Failure of the Media Part Three: NBC and the End of the Brandon Tartikoff Strategy

In my post Failure of the Media Part One I discussed how demographic changes, mostly the lack of young Whites, made the youth-oriented Indie 103.1 FM a failure, compared to the older, stodgier, but more profitable AM talk radio, oriented towards an older, White male audience. In my post, Failure of the Media Part Two, I covered the sad, lingering death of the LA Times, intent on becoming the print version of NPR without the massive government subsidies. Now, I'll cover the sad decline of broadcast TV networks, with a special emphasis on the near total decline of NBC.

In all three cases, key decision makers have deluded themselves about demographic reality, and basic economics.

If Indie 103.1 failed because it was not 1983 any more, and there were not enough (White) youth, and the LA Times slowly sinks underwater because the attempt to become a print version of KCRW was doomed to be a money loser from the start, broadcast TV networks, and NBC in particular, fall from grace is far more puzzling.

Because once upon a time, the Brandon Tartikoff strategy actually worked for NBC. When Tartikoff was running it. Boiled down to it's essentials, it meant giving shows without much audience appeal that were well written, acted, and produced, several years to find an audience, and allowing some lower-rated shows (Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, the first few years of Seinfeld) to stay on the schedule as long as they drew high advertising rates based on wealthy yuppie audiences. For the time, the early 1980's, this was new. But a critical component of Tartikoff's strategy was shows with broad, popular appeal. Tartikoff was instrumental in launching shows like Miami Vice, the Cosby Show, Knight Rider, and Family Ties. Not to mention the A-Team.

Now, NBC's schedule is among the lowest rated of the broadcast networks, excluding the teen-girl oriented CW. Even it's head, Ben Silverman, has given up on the idea of becoming the number one rated network. Moves such as canceling the acclaimed "Life" and moving the similarly acclaimed "Chuck" to a thirteen episode run in the Spring of 2010 were something Tartikoff would not have done. Nor would the emphasis on cheap, disposable reality shows that make money on low ratings be part of the old Tartikoff strategy. Instead, NBC is loading up on cheap, female-appealing reality shows, and running a Jay Leno hour-long talk show at 10 pm every weeknight. Only Fox still programs new shows on Saturdays, "Cops" and "America's Most Wanted." NBC abandoned Saturdays in the late 1990's after the failure of the XFL stunt (a weird cross between football and Wrestling created by WWE head Vince McMahon). CBS and ABC had stopped running new shows several years earlier.

NBC is not alone, of course, in having problems with profitability. Ratings leader CBS has shown reduced operating revenue, compared with years before, prior to the recession. Fox, ABC, and the CW are also hurting. ABC canceled the series "Samantha Who?" with star Christina Applegate, due to an inability to reduce costs. According to Deadline Hollywood Daily, half a million per episode had to be cut from the budget to get the show renewed. It's possible that CBS made a similar decision in canceling the excellent "Eleventh Hour" which got good ratings.

The reason for the move to cut costs is clear: the networks, pretty much all of them, don't believe they can get enough viewers. Probably most of the networks don't want to do the things required to gain viewers. Since it would be too uncomfortable for network executives dealing with producers. NBC's Silverman, after all, was a reality show producer himself before becoming head of NBC programming, and will surely return to that once he leaves NBC, as is true for most programming heads. [Former "Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "Hill Street Blues" producer Grant Tinker became Tartikoff's boss at NBC.] Programming heads don't like to pressure producers outside their comfort zones, knowing the places can and will be reversed some day soon. Today's programming heads and producers are relatively happy creating content that is "edgy and hip" and aimed almost exclusively at women 18-34, the female youth demographic, so desired by advertisers. It was a strategy that worked reasonably well, during boom times, but is out of touch, and dangerously so, with economic reality today.

It's useful to compare today's America, and state of television, with that of the America in the 1960's. It's true that in the 1960's, there were only three broadcast networks, as opposed to five today (Fox and CW did not exist then). But there are about 100 million more people today in the US than there were during the 1960's. In 1970, the population of the US was about 203 million. Today, America has about 306 million. This increase of about 103 million people amounts to about roughly a 50% increase from 1970 levels. The Beverly Hillbillies drew about 60 million viewers during it's peak years. Today, with 50% more people, the highest rated show on broadcast TV is "American Idol" with about 25-30 million viewers. By contrast, HBO which is available to almost every household in the US, has only a third of households subscribing, which amounts to about 8-9 million viewers for the Sopranos, and 11.9 million viewers for the finale. Only the Superbowl, with ratings of around 100 million viewers or so has accomplished keeping near pace with population increases. One would imagine, that all things being equal, shows that were popular would be posting viewers in the 90 million range (about a 50% increase from the 60 million that the Beverly Hillbillies drew). This is not so. Even during the 1980's, before Fox and the CW, and widespread cable TV, the A-Team only drew 20 million viewers at it's height. [Fox first broadcast in October, 1986]

Even during the early 1980's, viewership had declined, despite the lack of alternatives (no Fox, no CW, no UPN nor WB networks, no cable inroads). A cable show like HBO's True Blood generates only 1.4 million viewers per showing. Broadcast network executives and producers argue that viewer erosion is a function of audience fragmentation, but clearly viewers were not watching TV, by the droves (nearly 50% less compared to the late 1960's) in the 1980's, comparing say Beverly Hillbillies (60 million viewers) to the A-Team (20 million viewers). This without cable, Fox, CW, UPN/WB, and so on. Even with cable competition, the numbers don't add up, i.e. there's just not enough total viewers of stuff like True Blood to account for the "missing" viewers. Moreover, cable networks like HBO, Showtime, USA, Sci-Fi, and others run their schedules in the Summer months, precisely to avoid competition with the broadcast networks, who have re-runs or unwatchable reality shows during that time.

The missing viewers, are of course, men. The Long Tail Blog has old data from the 2004-5 controversy over the "missing" male viewers reported by Nielsen. [Changes in methodology in 2004 had a 10% decline in male viewership 18-34, which was "adjusted" back to previous viewership levels in 2005.] Nevertheless, TV is a mostly gay-female ghetto. Sitcoms can have up to 80% of their viewers female, as a quick look at shows like "Friends" or "How I Met Your Mother" would confirm.

Look for example at ABC's 2008 Fall Schedule:

Number of shows (Primetime): 16.
Number female skewing: 16.

NBC's Fall Schedule has:

Number of shows (Primetime): 18 (I'm not counting the Saturday edition of Dateline NBC).
Number of female skewing: 13 (note, the five shows that are male skewing include the two Sunday Night Football shows, the pre-game and the Sunday Night Football.)

CBS's Fall 2008 Schedule is here:

Number of shows: 22.
Number of female skewing: 21 (I'm including only NUB3RS as not female skewing, and even that might be pushing it, if you added NCIS, Without A Trace, and the Unit, you would get to 18 as female skewing. My standard for not female skewing is a "male" show like the A-Team, i.e. few female roles, not much concern for relationships, other things women viewers like to see).

Fox's Fall 2008 Schedule is here:

Number of shows: 17 (I'm counting the Saturday shows of Cops and America's Most Wanted).
Number of female skewing shows: 15.

CW's Schedule for Fall 2008 is here.

Number of shows: 10.
Number of female skewing shows: 8 (I'm counting Smallville and Supernatural as at least not female skewing shows, they are weird hold-overs from the WB days).

This gives us the following graphs:


[Click Image to enlarge]

As you can see, NBC had the most shows that were "Men Friendly" in the sense of not being female skewing (such as say, ABC's "Desperate Housewives") with five, two of those related to Sunday Night Football (the pre-game show and the game broadcast, respectively). Moreover, even shows such as "Heroes," and "Chuck," and "My Own Worst Enemy" had substantial female-friendly elements (soap-opera style relationship stuff, and so on). NBC, moreover, did not do very well with it's line-up of shows. "My Own Worst Enemy" was canceled fairly quickly, and "Life," "Chuck," and "Knight Rider" failed to catch on (though "Chuck" was renewed).



[Click Image to enlarge]

The percentages were overall, fairly dismal. Men make up approximately 50% of the population, but only NBC cracked 25% of their shows being "Male Friendly" and that was a function of the Sunday Football broadcasts. One could argue about how to classify such CBS shows as "Without A Trace," or the various CSI-en, or "Eleventh Hour," but even adding them to the male-friendly mix would not approach 50% for the network, let alone total.

What's wrong with the television networks is the lack of men. Men are the missing viewers. Even counting cable systems, we have the following female-oriented cable networks: Lifetime, Lifetime Movie Network, WE, Oxygen, Bravo, Out, HGTV, Food Network, TLC, A&E, HBO, Showtime, Fine Living, Travel Channel, and Tru. That's a total of 15. Male oriented cable networks include: History Channel, ESPN, NFL Network, National Geographic, Discovery, USA, and Spike. That's a total of 7 networks. As we can see regarding broadcast networks, ALL the current broadcast networks are oriented overwhelmingly towards women.

This emphasis on female viewers has done two things. First, it has made entertainment dull, predictable, and PC-driven. Pushing the message that say, criminals (like the ones always breaking into the house "protected" by the Brinks Home security system in the series of commercials) are mostly mid thirties White guys who look middle class:



Or the endless supply of middle aged, White guys who probably resemble the ex-husbands of the script writers (Law and Order-en family of shows is notorious for this). Instead of the depressing reality of violent crime committed by Blacks and Hispanics. The White female audience demands PC and Multiculturalism, not just because those populations are totemized as some "Magical Negro" (ala Spike's Lee's famous essay decrying the dehumanizing effects of movies such as "Legend of Bagger Vance" where Black characters have magical powers ... that they use to spiritually enlighten White protagonists). But also because women find most "beta" males tedious, as workplace competitors, and bearers of unwanted sexual attention. Thus TV gives women the wrong ideas about who are the risky ones (hint: it's not the boring mid-thirties White guys) for crime and violence, and in asserting the PC dogma, boring and predictable.

Television, after all, has advantages over movies. Longer running times allows complex story lines (about 15 and a half hours for a 22 episode season, compared to 2 hours for most movies). Television is usually dominated by writer-producers, allowing creative continuity. Lacking big budgets for Michael Bay type special effects, television relies more on character than explosions and CGI. Being free or mostly free, television can reach far more people per year than all but the biggest of movies. The actors, too, can often be more skilled, selected for the ability to make the audience like and care about the lead over years, rather than tabloid celebrity. Particularly in a recession, television should be attractive, given the ability to reach far more people with less marketing costs than a big budget movie.

If Television producers and writers were forced out of their female-pandering comfort zone, to create more male-oriented dramas and sitcoms, or at least "male-friendly" in that shows did not have many elements that turn off male viewers (primarily female views of men: "beta losers" and bad-boy winners, along with soap opera emphasis on "doomed love" relationships with bad-boy characters) the creative output would be higher, on average, because those crutches would be gone. More mature, complex, and intelligent characters would be created, with an emphasis on fun. You would also see a net improvement in the kinds of social information given. Far less "evil White guy" villains, and more accuracy in social information.

This relentless focus on female audiences to the point where some networks have no male-friendly shows on them at all (ABC) is of course driven by advertisers, who have traditionally felt that women consumers make most household purchases. As marriage is delayed, or never happens at all, and more and more women are single mothers, and divorce rates remain high, this assumption is seriously flawed. A relic more of the 1960's than today. The food magazine Cook's Illustrated ten years ago had only 17% male readership, today it is over 50%, according to the Wall Street Journal (print edition only). Anyone shopping at the Supermarket will find Dads with kids in tow, doing the shopping and decision making. The female-only strategy, which has been a long-time in coming (as seen in the huge drop-off in ratings from the 1960's to 1980's, long before cable and the internet and video games), was sustainable in good times, but clearly not in bad times. Advertising revenue is down, substantially down, from good times. The female viewership, not the male viewership, is fragmented and hotly competed over. Much hyped CW series "Gossip Girl" for example, can get 1.9 million viewers for new episodes. Meanwhile men have sports, some shows on USA and Sci-Fi network, and the History Channel. That's about it.

Attempts to be "edgy" with hip-female oriented shows such as the remake of Battlestar Galactica have not been ratings winners, for reasons original series star Dirk Benedict explained. [Read the link, it's hilarious.] Two to 1.7 million viewers is "Gossip Girl" territory. Lower even than the Dollhouse finale. [Clearly Dollhouse was renewed because execs want to be on-set for Eliza Dushku's scenes in skimpy costumes, even if the audience could care less.]

NBC's strategy of pursuing the lowest cost possible schedule, and damn the ratings, is doomed to failure. Silverman, coming from a reality producer's perspective, can't understand the fixed costs of a broadcast network, and the coming danger to Television. Broadcast networks, after all, are simply a way for content to be delivered, at the same time, to affiliate stations. The TV networks are merely the outgrowth of the original radio networks, which sought to provide national news, sports, and entertainment through the network model. Just as the LA Times started to decline long before the internet, so too has television viewership. But now the challenge in particular for NBC is worse. It's not just the recession and advertising market being down considerably. Or the brutal competition for female viewers among all the cable and broadcast networks.

The internet allows content creators to deliver serial shows either streaming on-demand, for free, or pay-per-download (the Itunes model), or indeed both. Amazon and Itunes both will gladly sign agreements for content providers, for downloads. The cost to the content producer is relatively low. Even setting up a website like Hulu (or piggybacking on that existing site, and those like it) is not that expensive, far less than say the marketing budget for the film "Sideways," and the former is a cost that can be expensed against many shows.

The future is unlikely to be in broadcast television. There was, for a while, a brief shining opportunity to put content on broadcast television (as a promotional opportunity), on the web as advertiser supported free streaming video, and pay-per-download Itunes/Amazon content, all supported by the vertically integrated mega-media corporations. But predictably, executives looked to their next jobs with content producers, and assumed the years ahead will look like the years behind. That's a dangerous assumption, in all likelihood.

Television is likely to become even more a gay-female ghetto, ala ABC, with almost no men watching it (it's clear in retrospect that execs could not wait to dump ABC's one male-skewing show, "Monday Night Football"), while challenges to the broadcast network arise from places filled with lean and hungry content creators craving access to all those under-served male consumers. Just as American TV is filled with actors from the UK and Australia, it could well be that Hollywood's TV (and movie) complex is replaced by creators from Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, eager to take a risk and make entertainment appealing to men as well as women. The technology exists, today, to provide that challenge.
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Advertising's View of Husbands

Advertising today has a definite view of husbands. Witness the ad below for Yellowbook.com:




Now, this ad might be a bit extreme, but it's illustrative of how Advertising (and the target market of women) view most husbands. As utterly replaceable. The woman even has a half-smile on her face as she searches for life insurance.

The woman is no more attractive than her husband. Compare the ad with this one:



"Jackpot." Increasingly, men are as objectified to women in advertising, as women are to men in pornography. This is not a healthy environment for formation of stable families, and evidence of consumerism as an approach to relationships, with short-term decision making on money and looks being marketed to women explicitly. [There is almost no marketing towards men, an astonishing factor given that say, Cook's Illustrated has gone from 17% male readership a decade ago to now, 50% male, or that it's common to see half the shoppers in the Supermarkets after work comprised of lone males. The idea that women alone make 80% of the purchasing decisions is as flawed as the assumption that there is a large and ever growing population of White youths.]

Note the only attribute for the Groom in the ad. Being hot.

These ads, in tandem, comprise more arrows pointing towards a profound, and probably irrevocable shift towards chaotic, short-term relationships instead of the nuclear family.
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Sandra Tsing Loh and The State of Marriage

In my previous post, How Many (White) Men Are Getting Married I noted that there was a definite trend for White Men, between ages 35-40, to be unmarried. Using the GSS Data, the increase was from 5% in 1972 to 25% in 2004. A marked increase. Recent, a couple of articles by married women have shed light on the state of marriage by people who are, in fact, married, and are the Yuppie, White upper income class of people.

The infamous, Sandra Tsing Loh article in the Atlantic, extolling the virtues of divorce and a new post-marriage order where,

...let them have some sort of French arrangement where they have two men, the postfeminist model dad building shelves, cooking bouillabaise, and ignoring them in the home, and the occasional fun-loving boyfriend the kids never see.

Tellingly, the article derides Dads who help around the house and kitchen as "kitchen bitches" and finds both un-manly and un-romantic. Another woman writes that her marriage is a prison and she needs to bust out, because her beta male husband is not exciting, though a good father and husband. Comments about Loh's article can be found both here and here. Ross Douhat in the New York Times makes some silly observations and stupid ones on the matter (that the Upper classes are in fact stable, and with few incidences of divorce, and that cross-class marriages should take place, respectively).

But what is the real picture of marriage today, in America, among Whites? Increasingly, it looks as if marriage was for Upper Class people only, and no longer something that characterizes lower and middle class Whites.

Sandra Tsing Loh's article is not new. Barbara Ehrenreich, of "Nickel and Dimed" wrote a December, 1999 Essay on the future of the family, sadly no longer online, in Time Magazine, in which she advocated a "fluid and ever-changing arrangement" for family care in which "the community" would care for children while women pursued passionate, intense, but short-lasting affairs. More recently, she's written here that:

Which brings us to the third big scenario. This is the diversity option, arising from the realization that the one-size-fits-all model of marriage may have been one of the biggest sources of tension between the sexes all along--based as it is on the wildly unrealistic expectation that a single spouse can meet one's needs for a lover, friend, co-parent, financial partner, reliably, 24-7. Instead there will be renewable marriages, which get re-evaluated every five to seven years, after which they can be revised, recelebrated or dissolved with no, or at least fewer, hard feelings. There will be unions between people who don't live together full-time but do want to share a home base. And of course there will always be plenty of people who live together but don't want to make a big deal out of it. Already, thanks to the gay-rights movement, more than 600 corporations and other employers offer domestic-partner benefits, a 60-fold increase since 1990.

Standard stuff from a feminist who thinks Muslim misogyny is based on fears of globalization.

Betty Friedan, who wrote of marriage as a prison, in "The Feminine Mystique" set the tone, years earlier of course. It is striking, however, that all of these women belong to a class. Fairly rich, ranging from mansions on the Hudson (Friedan never did housework, she had maids and servants) to various maids and nannies, but not rich enough to prevent divorce or longing for divorce.

The film The Nanny Diaries has a scene in which the prospective nanny, played by Scarlett Johansson, has lunch with her prospective employer (played by Laura Linney). There is an uncomfortable moment when an old friend of the Linney character stops by the table and laments her downward mobility after the divorce. Near the end of the film, the Linney character divorces her husband also, and loses the ability to live the high-life with mansions, summer homes at Martha's Vineyard, and other luxury amenities provided by her master of the universe, Wall Street titan husband. In reality of course, most married couples with that level of wealth try to stay together. The stakes, particularly for the children, are tremendous. There is a lot more ability to rise high on a net worth of $20 million, than there is with only perhaps $8 million an ex-spouse, after lawyer fees. Serious money creates serious behavior, though perhaps the super-rich divorce at the rate of those on the lower end of the financial spectrum.

It's striking that the women complaining about their sexless, "beta male" husbands (Loh, others) and the need to "re-invent" marriage as a formless, shapeless mess in which kids and husbands come last after a woman's need for passion and excitement, all come from a certain class. One able to afford nannies and maids and carpenters, making "kitchen bitches" superfluous, and speaking to the need to indulge "passion" while not at the level of wealth in which divorce means no more summering at the Hamptons in a private mansion. At least one of the women in Loh's article is described as making $120,000 a year, in addition to her husband's income (which should push their dual-incomes to around $200,000 or more a year). Given their social network, it's reasonable to assume the same for Loh and her husband (she an NPR commentator, and Atlantic writer, he a guitarist for Bette Midler) and the rest of her friends.

These women have enough money to hire their own nannies, their own carpenters, their own part-time cooks, and thus don't need or want their husbands helping around the house. It's not any accident that the women describe it as unmanly, as does the Salon.com woman who describes her marriage as a prison. Their basic needs are met by their income, and they desire stimulation and excitement. [This is why, middle income women always support more immigration, legal or illegal. Because immigration increases the supply and lowers the cost of Rosa the Nanny and Manuel the carpenter, without facing competition as, say, a Concert Violinist or Environmental Lawyer, two of the occupations of Loh's friends.]

The women also have another beef with their husbands: they don't respect them because they earn as much or more than their husbands. This is a trend that has been developing for some time.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics website has a wealth of demographic data. Their 2007 report on Women's Earnings has a wealth of data. Among the highlights are:

• The difference between women’s and men’s earnings was largest among those aged 55 to 64, with women earning about 73 percent as much as men in this age group. By
  comparison, women earned 87 percent as much as men among workers 25 to 34 years old, and 92 percent as much among 16- to 24-year-olds. (See table 1.)


• Between 1979 and 2007, the earnings gap between women and men narrowed for most age groups. The women’s to men’s earnings ratio among 35- to 44-year-olds, for example, rose from 58 percent in 1979 to 77 percent in 2007, and the ratio for 45- to 54-year-olds increased from 57 percent to 75 percent. The earnings ratios for teenagers and for workers aged 65 and older fluctuated from 1979 to 2007, but their long-term trend has been essentially flat. (See table 12.)

From the report, we have the following graphs:


[Click Image to Enlarge]

Clearly we can see that women's earnings have been increasing. Correlation is not causation, but it is interesting that as women's earnings have increased both in absolute and relative to men's earnings, divorce and later marriage and single motherhood have all increased. Charles Murray believes that the single motherhood rate among White working and middle class women may be as high as 40% and 20% respectively.


[Click Image to Enlarge]

Again, correlation is not causation, but marriage seems strongest in those populations (Asian and White) that have the biggest earnings gap between men and women, and weakest in those populations (Black and Hispanics) that have the smallest gap.


[Click Image to Enlarge]

Men have done poorly in 1979 dollar amounts (and 1979 was a miserable year, economically) to 2007, in all educational areas except Bachelor's Degree and Higher. But even there, they are far out-stripped by women, and women have done better than men, with small but measurable increases for Associate's Degree and High School Grad, where in comparison men have losses, and substantial ones, from 1979 dollars. Even with less than High School diplomas, women posted smaller losses than men in 1979 dollar amounts, i.e. inflation adjusted.


[Click Image to Enlarge]

Finally, we can see that women outnumber men in most workplace areas, except things like mining, trucking, and the like. In Professional occupations, women outnumber men by 9.4%. This is the largest gap on the graph.

It's possible, that as women have closed the earnings gap with men, particularly among middle class, professional occupations (such as lawyers, doctors, the like), the ability of most men, who won't be very exciting even on a good day, to first attract a woman into marriage, and then keep her happy, is low. Given that women can as Loh recounts her friend "Ellen" can pursue lots of bad boys, why not replace "nice guy" husbands like Ron with maids and nannies, and keep the bad boys around? Increasingly, this seems to be the choice women are making.

The Wall Street Journal in the "Real Pregnancy Crisis" suggests that the real issue is non-College White, Latino, and Black women having children out of wedlock. The CDC reports that 40% of children were born illegitimately, compared to 11% in 1970. Fully 60% of these children were born to women in their twenties, only 23% to teens. The article decries the nonsense feminist academics praising this development, ala Loh, Ehrenreich, and Friedan before her.

ABC News notes that America is not alone. Iceland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark post rates of 66%, 55%, 54%, and 46% respectively of illegitimacy. Nations known for rough gender parity in earnings, feminist politics, and lack of respect for their men. [One of Loh's friends notes in the Atlantic how "enlightened" Swedish women prefer dominant, aggressive Muslim men to their nice-guy Swedish men.] But then Sweden allows for gender-based abortion. Not the mark of a successful society, as China attests to. With 32 million more men than women under the age of twenty, gender imbalances due to sex-based abortions can be explosive. So too, lurching into illegitimacy as the social norm.

Thanks to reader Puma, for the link to Rutgers University study on the family.



[Click Image to Enlarge]

Over the last 40 years, marriage has declined radically, among women. While there are no class breakdowns, the largest slices of women are naturally going to be lower and middle class women, not upper class women.

We can see this decline in respect for marriage and husbands in the culture too. Nearly every ad, even those now featuring Black fathers, have doofus dads who are the butt of jokes.

Marriage, and the traditional nuclear family it seems, is something only for rich people. Yuppie women like Loh or Ehrenreich, can afford to replace husbands with exciting lovers and immigrant labor. For poorer women, out-of-wedlock children and rotating bad boys are the rule. Only where divorce means giving up real, serious money, in the millions of dollars, and giving up great luxury, do we see stable families and intact, nuclear family marriages. This great sea change, might incidentally explain the hatred of Sarah Palin, who famously married a blue collar guy of no great wealth, in her early twenties, and leveraged his support to run for office, first as Mayor of Wasilla, and then as Governor of Alaska.

After all, even the author of Moneyball, Michael Lewis, cannot get his wife's respect of that of other women. Lewis, a best-selling author not once but twice, with "Liar's Poker" is treated like a doofus.

In "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," it was eerie how the literally empowered women treated men. Written by avowed feminist Joss Whedon, Buffy and her super-powered female friends pursued, non-stop, dangerous bad boys with superpowers, who were their superiors. Character, morality, and duty meant nothing, only the thrill of violent, dangerous, super-powered men. Perhaps the most illustrative moment came when Buffy's second vampire boyfriend, "Spike" raped her, and she fell in love with him and (implied off-screen sex) with him again. [Star Sarah Michelle Gellar hated that particular storyline and feuded with series creator and show-runner Whedon over it.]

Now, women don't have superpowers. But the better earnings, status, social conditions, and opportunities afforded women have not come without a cost, all across the West. If women are hard-wired to be hypergamous, i.e. desire men of greater power and status than themselves, this would make "kitchen bitches" irrelevant and explain our brave new world of single mothers, rotating bad boys, and disdain, shown over and over again, for fatherhood and men who embrace it. It would also explain the success of the institution of marriage in the only class that still sustains it: high powered men making millions every year and women who work only part-time in jobs that pay little but give prestige, i.e. the Non Governmental Organizations, the NGOs, like Greenpeace or Amnesty International or Heal the Bay.

The very rich men, those of the Upper Class have superpowers. They have more power and status than their wives.
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How Many (White) Men are Getting Married?

Recently, several bloggers have challenged my assertions that fewer and fewer (White) men are getting married. They cited the GSS Data, available here as evidence that I was wrong, that White Men are getting married at the same rates now as before. The Inductivist and also Audacious Epigone have used the Web Tools available at the Berkeley site to conclude that there is no evidence to support that Men are not getting married, or delaying marriage, over time.

Having downloaded the data myself, I can only conclude that so far ... they're wrong.

[For those interested in replicating my results, the following is how I did it. Those uninterested may skip this section.]

Downloading the data, (I used the 1972-2006 data set), with the variable AGE (age of respondent), YEAR (year of survey), MARITAL (marital status, 1=Married, 5=Never Married, etc), Sex (1=Male, 2=Female), RACE (1=White), plus of course the always present CASEID, you get a nice text file you can load into MySQL. To make things simpler, I added a constraint in the file created and downloaded, and specified only White Men (SEX=1, RACE=1). Loading this into MySQL gives you interesting results. [I wanted to look at White Men only, avoiding race and class, and looking at what most observers believe the most stable and unchanging group of men in the US.]

One of the things that struck me (and this is why you CANNOT avoid looking at the data in raw form) is how small sample sizes are for White Men in the Age Ranges. For example, the SQL Query

select year, age, count(*) as Num_Age from gss_marital where year = '1975' group by age with rollup;

gives you this output:



Year	Age	# of Respondents
1975	18	2
1975	19	17
1975	20	13
1975	21	13
1975	22	12
1975	23	11
1975	24	16
1975	25	21
1975	26	9
1975	27	20
1975	28	10
1975	29	14
1975	30	15
1975	31	6
1975	32	13
1975	33	11
1975	34	9
1975	35	11
1975	36	12
1975	37	11
1975	38	14
1975	39	7
1975	40	12
1975	41	11
1975	42	11
1975	43	11
1975	44	7
1975	45	11
1975	46	10
1975	47	6
1975	48	9
1975	49	10
1975	50	13
1975	51	6
1975	52	11
1975	53	7
1975	54	10
1975	55	8
1975	56	9
1975	57	10
1975	58	11
1975	59	6
1975	60	10
1975	61	2
1975	62	9
1975	63	11
1975	64	7
1975	65	7
1975	66	8
1975	67	7
1975	68	7
1975	69	8
1975	70	13
1975	71	4
1975	72	4
1975	73	4
1975	74	6
1975	75	1
1975	76	4
1975	77	7
1975	78	2
1975	79	2
1975	80	5
1975	81	3
1975	82	1
1975	83	3
1975	84	1
1975	85	1
1975	86	2
1975	87	1
1975	88	>1
1975	89	1
1975	\N	598

The last row is of course the rollup row, showing there were indeed 598 White Men interviewed in 1975. That might seem like a lot, but look at the data at a more atomic level. Only 7 53-year olds, and only 10 54-year olds, in 1975 were interviewed. Your data is only as good as your sample size, and for each age, the samples can be appallingly small. The problem of course is randomness. Can we be sure that for the very small sample sizes for each age, survey takers got a truly random sample of White Men? Much less repeating it for every year? Given that the survey ran from 1972-2006 (I did not use the file with incomplete 2007-2008 data).

select year, count(*) as Num_Men from gss_marital group by year;
select year, count(*) as Never_Married from gss_marital where marital = '5' group by year;


Will each get you the total for each year of all men (all ages), by year, and then the total for all men, all ages, who were never married (MARITAL=5). I've dumped that into an Open Office Spreadsheet to get the following:


[click Image to Enlarge]

Wow. Just for laughs I tried the following:


select year, count(*) as Num_Men from gss_marital where age > '34' and age < '41' group by year;

select year, count(*) as Never_Married from gss_marital where marital = '5' and age > '34' and age < '41' group by year;


And got the following graph (once I loaded it into OpenOffice)





Therefore, it certainly looks as if the data suggests that AT LEAST White Men are getting married later, which would certainly make the "Never Married" status stronger in surveys. The data is not inconsistent with that hypothesis, at any rate. How good is the GSS Data? Not particularly good, given questions about small sample sizes for White Men, at each age, and just how random the selection of the survey takers was, but it is one of the few social surveys we do have covering considerable time periods. We certainly see a fairly consistent rise in "Never Married" over the years, which matches the increased cost for a family, given rising housing prices, and the decline of real wages, in terms of house-buying at least, since the 1970's.

Just as important however, may be the changing expectations of women with respect to marriage. Sandra Tsing Loh, the NPR commentator, writer, and performance artist, has a revealing column in the upcoming Atlantic Montly, which I will be posting on later. It certainly seems among professional urban women, marriage has undergone redefinition. Akin to more of a short-term contract offered to NFL free agents, than anything else.
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Advertising: Where the (White) Men Aren't

Thanks to reader Patrick, for the e-mail tip on the Jawbone "viral marketing" ads. While the ads themselves (originally on the Jawbone website, since pulled but still available on YouTube) are odious, virulently (anti White male) racist and sexist, that they exist and generate many positive comments on YouTube is indeed telling. What is absent from television and nearly all marketing is men. Particularly White men. At least in so far as White Men being the target of sales efforts, instead of mere reflexive hostility.

Below are a sample of the Jawbone Ads, created for the web as part of a "viral marketing" effort:

White Guy in Asian Dry Cleaner (1.1 Million views):



Noisy Guys in Pool (2,478 views):




Noisy Rugby Players in Bar (133,917 Views):



Responsible Marketing did not think much of the ads. Culture Buzz loved it. Top Rank Blog thought it was stupid and offensive. IntoMobile.com thought it was brilliant (because it was a White guy getting murdered by an Asian family).

But what is striking about these videos is the message (all directed by Music Video Director Samuel Bayer [Green Day, Garbage]). The message is that White Guys are terrible, and deserve to be killed, or better yet, turned gay. The video play on the hatreds towards White men by Women, Blacks, Asians, and so on.

Yet ...

Who is the biggest market for Bluetooth headsets? Why yes. White Men.

The older Black man sitting in the Dry Cleaner, ignoring the murder of the obnoxious White male customer? According to the Wall Street Journal, Middle Class Blacks are 40% of the Black population. Blacks themselves are 12.5% of the population. Thus the Middle Class Blacks are 5% of the population, and the Middle Class Black guy just sitting there ignoring the murder of the White guy is 2.5% of the population at best. While it may be quite typical for White women to wish that annoying White guys "turn gay," the gay population in the US is estimated at between 2.5% to 3%. While it's difficult to estimate, women remain a smaller technology buyer segment than men, though single women are increasingly more important technology buying segments, they still trail single men in buying technology, particularly cutting edge consumer electronics.

There isn't much payoff in terms of gaining new customers for new consumer technology like Jawbone's "Noise Assassin" bluetooth headsets by making the largest buying segments the targets of either "turning gay" or death by sharks or angry dry cleaning staff.

Indeed, the implicit message, being an obnoxious White guy gets you turned "gay" or killed by Women or Black Guys is pretty negative. It's one more example of the total failure of Advertising and Marketing to reach White Male consumers. Since the marketing people are so filled with hatred for those very same consumers.

As more and more men and women do not marry at all, or delay marriage well into their thirties, and high divorce rates equal lots of single people, a strategy of relying only on White female consumers and non-existent Black Middle Class consumers (or gay ones) is bound to fail. White Men remain about 50% or more of the potential consumer base for everything from consumer electronics to cars. Single people, whatever the cause, means that at least half of all household purchasing decisions will be made by Men. Most of them, White men.

These ads show how the entire creative culture is oriented around the desire to erase White Men from existence. By either wanting to "make them gay" or simply kill them. Such a culture, oriented in a rough coalition of women, gays, and non-Whites who all oppose the existence of White Men, cannot exist for much longer without a great deal of cultural and political strife. Indeed, the opting out of male viewers from Television and movies is only part of this trend.
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Rock is Dead: Rolling Stone and the Lack of Young People

Rock is dead. Or, more to the point, the youth culture that created rock music is dead. Because we don't have enough young people. Not enough at any rate to create the kind of robust, competitive, and creative youth market that characterized the course of Rock music from the 1960's through the 1980's. For anyone seeking proof of that, simply examine the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine.


[click Image to Enlarge]



This isn't unusual. See the site Magazine Death Pool for the betting line on which magazines will cease publication. Note that Blender, which ceased publication in March 2009, had on the cover such rock "artists" as Kelly Clarkson. Meanwhile, the current Rolling Stone covers such cutting edge youth concerns as Obama's Energy Secretary saving the Planet, stories on "Mad Men," "Entourage," "True Blood," and "Weeds" (all skewing heavily female, and older, mid forties or later). American Idol's Chris Daughtry, and Willie Nelson are featured, along with the shocking news that American Idol's Adam Lambert is indeed, gay. Lambert of course poses on the cover as a seductive pop tart, reminiscent of Rolling Stone's 1990's era cover featuring the edgy, youth-oriented Britney Spears (pre-meltdown, pre-Federline).

None of these features, stories, photos, or series of covers screams youth orientation, and of course nearly every bit of content skews heavily older and female.

This is because America's most scarce resource is young (White) people, who drive Rock and other aspects of youth culture.

The short story of 20th Century demographics would read something like the following. In the 1920, prosperity and an increased supply of youth (born after the turn of the Century in good times) created a youth culture. Increased prosperity also led to more babies being born. Then the Great Depression ended the Youth Culture, followed by WWII, which made teenagers who turned 18 in 1942, 1943, 1944, and 1945 (born in 1924, 1925, 1926, and 1927 respectively) into adults very quickly. Youth culture did not return, until the post-War baby boom and rising incomes created it as in the 1920's. Starting with first toys and then music, youth markets exploded. The Davy Crockett craze, and toys, were as important as Elvis. For example, Hula Hoops came on the scene in 1957, along with Frisbees. Kids who were ten or eleven in the 1950's, entered their late teen age years and early twenties in the 1960's, and drove the youth culture, from music to fashions.

But, births became radically reduced in the latter half of the 1960's. Rising costs of living, declines in real wages, ending of restrictions on abortion, contraception, and the belief in delayed marriage reduced fertility and births every year starting in 1965. During the 1970's, this reduced fertility (as families were also hammered by a poor economy) only increased, recovering somewhat in the 1980's, only to fall again in the early 1990's during the recessionary period, and the high cost of housing in the inflationary period of the latter 1990's and early 2000's when the Dot-Com and Housing bubbles drove prices in urban job centers (mostly on the coasts) up past affordability for many families.

This has left marketers, publishers, creative people, pundits, and many others in a mental prison. Their model of how the world works (there is always more young people, and a large group of young people drives an ever changing culture) is at odds with the reality: there is an ever smaller supply (of young White people) who are the engine of youth culture, and this lack of young (White) people is the chief cause of the decline of youth culture in all areas.

While it is true that internet piracy, decline of the CD as a sales medium for music, and the growth of low-cost online sales of mp3 versions of music on sites as diverse as Apple's Itunes store and Amazon's own online offerings have seriously diminished the money rock artists (and everyone else) earn from recordings, live performances are still lucrative.

It's still possible to make (considerable) amounts of money from rock music, by touring and performing live, where fans will pay considerable amounts of money to see favored artists. It's interesting however to see just who ranks in live performing revenues.

The 2004 Rolling Stone Rich List has for example, James Taylor making about the same amount ($20 million) as Eminem. The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and the Eagles are the top three performers. In 2007 Miley Cyrus earned a combined $64 million from concerts and music sales. But no new artists like Elvis in the late 1950's or the Beatles in the mid 1960's are earning this amount of money, from either recording or touring. Cyrus, working the tween girl market, made close to the amount that the Eagles did in 2004 ($63 million for the Eagles vs. $64 million for Cyrus).

As an aside, it's interesting that while musicians can make money from older fans (the Stones, Springsteen, the Eagles) or young tween girls (Cyrus), there's little evidence of any performer who can draw young White men in appreciable numbers to be competitive with the top revenue earners in pop music. Young men seem completely absent from popular music.

The 2000 Census data can be found at that link, while the 1990 Census data (for White Alone) data can be found here, while the 1980 Census data (PDF only) can be found here.

Here is the graphic version of the 1980 Census:


[Click Image to Enlarge]

Using the 1980, 1990, and 2000 Census, I've constructed the following table.

	2000	1990	1980
Under 5 years	12,859,892	13,649,490	11,789,394
5 to 9 years	13,944,882	13,616,268	12,200,468
10 to 14 years	14,322,638	12,853,558	13,699,871
15 to 19 years	14,167,148	13,342,703	16,138,482
20 to 24 years	13,064,891	14,523,912	16,541,315
25 to 29 years	13,501,773	16,638,544	15,262,799
30 to 34 years	14,818,786	17,351,513	14,143,721
35 to 39 years	17,031,493	16,081,606	11,290,738
40 to 44 years	17,265,995	14,506,390	9,408,654
45 to 49 years	15,810,626	11,585,703	9,034,158
50 to 54 years	14,213,875	9,504,871	9,812,613
55 to 59 years	11,107,247	8,968,416	9,990,620
60 to 64 years	8,945,842	9,211,123	8,813,447
65 to 69 years	8,040,225	8,899,637	7,641,210
70 to 74 years	7,648,193	7,126,564	6,001,564
75 to 79 years	6,530,019	5,485,025	4,229,594
80 to 84 years	4,408,597	3,552,695	2,631,873
85 years and over	3,778,504	2,788,052	1,972,317

From this data, I've constructed the graph below showing the decline in youth cohorts from the 1980 Census data:


[Click Image to Enlarge]

I must mention that the estimates from the US Census Bureau show an increase in youth cohorts, wrt to 2008 vs. 2000, but these are estimates and not complete enumerations. They also fly in the face of the other data, which suggests a birth dearth and scarceness of young people. Among others, the losses at the UPN and WB networks, and continued losses at the merged CW network, aimed solely at teen girls. For example, the highest ratings of WB/UPN series Buffy the Vampire Slayer were 5.3 million, while that of the 1980's series the A Team were 20.1 million viewers.

Nevertheless, the data for White Alone youth cohorts for the 2008 estimates show an increase in young people created during a decade of high housing costs and declining real wages. Perhaps people magically had children at little cost, unlike earlier decades. Or some other cause is at work (immigration from Europe with pre-existing children)? I do find it puzzling that the peak numbers of the Baby Boom (16-17 million per cohort) is now approached in numbers (around 15-16 million) for the younger age cohorts, under age 5 to age 29. Particularly since the numbers of age cohorts in 2000 who would naturally age (8 years later) don't match up, there seems to be an extra 3 million people added with no explanation. Completeness however demands I point out that data, and let readers draw their own conclusions. My own are that the over-counting might well be from faulty estimates and wrong classifications (Hispanic/White being put into the White Alone category).

The White Alone category is the driver of the youth market, because Hispanics tend to strongly prefer Spanish-language media. As I've noted in other posts, during the campaign for and against California's Proposition 8 (overturning gay marriage), the opponents of Prop. 8 recruited Puerto Rican actress America Ferrara, star of the ABC-TV series "Ugly Betty" to record spots against Proposition 8. In English. Proponents of Proposition 8 got actual, Mexican native and Spanish speaking Telenovela stars to record spots in Spanish for Prop. 8. This undoubtedly helped Proposition 8 to pass.

America has a substantial Hispanic/Mexican youth population, but they tend to inhabit a separate and distinct cultural universe which only occasionally intersects with the English speaking, White/Black culture. Blacks do share many if not most of the cultural assumptions and enthusiasms of the White population, and a quick check of Nielsen's excellent ratings portal confirms that Black and White preferences for Television remains pretty much the same. While Hispanics don't share many of the same viewing patterns. Howver, there simply are not that many Blacks (12.5% of the population) to make an impact as a mass-driver of youth culture.

[Note to bloggers, for those seeking to copy/paste data into Excel from web-pages, a good Text Editor that can do regular expression search and replace is critical. For this post, I'd selected web pages generated by the US Census Bureau website and copied into TextWrangler, the free text editor from the BBEdit folks for the Mac. Using regular expressions I replaced the pattern of \r\t\r\r (a carriage return, a tab, two carriage returns) with \t (a single tab). Of course you need to show the invisibles to figure out what to replace. Gedit on Linux does not have regular expressions, both Kate and Jedit (the latter also available on the Mac) have regular expressions in Search and Replace. Once you've set up your text file properly, save it and import it into Excel or Open Office as a delimited (tab) text file and save yourself lots of tedious typing. It's faster and you don't get errors. A good text editor is also critical in replacing the junk that Excel or Open Office create when it saves HTML files, which I've done in creating this table for Blogger.]

Rolling Stone is as tedious, older skewing, aimed at a mostly older, female readership, as it is, because there just are not that many young people. Not enough young people to make say, either the Killers or Arctic Monkeys (both formed in 2002) as well-known, as popular, and as profitable as say Elvis, the Beach Boys, or the Beatles, in their hey-days, or even as the Eagles in 2004, a band at that point 32 years old (the Eagles were formed in 1972).

Everyone knows the data, but some times it takes the posed glamor shot of an ... American Idol contestant to understand how rock, and youth culture in general, are both dead. Because there are not enough young people.
...Read more

Failure of the Media Part Two: The Lingering Death of the LA Times

By all accounts the LA Times should be doing well. Absent the leverage demands of the parent company Tribune Media, the potential readership of the LA Times should be large. After all, the US Census Bureau shows 9.8 million people in Los Angeles County alone, and the Metro Area of LA (including Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernadino, Orange, and Ventura Counties) offer no serious competitor to the LA Times. [Thanks to Google for the excellent graph at the link.] For people interested in reading about sports, entertainment, or anything else to do with the Los Angeles metropolitan area, there would seem to be no real alternative to the LA Times. It should be a perfect world, both plenty of customers, and no serious competitors. Even local blogs such as LA Observed or Mayor Sam's Sister City (the latter joking "written" by long-deceased Mayor Sam Yorty) offer no serious competition for the broad categories of sports, news, local happenings, and entertainment and few financial resources to compete in those broad categories.

Why then is the LA Times in trouble, with an ever declining readership, ever declining advertising base, ever declining staff, and morale at the paper at rock bottom? The answer is of course, demographics. Simply put, there are not enough upscale, Liberal White newspaper readers to make the LA Times profitable.


It's worth noting that the LA Times circulation peak was in 1988, with 1.1 million readers, daily. The LA Times has been declining in circulation ever since, down to 739,000 daily, as the chart below makes clear. [Data from the Wikipedia cite, see also here]


[Click Chart to Enlarge]


Yet even as the paper has been mired in one controversy over another, from the carefully timed release of sexual harassment allegations regarding then recall candidate for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (two days before the vote), to the suppression of the video of Barack Obama at PLO operative Rashid Khalidi's going away party and controversy over revenue sharing of an LA Times published magazine celebrating the Staples Center, population has been increasing in LA County. The increase is 14%, from 1988 to 2008, while the decrease in circulation is fully one third, at 33%.


[Click Image to Enlarge]

It's useful to recall, how under fully 14% fewer people in LA County alone, the LA Times reached it's peak circulation of 1.1 million daily. The featured Sports columnist was Jim Murray, not J. A. Adande. Batting Cleanup for Murray was the sarcastic Scot Ostler. Pat Morrison, from PBS, was not a columnist, while Jack Smith was. The newspaper, while fairly socially liberal, had a moderate to conservative political bent, was oriented towards serving it's mostly older, male readership in the things that mattered, local Sports, politics, and entertainment. The paper spent comparatively few resources on hip/trendy, but unread music columnists like Robert Hilburn, or tragically hip (but unread) movie critics like Carina Chocano. Angry Hispanic chauvinists and Liberals like Al Martinez and Steve Lopez were largely kept under wraps. Knowing that readership of the LA Times was mostly White, Male, and conservative.

This focus changed, even before Otis Chandler relinquished day-to-day control in 1995, as senior editors began to focus not on what their customers wanted, but on competing with local NPR stations they'd listen to in the drive over to work. Despite, of course, all those NPR stations being subsidized affairs that required massive fundraising efforts quarterly and relied upon being license holders of valuable broadcast frequencies, through government largesse. The success of NBC, nationally, with the Brandon Tartikoff strategy was no help either. Tartikoff's strategy, was to trade absolute number of viewers at NBC in favor of young urban professionals, the yuppies. In the go-go 1980's, the strategy worked as advertisers clamored to get in front of people with money. For the LA Times, however, this strategy was disastrous.

Because locally, Los Angeles was changing. The increase in population, as seen in my post, Radio and the Death of Indie 103.1, was mostly Hispanic/Mexican. Whites were actually a declining part of the population, and there was not enough wealth being created to drive upscale advertising. Even worse, by it's very nature, paper newspapers cannot track the type of people reading it's content (and ads). While NBC and other broadcast networks could proudly tout through the Nielsen reports, just how many women 18-34, or other coveted demographic slices, were watching the shows and ads. Advertisers with the LA Times had no way of knowing if the ads were reaching the wealthy few of Marina Del Rey, Malibu, Santa Monica, the Venice Canals, or people in Torrance, Tarzana, or Culver City, decidedly less wealthy and therefore not worth paying extra for to reach.

Meanwhile, forces were brewing that would devastate LA's economy, create White Flight, and conspire to help mortally wound the LA Times. The forces had two names: Bill Clinton, and Rodney King.

Under Bill Clinton's leadership, the LA area lost175,000 jobs at a minimum. Losses accounted for fully 45% of all high tech jobs in 1998, the near peak of the Dot-com boom. The biggest losses in that sector since the end of WWII, affecting nearly 12,000 firms in the LA basin. As shown in this WSJ article, rosy projections by Clinton and his people about changing over to entertainment from aerospace proved a mirage. High paying jobs, and the ability of those high-paying jobs to sustain a White middle class (that read newspapers like the LA Times) in a region of high housing costs, taxes, and energy costs, collapsed with Clinton's defense cuts. As others have noted, particularly Steve Sailer, LA's geography does not lend itself to living just anywhere. Weather is brutally hot (and smoggy) in low-cost areas such as Riverside, San Bernadino, and the Antelope Valley. Meanwhile job centers are located in nice to live in coastal areas, making commutes brutal. Key coastal areas that have decent climates and easy commutes are off-limits because of huge concentrations of crime-ridden non-White populations, making gentrification a joke (Watts, South Central, Bell, much of Long Beach, and East Los Angeles all fall into this category). Parents have to spend considerable sums of money to live in school districts that are merely acceptable, where their children do not face gangs or anti-education populations. All of this was sustainable as long as high-paying jobs in either the assembly line or engineering staff and large supporting structure of ancillary firms continued to exist. By 1994, that structure was gone, and families unable to afford LA's high cost of living fled elsewhere. To Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, Utah, and Colorado.

Few were inclined to stick things out, because of the impact of the Rodney King riots. The riots, and the inept, politically driven response by the LA and State leadership, lost the confidence of LA's middle class. The riots, occurring just hours after the Not-Guilty verdict in the trials of LAPD officers Koon and others, on April 29, 1992, killed 53 people and left substantial parts of the city (most of it located in Black/Hispanic South Central) in burnt out ruins. However, the beating of Reginald Denny, by a Black mob, as the LAPD and other law enforcement authorities retreated, shocked middle class Whites in the LA area. As did the televised gun battles between Korean shop owners and marauding gangs of mostly Black looters, with the law enforcement authorities absent entirely.

Here was unmistakable evidence that when it came to public safety or suppressing a mob of Black (or Hispanic, just as many if not more of the rioters and looters seen on TV were Hispanic/Mexican), the political leadership, from Republican Governors like Pete Wilson down to the LAPD Chief Darryl Gates, and Black Democratic Mayor Thomas Bradley, would choose to sacrifice public safety instead of crack down hard, on mobs of non-Whites. While expedient politically in the short run (avoiding hugely negative press coverage which was for the most part solidly pro-rioter, and predictably anti-police) this series of choices to sacrifice mostly White (and Korean) public safety in favor of avoiding criticism for shooting and mass arrests of Blacks and Mexicans, had predictable results.

Besides increases in gun ownership among Whites, those who could leave Southern California did so, for states that were noticeably more White, and committed to public safety. Loss of confidence in the entire class of leadership, Republican and Democratic alike, when it came to public safety, had the Los Angeles Basin White middle class ready to leave when economic hardship hit in the form of Clinton's defense cuts that destroyed the economic basis of the White middle class.

As a result of the White flight from the LA basin, the LA Times began to lose readership, and potential readership, year by year. All the while, more immigrants, legal and otherwise, crowded into the LA basin. However, nearly all of these immigrants were non-English speakers, and preferred their newspapers, if they read them at all, in their native languages. Further eroding the LA Times financial position. In response, the LA Times leadership, created more and more liberal coverage. Not just on the opinion pages, but in the coverage of everything from Sports, to Entertainment, to News.

Completely absent from the LA Times pages were the growing influence of the MS-13 gangs, their ability to push westward from Downtown LA into MacArthur/Westlake Park, and the flight of Blacks southward into Long Beach out of South Central and Compton as superior numbers of Mexican immigrants (and gangs) pushed them out of native turf. That many of the gang-related murders in the LA area each year were related to these struggles were never mentioned in the LA Times. Meanwhile, it was by no means unusual for LA Times movie critics like Carina Chocano to query film-makers/producers like Judd Apatow on why fat White Guys get all his jokes (Apatow responded that political correctness dictated that only Fat White Guys be funny, the subject of jokes) in PC-inquisitions. Much of the content of the LA Times resembled a PC inquisition, into the state of mind of any (White Male only of course) person who might harbor racist, or sexist, or homophobic thought (crimes).

Naturally, subscribers edged ever downward. To their current level, a third less than the 1988 peak. Now with a heavy debt load acquired by the leveraged purchase of the Tribune Company by owner Sam Zell, the LA Times seems circling the drain like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and other newspapers that might cease publication altogether in favor of online-only limited content.

The environment for Print Newspapers is dire. Newsosaur notes that young people (and there are few of them to begin with, at least White ones, due to the birth dearth) do not like to read newspapers, and the percentage that do has declined from 40% or so in 1999, to around 30% today. This is consistent with other findings. Older (White) Americans, age 65+, read newspapers the most (above 70% in 1999, to about 65% today). While ALL groups have declined, only ages 45 and up both started and finished above 55% in reading newspapers regularly).

Even worse, ad sales slid an appalling $2.6 billion last quarter or fully 28.3%. There is not any prospect of an upturn in the economy bailing out a failed strategy of appealing to ever younger, more liberal readers, who don't read newspapers in the first place, while alienating older, more conservative readers. The collapse of the housing industry and banrkuptcy of GM and Chrysler, means that ads for houses and autos, mainstays of newspaper advertising, are largely gone. Not to be replaced or revived any time soon.

Clearly, the LA Times, and parent Tribune Company, is only a few short steps away from bankruptcy, and perhaps cessation of the print publication of the LA Times. I doubt many readers will miss them.

So what is ahead for papers like the Times?

They can probably soldier onward, zombie-like, as glorified blogs. Costs for electronic versions are astonishingly low, but there remains the problem of getting people to read their content. The LA Times certainly could have driven millions of viewers to it's website by the simple expedient of putting up the video of Barack Obama at Rashid Khalidi's going away party. That it did not speaks volumes about it's desire to present ideological purity and propaganda (news suppression) over providing content someone might actually want to read. But simply producing a glorified "professional" version of LA Observed without the style and critically, the content of that website is not going to produce profits. Merely lower levels of losses.

Newsosaur, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, believes that his "ViewPass" will allow newspapers to charge prices content on array of mobile devices a sort of me-too operation in the way that the NFL or MLB charges for games streamed onto mobile phones and the like. I don't think that will succeed. Simply because newspapers are unable to provide anything worth reading.

Lost in all of this is the generational change of leadership in newspapers and indeed nearly all media. Old-line editors were like columnists such as Jack Smith or Jim Murray. They understood, and shared, the likes, dislikes, prejudices, virtues, and flaws of most of their readers. Because they were like their readers: older, Whiter, more conservative, middle class, and well, male. They certainly were not part of the liberal hothouse of academia and the media that exists today, advancement was through apprenticeship and demonstrating that stories generated readers (and thus money), not through "correct" ideology and gender, race, and sexual orientation membership. It would have been unthinkable in the Jim Murray era for the LA Times to employ a Sports Writer who openly had (a publicly celebrated in the LA Times pages) sex change operation. It simply would not have been tolerated, the risk of canceled subscriptions was too high, and the paper's purpose was to turn a profit, not push a social agenda (one alien to most of it's readers).

When the agenda of "celebrating" the transformation of Mike Penner to Christine Daniels takes precedence over providing an enjoyable Sports section for the morning breakfast table, newspaper management has lost all ability to connect with it's potential readers. A "ViewPass" can provide all the centrally managed mobile content that can be created, potential readers won't pay for Sports content provided by trans-gendered folk, even if said content is free.

Newsosaur is quite skeptical of the ability of the government to provide bail-out money. The losses are too deep, and the taxes required too onerous, to provide a complete Pravda model. While it's certain bailouts will be proposed, the ability to push them through in hard economic times when readers have already voted with their wallets (not to subscribe) is questionable.

It's quite likely, instead, that various bloggers, and conglomerations of bloggers, locally, will provide content, and that as newspapers like the LA Times shrink down to LA Observed / Mayor Sam's Sister City size, those bloggers or people like them will grow upwards. After all, it's all about content.




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