On August 29th, 2006, during a CNN broadcast of George W. Bush's speech on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina (2005), Kyra Phillip's microphone was left on while she was apparently in the bathroom, leading to her audio conversation being broadcast over the President's speech (the video showed Mr. Bush's speech only). During the conversation, Phillips reveals information about how much she loves her husband and how hard it is to find a good guy. The unidentified women agrees and talks about how her family is reacting to her relationship, particularly her brother. Phillips then responds "of course brothers have to be protective. Except for mine, I gotta be protective of him. He's married, three kids, but his wife is a control freak!" The conversation continues until a CNN employee enters the restroom and tells Phillips that her mic is on. CNN Anchor Daryn Kagan then interjects and summarizes what Bush discussed during his speech. The video was posted on YouTube and caught fire amongst bloggers. Phillips later apologized for the issue with the microphone.
Now, in part because of a leg injury to "The Sopranos" star James Gandolfini, that show will not be back until later, perhaps March. When it returns, Mr. Ellin was told, HBO would like to schedule "Entourage" after "The Sopranos," which will be in its final eight-episode run, the better to expose as many viewers as possible to a show that is looking more and more like the next signature series for HBO. Carolyn Strauss, the president of HBO Entertainment, has been making that point for months. Before the current "Entourage" season started, she called the series "the future of the network." The truth is there is not a lot of competition for that designation at the moment. "Sex and the City," HBO's first great popular comedy, is long gone. So is "Six Feet Under." Besides "The Sopranos" a batch of other HBO series are heading into their final seasons. "Deadwood" will have just a four-hour coda next season. Even though its first season was both exciting and promising, HBO has already announced that "Rome" will have just one more season. HBO managed to talk Larry David into bringing back "Curb Your Enthusiasm" for one more go-round, but that will likely be its last. The drama "Big Love" won wide critical acclaim in its first season, but its long-term prospects remain uncertain. Which leaves "Entourage," a show that has clearly achieved a central goal for a series on HBO, a pay channel that depends on people feeling that they can't afford not to pay the monthly fee: "Entourage" gets people talking.
It's easy to complain about the state of TV content these days, but last night I watched episodes of Real Time and Bill Moyers on Faith & Reason. Now that was some interesting television! Last week I also watched When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, Spike Lee's documentary about Katrina and New Orleans. Sad and disturbing. New Orleans...Iraq...someone, not knowing better, might mistake us for utterly incompetent.
From an article of the same title by Jim Puzzanghera in the LA Times:
PBS plans to resume selling advertisements on its popular PBS Kids website, angering parents, children's advocates and consumer watchdog groups concerned that the plan would pollute one of the last commercial-free bastions for kids on the Internet. "Children are basically inundated with marketing and the PBS website was in some ways a sanctuary," said Susan Linn, a psychologist and co-founder of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood in Boston. "This is just one more step in the commercialization of PBS and children's programming." PBS said it needed to find new revenue sources because its funding was unreliable. The public broadcaster joins other media entities in tapping into a booming online advertising market. "This is going to be very smart and respectful, and anything that will appear online will be in the spirit of what is on PBS on air," said Kevin Dando, director of education and online communications at PBS. Dando would not say how much money the ads were expected to generate. Sponsorship messages already appear before and after children's TV shows such as "Sesame Street" that air on PBS stations. Web pages for individual children's shows also feature sponsors and links to their websites... The flap over advertising is not the first for PBS. The public broadcaster upset watchdog groups as well as many of its own stations with the 2005 launch of an advertising-supported joint-venture cable channel targeting preschool children called PBS Kids Sprout. PBS also got static in recent years for allowing fast-food giant McDonald's to sponsor the venerable "Sesame Street." Now, these critics worry that once PBS gets a taste of revenue from the sale of commercials online, it won't be able to resist selling traditional advertisements on its television shows.
I still get a kick out of the Futurama episode where advertisements are broadcasted into people's dreams.
Fry: "That's awful! It's like brainwashing." Leela: "Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?" Fry: "Well, sure, but not in our dreams...only on TV and radio...and in magazines and movies and at ball games, on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams! No sir-eee!"
That's the first part of the episode. Part 2 is here and part 3 is here.
