Community station KGNU buys commercial signal

Bucking a national wave of media consolidation by large corporations, Boulder community radio station KGNU reached terms to buy Denver AM radio signal KJME, offering metro Denver listeners independent news and diverse music currently unavailable in Denver.

The deal, which was finalized last month just days ahead of the Republican National Convention, runs counter to a national wave of media consolidation by large corporations. Clear Channel Communications, the media giant that owns over 1,200 radio stations across the country and organized pro-war rallies ahead of the invasion of Iraq, owns eight stations in Denver.

After its purchase of the KJME AM signal, listener-supported radio station KGNU began broadcasting in the Denver area on Aug. 29 — the day that marked the largest march at a political convention in US history. (Pacifica Radio)

Gallup finds trust in media at new low

In the wake of the CBS “60 Minutes” controversy, a new Gallup Poll finds the news media’s credibility has declined significantly among the public. The poll, taken Sept. 13-15 while the CBS report on President Bush’s National Guard service was being questioned but before the network issued an apology, found that just 44 percent of Americans express confidence in the media’s ability to report news stories accurately and fairly.

On the other hand, 39percent currently say they have “not very much” confidence in the media’s accuracy and fairness, while 16 percent say they have “none at all.”

The partisan divide goes something like this: 59 percent of Democrats express confidence in the media, 31 percent of Republicans do so and 44 percent of Independents feel that way. Of the entire sample, 48 percent perceive the media as “too liberal,” 15 percent as “too conservative,” and 33 percent find it “just about right.” The number finding the media too liberal has only gone up 3 percent in the past year, however. (Editor and Publishers Staff)

Army’s war game recruits kids

Your kids can download the “America’s Army’’ video game for free. Well, it is free for them. You have already paid for it with your tax dollars. In the game, kids kill people with weapons that look and respond like the real things. They ambush terrorists and, when caught in a firefight, they can hear bullets whistle past their ears and even hear the shell casings from their M-16s clatter onto the concrete floor.

“America’s Army’’ is one of the US Army’s most popular and effective recruiting tools — conceived, designed and distributed free to reach the 13- to 21-year-old crowd. Unlike 30-second TV ads, the game is what the ad industry calls “sticky’’ advertising: consumers are engaged for much longer periods than with traditional commercials and ads. The game and its upgrades have been downloaded more than 16 million times since the original version was released to strong acclaim in the gaming world two years ago.

The Army’s target for this year is to sign up 77,000 young men and women for active duty. Next year, according to an Army spokesman, the target is 80,000. Video games are the new frontier for marketing and advertising. McDonald’s, Pepsi, Nike and ESPN are among the many companies using games to attract customers and foster brand loyalty at young ages. (San Francisco Chronicle)

The story that didn’t run

In its rush to air its now discredited story about President George W. Bush’s National Guard service, CBS bumped another sensitive piece slated for the same “60 Minutes” broadcast: a half-hour segment about how the US government was snookered by forged documents purporting to show Iraqi efforts to purchase uranium from Niger.

The journalistic juggling at CBS provides an ironic counterpoint to the furor over apparently bogus documents involving Bush’s National Guard service. One unexpected consequence of the network’s decision was to wipe out a chance — at least for the moment — for greater public scrutiny of a more consequential forgery that played a role in building the Bush administration’s case to invade Iraq. A team of “60 Minutes” correspondents and consulting reporters spent more than six months investigating the Niger uranium documents fraud, CBS sources tell NEWSWEEK.

Some CBS reporters, as well as one of the network’s key sources, fear that the Niger uranium story may never run, at least not any time soon, on the grounds that the network can now not credibly air a report questioning how the Bush administration could have gotten taken in by phony documents. The network would “be a laughingstock,” said one source intimately familiar with the story. (MSNBC)

Concerns over media coverage

Journalists must urgently debate whether their coverage of crises such as the hostage-taking in Iraq is driving terrorists to commit ever more outrageous atrocities, a top BBC executive said on the night of Sept. 26. Roger Mosey, the corporation’s head of television news, called on broadcasters and newspapers to review the ethical dilemmas raised by the Beslan school massacre in Russia and the terrorist-made videos of hostages facing murder in Iraq.

Nick Pollard, head of Sky News, said: “Most people in the business, like most viewers, feel uneasy about all the videos we’ve seen. But I feel it’s right to show the videos as we’ve been showing them. If we weren’t showing a video and at some stage the hostage was killed, and it turned out later this hostage had made direct appeals to Tony Blair which were not seen, I think the public’s reaction would be: ‘We should have known this. It was censored by the media and the government.’”

The broadcasters are coming to terms with the growing power of the internet, which experts say is likely to play an increasing role in Islamic militancy. A compilation of video clips of executions placed on the web by the al-Tauhid group three weeks ago has been downloaded more than 20,000 times, according to research by Reuven Paz, an Israeli specialist in radical Islam. (The Observer)

CNN producer kidnapped and released

Palestinian gunmen have kidnapped a CNN producer in Gaza City, the American news network said Sept. 27. CNN said Riyadh Ali, who is reportedly an Arab Israeli citizen, was taken away at gunpoint from a CNN van to an unknown location. Witnesses said two cars with gunmen approached the CNN van on a Gaza street. Ali was released on Sept. 28.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility and it was not clear whether the kidnappers were militants or linked to Palestinian security services. Colleagues of Ali said he worked as a producer and was based at the network’s Jerusalem bureau. CNN correspondent Ben Wedeman said he had no idea of why Ali was kidnapped.

Speaking on CNN, Wedeman said: “These men were not very communicative, they just asked ‘which one of you is Riyad ?’ and that was it.” He said: “Their appearance was not unusual, they weren’t dressed in any way different than your average Gazan of their age, which was somewhere in their early twenties.” (Guardian)

Growth of Wal-Mart bad for papers

Newspaper advertising this year has been a major disappointment to both the papers and their investors. But while everything has been blamed, from the war in Iraq to a struggling economy, a study Sept. 21 said the problem is deeper and will continue. Some call it the “Wal-Mart effect.”

“Wal-Mart and stores like them don’t simply advertise in newspapers the way traditional department stores do,” said Paul Ginocchio, a Deutsche Bank Securities media analyst and the report’s chief author. “Most troubling for newspapers is that this isn’t going away. It’s actually accelerating.”

Since the early 1990s, as big-box stores expanded from small and midsize towns into the suburbs of major US cities, they have changed the face of retailing. By extension, their success cut away at the advertising revenues of newspaper companies.

Coming out of the 1991 recession, big-box retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Costco Wholesale Corp. accounted for about 16 percent of general merchandise sales nationwide; today the figure is nearly 50 percent. That jump in market share, Ginocchio said, is the main reason retail advertising growth at the nation’s newspapers is expected to be less than half the four percent that the industry forecast at the beginning of 2004. (Chicago Tribune)