… came this afternoon as Chris Matthews batted around the RNC post-mortem with a couple of analysts on MSNBC. He finished the segment with this observation:

Did you ever see the movie Mrs. Doubtfire? Where the guy, Robin Williams, fails as a husband, and he comes back dressed as a housekeeper, and he gets a job so he can have responsibility for the kids again, having failed them as a dad and a father and as husband.

Is this what John McCain’s doing, and what the Republican’s party doing out there in St. Paul—coming back as Mrs. Doubtfire?  ‘We’ve failed in our role for eight years  We’ve got a new costume on, accept us and give us custody of the country again, ’cause we look a little different.’ It’s a Mrs. Doubtfire strategy!

From the concept to his prose it’s a good example of how Matthews, for all his idiosyncrasies, remains a cut above the normal cable political hosts.

You can find the segment on this page, under the link “Conventions are over—now what?” at about the 6:45 mark.

As a contrast, this was David Gregory’s lede-in, which followed immediately after:

The conventions are over, Whew! So who has the momentum now and who is winning this battle over change? As the race for the White House enters the home stretch….

Yawn.

(Keith Olbermann, of course, remains a master of such references. One was Thursday night, as Matthews went on about Sarah Palin, comparing her to Norma Rae. Said Olbermann, almost under his breath: “Norma Rae by way of Tracy Flick.”)

Here’s Daniel Henninger, the WSJ’s “Wonder Land” columnist, lionizing Sarah Palin:

In a less crazed world, the Sarah Palin story — hunter and snowmobiling mom becomes Alaska governor and routs old-boy political machine in bed for years with energy industry — would be celebrated. Of course, they have to demolish her.

Sarah’s story is the stuff of Erin Brockovich movies and full-page newspaper spreads. Except: She’s “pro-life,” is a “Christian,” and unlike all the stiff white guys who came in second, Sarah looks like she might help get a Republican elected.

I don’t know who “they” are, and I think it’s weird Henninger knows Palin well enough to use her first name. But I do know that Erin Brockovich may be a more apropos comparison for Palin than Henninger suspects. Here’s something from a Salon investigative piece by Kathleen Sharp, which got too little notice at the time:

[…M]any plaintiffs in the Hinkley case say the movie misrepresents what happened. Far from being the populist victory the movie depicts, the Hinkley lawsuit was a case study in how the rise of private arbitration, as an alternative to costly public trials, is creating a two-tiered legal system that not only favors litigants who can afford it over those who cannot, but is open to potential conflicts of interest and cronyism.

The case never went to trial, because Pacific Gas & Electric, the utility accused of polluting Hinkley, and the plaintiffs’ lawyers agreed to private arbitration before a panel of for-hire judges, some of whom had socialized with the plaintiffs’ attorneys.

Now, many of the townspeople who sued complain their awards were smaller than they deserved. Some have even hired lawyers to get back excessive legal fees charged to children. They say the attorneys kept their awards for six months after the settlement money was delivered, and that they didn’t receive interest on it. They complain that there was little or no apparent logic behind the varying amounts of money individual plaintiffs received; some claim that the arbitrators never even looked at their medical records.

Hitsville doesn’t care about the politics surrounding Sarah Palin’s v.p. nomination, but finds the journalistic controversy over whether she was a member of the Alaska Independence Party interesting. The NYT’s Elizabeth Bumiller reported yesterday that she’d been a member of the party for two years. The McCain campaign has said this isn’t true, and even produced the head of the party to say she’d been mistaken when she told Bumiller about Palin’s membership.

Bumiller’s original story is here.

An NYT blog’s account of the campaign seeming refusation is here.

Anyway, I heard Bumiller defend the piece against charges of inaccuracy on TV last night, and the Times hasn’t yet posted a correction, so I assume they are standing by the story, despite the blog item.

You can see a pretty comical video account of an AIP meeting in the YouTube entry below, to which I am grateful for giving me the hed of this item.

It gives you an insight into the sort of attitudes a woman in politics like Palin had to deal with.* In it, however, the guy seems pretty sure Palin’s a member of the party, and has a pretty exact account of both her being in the party and why she left it. It’s possible, though, he was wrong. (And possible, too, that he was the source of the information that mislead the head of the party, who’d spoken to Bumiller.) But for what it’s worth it is a contemporary bit of information that buttresses Bumiller’s original contention. Just because he’s a sexist old chucklehead doesn’t mean he was wrong!

It’s an open question as to whether reporters should trust the McCain campaign at this point. From the WashPost:

Last weekend, two campaign officials told The Washington Post that the background investigation of the finalists included an FBI check of any possible ongoing criminal investigations. That information was incorrect. A knowledgeable official said Tuesday that the vetting team had hoped to run such a check but that FBI officials declined to do so because that type of inquiry is reserved for people nominated for senior administration jobs. The official also said the FBI was uncomfortable providing the information to a political campaign, rather than to government officials.

It reads as if the campaign was throwing around phrases like “FBI background check” with little regard for honesty or, indeed, reality.

p.s. Howard Kurtz on the McCain campaign’s pushback:

The intensity of media inquiries hit a new level after an anonymous blogger on the liberal Web site Daily Kos last weekend charged that McCain’s running mate is actually the grandmother of Trig Palin, the 4-month-old baby born with Down syndrome, and that the real mother is her daughter, 17-year-old Bristol Palin. That led to mainstream media inquiries, which prompted the McCain camp to disclose in a statement Monday that Bristol is five months pregnant and plans to have the baby and marry the teenage father.

The Kos speculation, extreme even by liberal blogger standards, was certainly underway when the revelation was made. But there’s another account of why the Palin family came clean:

The ultra-conservative governor’s announcement about her daughter’s pregnancy came hours after The ENQUIRER informed her representatives and family members of Levi Johnston, the father of Bristol’s child, that we were aware of the pregnancy and were going to break the news.

In a preemptive strike Palin released the news, creating political shockwaves. 

That’s from the National Enquirer. Who are you going to believe—them or Howard Kurtz?

* On the other hand, here’s another YouTube video featuring Palin:

Update: The NYT has just posted a story on the AIP, saying that Palin’s husband was a member, but the now-governor never was.

A few days ago, in the post “The Curious Incident of the Kid Rock album that sold 1.7 million copies,” we looked at Atlantic’s experiment yanking artists off iTunes, on the theory that allowing folks to buy the songs they wanted online was cannibalizing CD sales.

This quixotic plan may or may not have worked with Rock, whose retro songs aren’t exactly the talk of the internet. But another figure of the company’s plan is British hip-hop artist Estelle. How’s that working? Reports the BBC:

British R&B star Estelle has seen her single American Boy plummet down the US chart after her latest album, Shine, was taken off iTunes in the States.

Record label Warner made the move to force fans to buy the whole album, not just individual songs, reports said.

American Boy, featuring Kanye West, was UK number one for a month in March.

It was in the iTunes top 10 in the US before its removal. It was also at 11 on the official Billboard singles chart—but has now dropped to number 37.

(Emphasis added.) The drop makes sense; the Billboard chart takes digital sales into account. This, however, might make the company more concerned:

Meanwhile, Shine, which is nominated for the prestigious Mercury Music Prize in the UK, has dropped to number 159 on the Billboard album rundown.

The album has spent 17 weeks on the chart, peaking at number 38.

The story doesn’t say it, but the Estelle song is of course available all over the web for free, as this Elbo.ws search attests. Why the company would eliminate an income stream on a rising artist and drive her fans into the MP3 blogs is a mystery.

“Anyone Else But You,” the meditative Kimya Dawson love song that ended Juno on a bit of winsome emotion, is now the soundtrack for the Atlantis Resorts. Someone else is doing the singing, and the lyrics—quirky and poignant in the original—have been blanded out. Nothing at all about “You shook a little poop out of the bottom of your pants.”

Via Pitchfork, video of a new car ad featuring Cat Power singing “Space Oddity.” There are many things wrong with this, the first being greedy David Bowie.

The ad is hard to figure out, but it seems to be Lincoln making a play for aging and moneyed boomers, pricking up a teen memory or two with a Bowie tune. Marshall is there to add some postmodern edginess, the song’s futuristic sheen now anachronistic and the gender switch adding a bit of disruption as well, all in the service of promoting an overlarge car, Lincoln’s new topline luxury sedan, that gets 16 miles to the gallon.

The ad gets all revved up over the “Check ignition and may god’s love be with you” line, but doesn’t wait around to see the driver adrift in space after the technology fails.

Besides his hits–often novelties, sometimes deceptively novelty tinged–he was a guitarist so good Chet Atkins loved to play with him; in the clip above, you can see Reed’s blistering style seem suddenly rough-hewn as Atkin’s ultra-sophisticated technique steps forward.

Nikki Finke goes on and on about The Dark Knight’s box office success:

So The Dark Knight posts still another best-ever. Media By Numbers is reporting that Warner Bros’ latest Batman installment crossing the $500 million domestic gross milestone today after only 45 days in release. It’s already the second-highest grossing pic of all time behind only the $600.8 million domestic haul of Titanic which took 91 days to pass $500M. The projected domestic cume for Dark Knight is $502,421,000 after this weekend. Interestingly, Wednesday, August 27th (its 41st day of release) was the first single day that the film earned below $1 million. In all, Dark Knight has set 14 major movie records since its release July 18th:

I won’t bore you with the actual records. Again, however, when you are talking about Inflated Hollywood Play Money™, box office records are everywhere.

When you talk about real money, and real box-office attendance figures, The Dark Knight’s achievments are less interesting. They run more like …

* The Dark Knight has now sold about as many tickets as Shrek 2!

* If it keeps going at this rate, why, it might be as popular as Thunderball!

* But probably not Grease!

Now, all that said, The Dark Knight does deserve credit for rolling up even those numbers at a time when movie attendance, as the last item noted, is declining. Part of its success has to do with Imax screenings, which have totaled $42M. (Take those away, and the film’s adjusted box office falls back to Independence Day territory.)

So Warner deserves credit for milking the film’s fanboy base with those large-format exhibitions and repeat viewings. It’s a marketing triumph, of which items like Finke’s play an important part.

———-

Previously in Hitsville:

Bogus box office and “The Dark Knight”
Box office records that aren’t
A record box office in 2007? Not so much
Crazy Nikki, PR person
The box office record that wasn’t, cont’d
A record summer that isn’t

Hedline in Variety:

Summer season a smash success

The actual story:

Through the Monday holiday, summer box office was estimated at roughly $4.12 billion vs. $4.16 billion for summer 2007. Year to date, the domestic box office is down about 1% vs. last year. Final tallies will be released today. Attendance is down by about 3%-4% for the summer and the year to date.

In other words, the summer box office was lower than last year’s*.

Overall domestic box office is lower than last year’s too.

And, leaving aside Inflated Hollywood Play Money™, attendance is down a significant chunk as well, both this summer and for the year to date.

Other than that, however, things are “smashing.”

* Last summer’s box office was called a record as well. In 2002, about 650 million movie tickets were sold; this summer that figure was about 580 million. That’s a decline of more than 10 percent in six years–in the face of a sizable population increase as well.

———-

Previously in Hitsville:

Bogus box office and “The Dark Knight”
Box office records that aren’t
A record box office in 2007? Not so much
Crazy Nikki, PR person
The box office record that wasn’t, cont’d
A record summer that isn’t

A few weeks ago, during the epic non-coverage of the John Edwards scandal, I wrote this:

I’ve been a media editor for many years and can tell you where the vast percentage of “media coverage” comes from. A big story breaks. Cue some upper editor, affecting sagacity and sucking on an imaginary journalistic pipe: “We should really take a look at the media coverage of this!” There was no actual story to do that a reader might find interesting, just, “Let’s take a look at the media coverage!” That’s “media writing” in the most insipid, Howard Kurtzian sense of the term.

Now, with the Edwards embarrassment behind it, big media can go back to the business as usual I described. Here’s the NYT today, with a quarter-page story, hedlined “TV Cameras Turn from G.O.P to Storm,” about how TV is covering  Hurricane Gustav rather than the Republican Convention.

ST. PAUL — The network news anchors, Katie Couric, Charles Gibson and Brian Williams, were diverted from here on Sunday, and with them went Senator John McCain’s chance to command the national stage for four nights before a huge television audience.

As it became clear on Sunday morning that Hurricane Gustav had the potential to do enormous damage to the Gulf Coast, the networks began upending their schedules for the Republican National Convention and reassigned many of their stars to a story that they believed had greater news potential.

Since there is nothing interesting to say on the subject beyond the hedline, by the end of the second paragraph, the poor reporter, Jim Rutenberg, has restated the hed’s thesis twice. In the fourth graf, he states it again:

Most of the broadcast networks had been planning to open their morning and evening newscasts on Monday from the floor of a convention hall festooned with signs promoting Mr. McCain’s message, “Country First.” But by midday, executives at the networks had for the most part decided to open their marquee programs from the Gulf Coast, a place that holds embarrassing symbolism for the Republican brand.

… and again, in graf seven:

The networks were careful to say that they still planned to devote an exceptional amount of coverage to the Republican convention, if and when it began in earnest. But, they said, depending on the impact of the storm, the convention was likely to have to share the news stage.

… and graf eight:

For news executives, there was little debate over whether to divert resources to the Gulf Coast as the storm built through Sunday morning.

… and several more times through the rest of the story.

That’s the modern way to cover the media. Over at the Washpost, Howard Kurtz has already bounced back from his humiliating role not just in the non-coverage of the Edwards debacle but his failure to write about the non-coverage. Last week he was back to his old tricks, adding yet another tonguebath of Katie Couric to his portfolio*.

Today, he leaps into action to discuss the implications of this momentous coverage switch, spelling out the mundanity of the decision with typical aplomb and at typical length:

“It’s kind of a no-brainer,” Kate O’Brian, ABC’s senior vice president, said of the decision to send [anchor Charles] Gibson to New Orleans. “Charlie goes where the big news is. . . . I don’t think it’s going to be looked at as a fairness issue when the Republicans are making the same decisions we are.”

By suspending all but minor business functions for Monday’s session, McCain’s team essentially ratified the media’s decision that the mass evacuation ordered in advance of a life-threatening hurricane is, for the moment, a more compelling story.

*The lengthy Couric piece joins others I detailed here. Note how it carefully avoids getting into Couric’s horrific ratings or dwelling on the pathetic one hour a night CBS gave the convention early in the week. Nothing wrong with a beat reporter sucking up to a source, but Couric at this point is one of the walking dead, professionally speaking. Does anyone care about what life is like for the least-watched news person of any consequence on all of television? How does Kurtz pitch the story to his editors? (”I would like to spend the day tagging along with a person whose work is entirely spurious to the event at hand.”) If he doesn’t have any oversight on stories like this, why didn’t he display the same carte blanche during the Edwards affair?

The NYT joins the “Vinyl is Back!” motorcade, which is led by a pristine AMC Gremlin. If you recall, Time magazine heralded the return of vinyl some months ago with the news that the format, among other attributes, had the improved “social interaction” of “getting up to turn over the record.”

The Times finds that this was just the beginning, leading off the piece with a tempestuous tale of modern teen courtship:

During his freshman year at Point Park University in Pittsburgh a couple years ago, James Acklin, now 20, felt lost among the social cliques on his new campus until he got to talking with a student who was in some of his classes. She seemed unusual, and it wasn’t just her look: thick-framed eyeglasses, bangs and vintage dresses. Then, one rainy day in February, the two skipped class and went to her apartment. As soon as she opened her door his instincts were confirmed: she had a turntable. So did he. They both spoke the language of vinyl.

Their bond was sealed as soon as she placed the stylus on an LP by the band Broken Social Scene, he said in an e-mail message. “There was this immediate mutual acknowledgment, like we both totally understood what we define ourselves by,” continued Mr. Acklin, who considers his turntable, a Technics model from the 1980s that belonged to an aunt, a prized possession. “It takes a special kind of person to appreciate pops and clicks and imperfections in their music.”

The article kindly does not name Acklin’s retro soulmate, but I’m pretty sure the resulting scene looked a lot like the Dick Shaw/Barrie Chase pas de deux in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, some of which can be seen at about the 1:30 point in the clip below:

As for the rest of the story, as is usual with these pieces, if you do the math you see that the rise of vinyl sales represents only the tiny fraction even of the decline in industry sales each year, and is positively minuscule compared to overall sales. All the writer can do is cite esoteric statistics–like the fact that Newberry Comics has sold 400 turntables. Apple has sold nearly 200 million iPods.

The Wall St. Journal has a case study of Kid Rock’s latest album, Rock ‘n’ Roll Jesus; the paper says that, because Rock wouldn’t allow the thing to be sold on iTunes, it has sold 1.7 million copies–and that this was leading his record company, Atlantic, to contemplate yanking the work of other artists, too, from the service.

This year, Kid Rock, whose real name is Bob Ritchie, has had a massive radio hit with “All Summer Long” — a nostalgia-soaked rocker built on riffs sampled from two of the most iconic songs in classic rock: Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” and Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London.”

Mr. Levitan, his manager, points out that if his client’s album were sold the way iTunes wants, many of his 1.6 million U.S. album sales to date would instead have shown up as 99-cent downloads of “All Summer Long.”

When I first read the article Mr. Levitan’s contention jumped out at me, and I began to ponder his words. I absent-mindedly torrented the album and mentally committed to spend all the time it took to get it trying to figure out the implications of his scheme or plan.

Here’s what I came up with:

1) Well, yeah. If you can’t get a certain product in one of the venues from which you’d expect to, sales will go up in the venues remaining.

2) But since each new release from an artist sells differently, you can’t really tell exactly how much effect such a change would have.

3) Indeed, 1.7 million is pretty low for Rock–he used to sell ten million plus.

4) What’s really going on here is that the music industry is playing another round of whack-a-mole with the singles format. The industry did away with it ten or twelve years ago for just this reason–why give kids an opportunity to buy a song for 99 cents when you can present them with the sole option of shelling out $13.99 to buy the song on a nice new shiny CD, along with eight or nine other songs they might not want?

5) This was one of the resentments of the industry that has fueled the file-sharing networks. (”Sure, it’s wrong, but the record companies do worse every day.”)

6) Since, in stark contrast to ten or twelve years ago, file-sharing now exists, the industry’s math isn’t quite the same. Let’s say back then the industry needed to con persuade only seven or eight percent of the fans of a given song to part with the higher CD price to break even on the deal. Today they have to do that minus the number who will just get a friend to email or swap them the song they really want. The number remaining represents a very small and very unsophisticated part of the audience–meaning that additional full CD sales would be minimal.  (To be fair, you could also add on those with enough disposable income who would ordinarily just buy the song on iTunes but would then shrug and purchase the whole album when they find they couldn’t.)

7) But that just reminds us that Rock is something of a special case in any event. “All Summer Long” can’t be found on Elbo.ws, suggesting either that Rock has an extremely aggressive campaign to keep his music off the MP3 blogs, or that the Kid Rock fan base and computer-savvy music fans don’t as yet overlap significantly. The song itself is pretty sad, with Rock chanting some singsongy nostalgic drivel over those riffs the WSJ story mentions. The crude construction of the song and the dates of those samples capture the demographics of his fan base pretty clearly.

Whoops! My torrent’s finished.

A week and a half ago, Hitsville listed the five stories that had metastasized as the major media ignored the John Edwards affair story. A few have begun to dribble out. In yesterdays NYT, for example, David Carr takes a look at the Enquirer and finds something surprising:

Like any journalism, what the Enquirer does costs money — the Edwards investigation took nine months — and that’s in short supply at the headquarters of American Media. The company’s revenue for the quarter ended June 30 was $119 million, down 2 percent. Operating income was off slightly at $26 million and over all, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization were down 6 percent.

Decent numbers, but a massive debt overhang is demanding better performance. Early next year, $400 million comes due and if those payments cannot be made, another $500 million will come due. With almost $1 billion in debt and a declining subscription-based tabloid business, the dream of taking the company public seems very distant.

While the Enquirer’s parent company may be debt-laden and the tab business may be in decline, a 20+ percent return and $2 million a week in profits is nothing to sneer at. I would have liked more details—how the decision was made to pursue the Edward story, how the paper went about it, how many people were on Edwards’ tail, and for how long—but there was an actual story there, as it turned out.

That sideshow aside, others have ventured into trying to explain why the country’s major media, almost without exception, didn’t follow up on the Enquirer’s investigation. Isn’t it strange that, after two weeks of hand wringing, many major organizations still haven’t answered the question intelligently or honestly?

While the papers should probably have been devoting some resources to the Edwards story after the original stories alleging the affair were published many months ago, the story changed significantly on July 22, the day the Enquirer reporters caught Edwards in that Beverly Hills hotel.

Even if you don’t want to report about the personal activities of Edwards, this falls under the heading of pure spectacle—Edwards barricading himself in a basement restroom, having been treed there, so to speak, by the baying Enquirer hounds—and is of intrinsic interest.

(As I noted before, this is particularly true when you consider the utter triviality of so much news coverage, much of it generated from PR initiatives from the politicians themselves. Live by the photo op with cancer-stricken wife, die by the basement bathroom assault from tabloid hyenas.)

After that point, the papers were suppressing information. (The chances that the Enquirer made up the confrontation seem pretty low.) This distinction is glided over almost uniformly by the post-mortemers, you might say conveniently so.

In the NYT story discussing the lack of coverage (which came out only after Edwards had confessed), the Wash Post’s top editor didn’t get pressed on this point:

“These kinds of allegations fly around about just about every candidate,” said Leonard Downie Jr., executive editor of The Washington Post, which had not written about the affair until Friday. “We checked them out and we asked questions, and at no time did we have any facts to report.”

Foxnews.com had, at that point, confirmed that the confrontation in the hotel had happened, so the papers seem to have had a verifiable contention on their hands. They could interview the Enquirer reporters, and talk to people at the hotel, and then get a comment from Edwards. That the Post and every other major media organization didn’t do that shows that they had an agenda that isn’t explained by their excuses.

Downie’s not an unserious guy, but it’s kinda sad when the editor of the Washington Post displays the same sort of fact avoidance and weak rationale of, say, Dennis Ryerson, editor of the Indianapolis Star:

[Y]es, the media were slow to react to the Edwards story. Is that automatically bad?

Anybody can post anything on the Internet. A lot of good information shows up but a lot of lies, innuendoes and outright falsities surface as well.

… or Jack Lessenberry, ombudsman of the Toledo Blade:

Ron Royhab, The Blade’s vice president-executive editor, said, “Yes, we knew about these rumors, but we aren’t in the business of reporting rumors and gossip just because it shows up in a tabloid somewhere.”
[…]
I am not sure if The Blade should have done anything differently.

… or the redoubtable Connie Coyne, the Reader’s Advocate from the Salt Lake Tribune:

Every once in a while folks in the journalism business get their shorts in a knot for what can seem to be no apparent reason.
The latest knot is about whether the mainstream media (newspapers, television and radio, as opposed to blogs and tabloid publications) should have jumped in right after The National Enquirer and others printed stories about the rumors that former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards was cheating on his wife (who has stage 4 cancer) while he was running for the top political job in the country.
Remember, please, that the flap is about printing rumors, not investigating rumors to track down fact.
The mainstream media outlets - for the most part - stayed clear of the Edwards rumors until after Edwards finally admitted the affair, saying he told his wife about it in 2006.
The National Enquirer, apparently hearing the rumor, rushed out to California where it exercised its stock-in-trade, checkbook journalism, to buy information from a source extremely close to the mistress (some folks guesstimate the information came from the mistress in exchange for a big fat check). 

(Links via Romenesko.) Those guesstimating folks with their shorts in a knot!

The Indiana Star’s Lessenberry and Salt Lake Tribune’s factually challenged Coyne are good examples of how newspapers use ombudsmen to cover up problems, not highlight them; you just hire someone who (in Lessenberry’s case) doesn’t think too hard or ask uncomfortable questions, or (as in Coyne’s case) who writes pugnaciously on a subject with the basic facts of which she is unfamiliar.

Any conscientious reporter faced with such dissembling would press through the obfuscation. The story wasn’t rumor and gossip: At this point, it was a full-on Marx Bros. routine, seen by more than a half-dozen people, that included a luxury hotel, a philandering pol, a dizzy mistress, a baby, a staircase, a men’s bathroom, and, finally, a deus ex machina in the form of a hotel security guard who in the movie version, I am sure, will be played by Billy Gilbert.

But again, the issue now is not whether the papers should have written about that imbroglio … it’s that they’re not even being straitforward about the facts involved while scrambling to justify to readers why they didn’t! And the mystery of what the actual rationale was for not writing about Edwards and the hotel continues, from papers like the Wash Post to TV networks like CNN.

If only they employed a media critic who would take a tough look at the issue….

From today’s WSJ ($):

On Thursday, Ticketmaster, a division of Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp, begins trading as a standalone company—just as the ticketing giant faces one of its biggest challenges.

Ticketmaster’s largest client, Live Nation Inc., plans to launch its own ticketing business in January, after their current 10-year contract expires. Live Nation concerts last year represented 14% of Ticketmaster’s $1.2 billion in revenue, and Live Nation has made no secret of its desire to compete with Ticketmaster for other clients in the future.

Concert ticketing is a completely pointless business, made possible only by the unusual economics of live music; there’s no real competition for the consumer’s dollar when he or she wants to see a particular act. In this context, the extra dollars you get charged for those mysterious ticketing and handling fees are rarely a deal-breaker.

Over the years Ticketmaster has carved out a niche for itself by exploiting this phenomenon in a canny, if indefensible, way: Jacking up the fees even higher, and kicking parts of them back to the venues and artists to keep its hegemony over the business secure.

Live Nation, which, as Clear Channel’s concert arm, debauched the concert industry over the past decade, has long envied Ticketmaster’s money stream. Now it has a chance to cash in itself.

The only good news for consumers is that, once it solidifies its hold on the ticketing industry for its own concerts, the audience may start questioning why it’s paying an additional ten dollars a ticket to the company for the privilege of buying its own product.  (When you buy a lawn mower at Sear’s, the store doesn’t charge you a “purchase fee” or a “cashier’s fee.”)

But that’s only if the concert audience stops acting like sheep. Unlike the recorded music industry, which is having its lunch eaten by digitization, there’s no parallel on the horizon for live shows.

Not every documentary has to be fine journalism, of course, but, lacking claims to some aesthetic extra-reality ineffability, they should offer the basics.

That was my complaint about the Roman Polanski thing on HBO. You don’t have to agree with the facts. You can refute them. But not to mention them is tantamount to fraud.

Reviewers don’t always have the inclination or wherewithall to check them, however. Tom Shales does, in his review of a new HBO documentary on Helen Thomas:

What’s disappointing about Thomas, and troubling about the film, is her stridency in criticizing Israel and defending its enemies. Other than a passing reference to Thomas’s parents as having been Syrian immigrants, the film never hints at Thomas’s anti-Israeli rhetoric. In her writings, she’s already dismissed both John McCain and Barack Obama as being friendly to Israel and hostile to the Palestinians, “so the Israelis have no worries about the November election.”

Especially during the current administration, her “questions” at press briefings have been more like tirades, on one occasion prompting Tony Snow, the late journalist who was then press secretary, to respond, “Well, thank you for the Hezbollah view.” This would have been a pertinent and amusing clip to include in the film. Not for nothing was Thomas recently hailed as “the epitome of journalistic integrity for over 57 years”—by the Arab American News.

You don’t have to disagree with Thomas to acknowledge that it should have been in the film.

Taken with the Polanski issue, you have to wonder whether HBO’s highpowered (and press-friendly) documentaries chief, Sheila Nevins, should be held accountable to the declining standards in the division.

—————
Previously in Hitsville:

Roman Polanski: The Ick Factor
The Polanski whitewash continues
P.S. on ‘The Polanski whitewash’

Via the Daily Swarm, a WashPost story about Pandora on the edge:

Pandora is one of the nation’s most popular Web radio services, with about 1 million listeners daily. Its Music Genome Project allows customers to create stations tailored to their own tastes. It is one of the 10 most popular applications for Apple’s iPhone and attracts 40,000 new customers a day.

Yet the burgeoning company may be on the verge of collapse, according to its founder, and so may be others like it.

“We’re approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision,” said Tim Westergren, who founded Pandora. “This is like a last stand for webcasting.”

Webcasters like Pandora and SoundExchange, which collects moneys from web radio for artists, are in a high-stakes battle over how much the stations should kick back, and stories like this on one level are just part of the PR campaigns that emanate from both sides. That said, it’s obvious that the copyright board’s per-song per-listener royalty structure is flawed, benefiting as it does larger companies. Royalties flowing back to the artists and labels should be based on a percentage of a company’s revenues. It’s not  hard to see where this is all going:

1) The music industry uses its ferocious lobbying power to get laws or regulations that break its way
2) As a result, promising new models for the industry get stifled
3) What do survive are big-money operations that screw their customers and get in bed with the industry
4) The result is an inferior version of a potentially superior product—in this case for example “internet radio” that sounds a lot like “Clear Channel radio,” laden with commercials and compromised by payola or its equivalent

In the old days, that would be the end of the story. Today, of course, it’s not. It just means listeners will gravitate to illegal downloading and sharing and passing around music with no royalties at all for the artists. Here again, the industry, with a screw-the-customer mentality deep in its DNA, is busily trying to charge people more for a crummy product when the audience has a better one available free.

Hitsville can’t wait to see Tropic Thunder; he’s traveling and missed the screening. Stiller’s funny, Robt. Downey’s the man, Zoolander was a hoot, there’s the Hollywood satire, etc. etc. etc.

But none of that doesn’t mean that DreamWorks didn’t spend too much money on it, that it isn’t going to be a flop, or that certain parts of the industry media haven’t been played like a fiddle to minimize the inevitable image problems that result. Consider Nikki Finke, the usually pugnacious industry blogger, and her ginger handling of the latest box office on the film:

Very early Thursday numbers for Tropic Thunder’s domestic box office are running around $4.5 million after its Wednesday opening take of $6.5 million in 3,319 theaters. And tonight DreamWorks/Paramount is starting to revise downward the weekend and 5-day forecasts for the R-rated movie-within-a-movie comedy from Ben Stiller.

And just a few days ago?

Here is what my box office gurus are predicting: low $30sM for Friday-Saturday-Sunday and low $40sM for the 5 days. As one of my experts analyzes, “Unfortunately, a few of the tracking services say that Tropic won’t be as high as Pineapple. They are saying about $35M for the 5 days. My gut is higher. I bet $42M for the 5 days. The reviews could not be better, the heat is huge, people love comedy. I think it will surprise.“

Emphases added. Yeah, well the film’s box office was surprisingly low. Generally Finke would be chirping about the releasing studio’s bad fortune, but there’s a strange forcefield that emanates from anything having to do with Steven Speilberg, and the DreamWork’s PR machine has been working overtime to drum up publicity and spin the film as a Paramount flop and not a DreamWorks one. (If you recall, just a few weeks ago the film’s success was so hyped the NY Times was calling it a “gift” from DW to Paramount.) Yesterday, Finke was still seeing it from DreamWorks’ perspective:

Well, the studio fully anticipated the soft Wednesday opening …

They expected it! That was for Wednesday; and now, an equally soft Thursday result. This I guess could be said to be unexpected. And that $42M yesterday … ?

Currently, the studio is expecting Pineapple Express-like North American gross of low to mid $20sM for the Friday-Saturday-Sunday weekend (down from low $30sM) and mid $30sM for the 5 days (down from $40M).

Forgive the close parsing but note a) that $42M subtly sank to $40M before b) sinking even more to “mid $30sM” to a c) “Pineapple Express-like” gross for the weekend, which strikes one as odd because Express is such a big hit, until you realize d) that she’s talking about that film’s second weekend gross.

In other words a film with three times the stars and three times the budget and half the opening box office may not be able to beat last week’s top opener on the second week out.

Finke has also raised her estimate of the film’s cost to more than $110M, up from $100M. Putting that budget increase together with the box office estimate drop, in other words, DreamWorks lost $20 million overnight.

Tanya Anderson is the single mom in Oregon, living on disability, whom the RIAA has been legally assaulting, against all the evidence, as a music pirate. After years of bad behavior, the industry has finally paid her a six-figure judgment. She and her lawyers had refused earlier settlements, leaving her open now to sue the industry back for malicious prosecution.

Hitsville’s previous discussion of the case here.

Slashdot discussion here.

Business Week’s long look at the case here.

The WSJ takes a look at the Jammie Thomas affair, which is awaiting a key reconsideration decision by the judge in the case in Minnesota. Thomas was the first person to go before a jury in an RIAA file-sharing case … and got her ass kicked to the tune of a several hundred-thousand-dollar fine late last year. But, says the Journal:

[…T]he judge in the case, Michael Davis, says his instructions to the jury might have been wrong.

Judge Davis told the jury that making songs available online for distribution to others was copyright violation and that the record companies did not have to prove distribution took place. He has since learned of a federal district-court case in Phoenix that ruled that making songs available was not copyright violation. He is weighing granting Ms. Thomas a new trial.

This is the questionable “making available” contention by the RIAA. Those fighting the RIAA say that the industry has to prove that specific songs were uploaded to convict someone of illegal file-sharing. The industry says that merely making the files available is grounds for conviction.

The WSJ story has a good analysis of the arguments and the status of the various cases in different parts of the country.

Wired News’s overview of the Thomas case is here.