The latest public relations offensive by Nexstar Broadcasting, including a half-hour diatribe against the cable industry on its Texas stations and one to be shown later this week on KODE and KSNF is an indication that the company is not getting what it had hoped for from its strongarm stance against the cable companies.
An article in Broadcasting Today indicates that the company has already cut off more than 120,000 cable customers. And while many of those people are still seeing the Nexstar stations by using antennas or by switching to satellite dishes, many others are simply doing without the stations and living quite nicely.
That makes it imperative for Nexstar to push the Dish Network and other satellite providers with stunts such as the 30-minute infomercials here and in Texas. Of course, it might have made more sense for Nexstar COO Duane Lammers to have put on these half-hour programs while he still had the people watching his stations.
But the company can still rake in a few bucks by convincing those who still have cable and are using antennas to make a complete switch to satellite since the dish companies, unlike cable, do pay the local stations for their signals.
Nexstar's plan of offering bonus spots to advertisers to compensate for the loss of potential customers has not been successful, the Broadcasting & Cable article said. In Abilene, Texas, Gary Grubb, advertising buyer for Lawrence Hall Chevrolet, told the magazine he has shifted about half of his advertising to other stations.
Lammers told the magazine the loss of cable has been no big deal, but his half-hour specials indicate otherwise. ""Our losses so far are below what we thought," he told the magazine, indicating that plenty of homes in the markets affected did not have cable anyway and other homes are serviced by other cable companies. "In Joplin, Mo., it affects just one out of eight homes," he said.
The magazine confirmed other published reports and Lammers' own story that he waved a penny in the air during the first meeting with Cox Communications officials last week. He told the officials he wanted them to acknowledge that the Nexstar stations were worth at least a penny to them. "If you agree to the concept, we'll give you the stations back right away. We know we'll get somewhere between one cent and 30 cents." He kept his penny, the article indicated.
Lammers is characterizing Nexstar as a freedom-fighting hero in this television war. "We have to do this," he told Broadcasting & Cable. "This is about the survival of local television."
For Nexstar, this battle may be more than just fighting for a principle. The company is highly leveraged, according to SEC documents, and could desperately use another source of income..the kind of income the cable companies could provide if they give in to Nexstar's blackmail.
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Springfield attorney Dee Wampler, who recently hired on as the attorney for accused pervert Gary Reed Blankenship, 55, of Neosho, has another high-profile case, according to today's Kansas City Star.
Wampler was hired by Blankenship after the former O'Sullivan Industries official was arrested after arranging a meeting over the internet with what he thought was a 13-year-old girl and running smack into waiting police officers when he arrived. Blankenship is free on $100,000 bond.
The Star article said Wampler is representing Shannon Braden, a Reed's Spring High School student who is charged with one count of attempted forcible rape and one count of accepted forcible sodomy in connection with an incident involving a 15-year-old girl who was allegedly assaulted in a boys restroom at the high school.
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It appears 103.5 has delayed its switch from an oldies format to country until Feb. 15. It initially had been scheduled for Feb. 1. Hopefully, we'll have a few hundred more delays. The last thing this area needs is another country station.
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Nice work by the Neosho Daily News's John Ford following up on the item featured earlier this week in The Turner Report about arbitrator James Newberry being selected to see if lawsuits against former Newton County Sheriff Ron Doerge and the mayor and city council of Southwest City can be worked out before they go to trial.
Ford's articles added some information and background to the report on this blog.
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A few more people have been introduced to The Turner Report thanks to an article by John Boyd of the San Angelo, Texas, Standard-Times, which was also printed in the Abilene Reporter News today.
Boyd wrote, "Turner's web log or 'blog' has become an important source for information on the dispute (between Nexstar Broadcasting and cable companies), averaging 160 visitors per day - relatively low number by Internet standards, but high when put in the context of who's logging on.
"Journalists, cable industry executives and members of local and state governments all regularly visit The Turner Report," Boyd's article said.
One of those people, the article said, is Tom Basinger, vice president of Cable One, who is quoted as saying, "He often seems to know a lot and knows it pretty soon. And when he writes about it, it's not just a sort of, 'here are the facts.' He takes stands and expresses opinions.' "
Boyd wrote about how I began my blog, quoting the message I gave my students last year. "I told them that by writing every day, I wasn't asking them to do anything that I wasn't doing."
The article continued, "Turner said he combs through an average of 200 e-mails per day and every news site he can find to keep his blog up to date and informative. The result is a unique and authoritative voice in the cable industry dispute, Basinger says.
''With the Turner Report,'' Basinger said, ''you never know what's going to be on it the next time you look.''
I thank Mr. Basinger for the kind words and Mr. Boyd for a well-written article.
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One of my favorite people in the world is my former student Michelle Nickolaisen, who is never afraid to say what she thinks, no matter how many people hold different views from hers. Michelle was one of the students who I encouraged to try blogging during my final year of teaching in the Diamond school system.
She is now a sophomore at Diamond High School and her blog, "Seceding From Society" at www.secedingfromsociety.blogspot.com is one that I check every day, though she doesn't update it anywhere near as often as I would like.
On Friday, she talked about something that happened in her American Government class.
Apparently, some students were telling highly inappropriate jokes about Jews, which her teacher, Mr. Withers, took offense to when he happened to hear one of them.
After Mr. Withers silenced the young man, the talking in the class continued until the students noticed Mr. Withers was sitting in front of the class with a picture of the Auschwitz gates. A student asked him if that was because of the joke.
No, Mr. Withers said, noting that "today is the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz."
The student said he felt bad about the joke.
I'll let Michelle tell the rest:
"Yeah," you should. SIX MILLION PEOPLE DIED! MAN, THAT'S HILARIOUS!"
By now the class is veeery silent. We spent a lot of the rest of the class talking about the Holocaust.
The whole incident made me very happy. That makes me sound kind of twisted, but the people around here truly sicken me with their apathy sometimes. And I have never seen a teacher yell at somebody for those jokes and it's about damn time. Last year when we were studying WWII and did a section on the Holocaust we actually had somebody say to the teacher, "Um, why are we going over this? I mean, no offense, but nobody really cares what happened to the Jews..." I think Mr. Withers actually managed to get it through some of their thick skulls that it wasn't just a teensy incident, that it was a horrible dark awful thing and if you try and make light of it, in any way, you are shaming all of the six million innocent people, men, women, and children, people just like you and me, who died for no good reason than hate. Many of whom never even got the most basic human right of a burial. They had no marker, no gravestone, no eulogy, nothing to remember them by but a name and a story that needs to be told.
And most important, if the dark stain of it fades, if we mock and make light, we are doing exactly what the horrible people who did this would have wanted.
If we forget, we might let it happen again.
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Did I mention that Michelle is only a sophomore? Some of the other students' attitudes she describes scare me, but as long as our schools have students like Michelle Nickolaisen, I feel a lot more comfortable about our future.