Don't Look Now But TV Homes Are Declining

The New York Post 9/26/12 reported the following. 

Don’t look now, but there are more US homes without TV sets than ever before.

It’s an historic reversal of trend — something like the birds flying north for the winter — but Nielsen yesterday reported that the number of TV households fell by 500,000.

The reason?

More people are watching TV on their computers, the ratings company said in an e-mail statement yesterday.

Read the rest of the NY Post article HERE. 

Here is my little 2 cents for what it's worth. Consider the source, Nielsen Media Research, the company accused of accepting bribes in India, the company that has shown time and time again they can't be trusted to provide objective, accurate information, regardless of how many billions of $s are riding on it.

I have no doubt that fewer people may be buying TVs and are watching their entertainment online. My interns are in the early 20's and don't own a TV. They've never heard of "Modern Family", "60 Minutes" or "Real Time With Bill Mahr", but then again, they are from Moscow, Russia.

Yet, I know intuitively people are watching more and more online and less and less on TV. But I'm going to need more proof than Nielsen Media Research before I accept anything as fact. 

Television Killed Itself: The Rise of Pointless Television

One of the best critiques on the frustration millions feel about TV today I've ever read. 

Television Killed Itself: The Rise of Pointless Television

You Tube to review "Innocence of Muslims" Video

Mixed feelings on this one. I don't want freedom of speech compromised because of the feelings of some in other parts of the world, many of whom have access to limited information and thus a limited view of the world. That being said, You Tube is a private company and censors content all the time for a variety of reasons. Of course the film is extremely distasteful, but so are many, many things posted on the web. Unfortunately, people are disrespectful and hurtful all the time, especially on the web where they hide behind their keyboard.

I'd prefer the cultures in these countries take a more tolerant view and accept freedom of speech, religion and tolerate other viewpoints, but will that happen overnight?

This incident could be an important watermark of dialogue between East & West. Either way I'll guarantee you this type of thing will happen more and more as people have realized it's manipulative power for their particular cause, which is sowing discord. Has there ever been a film lampooning Buddha? or God? Why didn't that spark violence? Maybe, if it happens again and again, it will eventually lose it's potency. Maybe the answer is more, not less? Just a crazy (and I suppose a potentially deadly?) thought.

The article from Broadcasting & Cable is below.

http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/489397-Report_Obama_Administration_Asks_YouTube_to_Review_Innocence_of_Muslims_Video.php

Fearless Enough for France?

I'm heading to France next month, Cannes and Paris. Not my typical off the beaten path trip, that's for sure. After visiting so called "dodgy" places in Latin America and Eastern Europe, you'd think Western Europe would be cake right?

Not so fast. See the following article regarding a French fashion journalist bitch slapping a total stranger because couldn't find her and her 2 friends front row seats fast enough to a fashion show. After placing the slap, she even bragged about it to the NY Post, admitting that she told her victim "Now you know you don't F__K with French People" wow! uhmmm.. Hmmm. Maybe Colombia isn't so dangerous after all.

FROM NY POST - PAGE 6 9/13/12 
The French journalist who smacked a fashion publicist at a Zac Posen show has been slapped herself, with a $1 million lawsuit. HL Group co-founder Lynn Tesoro’s suit says the incident happened at Avery Fisher Hall Sunday when she was set upon by Jalouse magazine editor Jennifer Eymere, her sister Vanessa Bellugeon and her mom, Jalou Publishing head Marie-Jose Susskind-Jalou. The trio was très offended when Tesoro wasn’t able to immediately find them seats for the show because fire marshals removed 60 coveted chairs. A witness tells Page Six: “Lynn Tesoro was trying to help the French women find a seat, explaining there were no seats available on the front row, but one of the ladies seemed very angry and was being really mean to her. Suddenly, one of the French women sharply slapped Lynn in the face and stormed off. Lynn seemed in shock, but she was very elegant about it and kept her composure. Nobody could believe it had a happened.” The suit doesn’t identify the slapper, but charges the trio with “assault, battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, slander and/or libel.” In an interview with WWD, Eymere said she was the slapper. “I said, ‘Be careful, I am going to slap you,’ and she kept doing it,” Eymere recounted. “I didn’t hurt her. It was just to humiliate her. She humiliated my mom and I humiliated her in front of her crew. Voilà. I just said at the end, ‘Now you know you don’t f**k with French people.’” When Page Six reached Eymere yesterday about the incident, she said “I can’t comment, I don’t want to talk about it.” When asked about the lawsuit she added, “I don’t know about that.” A source said that after the slap, the mother and daughters left Posen’s show, meaning they missed the surprise appearance of Naomi Campbell, the ultimate model of anger management. Sources further tell Page Six that the French women have not been on any Fashion Week guest lists since the incident occurred.

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/slapper_slapped_with_suit_PzK9D7iuF3yBx3FWxJrC5O#ixzz26PXDikvD

Alleged Bribery Charges @ Nielsen Media

The NYC HCTV Bus Campaign Hit Targeted Latin  neighborhoods and Madison Ave. 

Nielsen Media Research, the long unchallenged purveyor of television audience measurement, has been accused by a media company in India of taking bribes. What is not surprising to me is the allegation that the CEO knew about the alleged bribery and did nothing about it.

In 2006, we unveiled an educational and online petition signing campaign (somewhat pioneering at the time, as this was prior to Facebook and Twitter mania) called "Change The Sample" - later re-branded "Help Change TV" - that "outed" Nielsen's practice of tilting their already tiny Hispanic samples towards Spanish speakers, thus helping the big two Spanish language networks and Nielsen deep pocketed clients like Univision and Telemundo.

The impact was not just billions of dollars in the pockets of the Spanish TV companies but a general under or stereotypical representation of young American Latinos in the English language media landscape (slightly less of a problem to this day, no thanks to Nielsen but instead to the explosion of media outlets).

Our Press Conference was infiltrated by Univision Execs.
Talk About David Vs. Goliath?! 

In meeting after meeting with Nielsen we told them about the flaws in their system. Incredibly, they acknowledged the obvious shortcomings but said "tough", that's the way it is, it would cost too much money to change. We started the HCTV campaign online and it immediately hit a nerve as I fielded call after call from the press. It was one of the most surprisingly viral efforts I've ever been involved in.

Nielsen's then spokesperson Jack Loftus, instead of answering the charges, came after me personally in the press, despite my best efforts to keep the dialogue tough but civil and professional. In the process Mr. Loftus revealed both Nielsen's and his own apparent ignorance about U.S. Latinos or minorities in general (Nielsen was a fairly lily white company, especially at the top, with the exception of a few token minority positions meant to placate African Americans and Latinos and distract from the bigger issues they had tracking minority viewing).

Loftus claimed we were angry at low ratings for our syndicated shows at American Latino Syndication (my company at the time) and said something along the line of, and I'm paraphrasing only a small bit here "Rose should focus on producing programming ALL Latinos would watch". We answered back that his comments indicated that he and Nielsen believed that Latinos are not made up of diverse individuals, but one monolithic group who only like tacos, mariachi music, soccer and  cheesy novellas.

Nielsen said ALL Latinos are basically the same. 

What Loftus didn't know is that our ratings had exceeded all expectations and we were doing quiet well, in terms of revenue, audience and affiliates. Certainly much better than I had ever expected or planned (a 13x episode commitment on a local cable outlet would go on to air in over 100 markets for over 11 seasons and counting)!

Months later at the NATPE television convention in 2007 where we hired models to circulate flyers wearing "Change The Sample" T-shirts featuring a photo of a young Latina (our office assistant at the time) with tape on her mouth, the icon of the campaign,  Nielsen in a David and Goliath moment for the media history books approached me frantically to beg us to pause the publicity campaign.

They  promised if we let up on Help Change TV! that they would commission an independent research study on this very technical (it's research, it's all technical... and boring inside baseball kind of stuff, one of the reasons Nielsen was able to get away with it in our short attention span media cycles) but nevertheless very important issue and would have official results of that study in six months. They even said they'd share the methodology of the study with us to insure that the process was as transparent as possible.

We backed off on the HCTV campaign as promised and waited... and waited.. and waited. Finally after hearing nothing more from them, 7 months later I contacted Nielsen to inquire about the result of the study that they had promised us at the NATPE meeting.

Their reply? "What meeting"? 

They denied there ever having been a meeting much less a promise to commission a study despite the fact that there were no less than 3 high level executives from Nielsen in that meeting, the EXACT same executives that were now denying the meeting ever took place. Even after all the things that had come to light about the ugly side of this corporation, I was still shocked. They weren't just denying their promise to do the study, they were straight faced denying that the meeting even took place?!

That was my first lesson in how a multi-billion dollar corporation can simply dance, dodge and delay (and evidently lie) without any moral code of conduct or sense of moral obligation to keep it's word. The experience forever changed how I view research from a research company that an entire industry relied, in which billions of dollars still rely.

Their CEO at the time was Susan Whiting, and in my opinion, though I never met her, she was ultimately responsible (ever heard the saying that a fish stinks from the head down, it's true). The company that she was overseeing had no problem outright disregarding the truth, even though that is what they get paid billions of dollars to objectively try to get at.  How can you trust research results from a company like that?

And how is this for irony? According to Nielsens' website Ms. Whiting was named Chief Diversity Officer in 2010!

Whatever.

My feud with Nielsen ended years ago (visit Help! Change TV to learn more), when I sold my company and felt I had done all I could to represent the case that Latinos needed to be represented in a more positive and accurate light on U.S. English language television  (Spanish TV wasn't much better, it was full of sexism and racism by omission - you could count the number of dark skinned Latinos on Spanish TV on one hand but the girls dancing around in lingerie or thong bikinis during "family hour"? Well, you'd need to use your hands and toes as well of those of your friends and neighbors).  I felt I had successfully brought to light that  Nielsen's erroneous numbers were a big part of the problem.

Grassroots Activism 

Things have changed dramatically since Change The Sample / Help! Change TV's heyday in 2005-2007. Nielsen has undergone ownership and leadership changes. There has been an explosion of TV channels, social media is now the norm and Univision has new owners that seem to be a bit more forward thinking. But to my knowledge, Nielsen still hasn't addressed the discrepancy of how it gathers audience measurement for the largest minority in the U.S. (and heavy TV watchers), U.S. Latinos.

And now this news that Nielsen's current CEO is now being accused of knowingly ignoring a major scandal involving alleged bribery in India? Maybe not that much has changed after all.

FROM THE WEBSITE. MRWEB.COM

Indian broadcaster NDTV is suing Nielsen and Kantar Media Research over claims that staff at the firms’ joint venture TAM took bribes in exchange for overstating ratings. According to the suit, this practice has damaged NDTV’s business to the tune of around $810m in the past eight years.


In the case, filed in the New York Supreme Court, Indian broadcaster NDTV (New Delhi Television) accuses Nielsen and Kantar of violating the anti-bribery clause in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, through their TAM (Television Audience Measurement) joint venture in India. 


NDTV alleges that staff at TAM India took the bribes in order to falsify the ratings data, and says that at a meeting it attended with several of these field staff, they claimed they could influence what panellist households watched if they were paid between $250 to $500 per household per month. 


The TAM staff are alleged to have told NDTV that they were willing to manipulate the ratings for any channel willing to pay the bribe, and added that they were confident that they could triple NDTV’s channel ratings in Mumbai over a period of two to three weeks in the required target group. 


‘Nielsen, Kantar and TAM are liable for indulging in corrupt practices by manipulating viewership data in favor of channels that are willing to covertly provide monetary inducements/payments/bribes to TAM officials,’ NDTV says in its 194-page statement. 


The broadcaster complains that after making Nielsen’s CEO David Calhoun and Kantar’s CEO Eric Salama aware of the issue, TAM continued to publish data in India. NDTV asked the two firms to discontinue publication of the data until there was an increase in sample size from 8,000 to 30,000, but says that ‘no such remedial measures have been taken’, and ‘corrupt data’ is still being published. 


‘Nielsen and Kantar, despite their explicit promises to address such rampant corruption, have negligently, deliberately and wilfully, failed and refused to discontinue publication of corrupted data, failed to increase sample size and failed to increase security measures, all of which they knew they should have done,’ the suit continues. 


NDTV is seeking $580m on 42 counts, including negligence, gross negligence, and false representations. A source at Nielsen told DRNO that the firm believes the case is ‘without merit’, while Kantar parent company WPP said that the firm’s lawyers are reviewing the case, adding: ‘We are satisfied that there is no merit in any claim against WPP.’

Finally.. Inspriing TV

An inspiring story that reminds us of what good television CAN be...

A good read & a good film...neither with Ashton Kutcher

Nothing gets my blood boiling like good old fashioned true stories of human rights abuse. Yes, I know, it's been going on since the beginning of time, but I guess having the good fortune of having lived in the U.S. (AKA the "bubble") in a certain age (now), gives me the kind of false feeling that human rights are indeed a right, not a privilege for the lucky few. Anyone who has traveled extensively, knows that unfortunately for much of the world, this is not the case, yes, even today.

Serial tweeter and celebutard Ashton Kutcher famously made an ass out of himself when he attached his well meaning but pea sized brain to a cause in the U.S. against "Human Trafficking" and got his facts completely scrambled. The Village Voice called him out on it; he whined in return and to be honest I didn't think much about it other than "when will this guy go away?" (not in my lifetime I'm afraid).

The reality is that human trafficking does indeed exist in the U.S., but on such a minute scale compared to the rest of the world, that for a celebrity to attach themselves to a cause in such an ill informed way, well, it just gets priorities wrong and people confused. Money that should be allocated elsewhere gets allocated here in the U.S. where we probably rank something like 101st or so in volume of Human Trafficking.

I mean the U.S. has hungry people too, but to compare the U.S. poor to the horn of Africa or Haiti, well that is sort of what old Ashton did with his ill informed "End Human Trafficking in the U.S." campaign.

Human Trafficking is a tragedy, whether it happens in the U.S. or anywhere in the world, but Ashton, ye born of privilege, do your research and shine the light where it is needed most, where it is a major problem amigo... the Third World my friend! Take a lesson from my man George Clooney, now that guy gets his facts and priorities straight (war crimes and genocide is where it's at man), or just cut to the chase and join the Church of Scientology.

In the end, I'm not sure how much a guy like Ashton Kutcher, even with his millions of twitter followers or twits as I like to say, can actually impact a large scale issue like human trafficking.

I humble, most notable non celebrity that I am, submit that the best way to raise awareness is to actually educate people on the REAL tragedy of human trafficking where it is REALLY impacting people.

Two great examples just passed my radar this week "Little Princes" a book about trafficking of children in Nepal during their recent civil war.

And I finally saw "The Whistleblower", a movie about human trafficking of young girls by UN and US Peacekeeping personnel in Sarajevo after their brutal civil war.

The book "Little Princes" is a true account written by a guy who did something about child trafficking in Nepal and the film is based on the true story of a female police officer turned U.N. peacekeeper who blew the whistle on the United Nations and their role in sex trafficking. Both people risked their lives and both the book and the film are powerful and far more effective than an air headed celebrity who can't get his facts straight for raising awareness and hasn't risked much more than humiliation at a casting call his entire life.

I highly recommend you consume both and preferably within a week of each other. I read the book in 3 days and saw the movie straight through without once pressing pause, both highly unusual for me. Entertaining, informative and inspiring, all in one or actually... two fell swoops.

In a world of media madness, isn't it good to find some media worth our time. Media not trying to necessarily sell us anything but a message that needs to be heard. That my friends is this week's/month's or whenever we actually find some and get around to it, "Media That Matters". (cue the branding music).

Now if we can just figure out how to traffic good old Ashton K. to a 3rd world country, far, far away from here.