anywhere to be deported to (they end up as stateless persons).  From the article:

Plascencia and her family say the experience has shaken their ideas about the protections they are entitled to as American citizens. Sepulveda said she is now afraid to leave the U.S., the country she was born in. 

The real issue seems to be the lack of an apologetic response.  A simple "we made a mistake" statement would go a long way to making this situation clear as an accident and not part of a new normal in terms of policing.  That would have done more than anything else to reassure people (including those directly involved) and fix the otherwise terrible optics of the situation.

And how the hell do you make an adverb out of "grammar"?

Though it lacks the immediate punchline quality of Soylent and Juicero, Grammarly maybe an even better example of the dysfunctional Silicon Valley venture capitalist culture. From Christina Warren writing for Gizmodo.

For a company raising its first round of investment (Grammarly was founded in 2009 and has been bootstrapped ever since), $110 million is incredibly significant. As Bloomberg notes, this is among the largest initial investments for a startup recently. 

...

Intrigued by the buzz, I decided to try the free version of Grammarly’s Chrome plugin (the more robust premium version costs an eye-watering $30 a month) and see what could possibly be worth the hype.

In practice, Grammarly is basically a web-version of the Grammar check feature Microsoft Word has had since, like, 1995. Also, in my experience, the free version only works so well. The service will catch major typos, but plenty of errors, both in spelling and usage, go undetected.

Warren then quotes the Wall Street Journal:

Grammarly learns from the vast amount of writing it ingests, and it adjusts based on usage. In a simple example, when people write “Hi John” in an email, Grammarly was suggesting people add a comma. “But nobody used that,” Mr. Lytvyn said. “So we dropped it.”

Why is this such a good example of what's wrong with the money men up the the Bay Area...

The company raised ludicrous amounts of money.

It proposed an unrealistically expensive product...

An unrealistically expensive product that offered no immediately obvious improvement in functionality over what you already have available if you are running Microsoft office.

The proposal was based largely on trendy buzzwords...

Buzzwords that the CEO apparently did not understand the meaning of. What's described here is not artificial intelligence or machine learning, it is a fairly dumb algorithm. Furthermore, while this would be a good approach for something like an autocorrect function, it is (as Warren notes) a terrible approach for grammar software.

If only it were named for a bad 70s sci-fi picture it would be perfect.

Living in a post-truth world

This is Joseph.

Larry Summers on the heroic assumptions needed to make the current budget deficit neutral:

The Trump economic team has not engaged in serious analysis or been in dialogue with those who are capable of it so they have had nothing to say in defense of their forecast except extravagant claims for their policies. Taking their supply-side perspective, do they really believe that through tax cuts and deregulation they are going to accomplish more than Ronald Reagan, who after all reduced the top tax rate from 70 to 28 percent? Between 1981 and 1988, GDP per adult grew by an average of 2.5 percent, distinctly slower than what they are forecasting. Even this figure reflects a substantial cyclical tail wind from the decline in unemployment from 7.6 percent to 5.5 percent (which from Okun’s law implies adding about half a percent to GDP growth) — something unavailable in the present context.

Two thoughts here.  One, if assumptions this heroic are allowable then there is really no point to doing forecasts, as they are too unlikely to reflect reality.  Maybe we will have a period that is a positive outlier, but maybe it will be a negative outlier as well.  One has to argue for the central tendency as the most likely outcome and this isn't in line with past rates of growth.

Two, this is a pretty good estimate of the maximum effect of supply side reforms. Moving the tax rate from 70 to 28 percent is about the entire range of plausible rates, and increasing employment could be a intermediate step here.  But that would suggest a fairly modest effect, given that the US growth rate from 1948 to 2017 was 2.00%.  

If you see the drop in employment as being unrelated to the tax cuts (recovery from recession), then Reagan had the average growth rate of the post-WWII US.  You know, it might be possible that tax rates aren't a key driver of economic growth, compared to factors like good government.  Just thinking out loud here.

And this leads to my last and most puzzling observation.  If government is run like a business then why do they keep cutting revenue?  Does comcast cut prices in the absence of competition?  Or is this a principal agent problem writ large?

h/t Economist's View

Liz Spayd was a disaster for the New York Times because she was exactly what the paper wanted

From TPM:

The publisher of the New York Times announced Wednesday that the paper was eliminating its public editor position, a role currently held by Liz Spayd.

“The responsibility of the public editor – to serve as the reader’s representative – has outgrown that one office,” Arthur Sulzberger Jr. wrote in a memo to colleagues, which was obtained by TPM. “Our business requires that we must all seek to hold ourselves accountable to our readers. When our audience has questions or concerns, whether about current events or our coverage decisions, we must answer them ourselves.”

For a long time now, we have been talking about the central paradox that prevents the New York Times from moving forward. Going back all the way to the 19th century, the New York Times has been widely noted as being snobbish, prissy, and holier than thou. Perhaps from the paper's very inception, The New York Times has been defined by an unshakable belief in its own superiority.


While this was always a dangerous assumption, for most of the paper's history the risk was minimized by high quality and standards of journalism . When things started to go bad, however, the NYT was fundamentally incapable of honestly assessing and effectively addressing the problems. Judith Miller was not an anomaly; she was an unsurprising and completely representative result of the culture of the paper.

The great irony of a New York Times public editor position is that the more one is needed, the less doable the job becomes. When the paper was having a good run (and it has had quite a few), a public editor could point out real flaws that the paper was willing to address, because the criticism did not undermine any fundamental tenet of superiority. Unfortunately, the past quarter century or so has marked an all time low for the gray lady. Here is a partial list:
Whitewater;
Bush V Gore;
The Iraq war;
False balance;
Credulous reporting of untrustworthy anonymous sources;
Weakness in the face of (mostly conservative) pressure;
Inadequate coverage bordering on complicity with stories like swift boating and birtherism;
And finally, a determination to cling to all vendettas with the Clintons that arguably resulted in the Trump presidency.

Some of the public editors, most notably Margaret Sullivan, aggressively pursued their duties and tried to give voice to the most valid criticisms being made about the paper. The NYT, however, showed no interest in acting to rectify those problems and often gave the impression of not even caring.

Perhaps the selection of Liz Spayd was a reaction against the blunt honesty of Sullivan. From the very beginning, Spayd publicly and enthusiastically bought into the best-newspaper-ever belief system. It permeated her columns and put a clear boundary on her criticisms. She was exactly what her bosses had always wanted and the result was a PR nightmare. It turned out that having a public editor who instinctively cited with her editors over the public was a bad idea.

Here is a sample from last year:

"Why do you hate us for caring too much?" – – Dispatches from a besieged institution

Public Editor
From Wikipedia

The job of the public editor is to supervise the implementation of proper journalism ethics at a newspaper, and to identify and examine critical errors or omissions, and to act as a liaison to the public. They do this primarily through a regular feature on a newspaper's editorial page. Because public editors are generally employees of the very newspaper they're criticizing, it may appear as though there is a possibility for bias. However, a newspaper with a high standard of ethics would not fire a public editor for a criticism of the paper; the act would contradict the purpose of the position and would itself be a very likely cause for public concern.

I don't want to impose a template, but generally one expects public editors to serve as the internal representative of external critical voices, or at least to see to it that these voices get a fair hearing. A typical column might start with acknowledging complaints about something like the paper's lack of coverage of poor neighborhoods. The public editor would then discuss some possible lapses on the paper's part, get some comments from the editor in charge, and then, as a rule, either encourage the paper to improve its coverage in this area or, at the very least, take a neutral position acknowledging that both the critics and the paper have a point.

Here are some examples from two previous public editors of the New York Times.


Clark Hoyt

The short answer is that a television critic with a history of errors wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant were not. But a more nuanced answer is that even a newspaper like The Times, with layers of editing to ensure accuracy, can go off the rails when communication is poor, individuals do not bear down hard enough, and they make assumptions about what others have done. Five editors read the article at different times, but none subjected it to rigorous fact-checking, even after catching two other errors in it. And three editors combined to cause one of the errors themselves.

Margaret Sullivan

Mistakes are bound to happen in the news business, but some are worse than others.

What I’ll lay out here was a bad one. It involved a failure of sufficient skepticism at every level of the reporting and editing process — especially since the story in question relied on anonymous government sources, as too many Times articles do.

…

The Times needs to fix its overuse of unnamed government sources. And it needs to slow down the reporting and editing process, especially in the fever-pitch atmosphere surrounding a major news event. Those are procedural changes, and they are needed. But most of all, and more fundamental, the paper needs to show far more skepticism – a kind of prosecutorial scrutiny — at every level of the process.

Two front-page, anonymously sourced stories in a few months have required editors’ notes that corrected key elements – elements that were integral enough to form the basis of the headlines in both cases. That’s not acceptable for Times readers or for the paper’s credibility, which is its most precious asset.

If this isn’t a red alert, I don’t know what will be.

But these are strange days at the New York Times and the new public editor is writing columns that are not only a sharp break with those of her predecessors, but seem to violate the very spirit of the office.

In particular, Liz Spayd is catching a great deal of flak for a piece that almost manages to invert the typical public editor column. It starts by grossly misrepresenting widespread criticisms of the paper, goes on to openly attack the critics making the charges, then pleads with the paper's staff to toe the editorial line and ignore the very voices that a public editor would normally speak for .


[Emphasis added]

The Truth About ‘False Balance’

False balance, sometimes called “false equivalency,” refers disparagingly to the practice of journalists who, in their zeal to be fair, present each side of a debate as equally credible, even when the factual evidence is stacked heavily on one side.

There has been a great deal of speculation as to what drives false equivalency, with the leading contenders being a desire to maintain access to high-placed sources, long-standing personal biases against certain politicians, a fear of reprisal, a desire to avoid charges of liberal bias, and simple laziness (a cursory both-sides-do-it story is generally much easier to write than a well investigated piece). Caring too much about fairness hardly ever makes the list and it certainly has no place in the definition.

Spayd then accuses the people making these charges of being irrational, shortsighted, and partisan.

I can’t help wondering about the ideological motives of those crying false balance, given that they are using the argument mostly in support of liberal causes and candidates. CNN’s Brian Stelter focused his show, “Reliable Sources,” on this subject last weekend. He asked a guest, Jacob Weisberg of Slate magazine, to frame the idea of false balance. Weisberg used an analogy, saying journalists are accustomed to covering candidates who may be apples and oranges, but at least are still both fruits. In Trump, he said, we have not fruit but rancid meat. That sounds like a partisan’s explanation passed off as a factual judgment.

But, as Jonathan Chait points out, Weisberg has no record of being a Hillary Clinton booster. The charge here is completely circular. He is partisan because he made a highly critical comment about Donald Trump and he made a highly critical comment about Donald Trump because he is partisan.

But the most extraordinary part of the piece and one which reminds us just how strange the final days of 2016 are becoming is the conclusion.

I hope Times journalists won’t be intimidated by this argument. I hope they aren’t mindlessly tallying up their stories in a back room to ensure balance, but I also hope they won’t worry about critics who claim they are. What’s needed most is forceful, honest reporting — as The Times has produced about conflicts circling the foundation; and as The Washington Post did this past week in surfacing Trump’s violation of tax laws when he made a $25,000 political contribution to a campaign group connected to Florida’s attorney general as her office was investigating Trump University.

Fear of false balance is a creeping threat to the role of the media because it encourages journalists to pull back from their responsibility to hold power accountable. All power, not just certain individuals, however vile they might seem.

Putting aside the curious characterization of the Florida AG investigation as a tax evasion story (which is a lot like describing the Watergate scandal as a burglary story or Al Capone as a tax evader), equating her paper's pursuit of the Clinton foundation with the Washington Post's coverage of Trump is simply surreal on a number of levels.

For starters, none of the Clinton foundation stories have revealed significant wrongdoing. Even Spayd, who is almost comically desperate to portray her employer in the best possible light, had to concede that “some foundation stories revealed relatively little bad behavior, yet were written as if they did.” By comparison, the Washington Post investigation continues to uncover self-dealing, misrepresentation, tax evasion, misuse of funds, failure to honor obligations, ethical violations, general sleaziness and blatant quid prop quo bribery.

More importantly, the Washington Post has explicitly attacked and implicitly abandoned Spayd's position. Here's how the Post summed it up in an editorial that appeared two days before the NYT column.

Imagine how history would judge today’s Americans if, looking back at this election, the record showed that voters empowered a dangerous man because of . . . a minor email scandal. There is no equivalence between Ms. Clinton’s wrongs and Mr. Trump’s manifest unfitness for office.

Charles Pierce's characteristically pithy response to this editorial was "The Washington Post Just Declared War on The New York Times -- And with good reason, too."

If is almost as if Spayd thinks it's 2000, when the NYT could set the conventional wisdom, could decide which narratives would followed and which public figures would be lauded or savaged. Spayd does understand that there is a battle going on for the soul of journalism, but she does not seem to understand that the alliances have changed, and the New York Times is about to find itself in a very lonely position.


[Apologies for earlier cut and paste errors.]

War on Science -- part [really big number]

From the Washington Post:

White House budget aims to ‘slow’ gains in weather prediction, shocking forecasters
By Jason Samenow May 24

In an inexplicable budget proposal that has floored the weather community, the Trump administration aims to reduce investments in programs that would improve this model and many others aspects of the nation’s weather forecasting.

Released Tuesday, the proposal slashes funding at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the parent agency of the National Weather Service, by 16 percent.

The proposal not only reduces investments in weather forecasting technology but also cuts programs that would enhance understanding of phenomena, such as El Nino, hurricanes and tornadoes. NOAA’s weather satellite programs would see reductions in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

“This budget would ensure that NOAA-NWS becomes a second- or third-tier weather forecasting enterprise, frozen in the early 2000s,” said David Titley, who served as chief operating officer for NOAA from 2012 to 2013.

It gets worse from there.

For most politicians, the assault -- strike that -- the creationist dinosaur museum would be a low point

[I really should have researched this one more thoroughly.]

Being both a plutocrat and fanatical Christian fundamentalist requires a highly selective reading of the Good Book.

From the Week via LGM.

Gianforte is a big fan of citing Noah, as it turns out. In a 2015 talk at the Montana Bible College, he told the audience that he doesn't believe in retirement because Noah was 600 when he built the ark. "There's nothing in the Bible that talks about retirement. And yet it's been an accepted concept in our culture today," Gianforte said. "Nowhere does it say, 'Well, he was a good and faithful servant, so he went to the beach.' It doesn't say that anywhere."

He added: "The example I think of is Noah. How old was Noah when he built the ark? Six hundred. He wasn't like, cashing Social Security checks, he wasn't hanging out, he was working. So, I think we have an obligation to work. The role we have in work may change over time, but the concept of retirement is not biblical."

In memory

Keeping Mr. Magoo out of Class Foghorn Leghorn

Josh Marshall has frequently compared Donald Trump to the character Mr. Magoo. That got me to wondering how many people out there have actually seen one of these cartoons.

Just so our younger readers will get the joke, here's an Oscar-winning short from 1954.





And while we're explaining jokes, the movie Magoo almost saw was a reference to another of the studio's hits, albeit in a very different vein, The Tell-Tale Heart.

The film was the first cartoon to be rated X, indicating it was suitable only for adult audiences, by the British Board of Film Censors. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film but lost to Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom from Walt Disney Productions.

In 1994, animation historian Jerry Beck surveyed 1000 people working in the animation industry and published the results in The 50 Greatest Cartoons: As Selected by 1,000 Animation Professionals, in which The Tell-Tale Heart ranked #24

For most candidates, the assault would be a low point

The threads are converging like crazy on this one.

We've got your crazy tech millionaire.

We've got your GOP candidate wildly overreacting to a question about the healthcare bill.

We've even got your war on science (Mark Strauss writing for Gizmodo back in 2014):

A group of students and faculty at Montana Tech are organizing an unprecedented graduation boycott to protest the university's decision to invite two commencement speakers who are prominent supporters of a young earth creationist museum.

Montana power couple Greg and Susan Gianforte are engineers who have founded several tech companies and made donations to computer science programs at colleges throughout the state. But what rankles critics is that the Gianfortes were also major donors to the Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum, which describes itself as the "largest dinosaur and fossil museum in the United States to present its fossils in the context of biblical creation." Its mission statement:

    When you visit a major natural history museum today, you will see wide-eyed elementary and preschool children (not to mention their parents and teachers) being funneled into an abyss of scientific deception. No matter whether it's the study of animals, earth science, or astronomy, the wonders of God's creation are prostituted for evolutionism. And the end result is just more confusion, mystification, and cynicism in the lives of our young people and adults.

Let's hope "zombie companies" don't become a zombie idea

The OECD has a certain reassuring predictability. When explaining a perceived crisis, they will conclude that the country needs reforms and it needs market-based solutions and, most of all, it needs reforms that unleash market-based solutions.

I first noticed this pattern when I was following the education reform debate (where the OECD figured prominently). I also noticed something else. Though the organization put out reams of impressive looking studies and data, the actual arguments tended to have a context-free snapshot quality. “This country is not following our list of rules and it is in trouble.” It didn't matter that the country had never followed the rules and had previously been doing fine or that some other country (in the case of ed reform, usually Canada) was even further from the OECD prescriptions and was doing great.

Which brings us to this recent piece by Catherine Mann and Dan Andrews (chief economist and deputy head of the structural policy analysis division, respectively, for the OECD).

Second, in well-functioning markets we would expect strong incentives for productive companies to aggressively expand and drive out less productive ones. The opposite has happened. The propensity for high-productivity companies to expand and low-productivity companies to downsize or exit the market has declined over time. This pattern is evident in the U. S. and is particularly stark in southern Europe, where scarce capital has been increasingly misallocated to low-productivity firms.

Third, across the 35 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, we are seeing a drop in the dynamism of the business sector. Not only has the share of recent entrants into the market declined, but marginal companies, which would typically exit or be restructured in a competitive market, are more likely to remain. At the same time, the average productivity of these marginal businesses has fallen. In other words, it has become easier for weak companies that do not adopt the latest technologies to survive.

The survival of weak companies drags down average productivity, but the consequences for growth are even worse. Since such firms take up scarce resources, their prolonged survival (or their delayed restructuring) inflates wages relative to productivity, depresses market prices and undermines investment -- all of which deters the expansion of productive companies, particularly startups, and amplifies the mismatch of skills.

Today, the risk is that this phenomenon may contribute to a period of macroeconomic stagnation, as occurred in Japan during the 1990s.
...

There is no single fix to the productivity problem. But, over time, a strategy centered on encouraging innovation in firms, facilitating entries and exits from the market and helping workers retool can combat the structural weaknesses afflicting advanced market economies. Clearing the path for higher productivity growth is the surest way to ensure that economic expansion helps workers and doesn’t fizzle.

Just to be clear, I am not necessarily opposed to many (perhaps not even most) of these proposals. Furthermore, I certainly agree that we should make it easier for badly run businesses to go away (though my definition of "badly run" may be different than that of the authors). That said, there is a great deal here that gives me pause and it is entirely consistent with the pause-giving elements of other OECD studies.

One troubling aspect was particularly well illustrated by the mention of Japan. Many of the policies that the organization objects to have been in place for a long time, and during that time, many of the countries used as examples have had both very good and very bad economies. For example, I'm under the impression that Japan has long had official practices in place that make innocent young freshwater economists cry themselves to sleep, but those same practices were in place during both the boom of the 60s, 70s, and 80s and the bust that followed. Likewise (though to a lesser degree) the United States has experienced highs and lows in the past few decades that seem unconnected with the reforms the OECD proposes.

And, with the all-important caveat that I am desperately out of my depth, I would assume that the more competitive and uniform markets of the European Union and the far greater employee mobility (at least until last year) would have been just the sort of reforms that the authors insist are the best way of fighting our economic woes.

I am even more troubled by the chronology with respect to the claims about the impact of bringing down barriers to entry for new businesses. The trouble is that we have seen a recent and, as far as I know, unprecedented drop in these barriers due to the rise of the Internet and mobile, and it happened…

Right…

About…

Here.

Once again I'm not saying that the proposals are bad and I am certainly not arguing that barriers to entry for new businesses are good; I am just saying that, even if our friends from the OECD are getting the direction right (which they very well may be), it is difficult to reconcile the magnitudes of impact they promise with the historical record.

The genre is sci-fi. The business model is fantasy.

One of the hallmarks of a bubble is the strange inversion of perceived risk. You get to a point where, for the people driving the bubble, the pain and anxiety of loss associated with missing out grow overwhelming. The only seemingly rational course of action is to do what ever it takes to get into the game. No matter how onerous the terms, no matter how many treasured possessions you need to hock, no matter how far you need to overextend yourself, the sensible course is to invest as much as you can.

Obviously, there are situations where "getting there the fastest with the mostest" is the best strategy, but even then, the smart investor or executive will at least acknowledge the inevitable point when blank checks will need to give way to caution. When the assumption that more spending is always better becomes axiomatic, the smart money starts backing toward the door.

Which brings us to a recent story from io9.

We were early to the party when it came to talking about the possibility of a content bubble. The basic idea is that while, even allowing for multiple screens (I've got two running myself at the moment), the competition for viewers has gotten brutal between cable and satellite, pay-per-view, streaming video, and our old friend digital terrestrial broadcasting. (We won't even get into games.) In particular, the share allotted to cable and satellite has been steadily shrinking, so that even allowing for population growth and the opening of international markets, this sector is, at best, holding its own.

At the same time, the amount of programming, particularly original scripted programming, has exploded. On top of this, there is something of a bidding war so that increased supply is actually met with spiraling prices. Obviously, this does not mean that investing big bucks in a TV series or the broadcast rights to a major movie franchise is necessarily a bad idea, but it does mean that the decision to open up the checkbook carries notable risks in the middle of a bubble.

What's so troubling about the following from a business perspective is that NBC Universal Cable Entertainment’s President of Entertainment, Chris McCumber doesn't even seem to consider the possibility.

Of course, all of that is window dressing compared what Syfy will actually put up on screens. McCumber said the goal was to go back to high-end, scripted television, with four focuses: space and scifi, fantasy, paranormal and supernatural, and superheroes and comics.

The Expanse and The Magicians are clearly the network’s flagship returning shows, mentioned many times and with pictures all over the presentations. For new projects, it was announced Tuesday night that Happy!, the adaptation of a Grant Morrison comic starring Christopher Meloni that was announced last year, will get a full season. Similarly, the Superman prequel Krypton has a full series order.

…

The channel has also paid a historic sum of money for Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. It’s going to have some of the Marvel movies on it. Syfy wants to be the home of everyone’s content, in some way or another.

Bialystock's Paradox and von Hoffman's Dead Rat Problem

[Brief caveat. I have only a cursory knowledge of Watergate so I may be getting some of the history wrong. Fortunately, most of my readers are better informed than I am.]

Picking up from here...

First off, a bit of background courtesy of Wikipedia:

Nicholas von Hoffman (born October 16, 1929 in New York City)[1] is an American journalist and author.
...

Von Hoffman was fired by Don Hewitt for referring to President Richard Nixon, at the height of the Watergate scandal, as "the dead rat on the kitchen floor of America, and the only question now is who's going to pick him up by his tail and throw him in the garbage."

Von Hoffman's dead rat is one of many examples of how the Trump scandals turn the dynamics of Watergate on its head (it also reminds us how little predictive value there is in the Trump/Watergate analogy).

At the risk of being one of those counterintuitive types I'm always complaining about, the Republicans were lucky not to hold Congress during Watergate. The Democrats had to pick up the rat; all the Republicans had to do was hold the door through a reasonable level of cooperation across the aisle and an occasional show of independence from the president. The GOP certainly took a hit, but it was probably the best they could do under the circumstances. Furthermore, they were able to avoid intra-party war and exchange a huge and growing problem for a useful martyr.

To go just a bit further down the counter-intuition rabbit hole, I suspect that a significant number of Republicans in Congress are hoping that enough of their colleagues lose their jobs in 2018 so that this disposal job can be handed over to the Democrats. Of course, there are two obvious problems with that strategy. First, it is impossible to guarantee that it will be a colleague who goes down in the tsunami. Second, November 2018 is a long ways off and, if the pace of the scandal holds (or even gets worse), association with Trump has the potential to do a stunning amount of damage between now and then.

Understanding Ailes

This Gawker (R.I.P) article does an excellent job showing the connection between Ailes, the Nixon White House and the beginnings of the social engineering experiment we call the conservative movement (of which Ailes was a primary architect):

Roger Ailes' Secret Nixon-Era Blueprint for Fox News by John Cook





While this Sherman interview is the best concise take I've heard on the rise of Fox News.

The Content Bubble and the Consideration Deficit

I probably need to do a deep dive one of these days and explore the connection between the content bubble and the larger story of how hype and next big thing-ism drive and distort markets. For now though, I'm just trying to document how big and overpriced and unsustainable the explosion of original scripted television (and the marketing budgets behind them) has become.

With Emmy season approaching and with easily a thousand square miles of LA County lousy with "For Your Consideration" billboards, Ken Levine has a post up that perfectly illustrates the point:

With 455 scripted shows and God knows how many unscripted shows out there, it’s shocking how many television programs I’ve never heard of. In some cases, I don’t even recognize the network. Elaborate programs too (at least based on the cover art).  Costume dramas and battle scenes and crucifixes.

And as I thumb through them one by one I feel a certain pang of guilt. There may be two or three of these shows that are really terrific. Some very talented and dedicated people poured their hearts and souls into these shows. And the studio must’ve spent a fortune sending them out. Some of the boxes and packaging is extraordinary. They should give out an Emmy for packaging.

But Jesus, life is too short. And if there is a series I do want to watch they often only include a couple of episodes. Sometimes they also provide a code so you can watch the series in its entirety on line. So there’s thirteen hours, or more precisely – twelve hours I won’t be watching something else.