Wired profiles Errol Morris with a lengthy story. It doesn’t mention the debate over Morris’ paying people to be in his new documentary, Standard Operating Procedure.

But it does have another example of something I’ve mentioned before, namely Morris’s ability to posit seemingly meaningful questions that, if you think about them for about, oh, thirty seconds, really aren’t that profound:

It is one of the outstanding ironies of Morris’ story that the photographs, which were seen by the world as documentary evidence of torture, were used as a way to distract attention from the brutal crimes that took place off-camera. While the low-ranking soldiers caught in the staged pictures went to prison, the teams of professional Army and CIA interrogators who actually tortured and murdered prisoners inside Abu Ghraib were never identified or punished.

First of all, who “used” the photos in that way? The U.S. service people who took the photos were clearly mistreating the prisoners they were supposed to be guarding. They were appropriately punished. But the implication here is that there was a unseen hand (literally absent in the sentence by the use of the passive) “using” the shots to “distract attention.”

There’s a separate issue of how far up the chain of command awareness ran of these activities—I’m talking specifically about the abuse by low-level soldiers and the photo-taking. I haven’t seen the movie, but it doesn’t seem that Morris is making that point.

He’s saying the controversy of the photos is covering up systematic torture and abuse by interrogators. I’m not a big-deal political documentary maker, but hasn’t that been the subject of years of front-page news of scandals, congressional hearings, political maneuvering and court cases? That whole “distracting attention” plan sure isn’t working! And the interrogators haven’t been tried because it’s a U.S. policy that, obviously, is under discussion, though you or I might think it’s wrong.

This is what I mean by Morris’s sophistry. “Isn’t that interesting?” he’s always quoted as saying. Well, no. Imagine a right-winger saying something similar: “The real irony is that the treatment of pregnancy in ‘Juno’ and ‘Knocked Up’ is being used to distract attention from the real crime, which is that 1.5 million innocent babies are brutally murdered in the womb each year. I find that very interesting.” He wouldn’t be taken seriously. Why is Errol Morris?

Less than a month ago, a federal district court in New York ruled on a contentious issue in the RIAA’s grim legal campaign against online file-sharing. A lot of folks have a file-sharing program like Kazaa running, and copyrighted songs sitting in their shared folder, ready to be uploaded. The RIAA’s position: That offer to swap is a crime in and of itself.

In the Elektra v. Barker case in New York, earlier this month, the court agreed.

Now comes a federal district court case in Arizona in which … a judge ruled precisely the opposite way.

Cnet’s story is here, Ars Technica’s here.  A gleeful press release from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is working on the case, is here. From Ars:

“The court agrees with the great weight of authority that § 106(3) is not violated unless the defendant has actually distributed an unauthorized copy of the work to a member of the public,” wrote the judge in his order. “Merely making an unauthorized copy of a copyrighted work available to the public does not violate a copyright holder’s exclusive right of distribution.”

In both of these cases, and others on the same topic, the rulings aren’t final; they are merely housekeeping issues in response to motions for summary judgment and the like before the real trials begin.

Words to strike fear into the hearts of even the hardiest kitschophile. Madonna’s directorial debut is called “Filth and Wisdom,” the title of which, based on the earliest reviews, would charitably be said to over-promise on both counts. After premiering at the Berlin Film Fest to amusingly bad reviews, the film, Variety reports, has been picked up by IFC for disribution this fall.

The story says there will be a theatrical run—presumably a short one—and a simultaneous video-on-demand availability. IFC is playing it straight:

“She took some interesting risks stylistically that all pay off at the end,” said IFC acquisitions and production veepee Arianna Bocco. “When I saw the film, I felt that it deserved a bigger, wider platform. Madonna and her crew are open to the kind of release we’re going to do, so it was a natural fit.”

Funny, just a few months ago she was, um, singing a different tune:

The low-budget comedy about three struggling flatmates in London could be made available first via download in the U.S. and U.K. and released theatrically elsewhere.

“I’ve been speaking to iTunes about releasing it through them,” the popstar turned scribe-helmer tells Variety. “I want the most amount of people to see it as possible. … I don’t like to do anything conventionally.”

How unconventional! The reviews are going to be fun to track on this one. Here’s a sample of what resulted from the Berlin screening:

Having contributed to arguably the worst films of some other big-name helmers (i.e. Warren Beatty’s “Dick Tracy,” John Schlesinger’s “The Next Best Thing” and Abel Ferrara’s “Dangerous Game”), Madonna seems to have learned little about directing from her experiences in filmmaking. Her stylistic approach seems most akin to that of late-’80s/early-’90s pop videos, wherein story is often revealed without dialogue in music-backed montages, the likes of which abound here. It’s as if she’s taken her video for “Papa Don’t Preach” as her main dramaturgical template.

From the it-couldn’t-have-happened-to-a-nicer-group-of-people desk:

Susan Butler, Billboard’s legal columnist, has a copy of the European ruling on the merger of Sony and BMG. The EU approved the merger a few years ago, only to have a court annul it due to insufficient reasoning. So a new approval has been filed, with a lot of the gory details of how the industry, in Europe at least, is faring. She says:

This report is unlike any other because it follows the most in-depth government investigation of the record industry in the history of recorded music, and it reveals digital pricing information in the European Union long held secret.

While the report doesn’t share the actual money figures, it does give a window into the crazy complexity of the world the majors now have to find their way through. For example, the report examined the deals the majors cut with five digital sellers and five mobile sellers.

Before you read her description of the deals, put yourself in the position of being the head of an international record corporation, faced with precipitously declining sales of your traditional product, the CD.

Oh yeah: Plus, remember that in your entire history you’ve had firm control over the product; had to deal with basically only one way to sell it; and been able to raise prices at will, withhold royalties from artists with impunity, and pay off radio stations to get your product played on the public airwaves to boost sales. Now, consider this:

In 2004-07, the agreements became more diverse and more complex. The contract terms and wholesale pricing structures are often customized to reflect the market position of the digital retailer and how much the label values the services that the digital company provides.

Each of the majors’ deals vary with each of the digital business models that exist in the online and mobile markets. These models include subscription, streaming and advertising-supported services.

There are different pricing conditions, discount structures, user conditions, digital rights management restrictions and other contractual conditions. In each of the major’s contracts, the way the label shares revenue or marketing costs is also significantly different from one another.

… and—ringtones aside—none of it anywhere near as remunerative as a good old-fashioned $18.98 list price CD! Butler has another dozen grafs of similarly complex detail for other parts of the new spectrum of income streams.

What this means for artists isn’t good:

[…R]ecording artists may never truly have transparent royalty accounting. The labels’ wholesale prices charged for digital and mobile distribution must not be transparent if the companies want to avoid violating antitrust laws. The more complex they make their pricing models, the less able they are to ever fix prices and thwart competition.

This could create an immense challenge for artists who audit the labels, especially when the labels’ deals with digital and mobile services are made on a catalog basis rather than a per-artist basis.

What the industry is already seeing is that current artists with some leverage at the label might get a piece of that action; old and nonactive ones might not.

And one final note we should remember as we read reporting on how the industry is doing in the future:

No one outside a major label can estimate how much revenue that label receives from digital uses. The digital pricing structures and other contractual terms, which are all confidential, are too complex. As a result, any market-share analysis based on unit sales will likely be misleading relative to actual revenue earned from the digital marketplace.

… comes in this page of postings about the company the music industry hires to dun suspected file-sharers. Here’s one:

I also got one of these “notice of copyright infringement” letters and receive a call practically every day from Caller ID PSC Group while I’m at work. They never leave any messages. What can I do? These claims are bogus… I hardly listen to music at all, let alone download it off the internet.

I think collection agencies are allowed to essentially harass people and thier families when money is owed. But these calls are slightly different: They are trying to browbeat people into settling a legal case—an imaginary case, actually. Nice.

[Link via Slashdot.]

Variety’s Todd McCarthy raves:

Finally, someone’s found a sure-fire way to make money with a modern Middle East war movie: Just send a Marvel superhero into the fray to kick some insurgent butt. The powerhouse comicbook-inspired actioner “Iron Man” isn’t principally about this fantasy, but it won’t hurt at least American audiences’ enjoyment of this expansively entertaining special effects extravaganza. Having an actor as supercharged as Robert Downey Jr. at the center of such a tech-oriented enterprise reps a huge plus, and Paramount should reap big B.O. rewards by getting out ahead of the summer tentpole pack with such a classy refitting of an overworked format.

A story in the Chicago Sun-Times quotes the judge in the R. Kelly case confirming what everyone surmised—that he’s put a gag order on the lawyers and closed hearings to the public to avoid tainting the jury pool for the trial, which at this point is still scheduled to get underway, finally, on May 9, which is next Friday.

The ST and the Chicago Tribune have asked the judge to open the hearings and release transcripts of the ones held under wraps. He’s scheduled a hearing on the issue May 8, which may be a canny way potentially to render the issue moot; he can hear arguments and then spend a couple of weeks considering the issue as jury selection proceeds. The ST quoted Judge Vincent Gaughn thusly:

“I can’t disclose the reasons without giving away the whole thing,” Gaughan said. “It actually is because of the proximity of jury selection, which is in about two weeks, and the fact that it might deprive Mr. Kelly of a fair trial.”

One court filing revealed that the matters under discussion include the long and seamy trail of accusations that have dogged Kelly since 2000, probably to decide how much of it prosecutors can introduce as evidence.
Obligatory historical boilerplate:

Kelly’s case has already been a six-year-plus circus. He’s accused of filming himself having sex with a girl who police said was 13 or 14 at the time. (The tape also shows him urinating in the girl’s mouth. According to news reports, the tape also has footage of Kelly having sex with a different young girl, but she has never been identified.)

Kelly was arrested again in 2003 after Florida police found digital photos of him having sex with a different young girl, but those charges were eventually thrown out. Kelly also married a 15-year-old girl in 1994; the marriage was annulled after word got out. Local Chicago papers have published allegations from more than a half-dozen other girls who said Kelly seduced them.

As Hitsville has written in the past, many news outlets of late, falling over themselves to write about Kelly’s tours or his zany video cycle, “Trapped in the Closet,”  have forgotten to mention the totally barfy history of accusations that portray him as a serial sex predator. They are hereby allowed to use without restriction the previous two paragraphs in their writing about Kelly.

———

Previously in Hitsville:

Tribune, Sun-Times protest closed hearings in R. Kelly case

Secret hearings in the R. Kelly case

The Godfather Who Shagged Me: The complete R. Kelly SexFacts™
Everything you ever wanted to know about the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly’s Publicist: He slept with my daughter!

Idolator, tracking the performances at Coachella yesterday, raved about Prince … Portishead and Kraftwerk … the Breeders … the Verve…

Didn’t I see this show in 1995? I certainly could have, except for Kraftwerk … who didn’t do their big reunion tour until 1998.

I can’t believe they didn’t get Stone Temple Pilots and Dinosaur Jr.!

——
Previously in Hitsville:

The Business of Festivals
The Year of the Fest

From a NYT story on the migration of classic TV shows to the web:

Hulu now offers 3,000 full-length episodes of archived television shows, including ones as old as “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” from 1955. […] Perhaps surprisingly, four out of five titles in the Hulu library are viewed each day. Clearly, an audience is pursuing the archives.

———

Previously:

Hulu.com: “The Wire” angle

I love Hulu

A few grafs into a review of a book of poetry by Aram Saroyan in the Book Review this a.m., I was taken up by the lucidity and flow of the writing:

The resulting pages, tapped in Aram Saroyan by his typewriter, were succinct. Saroyan was the master of the one-word poem. But his works were as musical and meaningful as more conventional poetry, too, and a lot more amusing. The minimal poems were eye openers, ear openers and mind openers, and no one else was doing anything much like them at the time, and no one has since.

[…]

Saroyan and his poetic cohort mostly lived in New York, and it was an exhilarating time for poetry — one of those extended moments, like the advent of Cubism in Paris or rockabilly in Memphis, where the artists who got it could do no wrong. Even the least writers of this Second-Generation New York School, as it’s sometimes called, were gorgeous and exciting for a while there, in the general vicinity of the St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project circa 1966-71.

I looked up and the writer was Richard Hell, of Voidoids fame. Saroyan, by the way, was a minimalist poet of the so-called Concrete school, most famous for a one-word poem—”Lighght”—that earned him some notoriety when some yahoo elected officials made fun of it after Saroyan for an NEA grant.

It seems to have been his first review for the paper, though the Times published a decidely less interesting op-ed piece, an encomium to CBGB, when the club closed, in 2006. (”Many of us were drunk or stoned half our waking hours, after all. The thing is, we were young there. You don’t get that back.”)

Business Week throws some reporting power at the story behind one of the RIAA’s suits against file-sharers. It’s the seamy case of Tanya Anderson, who is a 45-year-old single mom living on disability in Oregon. The Anderson case has been a poster child in the protests against the RIAA’s Soprano’s-style tactics.

The RIAA uses an investigative company, MediaSentry, to round up IP addresses of file-sharers off the internets. It then extracts the names of the corresponding users from the companies that provide internet service, and then sends notes to the users, saying they’re about to be sued. Then it funds a debt-collection-style phone bank, which starts to dun the users with calls, trying to get them to settle the case before trial, generally for $4000 or $5000.

The RIAA seems to have made a mistake in Anderson’s case, and their tactics were reprehensible from top to bottom. Here’s just one example:

Over the next few months, [lawyer Lory R.] Lybeck and the record industry tussled over Andersen’s computer. The court ordered Andersen to hand over the computer, and the RIAA took it to an expert so it could be searched for signs of music piracy. But then the industry’s lawyers refused to release the expert’s report. Ultimately, Donald C. Ashmanskas, the U.S. District Court judge overseeing the case in Portland, ordered the RIAA to turn over the information, which it did in January, 2007. The result? No evidence of piracy.

There’s a happy ending, too:

Lybeck was convinced his defense was airtight. On May 14, he asked the Portland court for summary judgment. Ashmanskas gave the RIAA until June 1 to provide more evidence linking Andersen to the alleged infringement. In the week leading up to the deadline, the RIAA told Andersen it would drop its case if she agreed not to pursue counterclaims. She refused. Finally on the deadline, industry lawyers dropped the case without conditions and agreed not to sue Andersen again.

Worth reading. All that said, I thought one part of the story didn’t fit. For one, Anderson admits she had downloaded KaZaa onto her computer, though according to the story she didn’t use it:

As Andersen and the attorney prepared their defense in 2006, his conviction grew. Yes, Andersen had installed on her computer a software program, KaZaA, for sharing music over the Net—one reason the RIAA suspected her. But Andersen deleted the program after a few months and didn’t appear ever to have used it. Plus, some of the music Andersen had supposedly shared online just didn’t fit her taste. The songs included rap tunes with titles like “I Stab People” and “Dope Nose.”

An innocent single mom in Oregon, living on disability… who at some point knew enough about computers and file-sharing to download Kazaa to her computer. And if the RIAA got on her trail, it’s possible that she was actually running the program. It doesn’t quit fit. Her daughter, eight at the time she was sued, doesn’t seem to be a factor, but the story doesn’t ask the question of whether Anderson had ever let friends use her computer.

That aside, no one deserves to go through what Anderson did. Here’s what she told p2pnet in an earlier story:

Through this lawsuit, I’ve been humiliated, embarrassed, shamed, and my privacy has been greatly violated by the other side.

They not only deposed my 10-year-old daughter, but, deposed my grown step-kids (who I’ve long been divorced from the father), friends, etc.

At one point, they even tracked down and called my new landlord. I had been living here for only one month. They’ve asked and investigated quite a bit of extremely personal information, which was very humiliating.

As you know, I never did what the RIAA accused me of. There was no need for this lawsuit to ever even take place. I did everything humanly possible from the day I received the first letter to tell them there was a mistake. I even offered for my computer to be looked at from the beginning. They didn’t want to listen. I’ll never under why they continued to put me through the drug out nightmare that they have.

———–

Business Week: “Does she look like a music pirate?” [Link via Slashdot.]

When Hitsville wrote originally about the fact that filmmaker Errol Morris had paid some of the subjects of his new documentary, “Standard Operating Procedure,” one commenter here took issue with it. He made this remark:

While some documentaries are surely “journalistic,” I would love to meet the first asshole who decided that all documentaries be judged according to the standards of journalism.

Well, I am that asshole. Now that the issue has made it to the New York Times, It’s worth explaining exactly why it’s wrong.

1) You can say that documentary making is a form of journalism, or you can say that they both have the same role, which by definition is to convey some species of factual information. Inherent in that process are certain ethical requirements. The stream of furors over fabricators in the press and in the sleazy world of memoir publishing, and, now, with the interest in this angle, in the documentary world, is strong evidence that people feel the promulgators of such stuff should be honest. Any species of documentary has its parallel in the print world. There is the advocacy piece; there are re-enactments of key scenes, based on the testimony of participants; and of course high-level investigative work. These are all valid, and viewers, like readers, are smart and can easily apprehend the difference between “Woodstock” and “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Hoop Dreams,” “The Sorrow and the Pity” and “Crumb,” and they can surmise on the objectivity of the makers with some reliability as well. But that ability breaks down when a documentary that appears to be operating at a very high level of objectivity was actually put together with some rules broken behind the scenes.

2) When you pay someone to be in a documentary, or a source for a piece of journalism, you create an incentive for them to embellish their story. They are working for you now; maybe they should give value for money. The scene being described might take on a little more drama; the tears for the camera may come a little bit faster. A filmmaker of great integrity might work hard to minimize those corruptions of the truth, perhaps. Others won’t.

3) It creates a market, in the economic sense of the word, for the truth. Many subjects of documentaries are of interest to one person—the documentary makers. Others have a much wider appeal and can make money writing their own book. A wide swath in the middle, however, will be delighted to find a potential new income stream available to them. That’s good for them, bad for the dissemination of information to the rest of us.

4) It’s possible that Morris that opened up a portentous can of worms: Here he has created a market for information of great national import. It’s hard enough for reporters to get information of governmental malfeasance; now American service people in the Middle East know there is a money to be made talking about bad behavior over there. Why should they talk to a legitimate reporter when they might be able to score a documentarian with a checkbook?

Those are the real-world reasons why you shouldn’t pay for interviews. The joke, of course, is that I didn’t even have to make those arguments. Morris knew it was wrong. If paying for interviews is OK, why did Morris just not tell people? When asked about this at a screening of the film, according to the original blog post about it, you can see he didn’t answer the question right away. (”Morris eventually acknowledged that he did, in fact, pay his interview subjects, jokingly explaining that he did so because ‘I have a lot of money and want to share it.’)

Here’s what Morris said when he was asked about it by a GQ interviewer:

“I don’t know if it’s a great idea for me to talk about it. I’ve always felt that if someone specifically asked me, I wouldn’t lie about it, because I think that would be incredibly stupid.”

This issue has a tangential similarity to the sophistry in the debate about payola in the music industry. It’s not illegal to take money from a record company to play a song on the air; it’s illegal to do that and not tell listeners. The argument isn’t about taking the money: it’s that both parties want to keep it secret. No one’s telling Morris he can’t pay for interviews; and if by his lights it’s ok to do so, why not just tell people at the beginning of the film—”Some of the participants were paid to be interviewed”?

Instead, as I wrote earlier, Morris has a penchant for gnomic utterances that are less than they seem. Here he displays another tick, turning an ethical issue that reflects badly on himself (paying people for interviews in his movies without revealing the fact) into an ethical pat on the back for himself. (”Yes I robbed the bank, but I made a personal vow to myself that I would answer truthfully if asked about it.”)

Morris also retreats into half-truths and semantic games. In a statement made to Hollywood Elsewhere, Morris said he paid Fred Leuchter, the subject of his film Dr. Death, to appear in certain scenes, but not to be interviewed. This is a specious distinction. He also muddied the issue by talking about travel expenses, when travel expenses are a side issue.

And when the NYT wrote about it today, the reporters quote him indirectly saying he had paid interviewers “for their time,” another bit of euphemism. (“We weren’t paying the congressman for his vote, Your Honor; we were paying him for his time.”)

And it’s probable, too, that Morris has been complicit in allowing the impression to get out that he didn’t pay for interviewers. In an extremely favorable NYT feature story on the new film several weeks ago was this passage:

That Mr. Morris was able to wrangle Ms. England—as well as Janis Karpinski, Abu Ghraib’s former commanding officer, and Tim Dugan, a contract interrogator, among others—came about through a careful and persistent cultivation of their subjects and their lawyers.

It’s possible that the reporter wrote that on his own authority and that the issue never came up in his interview with Morris. Possible, but doubtful.

The final argument Morris puts forth is that he couldn’t have gotten the interviews otherwise. This, too, is intellectually incoherent. (”There’s nothing wrong with doing this, but in any case I had to.”) It is the documentary-maker’s job to find the interviews, just as it is the reporter’s job to get the story. Sometimes, it can’t be got.

In my discussion with the commenter, I said that I hadn’t contended that paying for the interviews affected the content or integrity of the film, though of course it did. Journalism has all sorts of moral issues when it comes to seducing sources, as Janet Malcolm impoliticly noted many years ago. But there are some ground rules, and it helps both the craft and, more importantly, the understanding of audiences to adhere to them. In a world transfixed by reality TV that’s made up, memoirs that aren’t, and a fair and balanced cable channel that isn’t, I’d like to point out that the problem with the world today does not extend to the overstrict observance of such niceties. Where you stand matters.

—————–
Hitsville: “Does Errol Morris pay people to be in his films?”

The original And the Winner Is… blog item.

The original Hollywood Elsewhere item.

NYT: “Film on Abu Ghraib puts focus on paid interviews”

NYT: “Of crime and perception at Abu Ghraib.”

Michael Cieply and Ben Sisario take a look at the growing concern about how Errol Morris got his interviews for his newest film, Standard Operating Procedure. This is the film about the Abu Ghraib prison guards, some of whom he paid to be in his movie. As we’ve seen recently, Morris thinks it’s OK for documentary filmmakers to pay people for interviews, but that’s not the way he behaves (because he doesn’t disclose the fact in his films) and that’s not the way he talks about it either.

In the Times story, he says the subjects were paid “for their time,” a sophistic distinction. When asked about his practice by Hollywood Elsewhere earlier this week, he said he paid a subject of one of his films for “several scenes,” but insisted he didn’t pay him for the interview, which seems, well, sophistic as well.

More on this tomorrow.

The collapse of Starbucks’ plans to become a major player in the film and music industries collapsed yesterday, as the chain jettisoned its top entertainment exec and outsourced its music arm.

Wrote the Times:

As part of the changes, Starbucks said Ken Lombard, president of the entertainment unit since 2004, had departed.

Starbucks also said it would turn over management control of Hear Music, its in-house record label, to its partner in that venture, the Concord Music Group.

Thus endeth one of the silliest ongoing stories in the industry, as each time the company sent out a press release the press swooned: “Starbucks goes Hollywood!” “Starbucks signs Paul McCartney!”

It all started two years ago, when the press was abuzz with talk of Starbucks’ getting into the movie business by cutting a promotional deal with LionsGate for a film called “Akeelah and the Bee.”

The deal was announced on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, and then breathlessly followed up by the New York Times (which credited the Journal with the scoop) and the LA Times (which didn’t) . Wrote the Journal:

For Hollywood, Starbucks represents a potentially lucrative new force at a time when the industry is struggling with a steep downturn in movie attendance and flattening sales for DVDs. With pastimes like videogames stealing customers and consumers turning to the Internet and other new technologies for entertainment content, executives are rethinking how they sell movies. A key part of that effort is finding new real estate in which to grab moviegoers’ attention.

Wrote the LAT:

Lombard said Starbucks wanted to be to movies what talk-show host Oprah Winfrey’s book club was to reading. Though the company says it will not produce films, it plans to pump millions of dollars into films it chooses to promote.

“This is not a test for us,” Lombard said. “This is a firm commitment for us to expand the brand into the movies.

[…]

“They broke the mold when they decided to do music,” said Ron Paul, founder of Technomic Inc., a food market research company. “If bookstores have coffee, then why can’t a coffee store sell books and movies?”

Well, for all sorts of reasons. If you read the stories closely, you could see that the producers of the film were basically just paying the chain to promote its movie; Starbucks was given some undisclosed share of the film’s profits, along with a courtesy “presentation” credit on the film itself.

This was all basically an adult version of a Happy Meal with a Narnia figurine. The twist was that the film was paying the store for the tie-in, rather than the other way around. But even this wasn’t all that different from all of the other non-coffee crap the chain purveys from its stores. Still, Starbucks had a canny PR campaign for the deal, the WSJ bit, and the other papers followed up on the big news.

Now we can see that it was a sketchy plan all along. While Starbucks has obviously shown it can sell music and perhaps even DVDs out of its stores along with little tins of breath mints, the stories today note that the company basically hit a wall at a certain point, as per-store numbers on media sales haven’t risen lately.

The problem with the strategy is that it was predicated on novelty. With movies and CDs, after the novelty  of buying a Starbucks-approved CD wears off, folks will actually start to notice the quality of the music or movies they are being presented with each week or month.

Paul McCartney offering his new record through Starbucks is an interesting fact—for about five minutes. And Starbucks got its little blast of publicity for it.  Joni Mitchell’s doing the same thing is interesting too, but at that point the half-life phenomenon kicks in. What happens next, Elvis Costello? Maybe Van Morrison, and all of a sudden the company is out of pantheonic figures to market and has to go down a tier—to John Cougar Mellencamp, or  Stevie Winwood—and then another: I don’t know, Shawn Colvin, maybe, or Jackson Browne.

Starbucks can sell whatever it wants to in its stores, and for folks who want their music and movies mediated by a fast-food outfit it’s a good match. But as I’ve noted before, when the “how” of the selling of the product becomes the story, it’s a good bet that there’s little else to talk about.

The Chicago Sun-Times is reporting that a spat betwen a former lawyer for R. Kelly and a judge may delay the start of Kelly’s child-sex trial, scheduled to get going May 9.

The lawyer is asking a higher Illinois court to delay the trial. According to the story, Adams is a “renowned  criminal defense lawyer” who wanted to join Kelly’s legal team (of which his son is already a part), but the judge in Kelly’s case, Vincent Gaughn, wouldn’t allow it:

In his court filing, Adam said he balked at Gaughan’s insistence he sign an order agreeing to reinterview witnesses before trial. Since Adam would not sign it, Gaughan refused to let him participate in the case.

Adam called Gaughan’s rules “an unwarranted and unconstitutional interference” with Kelly’s right to counsel.

Kelly’s case has already been a six-year-plus circus. He’s accused of filming himself having sex with a girl who police said was 13 or 14 at the time. (The tape also shows him urinating in the girl’s mouth. According to news reports, the tape also has footage of Kelly having sex with a different young girl, but she has never been identified.)

Kelly was arrested again in 2003 after Florida police found digital photos of him having sex with a different young girl, but those charges were eventually thrown out. Kelly also married a 15-year-old girl in 1994; the marriage was annulled after word got out. Local Chicago papers have published allegations from more than a half-dozen other girls who said Kelly seduced them.

One of the things I think the press doesn’t do well is deal with liars. Corporate culture, which involves a lot of lying, is taken for granted. The corporate folks have it both ways: When accused of something, they say, “Oh we would never do that! I’m a husband, a father! I have children! We would never pollute that river/steal our customers’ money/break myriad federal laws/etc. etc. etc. ”

And when they are caught, they say, “Well, it was my responsibility to the shareholders to not acknowledge the truth at that juncture.”

Now, that’s how it goes with crimes and scandals, but it also happens at a much less toxic level on a quotidian basis, but the liars in questions rarely get called on it.

We saw it the other day, when Les Moonves, the head of CBS, visited CBS News to try to buck up staff morale. Wrote the NY Times:

On Friday Mr. Moonves and Mr. McManus visited CBS News headquarters on West 57th Street in Manhattan in an effort to raise morale and offered their full backing to Ms. Couric, saying she would definitely continue as their anchor.

Emphasis added. Moonves was of course lying to his staff and the public; several national papers had already reported that Moonves and Couric had begun to discuss her departure, and, as we saw a few days later, Couric’s ratings are down to unprecedentedly low levels in any case, and no one at the network has a plan to raise them.

Which is fine. My complaint is with the press, which next week will begin referring to him again blandly as “CBS chairman Les Moonves.” Why don’t they call him a liar, too? Why don’t we see journalism like:

“… Moonves said, though in the past when asked about CBS matters he has lied,” or,

“… said the CBS Chairman, a known liar.”

It’s worse because he has ultimate oversight of an institution, CBS News, that should be synonymous with intergrity and forthrightness. It is a funny thing to natter on about, these days, but that’s just another example of what doesn’t get said:

“Moonves, though the titular head of an organization that asks millions of Americans to trust its reporting, lies a lot.”

I don’t think it’s a cheap shot to bring his marriage into this; he’s married to Julie Chen, who besides being several decades younger than him is allowed to be both a correspondent on the CBS Early Show and host of “Big Brother.” Talking about ethics is a pointless exercise when it comes to reality TV, of course, but shouldn’t someone care that a CBS newsperson like Chen spends half her time giving pretend reality to viewers?

Like maybe the chairman of her network? Oh, wait …

It’s hard to write about “DRM,” or “digital rights management,” because just the name—you have your choice of an acronym or mind-numbing phrase—puts one to sleep.

So, imagine this: You’re reading a book—or listening to a CD. Suddenly, the words evaporate off the page, or the music goes silent. You investigate, and find out that there’s a guy somewhere with a magic wand able to make that happen.

That’s basically the state of affairs in the digital age: Many of the things we buy are magically connected to a company that has the power to do that. DRM is the wand.

Certain Microsoft customers will be finding out about this in coming year, as the company announced this week it was ending its MSN Store, which sold DRM-encased songs. The music isn’t going silent right away, but it will, as people move on to new computers; in Microsoftspeak*, folks will not be able to “authorize” the songs on new computers after August of this year. Over time, restrictions in the DRM will mean the customers can no longer hear them. Says Ars Technica:

The news will likely upset a number of Microsoft’s customers, who bought music from MSN Music before the company launched the Zune Marketplace and decided to ditch the old store. Microsoft’s decision to turn off the MSN Music authorization servers serves as a painful reminder that DRM ultimately severely limits your rights. Companies that control various DRM schemes, as well as the content providers themselves, can yank your ability to play the content which you lawfully purchased (and now, videos) at any moment—no matter what your expectation was when you bought it.

Emphasis added. Microsoft has tens of billions of cash on hand, so as a matter of principle it could easily shell out the small amount of resources it would take to keep “authorizing” the songs, or just turn them into mp3s; it could do that to make it clear that the company’s commitment was to its customers; that DRM is there just to stop piracy, not to stiff users.

But then, it wouldn’t be Microsoft.

*Possibly the most enraging word in the digital lexicon, incidentally, is “support.” The email from Microsoft said:

As of August 31, 2008, we will no longer be able to support the retrieval of license keys for the songs you purchased from MSN Music or the authorization of additional computers.

Support in the IT sense is directly synonymous with “trouble our sorry asses to bother to make this work for you so you can use the product we sold you/do your job.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to deal with IT folks to get my staff iTunes, or RealPlayers, or IM programs on their computers, only to be told blandly, “We don’t support that.” You can always get around it, but it typically involves a long educational process with higher-ups, who initially allow the phrase an entirely unwarranted talismanic force.

Over in Slate, Troy Patterson offers an argument that seems to have started out only half-serious but becomes pretty compelling as he marches away through the network’s news-related programing. Katie Couric is obviously not enjoying the job, CBS Sunday Morning is moribund, The Early Show is fluff etc. etc.:

A brief word about CBS Sunday Morning: While it is obvious that this network’s coverage and presentation of current events is geared toward old people, the target audience of Charles Osgood’s show seems to be already dead—peacefully so.

Patterson also lights out on the sacred cow that is 60 Minutes:

We’re supposed to have some respect for 60 Minutes and I’m not entirely sure why that is. The most recent episode began with a Lara Logan piece on a Special Forces unit in Afghanistan. It was teased as a tale of valor that would also expose why we are losing in Afghanistan. In reality, it only addressed one of these topics. Guess which! Recounting a battle between the Green Berets and the Taliban, Logan—whose hair was mussed, which I take to be a considered choice—gave us a boys’ adventure story of the old school. It takes nothing away from the courage and sacrifice of these soldiers to say that the segment was an encyclopedia of war-story treacle: “I thought, ‘If I’m going down, I’m taking them with me,’ ” and so on.

The reason we’re supposed to have respect for 60 Minutes is that it does occasionally do actual strong journalism but it’s also true that 80 percent of the time, when you tune in, there’s nothing like strong journalism on the show. My pet peeve are the puffy profiles; the 60 Minutes angle is to give viewers the same fluff the lighter shows do, but with a patina of seriousness. The correspondents gaze quizzically at some celebrity, screwing their face up to get ready to ask an insipid question in a very hard-hitting way: “Was working with Steven the best experience of your professional life?”

But the show is such a hit it will never go away. But that can’t be said for the rest of the news division. There are of course many talented journalists working there, but at this point, even the fretting about the effects of cost-cutting on the division is a decades old routine, going back to the Lawrence Tisch and Westinghouse years.

There are two cable channels that provide fairly strong news coverage available to anyone in the country not too cheap to lay out for basic cable, so CBS News has no raison d’etre when it comes to breaking news. It also means that its reporting staff is comparatively puny. The company has virtually no web presence. While there is patently no one there with the programming smarts to figure out how to contend in the modern world, it’s also rue that there is no answer to the network’s big problem: It’s flagship show offers a product—a digest of the stories of the day wrapped up in a cute little package at 6:30 p.m.—that no one wants any more. CBS News is basically a typewriter.

Stephen Whitty, in his New Jersey Star-Ledger blog, goes after Errol Morris for paying for some of the interviews in his new film, “Standard Operating Procedure.” This is his argument against the practice:

Money, however, changes everything. Once cash is involved, all guiding lights are off, and it’s hard to even feel your way to the facts. Is this person saying this because he thinks it’s what I want to hear? Because he suspects it will make a better story? Will the fourth source hold out for more money, knowing what I paid the third one, and will he then feel obligated to exaggerate, so I feel I got my money’s worth?

Your guess is as good as mine—which makes my job, as a reporter, pretty much superfluous. Because if I can’t weigh motives and decide who may or may not be telling the truth, how dare I ask you to do that work for me?

I can think of several other reasons as well, which I list in a discussion with Hitsville commenter Jason Cohn here.

—————-

Previously in Hitsville:

Does Errol Morris pay people to be in his films?

Says the NYT:

On Tuesday CBS received ratings results that put an exclamation point on its troubles: the “CBS Evening News” recorded the worst five-night run in its history last week.

The program attracted an average of only 5.4 million viewers for the week, which a CBS spokeswoman, Sandy Genelius, said appeared to be the lowest it had ever received.

Emphasis added. The story puts a punctuation mark, a loud one, on the stories about Couric from last week to the effect that she and CBS brass had begun discussing her departure from the anchor chair.

Just a few days ago I wrote about Howard Kurtz spinning wildly for Couric on his CNN show, claiming she had seven million viewers. I wrote then she actually had just less than six, and we can see her ratings declining by another ten percent since then.

The amazing thing is that Couric began with thirteen million viewers. She has lost more than seven and a half million.

I want to be careful writing about this, because it all has nothing to do with her being female, or a blonde, or any of the other superficial things that come up. There are huge forces at work that Couric could not hope to combat: CBS can’t maintain a news division that can compete with a cable channel’s; and of course when you’re owned by MTV no one up top really cares about quality news coverage anyway. (Les Moonves is married to intrepid newswoman Julie Chen, the hard-hitting host of … “Big Brother.”)

All that said, Couric’s huge salary sucks money out of the newsroom; and she is by far the least qualified person ever to have sat in that chair. Everyone talks about her success as the host of the Today show, but few people talk about what a superficial and chirpy waste of air time it is. A couple of people have told me I sounded mean when writing about Couric last week. Forgive me for quoting myself, but this is why she doesn’t belong in the CBS anchor chair:

I took the time to watch Katie Couric announce she was leaving the Today show fourteen or fifteen months ago. Here’s what I heard: The first thing mentioned was Brian Doyle, a Homeland Security official who was busted for being a sexual predator online. Then came this, which I quote in its entirety:

COURIC: And welcome to “Today” on this Wednesday morning, everyone. I’m Katie Couric.

LAUER: And I’m Matt Lauer. Clearly, it’s a big embarrassment for the Department of Homeland Security. This agency is–is designed and supposed to keep us all safe and now their deputy press secretary is in some serious trouble.

COURIC: That’s right, Matt. Authorities arrested 55-year-old Brian Doyle on Tuesday evening and charged him with using a computer to try to seduce what he believed was a 14-year-old girl. It turns out, though, it was an undercover detective. We’ll have much more on that story just ahead.

We’ll also show you the dramatic congressional testimony from 19-year-old Justin Berry, the teenager we first talked to on Tuesday. He told Congress how he was victimized on online by more than 1,000 men. Now he’s angry that so little has been done about it. Matt:

LAUER: Katie, also ahead we’re going to have some crucial advice for women who are going to a bar or a party where drinks will be served. We’re going to go undercover to show you just how easy it was for our security expert to slip something into the drinks of some unsuspecting women.

Child porn… child porn… and mickeys! At 7 a.m.! It was a quick reminder that the real debate about Couric wasn’t that she’s a woman, that she’s a blonde, or that she shrieked at the help. It’s that she was the public face of a skanky network infotainment franchise.

The machinations the broadcast news organizations are going through right now are I think hugely overcovered in the national press; No one under 60 watches broadcast news, and it’s hard to see not only how the CBS News division has that much of its storied assets to protect at this point, but what options are open to it in the current media world. But there should be no question of the sort of newsperson Couric wasn’t when she took the job.

p.s. : The Times story contained these two paragraphs, side by side:

The poor results for CBS came in a week that included confirmation of a meeting in February in which Ms. Couric and her agent had discussed with Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS, and Sean McManus, the president of CBS News, the possibility that she might leave the anchor position sometime after the presidential election.

On Friday Mr. Moonves and Mr. McManus visited CBS News headquarters on West 57th Street in Manhattan in an effort to raise morale and offered their full backing to Ms. Couric, saying she would definitely continue as their anchor.

That’s good for morale: Lying to the troops.

____________

Previously in Hitsville:

Howie hearts Katie
Kurtz the lame
Couric, the debate, and the vaporization of CBS News
Katie Couric, a year later