Big mistake to go with President George Bush live Wednesday night rather than the UNC-UVa basketball game. The two events clash at 9 pm, and BT is going to go with a DVR-like time shift of the UNC broadcast. As a result, viewers will get the hoops action about 20 minutes after it happens live. That’s creative, but still wrong.
The reason is that anything could happen in the basketball game. It is, by definition, an unpredictable live event. A presidential speech is not, especially this one on the occasion of the Bush administration’s well-known plan for a troop “surge” in Iraq. As such, this is merely a policy PR event from the Oval Office. The game is ridiculously more newsworthy in that news will be committed. Moreover, a billion other outlets will cover the speech, whereas WBTV has exclusive rights to the Lincoln Financial broadcast. Going with the game would deprive exactly no one of live coverage of the president’s speech.
Contrary to what Shelly Hill, WBTV program director, thinks it would not be “incredibly insensitive of us not to carry the president’s address.” Instead, it is incredibly arrogant to think that a single station skipping the address matters much one way or another. This is not 1960.
Or you would not be reading this.
Update: Great of WBT’s Keith Larson to note our objection to WBTV’s solution on his air this AM. Not so great that Keith did not seem to grasp the principle which underlies the objection.
The relevant number is 1934. As in the year the FCC was created, along with much of our communication regulation. This, at last check, is 2007. WBTV is acting as if communication resources are 1934-era scarce by deciding to air the president’s speech. This is incorrect.
WBTV is also taking the position that the speech is newsworthy. That is a news judgment issue on which people may disagree, but I believe, on balance, George Bush will not tell us anything we do not already know or tell it in some new way.
Contrary to Keith’s assertion, it does not matter who sits in the Oval Office or which arm of the political duopoly he represents for these facts to matter. Nor does it matter that Waxhaw’s own, Charlotte Catholic graduate, and fellow UNC alum Kevin Martin is running the FCC in an ostensibly “conservative” fashion.
The FCC should be shut down and “the public” airwaves auctioned off to the highest bidder. A true 21st century communications world would not get bogged down in worrying if failure to carry some political speech would bring complaints and then fines from federal regulators. Perhaps politicians would even be relegated to the bandwidth they merit — something tinny, shrill, fuzzy, and out-of-focus.
