commentary

Shira Ovide: Netflix must grow. It has no choice. Sharks must keep swimming, and Netflix needs to keep signing up as many newcomers as it can. This is the path the company has chosen. Netflix’s blueprint is to spend money it doesn’t have today to land alluring programming and sign up as many customers as possible — and worry about the bill later.

After all that media drama, President Trump’s first Oval Office primetime address served no purpose but to get him on his true home: TV.

Next Gen TV will allow broadcasters to deliver hyperlocal content over-the-air, and they need to get serious about it.

Fox News political analyst Juan Williams: “In many ways, Trump is the white Marion Barry. They share a willingness to play racial politics, an authoritarian bent and an open hostility towards journalists. There is one important difference: Trump is doing his damage at the national level.”

Rich people have free speech rights. Do the corporations they run? That question is destroying democracy.

Local television stations are feeling it from every direction. Viewers have more choices, stations face more competitors, and owners demand more returns. None of this is new, only exaggerated. Here are some ideas on how to make local news relevant again,

President Trump started a trend: calling unfavorable news coverage fake. Foreign leaders — especially dictators and authoritarian regimes — have followed suit.

Steven Bochco was not the most prolific of TV’s star producers, but he was one of the few whose name everybody knew.

Media companies are scrambling to get bigger and create their own online video services, which don’t make much money or even meet consumers’ needs.

Did news publishers make a mistake in adopting “platforms” and specifically Facebook in a big way in the first place? I helped lead a major, prioritized Facebook push at a previous employer, and my answer is “no.” Drawing that conclusion is taking away the wrong lesson from the experience. Here’s why.

Los Angeles Times: “The real issue is whether any company should be able to amass control over so much of the public airwaves.”

What keeps people glued to YouTube? Its algorithm seems to have concluded that people are drawn to content that is more extreme than what they started with — or to incendiary content in general.

“Microsoft’s bet seems to be that it’s cheaper to hire slick PR muscle and to try to hoodwink regulators into handing out free spectrum than to buy spectrum like everyone else. As someone whose 600 MHz auction battle scars are still healing, I sure hope they are wrong.”

Conservative TV news giant Sinclair Broadcast Group wants its local viewers to be constantly petrified of an impending terror attack by Muslim immigrants and refugees. That’s the conclusion I’ve reached after watching all of Sinclair’s Terrorism Alert Desk segments from 2017 — segments the company produces in its national offices and forces its local stations across the country to air almost every day.

One measure of the leadership of the Stoneman Douglas generation might be convincing Hollywood that glib, cynical violence no longer sells, and teaching the rest of us that guns are anything but a game.

The government should require social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to use an  open application programming interface. This would make it possible for third parties to build software to monitor and report on the effects of social media algorithms. To be clear, the proposal is not to force companies to open up their algorithms — just the results of the algorithms.

The creation of the First Amendment by our nation’s founders demonstrated a profound commitment to human dignity, reason and the search for truth. First Amendment confusion reigns today in America. Today, too many Americans take a self-centered approach, claiming their own individual rights, but not acknowledging that the First Amendment protects the free speech of the other guy, too.

Kudos to Nexstar’s WHBF Rock Island, Ill., for recognizing that the First Amendment is about more than freedom of the press. It is also about religious liberty. You may have […]

Patrick Butler, president-CEO of America’s Public Television Stations: “Public television is primarily a local service, performed by 170 community, university and state licensees throughout America, pursuing essential missions of education, public safety and civic leadership for everyone — everywhere, every day, free of charge. Without the federal investment, this universal service would be impossible. And the farther away from major cities public television goes, the more important federal funding becomes.”

Every single day, in Washington, D.C., and every other city in America, there are responsible journalists working hard to hold the powerful accountable, to serve the public by reporting stories that often serve as catalysts for positive change, and who strive to live up to the exalted Murrow’s standards: “To be persuasive we must be believable. To be believable, we must be credible. To be credible, we must be truthful.”

“False equivalence” is the term for a mistake some of us are making today when we talk about there being two different ways of seeing the world, depending on what cable channels and media we get our information from on this story. But when we state it that way, it also sounds as if the two ways are comparable, perhaps even equal. They most definitely are not.

The biggest and most important social media challenge to you as a TV station is to use your platforms to increase ratings by getting new viewers to sample newscasts, and — even more critically — getting current viewers to watch you more often. If they watched you once a week and now watch you three times a week, that’s great growth. The same applies to digital. Imagine what it would do to your metrics if you could repeatedly bring back your users throughout the week.