Palin in prime time

You can’t say you didn’t get a warning. Back in September, Vox ventured the strong probability that Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska and current burgeoning financial conglomerate, would land a high-profile prime-time TV gig by the end of the year.

Missed it by 11 days.

Fox made its big reveal on Monday, naming Palin as a Fox News contributor (or “analyst,” according to the network). The network didn’t waste any time, trotting her out on her maiden voyage on Tuesday night, as one of the on-air guests on “The O’Reilly Factor.”

Bill O’Reilly threw softballs much of the time, asking Palin why she felt she was the target of so much criticism.

“It’s not about me personally,” Ms. Palin said. “They don’t like the message, they don’t like the common sense conservative solutions I articulate.”

As you’d expect from the GOP’s contender for the vice-presidency in the 2008 election, Palin lit into President Obama and his declining poll numbers.

"It was just a matter of time," she said. "There is an obvious disconnect between President Obama and the White House, what they are doing to our economy and what they are doing in terms of not allowing Americans to feel as safe as we had felt."

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“She is one of the most talked about and politically polarizing figures in the country. First off, we hope she brings that,” said Bill Shine, Fox News executive vice president, to the Los Angeles Times. “The expectation that Palin will utter something controversial will likely drive viewership.”

Shine’s statement is not-quite code for that which ought to be perfectly obvious to anyone who's observed her: Of course she’s being brought there in the hopes that she’ll be controversial. She’s expected to be controversial! There are probably riders in her contract that demand it.

In the short term, it’s a given that Palin’s legendary unpredictability and a strident right-wing stand on the issues will attract the prime-time eyeballs that advertisers love. That’ll help fill the depleted coffers of News Corporation, a company bleeding cash until recently (lately rescued by the blue giants of “Avatar”). And the unspoken but obvious Fox political positioning makes it the perfect pulpit for her peculiar, passive-aggressive brand of conservative populism — one that Margaret Carlson of Bloomberg News seems to get.

“Sarah Palin is the latest in a line of populists,” she told Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC on Monday. “But she’s very different in one way: Populists historically have pretended not to know anything. They’ve actually been part of a fairly intellectual group of people. But she really doesn’t know anything, and it’s in God’s plan that she not learn anything.”

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But ironically, Palin’s new higher profile on Fox may work against her. Up to now Palin has risen above the mainstream, defining herself on her terms, a conservative rock star in the mediasphere.

Now, working as a colleague with the likes of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, Palin’s just another coif at a studio desk, her pronouncements just another soundbite in the echo chamber; her renegade persona is flattened by the relentless, impersonal ubiquity of 21st-century television.

Time will tell whether Palin rises to the occasion, acquiring the intellect, charity and perspective she would need for any credible run for the roses in 2012; or whether, like Lonesome Rhodes shilling for Vitajex, Palin will gain just enough insight into the American people to exploit their insecurities of region and identity for financial benefit and nothing more.

Sarah Palin’s been going rogue for a long time, accomplishing much of what she’s pursued. We’ll see if she’s got what it takes to be a standout, or just a face in TV’s crowd.

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Image credits: Sarah Palin, Fox News logo: © 2009 Fox News Channel. Lonesome Rhodes: From "A Face in the Crowd," © 1957 Columbia Pictures.

Late Night With God Knows Who

Jay Leno is developing a reputation as the IED of feature television programming at NBC. His and the network’s decision to switch his brand of comedy from late-night to prime-time destroyed the chances of several provocative series, which had to be canceled to accommodate the jut-jawed juggernaut.

What’s developed in recent days, and confirmed tonight by NBC brass, proves the ability of the Leno death star to blow up everything around it.

By now you know about “The Jay Leno Show,” NBC’s incessantly hyped and ballyhooed bid to rewrite the rules of prime-time television, by bringing a known comedic quantity into America’s living rooms in prime-time — effectively shifting Leno’s late-night format to earlier in the evening (at 10 p.m.). NBC’s move was hailed as revolutionary; James Poniewozik of Time Magazine wrote an essay breathlessly titled “Jay Leno Is the Future of TV. Seriously.”

Poniewozik wrote last September: “If The Jay Leno Show succeeds — where succeeding means not getting more viewers than the competition but simply increasing NBC's profit margin — it suggests a TV future in which ambitious dramas become the stuff of boutique cable, while the broadcasters become a megaphone for live events and cheap nonfiction.”

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The viewing public was decidedly underwhelmed. The “Leno” show was touted as the perfect lead-in to the local news affiliates around the country. That’s been a connection Leno has been gamely trying to make at the end of his program, prodding his viewers to stay where you are, braying “YOUR LOCAL NEWS STARTS RIGHT NOW!” But the public wasn’t having it; the “Leno” show was largely ignored by viewers almost from the beginning. And the affiliates weren’t having it; “Leno” was a poor lead-in to the late locals, who resisted the Leno trial period after its sagging ratings pulled eyeballs away, with the advertising dollars that follow them.

Leno’s show attracts about 5.8 million viewers; some of CBS’ scripted features double or triple that. CBS’s “The Mentalist” pulls down about 17.5 million viewers. It’s something of an apples-to-oranges comparison; “The Mentalist” airs once a week, Leno’s on five nights a week, so an imbalance of the raw numbers makes sense. But regardless, the perception has been that the bloom is off the Leno rose.

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Meanwhile, Conan O’Brien has been gamely trying to grow into his seven-month-long position as host of “The Tonight Show,” broadcast at 11:35. It couldn’t have been good news, then, when O’Brien (about the same time as everyone in America) was going to be asked to move over to accommodate Leno — to give up the coveted 11:35 slot, and move “The Tonight Show” back to 12:05.

Boom.

It gets worse: Not only O’Brien would be affected. In order to accommodate him, NBC’s “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” would be required to move back to 1:05 a.m., a plan that would seem to make viewership in the wee small hours of the morning — InformercialWorld! — even more precious than it already is.

Boom.

Both O’Brien and Leno have made the most of it, commenting on the situation in their monologues and skits. O’Brien outlined a possible scenario to resolve the impasse: “NBC is going to throw me and Jay in a pit with sharpened sticks. The one who crawls out alive gets to leave NBC.”

But O’Brien’s not happy — having transplanted himself, his wife and children, his staff and his perspective from one coast to another less than a year ago, you could hardly blame him — and the vultures of Murdoch may be circling. Fox (the network with no late-night presence on weeknights and Wanda Sykes on Saturdays — for now) has reportedly offered O’Brien sanctuary, if it comes to that. The situation, murky right now, may be settled later this week.

“As much as I’d like to tell you we have a done deal, that’s not true,” said NBC Universal Television Entertainment Chairman Jeff Gaspin at the Television Critics Association press tour, on Sunday. “The talks are ongoing. [But] I hope and expect, before the Olympics begin, we will have everything set. I can’t imagine we won’t.”

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What’s clear already, though, is the chaos and lack of vision reflected in the whole Leno “experiment.” It wasn’t discussed much in the canonization of the new Leno comedy business model, but one of the main reasons for NBC’s agreeing to shifting him to 10 p.m. was no doubt purely economic.

In order for Leno to go on the air at 10 p.m., several NBC scripted televisions series airing at or near that time had to move over.

“Life.” “Southland.”

“Medium.” “Kath and Kim.” “My Name Is Earl.”

Ratings will invariably be blamed, but directly or indirectly, all of ‘em got offed to make room in the schedule for a comedian whose funniest days are in the rear-view mirror, a comedian whose reach into the emergent younger demographic NBC needs to be competitive, or even viable, is shaky at best.

Twas’ the flight after Christmas

If you haven’t got rid of that Christmas tree gathering dust, airborne pollutants, root rot and exponentially increasing risk of combustion in your living room, two enterprising “scientists” may have hit on a solution for you (especially if you happen to live in an unincorporated area).

The two amateur aeronautic engineers posted it all on YouTube on Jan. 1, revisiting a practice that YouTube has memorialized for two or three years now. This year’s aerodynamic duo retrofit a fading Christmas tree with 32 rocket motors wired in parallel with individual igniters and powered by a car battery. “The math was nothing exciting,” one says. “It was just a little differential calculus.”

After the engines are in, some subtle tweaking of the tree’s natural shape, and the countdown ... the green bird is gloriously aloft for all of three seconds, something marvelous to behold before it veers south and spears the ground, 75 nautical feet downrange.

Here’s to their grand and noble effort, one of many in recent times. Maybe next year every one refines their aerodynamics, boost the engines and does it on the other end of the holiday season. Think of it: a fully decked-out, trimmed Christmas tree with battery-powered lights in a sweet suborbital arc through the night sky. ...

Multiplied. Squared. One launch repeated safely in open spaces across America. Signal flares for Santa from coast to coast.

And to all a good flight.

Fixing the disconnect

CBS’s Bob Schieffer, an old hand at the D.C. bureaucracy, warned us about what was coming on Wednesday. “The way my source put it, the American people deserve an honest assessment, and they, and the bureaucracy, are going to get it.”

It was hardly the way you want to end a Christmas vacation. President Obama had barely put his feet on Hawaiian soil when the issue of national security burst back into the national attention span. Thanks to a disaffected youth’s futile Christmas Day attempt to detonate plastic explosives secreted in his underwear on a flight approaching Detroit, the nation’s aviation and national security machinery went into overdrive — an overdrive may are saying they should have been in all along.

In the two weeks since then — those already grueling weeks of holiday and post-holiday travel — we’ve come back to pat-downs, a heavy airport presence of uniforms and guns, and no carry-on liquids besides the ones circulating in your body.

And we’ve witnessed the interagency disconnects within the national security establishment. When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was apprehended, it was the endgame for a chain of errors in which the CIA, the NSA and the Department of Homeland Security overlooked Abdulmutallab’s known and suspected associations (as well as the warnings of his father that his 23-year-old son was being radicalized) and failed to share and jointly interpret the information that was available.

When Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said “the system worked,” and then backtracked about a day later, it was a sign of the cultural and informational fails that still prevail, more than eight years after 9/11.

You can call it a disconnect; President Obama went further, calling it evidence of a “systemic failure” of the national security apparatus. It’s this failure Obama addressed Tuesday in an address from the White House. The speech, whose starting time was twice delayed without explanation, was in some ways a bracing shot of vintage Obama: laying out the problem at hand, then breaking down a series of solutions; not getting caught up in the ritual blame-game Beltway kabuki; keeping an eye of the prize of the larger objective.

But the challenge that confronts him is a monster, and maybe even one with politically malign motivations. Not long into the new year, the debate started within the media:

Was the security lapse that enabled Abdulmuttalab to almost commit an act of terrorism unrivaled since 9/11 just a monumental chain of oversights of a bloated, arrogant, hidebound intelligence apparatus … or was it something worse, and horrible to contemplate: a willful, deliberate attempt to undermine the national security under the Obama administration, turning a blind eye to a clear and present danger with the intention of embarrassing the administration, and endangering its credibility for political gain?

Morgan Freeman, VOG

“From CBS world headquarters in New York — this is the CBS Evening News, with Katie Couric.” We’ve heard that at or near what used to be called “the dinner hour” since Sept. 5, 2006. When Couric began the CBS News anchor gig, no doubt eager to establish her bona fides, she was the beneficiary of the voice of Walter Cronkite, who uttered that introduction from the beginning, setting a tone of gravitas and experience that Couric has been more than equal to, again from the beginning.

Even after Cronkite died on July 17, the network retained him as the CBS News VOG (for voice of God, denoting the flagship of the brand itself) — as much a nod to Cronkite’s long multigenerational reach on television news and the culture as to not having anyone else to replace him.

Or so we thought. The new broom of a new year (and for some a new decade) sweeps clean. That was clear on Monday night — the first of 2010 for the CBS news crew — when the voice of Morgan Freeman rang, Mississippi-clear, to announce the Tiffany Network Evening News.

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How to parse this ripple in the culture … you can resort to the Firsts School of Significance: Freeman (a pitchman for Visa) is the first African American VOG in American broadcast news (James Earl Jones, the longtime VOG of CNN, beat him in the cable space by years).

Freeman’s bourbon-and-honey voice cements an African American flava to a worldwide audience of news junkies. The VOG is part of the default experience, part of the singular identifier that establishes an identity in the public mind. For the first time at CBS News — home to VOGs Cronkite, Sevareid and Murrow! — a voice of color becomes that identifier.

There’s no way to know, of course, if CBS was that calculating. The statements from the network in advance of Monday’s change were more turn-the-page circumspect. '”As comforting as it is to look back on the great career that Walter had, we're looking forward now and we just felt it was the right time to make the move that at some point had to be made,” said CBS News and Sports President Sean McManus. '”This seemed like the appropriate time since Walter's passing to make the move.'”

It may have been just the matter of the right voice. NBC made the same kind of change in December 2007, when Oscar winner Michael Douglas became the VOG for the NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams. And setting aside Freeman’s pitchwork for Visa, his is a movie voice we’ve loved and recognized for a generation.

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Having portrayed everything from a terrifyingly vicious New York pimp (“Street Smart”) to the President of the United States (“Deep Impact”), Freeman already projects into the culture with the kind of ubiquity CBS could use to its advantage.

So despite the ratings that have firmly cemented CBS Evening News as last in viewers, Oscar winner Freeman’s investiture offers the network and viewers that little intangible, a moment of Hollywood before 23 minutes of news (much of it dispiriting), plus commercials (most of them TiVo’d into three-second mush). The broadcast evening news model needs every edge it can get.

Lysergic Asset hit it on Monday, at Gawker: “For a minute there I thought that Morgan Freeman would be replacing Katie Couric. You almost got me to watch TV news.”

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Image credits: Freeman: Via IMDb.com. CBS eye logo: © CBS Inc.

The end of the equation as we know it

Happy New Frickin Year. If you’re reading this, you made it. With ’09 in the rear-view, there’s all at once something to look forward to. The first day of the year had the almost-magical ring of a binary sequence — 01.01.10 — but that didn’t last long. That day, in fact, in a story in the San Francisco Chronicle, we found out just how short-lived New Year’s good vibes might be. Anno Domini 2010 has barely begun and one man’s gloomy forecast would call a halt to, well, pretty much everything. There’s nothing like beginning a year with the prospect of an ending.

If you’ve been looking sideways at the year 2012 (in light of the doomsday events the Mayan calendar says we have in store), you may want to revise your plans. The year 2012 is soon enough. But according to biblical scholar and evangelical radio personality Harold Camping, the walls of the world can be expected to come tumbling down the year before that.

Unlike others in recent years who’ve prophesied the end days, Camping, a civil engineer and a student of the Bible for 70 years, has taken a seemingly novel approach: pegging the demise of our world to a purportedly tested, rigorously analyzed mathematical formula. His bottom line: Don’t make plans for doing anything on this plane of reality beyond May 21, 2011.

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Camping runs Family Radio, an evangelical station based in Oakland, Calif., and one with millions of listeners around the world. In a position of some influence in Bay Area media, Camping has a radio talk show, “Open Forum.” Camping told the Chronicle his company owns more than 50 stations in the United States alone.

Camping’s entrepreneurial bent extends to predicting the end of our fair blue planet. The Chronicle explains:

This is not the first time Camping has made a bold prediction about Judgment Day.

On Sept. 6, 1994, dozens of Camping's believers gathered inside Alameda's Veterans Memorial Building to await the return of Christ, an event Camping had promised for two years. Followers dressed children in their Sunday best and held Bibles open-faced toward heaven.

But the world did not end. Camping allowed that he may have made a mathematical error. He spent the next decade running new calculations ...

By Camping's understanding, the Bible was dictated by God and every word and number carries a spiritual significance. He noticed that particular numbers appeared in the Bible at the same time particular themes are discussed.

The number 5, Camping concluded, equals “atonement.” Ten is “completeness.” Seventeen means “heaven.” Camping patiently explained how he reached his conclusion for May 21, 2011.

“Christ hung on the cross April 1, 33 A.D.,” he began. “Now go to April 1 of 2011 A.D., and that's 1,978 years.”

Camping then multiplied 1,978 by 365.2422 days — the number of days in each solar year, not to be confused with a calendar year.

Next, Camping noted that April 1 to May 21 encompasses 51 days. Add 51 to the sum of previous multiplication total, and it equals 722,500.

Camping realized that (5 x 10 x 17) x (5 x 10 x 17) = 722,500.

Or put into words: (Atonement x Completeness x Heaven), squared.

“Five times 10 times 17 is telling you a story,” Camping said. “It's the story from the time Christ made payment for your sins until you're completely saved.”

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Got all that? If, like most people, you’re dutifully challenged by math no more complicated than keeping the checkbook in positive numbers, Camping’s formula may remind you of the algebra you dozed through in high school and skipped altogether in college.

It could be unsettling if you let it be: Instead of being some halfwit quasi-Nostradamus howling in the public square at the top of his lungs; instead of being the Luddite jeremiah from central casting carrying a sandwich board that tells us THE END IS NEAR, Camping is a scholar who brings both impersonal math and utterly immovable religious conviction to what he’s saying. And like any good scholar when confronted with a failure of a theory, Camping went back to the drawing board — or the whiteboard — and (presumably) found out what he did wrong the first time.

The flaw with any doomsday forecasts is, paradoxically, their eventual accuracy. The proof of such forecasts is an eventual certainty, but that doesn’t endow the forecaster with having insights beyond a grasp of the law of averages. If you say “the end is near” long enough, eventually you’ll be right — when you die, long before the world does.

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We just got through the end of the year; most people aren’t ready for the end of the brilliant, glittering equation that is our world. For them — for us — maybe Camping’s just another version of the guy with the sandwich board. That kind of prognostication’s been a fact of life for generations. It’s based more on a personal interpretation of cosmic events — and one’s personal exhaustion with the state of the world — than on anything to be empirically proven to be true.

The first mossback to carry that THE END IS NEAR sign was just as certain he was right as Camping is today; he just didn’t have a calculator handy.

While Camping’s argument for the imminent arrival of the rapture may have earnest underpinnings in biblical scholarship, and even embrace the irrefutability of mathematics … it’s not science.

And thank God for that.

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Image credits: Harold Camping in 2008: tk.