Extended quote follows; link to full piece at the end of this post:
Doubt me? OK, have a look at this from 2016, head of CBS, on Trump:
Leslie Moonves can appreciate a Donald Trump candidacy.
Not that the CBS executive chairman and CEO might vote for the Republican presidential frontrunner, but he likes the ad money Trump and his competitors are bringing to the network."It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," he said of the presidential race.
Moonves called the campaign for president a "circus" full of "bomb throwing," and he hopes it continues.
"Most of the ads are not about issues. They're sort of like the debates," he said.
"Man, who would have expected the ride we're all having right now? ... The money's rolling in and this is fun," he said.
"I've never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It's a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going," said Moonves.
"Donald's place in this election is a good thing," he said Monday at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco.
"There's a lot of money in the marketplace," the exec said of political advertising so far this presidential season.
Beyond politics, Moonves said ad sales in general are strong because there's not a lot of places beyond The Big Bang Theory where advertisers can reach 20 million people all at once.He also said cord-shaving and cord-cutting isn't having the negative impact on CBS that the phenomenon is having on lesser networks.
"You cannot live without CBS," Moonves said, ticking off NFL coverage, Stephen Colbert and 60 Minutes.
The CEO said CBS will be in bundles of just 15 channels, and it will get more money from the providers of those skinny bundles than it gets from the traditional bundles of 180 or more channels.
And, of course, CBS All Access for $5.99 a month can capture consumers who shun cable and satellite TV entirely.
"We're going to be in every home, we're going to be on every device," said Moonves.
He said he'd like to see live NFL games on CBS All Access as soon as this year.
Moonves also suggested CBS could sell some radio assets if the right offer presented itself, given radio is a slow-growth industry.
If the establishment media’s coverage in the home stretch of the 2018 midterm elections is any kind of prologue to 2020, be prepared for an avalanche of right-wing xenophobic propaganda during our next presidential election. That’s because, once again, the political press dutifully chased Trump’s rhetorical tail as Election Day neared, and repeatedly ceded its editorial judgment and newshole to the nativist fearmongering he used to stoke the Republican Party’s base. And nowhere was this fecklessness more apparent than media’s breathless “migrant caravan” coverage.
Left-wing media critics documented these failures almost in real time. Joshua Holland at The Nation (10/25/18) noted in late October how Trump was all but acting as the de facto segment producer for all those ubiquitous cable news panel shows that were spending all their time discussing a few thousand asylum seekers that were more than a thousand miles from the US southern border.
Likewise, a study by the liberal media research site Media Matters (11/2/18) found that Trump might as well have been the front-page assignment editor for elite newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times, which simply couldn’t resist the siren song of his manufactured crisis. In all, those two papers published nearly 30 different stories about the migrant caravan on their respective A1 pages in the two weeks before Election Day. And on three different days, the Times devoted twofront-page stories to what Trump had not-so-subtly began calling an “invasion.”
What is most striking, however, is the Post and Times’ unmistakable cognitive dissonance and institutional blindspot about this coverage. Throughout the weeks leading up to Election Day, these two news organizations dedicated analysis, blogs and opinion pieces—mostly online—to detailing the naked gamesmanship and misinformation behind Trump using the migrant caravan as a campaign bogeyman. But then the papers’ front pages and their “straight” political coverage routinely used Trump’s assumptions as the premises for framing their stories.
Read it all here at FAIR. For-profit media is interested in one thing above all: profit. If it sells ad revenue, run with it. Nothing else will get in the way of that.Doubt me? OK, have a look at this from 2016, head of CBS, on Trump:
Leslie Moonves can appreciate a Donald Trump candidacy.
Not that the CBS executive chairman and CEO might vote for the Republican presidential frontrunner, but he likes the ad money Trump and his competitors are bringing to the network."It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," he said of the presidential race.
Moonves called the campaign for president a "circus" full of "bomb throwing," and he hopes it continues.
"Most of the ads are not about issues. They're sort of like the debates," he said.
"Man, who would have expected the ride we're all having right now? ... The money's rolling in and this is fun," he said.
"I've never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It's a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going," said Moonves.
"Donald's place in this election is a good thing," he said Monday at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco.
"There's a lot of money in the marketplace," the exec said of political advertising so far this presidential season.
Beyond politics, Moonves said ad sales in general are strong because there's not a lot of places beyond The Big Bang Theory where advertisers can reach 20 million people all at once.He also said cord-shaving and cord-cutting isn't having the negative impact on CBS that the phenomenon is having on lesser networks.
"You cannot live without CBS," Moonves said, ticking off NFL coverage, Stephen Colbert and 60 Minutes.
The CEO said CBS will be in bundles of just 15 channels, and it will get more money from the providers of those skinny bundles than it gets from the traditional bundles of 180 or more channels.
And, of course, CBS All Access for $5.99 a month can capture consumers who shun cable and satellite TV entirely.
"We're going to be in every home, we're going to be on every device," said Moonves.
He said he'd like to see live NFL games on CBS All Access as soon as this year.
Moonves also suggested CBS could sell some radio assets if the right offer presented itself, given radio is a slow-growth industry.