Deggans on WEDU tonight; still recovering from public discussion last night on race, religion and media

It easily could have degenerated into chaos.

Last night, before a crowd of about 60 people at Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, I led a discussion on how the media has covered race and religion that took a turn into a conflict about evangelist Bill Keller and some of his more incendiary comments about Islam.

Keller had agreed to appear at the forum, which was co-sponsored by the Council on American Islamic Relations, so he knew some criticsm was coming. But most of the attendees took visible umbrage at Keller's unwillingness to back away from statements such as Islam was a "1,400-year-old lie from the pits of hell" and calling the Prophet Mohammed a "murdering pedophile."

Keller says his words are backed by the bible. Other pastiors onstage, including Arthur Jones from Bible Based-Fellowship in Tama, disagreed. Jones and Keller also disagreed on the notion that black ministers may be held to more media scrutiny or pay a bigger price for controversial statements than white evangelicals. In fact, the only thing all those on our panel could really agree on, was that media outlets weren't covering any of this particularly well.

I was struck by how entrenched some perspectives were. Even after I noted how a study showed that white people judge racial progress by looking at how far we';ve come and black people judge racial progress by how far we need to go -- asking how we bridge that divide -- Jones and Keller proceeded to echo the same thoughts is slightly different ways.

Questioners from the crowd tended to talk about "the media" as if we were all one big ball of an organization, with little distinction between print, network TV, cable TV, talk radio and the Internet. But each platform works indifferent ways, presenting different challenges -- so how can one criticsm fit them all?

What also seemed obvious: while the public is hungry for a media structure which delivers "The truth," increasingly, there is no such thing in modern life. Particularly, regarding complex issues such as religious faith, race prejudice, Palestinian history, anti-American sentiment in the Middle East and the role of the Muslim faith in terrorism, there often is no definitive "truth."

There is, instead, a collection of reports from a variety of sources -- each with their own set of values, advantages and shortcomings. And, increasingly, it falls to the news consumer to be selective and wide-ranging in the news sources they regularly consume -- their media diet, as I've written about before -- to make sure they get a balanced view.

As is often the case, I left last night's forum excited by the conversation, but concerned because we rarely seem to move beyond this point. Here's hoping this time might be different.

Hear me talk about this and other subjects on Rob Lorei's public affairs show for WEDU-Ch.3, Florida This Week, at 8:30 p.m. tonight or 12:30 p.m. Sunday. Below, there's a look at the last time I appeared on the show:

   

R.I.P. Harvey Korman

I always had a soft spot in my heart for enduring straight man/character actor Harvey Korman, who passed away last night at the age of 81. (Doen't he look like Kelsey Grammer's long lost dad in those early photos?)

Of course, his work on the Carol Burnett show was landmark television. So here's a cool skit I dug up on You Tube, featuring the great Korman and his longtime partner in TV comedy crime, Tim Conway.

Lost finally ends its season; what do we really know?

Lost may be the only TV series that actually benefited from this year's debilitating writer's strike.

While series like Heroes were diminished by shortened series or lost momentum when production stopped in November, like Desperate Housewives, the Losties used their time wisely, cobbling together a story about six of our 40-something castaways leaving the island that -- of course -- raised as many questions as it answered.

So what do we really know about the Lost universe after last night's two-hour finale (if you DVR-ed last night's show and haven't watched it yet, you might want to stop reading now)?

  -- John Locke is the mysterious dead guy whose funeral Jack attended at the end of last season, when producers whipped out the way-cool "flash-forward" scenes which have made watching Lost even more of a challenge. As a longtime fan, I love guessing whether a particular scene is in the past or the future, but I worry such storytelling tricks will keep new people from jumping on board.

-- So, if Locke is dead, why were the Losties off the island calling him Jeremy Bentham? And what killed him? And do you want to bet that, if everyone goes back to the island -- as we know they will, there's two more seasons to go, after all -- he'll somehow come back to life?

-- The Losties who made it off the island lied about being the only survivors from their plane crash to keep the world's attention away from the island. But since the island was moved in last night's finale, no one -- including them -- even knows where it is, anymore. So why lie? Wouldn't focusing the world's attention on the island make it less likely the remaining castaways would be hurt? And don't some of those people still want to get off the island?

-- I never realized how bad Matthew Fox's fake beard was during the first flash-forward until they used clips from it in last night's show. The guy looks like he's wearing an old felt beard from a G.I. Joe doll.

-- Given that Lance Reddick -- the mysterious black man who visits Hurley in the mental institution -- has joined the cast of Fox's new J.J. Abrams series Fringe, does that mean we'll never learn who he was on Lost?

-- What happened to all the plot points revealed in the Lost Experience, the multimedia game ABC organized in summer 2006 that revealed the Dharma Initiative was an experiment -- or series of them -- aimed at forestalling human extinction? Will lost producers ever get back to that concept, or will they be too busy trying to figure out who (or what) Jacob is to really get back to any of that?

-- We're still left with an island which seems to have its own consciousness, time traveling capabilities and even power over life and death skipping across the sea in between Australia and the U.S. And we don't get another tidbit of information until January 2009. Theorize away, kiddies...

Top marks for SP Times online business section

This may be a hollow victory, given that the St. Petersburg Times has recently merged the newspaper's print business section with the metro section, dropped print stock listings and lost one business reporter. But the Web site 24/7 Wall Street has named the Times online business section among the best in the country, giving it an A-grade (among the top 25 newspapers, only the New York Times received a similar designation; the Houston Chronicle got at A-minus)   

Here's what they say: "The financial section of the online edition of the St. Petersburg Times is remarkably well-done. The graphics and lay-out are as good as USA Today’s. The interactive features on local companies are particularly well done. The site also has a very fine photo section, something lacking at most other online newspaper money sites. Contacting writers and posting comments are easy and intuitive. Grade A."

Good going, guys....

Could Hollywood finally be listening to the critics?

As a longtime TV and media writer,I'm not sure what scares me worse: That newspapers think so little of our jobs that they're laying critics off en masse -- or that Hollywood may be so desperate, they've finally decided to start listening to us.

This notion surfaces following two developments: News that HBO has hired former theater critic and New York Times columnist Frank Rich as a consultant (along with former Talk magazine editor Tina Brown), and the announcement of a new deal in which TiVo users can consult the choices of my pal in Chi-Town, Chicago Tribune TV critic Maureen Ryan.

Oddly enough, the New York Times seems to have broken the story of TiVo's deal with Mo -- that's what we call her hanging around the TV Critics Press Tour each July -- in which users who sign up for the service will get recommendations straight from the sweaty remote of the TV goddess herself.

It's a way-cool, high tech way to handle the question I get most often: "What's your favorite TV show? Or "What the best TV show on right now?" Both of which I'm woefully underprepared to answer most days (right now, in the dog days of TV's summer, that answer would include Lost, Deadliest Catch, Late Show with Craig Ferguson, and precious little else). 

Rich's HBO consultant deal, known for many days now, seems a desperate move from a premium channel whose luster is all but gone. All its groundbreaking original series have ended -- from the Sopranos and Sex and the City to The Wire -- while big ticket movies and miniseries such as John Adams and Recount have received mixed reviews.

"Okay smarty pants critic," the channel seems to be saying, "you hated John From Cincinnati so bad, YOU figure out what we should be putting on." But us experienced entertainment writers know there's a big difference between reviewing a Beyonce concert and trying to play lead guitar in her backup band.

It will be interesting to see if these experiments bear fruit. I'm certainly ready to give local TiVo users a peek at my favorites list -- the Oprah Winfrey and Lifetime stuff is for the wife, of course -- and I can move into a corner executive office in Los Angeles at a moment's notice.

Given that the latest Big TV Ideas have involved reviving Knight Rider and American Gladiators, I could hardly mess things up any worse.

Deggans previews tonight's race, religion and media forum on local TV and radio

WTVT-Ch. 13's Kathy Fountain was kind enough to have me, Muslim civil rights activist Ahmed Bedier and TV personality-turned-pastor Ricc Rollins on her midday show Tuesday to talk about a free public forum I'm moderating tonight on race, religion and media coverage in Tampa.

Co-sponsored by the Tampa Bay Association of Black Journalists, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Human Rights Council and the Hillsborough NAACP, tonight's forum features a collection of local media figures, religious figures and activists, dissecting the way race and religion surfaces in media, from the Jeremiah Wright scandal to controversies about local televangelists.

Ahmed and I will also be talking about the issue just after 1 p.m. today, on Rob Lorei's afternoon radio show on WMNF-FM (88.5). We're hoping to start a dialog with the community which can get people thinking about how the media covers these hot-button issues, and what we might do to improve our efforts.

The event gets started at 7 p.m. tonight in the Student Services Auditorium at the Hillsborough Community College’s Dale Mabry Campus, 4001 Tampa Bay Blvd., Tampa. Admission is free and all are invited to attend.

Here's a preview of the discussion, taken from Kathy Fountain's Tuesday show:

St. Petersburg Times announces yearlong pay freeze for all staff, retirement incentive for staffers over age 50

The St. Petersburg Times announced this morning a yearlong pay freeze for its staff, along with an offer for "enhanced pension benefits" for staffers over age 50 with more than five years' service at the company. This was a long-rumored move, particularly after the slimming of the paper this month created an edition which requires fewer people to produce.

The goal, said Times editor, CEO and Chairman Paul Tash in a letter to staffers this morning, is to find "a graceful and humane way for the company to reduce its staffing levels." If the incentive offer doesn't produce enough cost savings -- Tash did not outline specific savings goals or staffing reductions -- the company may have to use layoffs to cut staff costs further.

The big question, which no local newspaper executive can answer yet, is whether the Tampa Bay market can still support two newspapers. And if not, which one will survive?

Already, the Times has reduced staff from 1,500 people two years ago to below 1,300 currently. Staffers have until July 28 to sign up for the program, and must retire by Aug. 31.

But Tash doesn't define the retirement incentives as a buyout. "A buyout is when you pay people not to work," said Tash, who has long opposed such programs. "This is just making it easier for people to retire if they choose." Unlike some buyout programs, any staffer who is determined to take the retirement incentive can do so -- staffers are encouraged to speak with department heads to figure out their own best strategy.

The incentives: An additional five years of age and service added when calculating a retire's pension. Health coverage is free until year's end. And staffers get a week's pay for each year of service, capped at 20 weeks.

The pay freeze begins Sunday; only staffers promoted to new jobs with expanded responsibilities will get pay raises, which must be approved personally by the company's top executives. Those who have already received pay raises this year will instead forego a raise in 2009. Tash also noted he has elected to reduce his pay by five percent while the pay freeze is in place, and that Times executives have had a pay freeze in effect since the start of 2008.

He said he hopes to know soon after the July deadline for taking the incentive whether involuntary job reductions will be necessary. "Weeks rather than months, I hope,"he said of the timeframe. "I know people are anxious."

"Some of you know my aversion to a general pay freeze, for example, though I have come to believe that circumstances require it," Tash writes today. "As difficult as these steps are, they also demonstrate our resolve to meet these challenges and surmount them."

Click below to read the full memo:

Couric visits Today to make notable admission: press didn't do job before Iraq War

  As expected, ex-Today show anchor Katie Couric took time from fronting CBS's floundering evening newscast to visit her former workplace, flanked by competitors Brian Williams and Charlie Gibson to announce a special one-hour fundraiser for cancer research on ABC, CBS and NBC.

What was unexpected: Couric agreed with charges in former White House spokesman Scott McClellan's controversial new book asserting that the press didn't do its job in the run up to the war in Iraq, failing to ask the kind of incisive questions which might have defused the Bush administration's drive toward the conflict.

"I think he's fairly accurate," said Couric this morning. "I do think we were remiss in not asking some of the right questions. There was a lot of pressure from the Bush White House...They said, well, if you keep it up, we're going to block access to you during the war. Those kind of strong arm tactics were really inappropriate....I think there was insidious pressure that I do think affected some of the coverage from some of the media outlets...I just think they weren't aggressive enough."

Williams, looking a little like a youngster at Thanksgiving dinner who just got moved up from the kids table, countered that, unlike Katrina, the evidence of Iraq's lack of weapons was not right in journalists' faces because they couldn't get to weapons inspectors. Besides the disappointing notion that evidence must literally be floating by a reporter's face before they will act on it, Williams seems to conveniently forget that U.N. weapons inspectors were regularly pleading publicly against war in Iraq so they could complete their work. Here's a CBS News story from before the war on U.N. inspctors' doubts about U.S. claims regarding Iraq's weapons.

By the time Gibson came on to insist in reassuring, avuncular fashion that all the right questions did get asked back then, a slow sense of horror crept over me as I realized these are the highest-paid journalists in the news business. And they aren't even discussing the most important element of McClellan's criticisms and others: What if you ask the right questions, but get back intentionally misleading answers?

Journalism, as we all know, is about more than asking the right question; It's making sure you get truthful answers.

At least Katie had the guts to speak plainly on the issue.  Watch the exchange here....      

New CW Sunday shows announcement names everything but the stars, cast and, um, Moonlight

They didn't announce the stars, casting, hosts or episode plotlines.

But when the CW network decided today to announce what its new Sunday lineup would look like in prime time this fall, it did reveal the information about which it seems to care most: the producers and the executives behind the shows.

That's because the CW notched another milestone in desperation this spring, turning over its Sunday night programming to Media Rights Capital, a production company formed under the wing of high powered Hollywood talent agency Endeavor.

  One thing they did confirm; despite a pitch to pick up CBS' canceled vampire detective drama Moonlight, the CW took a pass. (I'm betting it has a lot to do with the special effects price tag for all those scenes with the freaky long teeth and yellow eyes.)

Under this new stab at creating TV shows, neither the CW nor MRC has filmed any pilot episodes. Instead, they've pulled together the series by forging deals with producer/writers behind such TV shows as Reaper, Dirty Jobs and Reba. They will push ahead the start of prime time to 6:30 p.m. -- bringing them in direct competition with the end of many football games -- and the producers creating the shows are expected to meet this week to talk with advertisers about product placement opportunities inside their shows.

Before a single performer has been announced.

Don't get me wrong, I think the old system of developing TV shows made little sense -- filming all the pilot episodes for promising series at the same time, so networks have to fight over the best talent; creating 100-plus pilots priced at $2-million or so each just to build a slate of 35 new shows; scheduling them all to start in the same week in September.

But I'm not sure the solution to that bassackward system is to build series around talent agent relationships and product placement agreements. Here's the details on the new shows, from today's release:

6:30-7:30         IN HARM'S WAY – A reality show that looks at lives of people doing dangerous jobs.  Executive Producer is Craig Piligian (“Dirty Jobs,” “American Chopper,” “Survivor”). 

7:30 - 8:00       SURVIVING SUBURBIA – Half-hour comedy about a family and their new neighbors.  Kevin Abbott is Executive Producer (“Roseanne,” “Grace Under Fire,” “Reba,” “My Name is Earl”). 

8:00-9:00         VALENTINE, INC. – One-hour drama/comedy about an agency that finds lost loves, true loves and mends broken hearts.  Kevin Murphy is Executive Producer (“Reaper,” “Desperate Housewives”).

9:00-10:00       EASY MONEY – One-hour drama about a family that runs a high-interest loan business.  Executive Producers are Andy Schneider and Diane Frolov (“Northern Exposure,” “The Chris Isaak Show,” “The Sopranos”).

            All of the shows will begin production, pilot-free, by mid-June.  MRC and The CW sales team will begin meeting with advertisers and agencies this week.  Consistent with the MRC integrated business model, all five showrunners will participate in the initial meetings to present their creative points of view and hear advertiser needs from the on-set of the creative process.

            “Our approach...is simple: when you put talented people like our artist partners and the advertising folks together in a room, they come up with smart and creative solutions to problems.  We want them integrated and talking from the beginning,” explained Satchu and Wiczyk. 
       

What is Katie Couric's big announcement tomorrow on Today?

(UPDATE: Looks like the three biggest networks are teaming up to do a big fundraiser to fight cancer. Just when we were begining to dig thinking about who might get the chance to screw up CBS News even further, post-Katie. Sigh.)

She left the show two years ago, headed for an effort to re-invent the evening newscast that turned into the biggest train wreck in network TV news history.

So why is Katie Couric going back to the Today show tomorrow?

Former partner Matt Lauer made a vague announcement today that Couric was returning to the show Wedensday for a "major announcement." Given that Meredith Vieria has pretty much seamlessly replaced her on TV's top morning show, I doubt she's taking back her old gig (and even when she announced the move to CBS two years ago, she did it first where she was currently working).

For more than a year now, media writers have been predicing Couric's departure from CBS; this non-announcement announcement allows us all to wallow in that speculation for another 24 hours. Is she headed to CNN to take Anderson Cooper or Larry King's job? Is she following in Oprah and Barbara Walters' footsteps to develop her own syndicated talk show? (given her friendship with NBC honcho Jeff Zucker, a new syndicated show for the Peacock network is the only scenario where I might see her making a career announcement on Today)? 

I expect tomorrow's announcement to be much more about something innocuous that wouldn't ruffle either CBS or NBC's feathers -- a drive to spread awareness about Couric's pet charity, colon cancer research, perhaps. But regardless of how inane the actual announcement will be, Lauer's magnificently vague foreshadowing ensures lots of writers like me will be glued to the set tomorrow, looking for clues on Couric's exit strategy from CBS.

Just as he and Couric intended. Darn you TV news celebrities.

(UPDATE - Click below to read the press release from ABC-TV)