July 2008

Governor Schwarzenegger to Expand Broadband Services

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) has signed Senate a bill authorizing community service districts to provide broadband services to their residents. Nearly one and a half million mostly rural Californians do not currently have access to broadband service. The new law will help close this digital divide in rural communities by allowing community service districts to provide this additional service on top of many vital local services they already provide for including water, sewer and police protection. The bill implements a recommendation put forth by the California Broadband Task Force in its final report in January. The task force was created by Gov. Schwarzenegger to evaluate California's broadband access and make recommendations to increase services statewide. Specifically, the Task Force's final report includes maps of current broadband availability and speed, recommendations on how to achieve universal access and increased use and a time frame to meet those goals.

Isolated NC County Gets Wired

Living in a rural community is a larger impediment to Internet use than either race or class. The isolated rural community of Greene County (NC) turned itself upside down to get its citizens online in five short years.

New broadband plan for UK

According to Ofcom, UK customers enjoy an average download speed of 4.6Mbps. Anyone who has logged on at 6pm on a weekday would probably laugh at that figure. With some customers several miles from the local exchange on old copper wire, and many sharing connections with up to 50 households linked to one streetside cabinet, such speeds, let alone the advertised 8Mbps, are the stuff of dreams. The UK has a high take-up of broadband - 58 per cent according to Gartner research - the same as France, and ahead of Germany (49 per cent), the US (54 per cent) and Japan (55 per cent), but behind South Korea at 93 per cent. But it is the speed of connection where the UK falls down the world league table. BT unveiled plans on Tuesday to roll out a new UK fixed-line network offering broadband speeds five times quicker than those currently available. The former fixed-line telephone monopoly, is to spend £1.5bn on a fibre-based network covering 10m homes that will mostly enable download speeds of 40 megabits per second, compared with the existing 8 Mbps industry benchmark. BT has been spurred into action by Virgin Media, the cable television company, which plans to offer speeds of up to 50 Mbps to 12m homes by next summer.

Karl Rove denies political ties taint Fox News role

This should silence all critics... former White House aide Karl Rove denied on Monday that his close ties with Republican politics and John McCain's presidential campaign undermine his credibility as an election analyst for the Fox News Channel. "I do talk to people in politics all across the country, some of whom are very active in the campaign (but) I play no official role, or ongoing role," Rove said in answer to a question about whether he works for the McCain operation in any way. "I do get phone calls," he added. "I'm having dinner later this week with a great friend of mine who just happens to be the Republican state chairman of a battleground state. He's going to be in Washington, and it's not just the quality of steak I'm going to fix him that's caused him to stop by the house and pick my brain." Asked whether Rove was on "the honor system" regarding his contacts with top McCain campaign operatives such as Steve Schmidt, Moody replied: "He's always on the honor system. All of our employees are." "We get most of our information about the McCain campaign from our correspondents," Moody added. "I don't think Karl would cross an ethical line like that." Rove also dismissed the notion that his refusal to answer congressional subpoenas to testify in a probe of the Bush administration's firing of federal prosecutors amounted to too much political baggage for a network news analyst to carry.

Ad-Spending Battlefield Takes Shape

With 115 days left before the election, it is now clear what ad strategies the two candidates are going to use in the race for the White House. Sen. Barack Obama will attempt to expand the playing field, while Sen. John McCain will try to contract it. TV spending targeting the general election has reached more than $3 million a day. With more than $42 million spent on TV advertising since May, it's clear this election's ad spending is on pace to be one for the record books. So far, the McCain campaign has taken advantage of its early primary win and strong Republican Party fundraising to get a head start in crucial battleground states like Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Since April, McCain and the RNC have spent more than $19 million on ads. The combined spending of the two entities now tops $1.5 million a day. With the RNC so well-funded, it and the McCain team will be able to play the good cop/bad cop game with the electorate, allowing the McCain team to run a largely positive campaign. For Mr. McCain to be successful this fall, he needs to minimize the number of battleground states in play after the GOP convention. To accomplish his goal, he must use his ads and message to gain support in both red and swing states. This will allow his monetary disadvantage to be mitigated in the same way a small guy can fight a big guy in a confined space. The Obama campaign is relying on its ability to out-fundraise and outspend its opponents. Since June 20, Obama has narrowed the ad spending gap with McCain by spending close to $15 million in almost 20 states. This strategy has put the focus not only on the historic swing states, but on a number of recent red states. Team Obama is pouring millions into states such as Alaska, Georgia, North Carolina, Montana, North Dakota and Florida in an effort to extend the battleground this fall. He is hoping to put McCain into a hole he can't dig out of with just his public-matching funds. If Obama is able to drum up support in red states, it will be over for Mr. McCain before Halloween.

GOP should get serious about cyberspace

[Commentary] It's time for Republicans to get serious about the online revolution before it's too late. While the Democrats keep extending their political reach into cyberspace, too many in the GOP keep pretending the Internet will go away. Like a predator approaching an ostrich with its head in the sand, the Internet will not disappear. In fact, the Internet is quickly consuming many aspects of our lives, including how we engage with the political world. To ensure the party's future, Republicans must start to navigate this intersection of technology and politics as deftly as the Democrats have. Republicans need to adopt a lighter approach that will preserve the values of decentralization and freedom — essential conservative values — on the Internet. If we fail to engage in this effort, the Internet service providers, who control the last mile of the tubes into a customer's house or small business, will choke off the affordable tools available to conservative activists. They have already started exercising their market power to block applications that enable Internet users to distribute information across the Net. They will make the Internet look a lot more like cable TV, where citizens lack access to every legal channel available and where, consequently, conservative activists get shut out. Taking away these free tools will come at the major expense of the activists and small-businesspeople who are the core of our party's strength. (David All is the co-founder of Slatecard.com. Saulius "Saul" Anuzis is the chairman of the Michigan Republican Party and serves on the executive committee for the Republican National Committee.)

Obama Shot for Younger Demos, Clinton for Older on TV

Democratic contenders played to their strengths in their TV media plans by targeting the far ends of the demographic spectrum, according to a SQAD analysis of cost per points in key primary states. Barack Obama tended to place dollars against the younger demos, while Hillary Clinton targeted older adults. In the six weeks prior to the Texas, Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania elections, spending to reach 18-34 year-olds and those over 50 increased 11 percent and 10 percent, respectively, compared to 2007. In contrast, the average cost of spots targeting all TV households remained stagnant. "The desire of candidates to quickly and aggressively act before they fall victim to it has helped the spot TV market evolve into the advertising medium of choice for candidates and political action committees seeking to deliver fresh messages to tightly focused groups of key voters in the weeks leading up to an election," said Neil Klar, CEO of SQAD. "Spot advertising simply delivers maximum ballots for the buck."

Running on Faith

The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life analyzed the coverage of religion in the campaign through the majority of the primary season, a 16-month period from January 2007 through April 2008. The study finds that when coverage of the "horse-race" aspects of the campaign is excluded, religion emerges as a relatively prominent topic, accounting for 10% of the non-political-process during the 16 months studied. In fact, religion garnered nearly as much coverage as race and gender combined (11%), even though the front-runners for the Democratic presidential nomination were a black man and a woman. Overall, however, religion stories, along with other substantive and policy issues, took a back seat to campaign tactics and political strategy, which together garnered 81% of the coverage. So despite the attention paid to Obama's former pastor, questions about McCain's relationship with his party's conservative religious base, interest in Mitt Romney's membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the surprisingly strong campaign of former Baptist preacher Mike Huckabee, only 2% of the campaign stories directly focused on religion.

The Daily News and The Post Talk Business

Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corporation owns The New York Post, and Mortimer B. Zuckerman, the real estate developer and owner of The Daily News, who for years have been bitter tabloid competitors, are considering the unthinkable: cooperation. Representatives have been in discussions for several weeks to find ways to combine some business functions of The Daily News and The Post. In addition to a broader pact between The Post and The Daily News, the two newspapers and The Wall Street Journal, which is also owned by the News Corporation, are considering combining home delivery operations to save money, and have sought bids from vendors.

Post-Newsweek Buying NBCU's Miami Station

NBC Universal is poised to sell its Miami station, WTVJ-TV, to Post-Newsweek Stations, which already owns the ABC affiliate in the same market. The unusual combination of two major market affiliates would seem to be possible because of the unusually large Spanish-speaking population in southern Florida. Miami, the 16th largest TV market, is competitive given the fact that its large Hispanic population gravitates toward Spanish-language stations. A Federal Communications Commission rule allows a station to buy another station in the same market if "at least one of the stations in the combination is not ranked among the top four stations in terms of audience share," which in most markets, if not all of them, would prohibit a major affiliated station from buying another one. WTVJ is now rated sixth in total-day Nielsen ratings, behind Spanish-speaking Univision and Telemundo outlets.

On July 28, B&C reported that NBC Universal sold its Miami owned TV station, WTVJ, for just $205 million.

Benton

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