Dem
47
GOP
53
We hope Amazon is not able to somehow track the e-mails in the Electoral-Vote.com inboxes. If it is, then we are soon going to get a lot of recommendations for Nuts, Yentl, Funny Girl and The Way We Were, because of a dramatic uptick in the number of times the name "Streisand" has suddenly appeared.
Babs' newfound omnipresence has nothing to do with her career, either past or current. It has everything to do with the thing that might actually be her enduring legacy: The Streisand Effect. As a reminder, just to make sure everyone is on the same page, that is the phenomenon wherein the attempt to bury something, so as to deflect attention from that thing, actually causes it to get far more attention than if you'd just left it alone.
In the case of Streisand, she sued a photographer for the removal of an aerial photo of her mansion, a photo that was part of a large collection of shots of the California coast, and a photo that had been downloaded a grand total of six times before the suit. The lawsuit ultimately cost Streisand over $200,000 (she had to cover the other side's legal fees, in addition to her own), and it also led hundreds of thousands of people to seek out the photo. Hundreds of thousands is, as we understand it, more than six. Quite a bit more, in fact.
This week's Streisand Effect case study, meanwhile, involves late night comedian Stephen Colbert. As readers will know, he sometimes tells jokes that hurt Donald Trump's fee-fees. Since Colbert is a short-timer on an expiring contract, and since his late-night show reaches only a limited audience, the smart move would be to just ignore him until he goes off the air. But that's not how this administration rolls. Instead, in a transparent effort to be a good lapdog, FCC chair Brendan Carr has been doing everything possible to abuse his position and to put the screws to Colbert (and other meany talk show hosts).
At the heart of the current kerfuffle is the FCC's equal time rule—which, of course, requires television networks who are using the publicly owned broadcast spectrum to provide equal time to political candidates. In other words, if Joe Democrat is running for Associate Dogcatcher of East Cupcake, and he appears on WCUP's children's show Wake Up, East Cupcake! for 5 minutes, then WCUP also has to give 5 minutes to Dick Republican.
News programs are largely exempt from this requirement, because they can't control which candidates make the most news on any given day. And, for a couple of decades, the talk shows have been considered "news," for this particular purpose, and so were also exempt. Consequently, Late Night with Stephen Colbert had no concerns about booking Texas U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico for the show.
But this is where Carr comes in. He has decreed that maybe the talk shows aren't exempt from the equal time rule after all. He doesn't have the power to make this change by fiat, but Trump appointees currently have a 2-to-1 majority on the FCC board, and if Carr and the ironically named Olivia Trusty were to concur on a new rule (or, really, a new interpretation of the existing rule), that might stick.
CBS' lawyers huddled together and, under these circumstances, decided to forbid Colbert from airing the interview. Perhaps they did not want to deal with the potential legal costs of fighting this out in court, just for one 14-minute segment. Perhaps, more broadly, they did not want to anger the Trump administration. Perhaps the legal beagles were doing the bidding of their corporate masters, Bari Weiss and the Ellison family. Maybe it's all of these things. Anyhow, they put the kibosh on it.
That presumably left the show with two options, if they wanted to keep the Talarico booking. The first would have been to invite all the major-party Senate candidates to appear on the program. However, there are 11 of them in total, and that's way too much broadcast time. Colbert would probably be happy to invite Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) on, but he doesn't want to platform a corrupt fascist like AG Ken Paxton (R-TX), and he doesn't want to give a bunch of fringe candidates their 15 minutes of fame.
That leaves us with option number two, which is to make the interview online-only, and to post it to the show's YouTube channel. That is what they chose, of course, and here is the segment:
The average Colbert episode attracts about 2.7 million viewers; as of 6:30 p.m. PT on Tuesday, the YouTube video is at 3.7 million and counting. And if you read the comments on the video, they are full of things like "Dear FCC: Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I wouldn't have ever seen it otherwise." and "Never heard of Talarico. Didn't know who he was or what he stood for. Thank you FCC for bringing attention to this matter."
So, the Trump administration appears to have given the interview a lot more exposure than it would otherwise have gotten. On top of that—and this is addressed in the first minute of the interview—the administration has put out the message that it's authoritarian and uninterested in the First Amendment, and also that it's scared that the Republican Party might actually lose that Senate seat in Texas. Hard to imagine a better example of the Streisand Effect in action.
There is some squabbling going on right now between Colbert and CBS management. Colbert says that the FCC forced the interview to be migrated to the Internet, and that it otherwise would have been broadcast. CBS management says that the interview was always planned as Internet-only, so as to promote the show's YouTube channel. We know which side we believe here, especially since it's not clear to us why CBS would so very much want to promote the YouTube channel of a show that's going off the air in less than 3 months.
Meanwhile, we wonder how long it will be until these broadcast companies decide that they just can't be beholden to the politicized public broadcast spectrum, and decide to go all-streaming, or all-something-other-than-broadcast. We are aware that something like 25% of viewers still use antennas for TV. But in 2006, the broadcasters got together and decided that they just weren't going to accommodate analog TVs anymore, and that folks needed to get on board if they wanted to maintain access to TV programming. Seems like the time might be here for a similar kind of move. (Z)