Thursday, October 19, 2023

Thursday Tweets -- "a moment so cretinous and conflicted and confused that it keeps mistaking con men for seers.”



















Does this mean they'll shut up?







If you have to base government on a sitcom...











For the 479th time, every time a Democrat is in front of a microphone, they need to make the interview about reproductive rights, protecting democracy, and SS/Medicare.

On a related note.






Years ago I heard West going after Obama and coming to the defense of Nader's decision to run in 2000. I should have seen this coming.



Thoughtful thread:

Always listen to Sullivan.


"Lost" in the sense that he got the most votes.

 

It will require at least one dedicated post to list all the problems with this Matt Yglesias post. 



There's no doubt the clips were selectively edited, but this doesn't looked fake.


This reminds me of a gag from an old SNL sketch (the Mack Reardon Story), but I can't find a clip online, so forget I mentioned it.




Cartoonishly evil.


And just cartoonish.

Not as funny, but possibly more costly.





More from the angry young sensible Democrat.




 

This Time it's different.


More on Hinton's prognostication record.




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Wednesday, October 18, 2023

Ten years ago at the blog, we were talking about government shutdowns and GOP dysfunction

You be the judge as to how well our take has held up

Tactics, Schmactics -- why I don't buy the latest trope on the government shut down

[I haven't seen anyone frame the discussion in the following way, but a lot of the points I want to make in this thread have been made recently by Josh Marshall and Jonathan Chait. Both are on my fairly short list of daily reads and both have a rare gift for, to paraphrase Orwell, seeing what's in front of their noses.]

You've been hearing it everywhere from Paul Krugman to the National Review: the growing rift in the Republican Party is strictly over tactics -- everyone on the right agrees on what they want; they're just fighting over how to get there -- but having looked carefully at this (and I've stared into this abyss longer than I should have), I'm convinced that it's not just wrong but wrong on multiple levels. I don't think it fits the facts but, more importantly, I don't even think it answers a meaningful question.

Here's a rough analogy. Let's say you're standing in a subway station and a man next to you has a seizure, falls to ground and rolls off of the platform. In that situation, "Why would he want to do that?" is not a meaningful question. The idea of explaining actions through desires only make sense if we make certain assumptions about rationality, vantage and control.

When we're talking about groups, particularly groups large enough not to be able to form fully connected graphs, checking similar assumptions becomes even more important. We have a tendency to anthropomorphize institutions. "The business community wants this." "The Tea Party is trying to do that."   Of course, we know this isn't true. The most you can say is that there's a strong consensus or that the group is following the lead of an individual. This doesn't mean that it can't be useful to analyze groups as if they were individual actors; it can often be the best approach, but only if certain conditions are met. The first of these is that the groups have to be, for lack of a better word, functional.

To be functional, the group has to have certain mechanisms in place and working reasonably well:

Mechanisms to bring information into the system, analyze it and make appropriate decisions based on it;

Mechanisms to disseminate instructions for implementing these decisions, and gathering feedback from members to allow adjustments in strategy;

Mechanisms to check those personal agendas when they threaten the overall goals of the group.

My take is that for quite a while now, the Republican party and the conservative movement have not been functional by these standards. I'm not saying that conservatives are stupid or unbalanced or are acting in an irrational or erratic manner. I am saying that the mechanisms needed for functional operation have broken down and, furthermore, they have broken down in entirely predictable ways, as long as you apply the right principles (game theory, social and individual psychology, voting "paradoxes," collective action and principal agent problem, organizational theory, etc.).

For example, the Romney campaign's inability to process poll information clearly indicates a breakdown in the way that information is suppose to flow through a system. More recently, many of the statements being made by prominent conservatives are clearly cathartic; They can only be seen as the actions of people seeking emotional release without regard to the larger strategic goals of the group.

I've got some suggestions as to why this is happening that I will try to flesh out more later (with the caveat that I have no special expertise in any of these areas and I will invariably get in over my head). I've got first drafts of the next couple of posts, but just to restate the underlying thesis, when it comes to recent developments in the GOP, I think that we are less likely to find useful analogies in the Art of War and more likely to find them in When Prophecy Fails.

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Tuesday, October 17, 2023

What's a little rabies between best friends?

One point I probably should have emphasized more in previous feral disinformation posts is that while some of these effects may be big and obvious, they are often indirect and never simple. That is the nature of this particular beast.

The post-covid anti-vax movement is one of the best examples of how disinformation goes feral. Originally, attempts to deny or at least minimize the threat from the pandemic was straightforward propaganda and disinformation designed to prevent the outbreak from damaging Donald Trump's chances in 2020. As time progressed, however, the Republican party and conservative media lost control of the narrative and it took on the life of its own, to the point where when Trump finally had perhaps the one big accomplishment of his administration (Operation Warp Speed), the anti-mask/anti-vax movement had grown so strong that some of his strongest far-right supporters such as Alex Jones and Candice Owen attacked him for taking credit for it.

Now, the movement that was primarily about attacking anti-covid measures has metastasized, often with disturbing results and in unexpected directions. So far, debunked concerns haven't greatly lowered vaccinations, at least not in this story, but it is clearly pushing people in that direction.

Pien Huang  reporting for NPR.

But Marabito considers the current vaccination guidelines "excessive." She's one of many pet owners with "canine vaccine hesitancy," a phrase coined in a recent study led by the Boston University School of Public Health and published in the journal Vaccine. The study found that 53% of U.S. dog owners surveyed question whether the rabies vaccine is safe, whether it works, or whether it's useful.

The researchers sought to quantify a sentiment they were seeing in their work as veterinarians.

...

That around half of all dog owners are skeptical about the rabies vaccine is "very disturbing" to Lori Teller, a veterinarian at the Texas A&M School of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and past president of the American Veterinary Medical Association. "The rabies vaccine has been around for decades and it is so incredibly safe, especially when you consider the risk of death," she says.

Rabies is nearly always fatal if it advances to the point where symptoms appear.

...

Of the approximately 24 million dogs that are vaccinated against rabies each year, "the vast majority ... have no adverse reactions to the vaccine," he wrote in an email, "There are only a very small number of severe adverse reactions per year (~2.4 per 1,000,000 vaccinated) and, even with those, it's difficult to definitively attribute these reactions to vaccination."

In comparison, Wallace sees great benefit to rabies vaccinations. He analyzed rabies data and estimated that they prevent nearly 300 dogs from getting infected with rabies per year, in turn preventing more than 100 human deaths and saving more than $3 million in treatment costs.

Not vaccinating against rabies could lead to your dog dying if they get infected – or in some cases – if they bite someone, Teller from Texas A&M says: "There is a real likelihood that animal control could euthanize your dog and test it for rabies because human health is going to supersede animal health at that point," she says.

...

"The suffering and fear caused by it are so great that they make this the most dreaded of all diseases," wrote the authors of an article from 1928 in the American Journal of Public Health. In the early 1900s, thousands of pets and farm animals caught it each year, and dozens of people died from it.

After decades of concerted public health efforts, the rabies situation in the U.S. was brought under control in the 1960's, and remains so — meaning most human deaths are prevented. Each year, a few hundred pet cases are reported, and one to three people die from it.

...

Globally, rabies is still considered "one of the most feared infectious diseases worldwide," according to health researchers. The disease kills around 59,000 people each year, mostly in countries in Asia and Africa where the disease is endemic in dogs.

... 

Motta sees pet vaccine skepticism as a "spillover effect" from a rise in human vaccine hesitancy – related to the skepticism towards COVID vaccines and the anti-vaccine movement against childhood shots. "We see in our research that people who hold negative views toward human vaccinations are precisely the types of people who hold negative views toward vaccinating their pets."

While many dog owners have some skepticism towards the rabies vaccine, the shot is required by law in most places and 84% of the Mottas' survey respondents said they're still giving it to their pets. That's about the same as it was a decade ago, the CDC's Wallace says, according to a separate study conducted then.

Health officials say the margin is slim. The World Health Organization and CDC both recommend maintaining at least a 70% dog vaccination rate, to prevent rabies outbreaks. If the rate dips below that, parts of the U.S. could start seeing more deadly rabies cases in people and pets, Wallace says.

 

 

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Monday, October 16, 2023

Sam Bankman-Fried, Lord of Ithuvania*

One of the most persistent and damaging assumptions in the popular discourse is that to become fantastically rich you have to be the smartest person in the room almost all the time. The press is hugely invested in this notion and the result is a powerfully doubly reinforced halo effect. The idea that these tech messiahs are all super-geniuses is treated as self-evident despite the lack of actual evidence.


Your first reaction to someone who said Shakespeare is gibberish would be to think this guy is an idiot, and you would probably be right. There are many reasonable arguments you can make for the position that Shakespeare is overrated (just as you can do with pretty much any writer or artist who has at one point been widely described as the greatest of all time). You can criticize his sloppiness, his willingness to leave the narrative path for a cheap gag or pun. You can argue that future generations read things into the plays that weren't there. You can critique his worldview which while fairly advanced for a man of his period, certainly is filled with views we find repugnant today. But when someone goes with the gibberish attack, pretty much the only conclusion you can come to is that person is not smart enough to follow what's going on in the plays.

Of course, we all have our weak spots and there are countless examples of unquestioned geniuses who hold at least a few shockingly stupid opinions. No one expects SPF to be a gifted literary critic. people do, however, expect him to be mathematically literate, which is what makes the following so goddamn funny.

Image

 

Despite Musk's best efforts, there are still enough people on Twitter familiar with this classic example of a statistical fallacy to generate a suitable wave of mockery. Lots of tweets pointed out that any hand of poker, pat or not, would be evidence of cheating since the odds against getting any particular hand are astronomical. Others pointed out that you can't be your height (or other scenarios based on continuous variables.) according to this line of reasoning.

My go-to rebuttal of this broader class of fallacies is that any argument that can be applied equally well with minimal tweaking to every person living or dead cannot be informative. We are all highly unusual in some way.

P.G. Wodehouse once described his dim-witted hero Bertie Wooster as having passed through the world's finest educational institutions untouched by human thought. SBF came from one of the country's most distinguished academic families, grew up attending elite prep schools and math camps, graduated from MIT with a degree in physics and a minor in math, and still doesn't understand basic probability.

What's worse, this ineptness extends to the kind of mathematical reasoning that is at the very heart of Finance and particularly Trading. The indispensable Matt Levine points out this glaring example, also from Michael Lewis's book.

People have thought about this question! Like, this is very much a central thing that traders and trading firms worry about. The standard starting point is the Kelly criterion, which computes a maximum bet size based on your edge and the size of your bankroll. Given the intern’s bankroll of $100, I think Kelly would tell you to put at most $10 on this bet, depending on what exactly you mean by “this bet.” [7] Betting $98 is too much.

I am being imprecise, and for various reasons you might not expect the interns to stick to Kelly in this situation. But when I read about interns lining up to lose their entire bankroll on bets with 1% edge, I think, “huh, that’s aggressive, what are they teaching those interns?” (I suppose the $100 daily loss limit is the real lesson about position sizing: The interns who wipe out today get to come back and play again tomorrow.) 

But I also think about a Twitter argument that Bankman-Fried had with Matt Hollerbach in 2020, in which Bankman-Fried scoffed at the Kelly criterion and said that “I, personally, would do more” than the Kelly amount. “Why? Because ultimately my utility function isn’t really logarithmic. It’s closer to linear.” As he tells Lewis, “he had use for ‘infinity dollars’” — he was going to become a trillionaire and use the money to cure disease and align AI and defeat Trump, sure — so he always wanted to maximize returns.

But as Hollerbach pointed out, this misunderstands why trading firms use the Kelly criterion. [8]  Jane Street does not go around taking any bet with a positive expected value. The point of Kelly is not about utility curves; it’s not “having $200 is less than twice as pleasant as having $100, so you should be less willing to take big risks for big rewards.” The point of Kelly is about maximizing your chances of surviving and obtaining long-run returns: It’s “if you bet 50% of your bankroll on 1%-edge bets, you’ll be more likely to win each bet than lose it, but if you keep doing that you will probably lose all your money eventually.” Kelly is about sizing your bets so you can keep playing the game and make the most money possible in the long run. Betting more can make you more money in the short run, but if you keep doing it you will end in ruin.

 I'm a huge fan of Lewis's work, but I'll probably give this on a pass. SBF is a con-man with a messiah complex who really isn't that bright. I believe that's all I really need to know about him.

* Part of our long running Ituvania thread.

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Friday, October 13, 2023

"Trump leaking highly classified military data is getting less coverage than a literal dog-bites-man story." -- actually more true than when I wrote it.


The New York Times' capacity for self-parody exceeds your capacity for mockery. I wrote that tweet (my first one to go viral) in response to the NYT burying the latest story of Trump leaking some of our most closely guarded defense secrets.


Image


Image



This has not been a slow news week, but the NYT still found time for this.


The piece itself was, if anything, worse than you'd expect. Pretentious, bland, filled with amateur psychoanalysis, and lacking even that small amount of self-awareness to realize that he is, at the risk of repeating myself, writing a literal dog-bites-man story, the very definition of unnewsworthy.

There was only one interesting part, and that was entirely unintentional. It turns out the whole thing started with news releases from Judicial Watch, a right wing trolling operation...
... also known for race-baiting, conspiracy theories...


... and up to their pale white necks in the attempt to overthrow the election.




In a sane world, trivial stories from right-wing propaganda outs would, at best, merit a few column inches in the back of the paper, but in this world, far too many journalists are more concerned with avoiding the appearance of liberal bias than they are with doing their job.
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Thursday, October 12, 2023

Thursday tweets (we're thinking of advertising on the platform, but we'll need to scrape together the $10)

No tweets about the war but an observation that lots of people of people are making. Twitter used to be the place that you went to follow a big story in real time. That's one of the things Musk has managed to ruin about the site.









And it's not just Fox

After all these tweets, I finally go viral before Elon destroys the site.

It's important to have the support of family.



I assume the reasoning is that this positive press will prime the pump and the MSM will jump on the bandwagon, but given that the anti-vax wing of the party is pissed with Trump while most Dems have grown to hate RFK jr, this could go all sorts of interesting ways.


While the intent of the post may have been to satirize rather than to inform, learning that Rodger's dad was a chiropractor fills in a lot of the picture.

When I got to the part about needing unemployment to rise, I thought it was going to be about inflation, not the childish need to see employees grovel.


In other tech super-genius news...



They watch Fox so you won't have to.





Lectern-gate

A blogger named Matt Campbell has been pulling at threads dangling from the Huckabee Sanders administration and things are starting to unravel.



Yeah, the GOP moderates were so undemanding they were practically invisible.



"National Security Reporter @ForeignPolicy"


Maybe it's an exercise in constrained writing, like a lipogram.


 



Misc.


Yes, I did have to look it up.)



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Wednesday, October 11, 2023

"Now the language of this 15-minute conspiracy theory has made its way to some of the highest levels of the British government."

Another dot for you to connect in the feral disinformation thread.

If you are following the housing debate, this NPR segment on 15 minute cities is definitely worth reading for both good and bad reasons. There are a lot of problems with the piece, not the least of which is the choice to bury the most important section in the middle. Having the country's transport secretary spreading wild conspiracy theories should be the lede.

Another important point which should have been emphasized far more is the role of Jordan Peterson and particularly Joe Rogan. Peterson has a very large cult-like following while Rogan is one of the most popular broadcasters in the country. Both are Typhoid Marys of the feral disinformation epidemic. If you want to understand this crisis, you have to understand their place in it.

 One element this story has in common with yesterday's flying syringe is that it started with something real. While conspiracy theorists are certainly capable of inventing fantasies out of whole cloth, there are usually a few grains of truth mixed in.

 Julia Simon reporting for NPR:

At the fall meeting, Enright saw a group of attendees he didn't recognize. One of them stood up and asked about 15-minute cities. "To be honest, first I'd ever heard of that phrase," Enright says.

The group grew so agitated that they stopped the meeting. "They were explaining all about this theory about world government via the World Economic Forum trying to institute this policy everywhere of '15-minute cities,'" Enright recalls, "by which they meant you would only be able to travel 15 minutes from your home."

Enright couldn't understand why the bus priority lanes were getting mixed up with a conspiracy theory about 15-minute cities that restrict people's movements. "My job is to make travel easier so people can go wherever they like to find opportunity: jobs, education," he says. "Not to stop people going more than 15 minutes."

Yet the conspiracy theory that 15-minute cities are a way for the global elite to contain people in open-air prisons took off in the past year, says Jennie King, head of climate research and policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in London, a nonprofit that studies extremism.

"Fifteen-minute cities is the latest victim in a broader trend," King says. "The unifying theme of a lot of these attacks and conspiracies is that climate change is being used as a pretext to strip people of their civil liberties."

Some prominent right-wing podcasters, including Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan, have brought up the conspiracy theory on their shows. Last month, Rogan talked about 15-minute cities on his show. "You'll essentially be contained unless you get permission to leave," Rogan said. "That's the idea they're starting to roll out in Europe."

Now the language of this 15-minute conspiracy theory has made its way to some of the highest levels of the British government. Last week at the U.K.'s Conservative Party conference, the country's transport secretary, Mark Harper, said he was "calling time on the misuse of so-called 15-minute cities."

"What is sinister and what we shouldn't tolerate," Harper said, "is the idea that local councils can decide how often you go to the shops and that they ration who uses the roads and when, and they police it all with CCTV."

...

In February, thousands of protesters gathered in Oxford decrying the proposed bus priority lanes, which they saw as an onramp to draconian societal controls. Enright and his colleagues began receiving strange messages, phone calls and, eventually, death threats.


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Tuesday, October 10, 2023

Feral disinformation and "flying syringes"*

Continuing with the week's theme...

Hailey Branson-Potts and Jessica Garrison writing for the LA Times:

As soon as Jon Knight applied for a seat on the Shasta Mosquito and Vector Control District board, the conspiracy theories started flying.

Knight, who owns a hydroponic gardening supply store in Redding, spoke darkly about his suspicion that Bill Gates had helped unleash genetically modified mosquitoes in California. And he warned about “flying syringes that will mass vaccinate the population.”

Knight was considered along with Donnell Ewert, a retired epidemiologist who once was the Northern California county’s public health director.

The Shasta County Board of Supervisors chose Knight — a right-wing political activist who was pictured outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, holding what appeared to be a white power symbol.

 ...

There are parts of California that have doubled down on their political conservatism in the face of the state’s largely Democratic bent — and then there is Shasta County.

Home to 182,000 people, the mostly rural county has long been governed by mainstream Republicans such as Rickert, a cattle rancher.

But there is a bitter divide in Shasta County between traditional conservatives and the far right, akin to Washington, D.C., where ultraconservatives led the revolt that just ousted California Republican Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House.

Hard-right politicians — supported by members of a local militia, State of Jefferson secessionists and residents furious about COVID-19 pandemic restrictions — hold a majority on the powerful Shasta County Board of Supervisors.

Earlier this year, the board voted to dump the county’s Dominion voting machines, citing discredited allegations of voter fraud pushed by President Trump, and moved to hand-count ballots for its more than 110,000 registered voters. The decision prompted new legislation — signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday and set to take effect immediately — that limits the ability of local governments to hand-count ballots.

Last year, the Board of Supervisors fired Karen Ramstrom, the county’s public health officer, for following state laws requiring masks and vaccinations during the pandemic.

The appointment of Knight to the vector control board is just the latest example of what many exasperated residents describe as Shasta County’s descent into a political sideshow.

 ...

Knight said he recently got West Nile virus and was more sick than he ever had been.

 ...

Anita Brady, a retired high-school biology teacher, said Knight’s appointment to the vector control board terrifies her.

“The fact that he’s been swayed by these conspiracy theories, evidently for years, doesn’t give me much hope for what’s going to happen with this board,” she said.

Brady, who lives a few miles east of Redding, said she just wants the mosquito threat to be taken seriously — with a science-based approach.

In August, one of Brady’s neighbors contracted West Nile virus from a mosquito bite and was paralyzed by the disease. After weeks in the hospital, Brady said, he recently returned home in a wheelchair, unable to walk. 

* As with a few of these theories, the idea of using mosquitos for mass vaccination was not invented out of whole cloth, rather it is a highly speculative proposal that has been elevated to the level of a massive secret operation.

 

 

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Monday, October 9, 2023

Almost no one in the mainstream press has come to terms with what it means to have one of our two main political parties based on feral disinformation.

Just to get this out of the way, there are certainly false beliefs that are common among democrats/progressives/ liberals. The far left is a whole 'nother story but they don't have that much say in the party despite what Fox News would like you to believe.
 

For example:


The primary cause of Western mega-fires is not climate change. Most coastal cities will not soon be underwater due to rising sea levels. These are not whole cloth falsehoods. Climate change certainly exacerbates my region's forest fires and greatly complicates our ability to tackle them. Rising oceans are likely to submerge a handful of very low lying cities such as Miami Beach and, more importantly, can make storm swells all the more deadly for many coastal cities.

Yes, most Democrats hold these incorrect or at least insufficiently nuanced beliefs, but while it is important that everyone try to do better when it comes to misinformation, the disinformation problem on the right is an entirely different beast in terms of magnitude, type, causes, and potential for damage, and as far as I can tell, few researchers and almost no analyst with any major news organization has fully faced this problem and thought through its implications.

Just to review, what we've been calling feral disinformation started out as propaganda, conspiracy theories, and other false beliefs that were originally promoted or at least tolerated by the conservative movement because it helped advance their objectives, but this disinformation took on a life of its own. To put it bluntly, feral disinformation along with the desire to "own the lib"s define the Republican Party of the 2020s.

Almost all GOP voters base their political positions at least in part on some example of feral disinformation.

Certain false beliefs and conspiracy theories are so widely held in the party that no candidate can hope to be nominated without at the very least turning a blind eye. If you make evidence-based claims about vaccinations, the 2020 elections, or the lack of any support for conspiracy theories about prominent Democrats part of your platform, you are unlikely to have any hope of a career in the Republican Party beyond the district level.



Not only is feral disinformation found among a large majority of Republican voters, completely delusional variants are held by a disturbingly large minority, often including disturbingly highly placed and influential figures. Fantastic theories about vaccines spreading through casual contact or even genetically modified mosquitoes, futuristic life extending technologies keeping long dead politicians secretly alive, satanic cannibal cults of the elite, Protocols of Zion style Jewish conspiracies, rejected X-Files plots about aliens and subterranean lizard people, and of course flat earthers. While the typical Republican probably doesn't believe any of these things, taken together, the believers do represent a large enough group to have real impact in the party.

This is the reality that everyone who works in politics, either directly or as a journalist or as a researcher, has got to face up to. If you're looking at DeSantis's support, you pretty much have to start with anti-vaxxers. If you want to explain the ratcheting of more extreme and unpopular anti-abortion laws, you have to factor in urban myths about infanticide and and other child endangerment fantasies.

2,000 Mules has more to do with Trump's hold on the party than do any variables political scientists would normally put into their models. 

At this point, trying to understand the GOP without considering the role of feral disinformation is like trying to explain the witch mania without considering the belief in the supernatural.



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Friday, October 6, 2023

Thursday Tweets -- Dems in Disarray













Imagine the reaction of your past selves when you travel back in time and  tell them how much you like Michael Steele's commentary.





Was this before or after he whined about the Democrats not cleaning up the Republicans' mess?









Quiet parts out loud.



 

We've been talking about the rise of the "Trump > the Pope" Catholics for years, but they still freak me out.







The sad part is that this in no way lowers the average quality of Briahna Joy Gray's commentary. 





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Thursday, October 5, 2023

Twelve years ago at the blog -- Even East Coast journalists are starting to catch on to Weigel and over-the-air television

Svengoolie has broken through from cult figure to mainstream appeal with write-ups in places like the WSJ and a full issue team-up with the Justice League. MeTV is a ratings juggernaut, crushing deep-pocketed competitors like Paramount's TV-land in the ratings. And while the streaming industry continues to lose billions of dollars, the over-the-air niche Weigel pioneered might be the most profitable spot on the television landscape.

Pretty good for a technology that people were calling dead on arrival fifteen years ago.

Friday, October 7, 2011

Free TV blogging -- Why Weigel Broadcasting may be the best business story that no one's covering -- part I

[I should start with the disclaimer that all of the information I have about Weigel comes from two sources: Wikipedia and way too many hours of watching television. It's entirely possible that a competent journalist could discover that the truth here is something entirely different, but if competent journalists were paying attention I wouldn't be writing these posts.]

Though the improvement in picture and sound got most of the attention, another aspect of the transition to terrestrial digital was arguably more important, particularly for broadcasters: under the new technology, each station could broadcast multiple subchannels. The situation was analogous to the TV landscape thirty years earlier when cable and satellite stations were exploding on the scene. It's not surprising that someone would try to create the broadcast equivalent of superstations like TBS. What is surprising is who was able to get a channel up and running before any of the competitors were out of the gate.

The name of the channel was ThisTV. It was produced by a regional broadcasting called Weigel, best known for operating the last independent station in Chicago and being the home of the cult favorite Svengoolie -- last of old time horror hosts. Weigel had a content deal with MGM which was not nearly as impressive as it sounds -- Turner had bought out the classic MGM library years earlier -- but MGM still had a lot of films including the catalog of American International, the studio responsible for virtually every drive in movie you can think of from the late Fifties through the early Seventies.

Access to all those AIP films probably had a lot to do with the unique ThisTV brand. Here's how I summed it up earlier:
Weigel are the people behind ThisTV and the exceptionally good retro station MeTV (more on that later). ThisTV is basically a poor man's TCM. It can't compete with Turner's movie channel in terms of library and budget -- no one can (if my cable company hadn't bumped TCM to a more expensive tier I never would have dropped the service), but it manages to do a lot with limited resources using imagination and personality. As a movie channel, it consistently beats the hell out of AMC.

ThisTV has caught on to the fact that the most interesting films are often on the far ends of the spectrum and has responded with a wonderful mixture of art house and grind house. Among the former, you can see films like Persona, the Music Lovers and Paths of Glory. Among the latter you'll find American International quickies and action pictures with titles like Pray for Death. You can even find films that fit into both categories like Corman's Poe films or Milius' Dillinger.

If I ran a TV station, I would definitely combine Bergman and ninjas. I would not, however, run Mario Bava's feature length pulp magazine cover, Planet of the Vampires from twelve till two. Some of us have to get up in the morning.

This mix was in place from the very beginning. The station officially debuted on November 1, 2008 with Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It but many stations started carrying it a day earlier to take advantage of a day of cheesy Halloween horror films. It was a formula that made a virtue out of cheapness (rarely seen auteur films and drive-in movies both have the advantage of not costing much) and it produced a format that's been running smoothly with remarkably few adjustments for almost three years.

For a small player to identify a new market, develop a concept, negotiate the necessary deals with a content provider (MGM), line up affiliates, make the countless other arrangements that accompany a major launch and to be up and running with a quality product when the support technology first comes online is an impressive accomplishment. But it gets better.

So far we have a solid business story -- small yet nimble company with some good ideas beats big, well-established competitors into a new market. Not exactly the most original piece of journalism but certainly good enough for the front page of the business section. However the story doesn't stop there. Weigel didn't just beat its big and well-financed competitors; it lapped them. Before the next entrant, Tribune/WGN, was able to get its station, AntennaTV on the air, Weigel managed to launch a second channel, the ambitious classic television station, METV. If this weren't enough, AntennaTV is the only one of the three to look slapped together despite having taken far longer to make it to the air (of course, we have no way of knowing how long it took Tribune to see the opportunity and how long it took them to act on it but either way Weigel looks good by comparison).

To put this in context, at least half of this story takes place after the collapse of '08, a downturn that hit advertiser-based businesses particularly hard. Furthermore, the story occurs in an industry that a large number of lobbyists and at least a few pundits were literally trying to kill. There had even been a New York Times op-ed calling for the government to eliminate over the air television and sell off the spectrum.

One of the great memes of the Great Recession has been that uncertainty paralyzes businesses. Even the possibility of a tax increase or some additional regulation -- both extremely mild by historical standards -- are enough to bring the economy to a standstill, but here's a market filled with unknowns under a credible threat of annihilation and we can still find a company like Weigel moving aggressively to establish dominance of it.

That's the other side of uncertainty. It allows companies to substitute boldness and decisiveness for money and market position and take advantage of opportunities that would otherwise be out of their reach.

[also posted at MippyvilleTV]

 

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