I’ve been to WTVP’s studio at State and Water streets downtown. It’s not an attractive building on the outside, but the digital television equipment and studio space inside is enviable. I’d love to work on their video editing suite. But the building and equipment came with a hefty price tag: $10.3 million.

I heard a rumor a few months ago (August) that WTVP was defaulting on their benefit loans to pay for all that fabulous new equipment and space. My requests for information from WTVP went unanswered, so I dropped it.

Tonight, however, Journal Star columnist Steve Tarter is reporting that WTVP is indeed in default and now owes Bank of America the balance of the loan — $6.9 million:

While the 2001 bond agreement originally gave the station 22 years to pay back the bonds, WTVP was found in technical default in 2005 after failing to raise a specific number of pledges and pledge money, items covered in bond covenants…. Now WTVP faces a deadline of Jan. 15 to restructure the bank agreement….

Here’s a little second-hand conjecture: I heard from someone that part of the reason they are in default is because WTVP had originally hoped to make more money in production work (using their studios and resources to shoot and edit commercials for other businesses), but their prices were so high that prospective clients chose the more affordable professional production services of WEEK-TV. I have no idea if that’s true or not, but it sounded plausible to me.

In any case, it certainly looks like they misjudged how much equipment and building space they could afford, and now they’re in trouble. I hope the station doesn’t go black, because I enjoy public television — both the network programs and local shows. Best of luck to them.

I’ve been trying to keep up on how cable franchise negotiations are going. You may recall that the city’s franchise agreement with Insight expired in April 2006. After several months, the city finally signed a temporary extension with Insight/Comcast through January 1, 2008. That’s not very far away now, and there’s still no permanent franchise agreement.

No doubt part of the reason it’s so hard to nail down a final contract is because the rules keep changing. With other players (read: AT&T) entering the cable market, state and federal authorities (e.g., the FCC) are constantly changing the landscape, trying to make it easier for telecommunications companies to get into the cable market. Most of the those changes negatively affect municipalities.

Now it seems the FCC has changed the way fees are used for so-called PEG channels. PEG stands for Public, Education, and Government. On Peoria’s Insight system, channel 17 is for Education access (you see ICC classes and District 150 board meetings on this channel), channel 22 is public and government access (you see everything here from city council meetings to independent talk shows to local band performances). It appears the cost of operating these channels will now be part of the franchise fee under any new franchise agreement, which means the city will get less revenue.

Here’s the explanation from City Manager Randy Oliver:

Last Wednesday the FCC released an order which will affect Peoria and many other municipalities on franchise fees and the use of fees paid by cable companies to support public, educational and government (PEG) channels and on certain other items. In brief, the FCC said that fees paid to support PEG channels can only be used for the ”capital costs” of such channels. If used for other purposes, the FCC said they count against the 5% Federal franchise fee cap-in other words are deducted from franchise fees. This is different from the provisions of some cable franchises, as well as some recent cable statutes adopted at the insistence of phone companies, which say that the fees municipalities get for such channels are not restricted to being used for capital purposes. The FCC also said that the preceding and its prior rulings about what can and cannot be included in gross revenues for franchise fee purposes apply nationally.

The FCC said that its order does not apply retroactively. It also indicated that it cannot void existing franchises, which it recognized may allow fees to be used for non-capital purposes (or differ from franchise fee calculation rules) for valid reasons, such as to resolve a franchise violation or rate dispute. For reasons such as these the FCC indicated that a cable company cannot unilaterally alter franchise fee computations or deduct claimed improper payments from franchise fees, but first must attempt to resolve matters with the municipality in question. The FCC also stated that Federal law does not restrict municipalities from adopting customer service standards greater than those issued by the FCC. AT&T continues to argue that it is not a cable company, although some courts have ruled to the contrary. The preceding thus is not always directly applicable to AT&T. In general the FCC order extends to incumbent cable companies some terms of the FCC’s March 2007 order on cable franchise terms for telephone companies. The March order is currently being challenged in the courts, with a decision expected soon. This is simply a quick summary of some of the main ways the FCC order is likely to affect municipalities.

The total average time a household had a TV set tuned during the 2006-2007 television year was 8 hours and 14 minutes per day.

When is TV news real journalism and when is it fake? According to the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), it’s fake when it’s nothing more than a “video news release,” or “VNR”:

Video news releases are public relations videos designed to look like television news stories. The vast majority of VNRs are funded by corporate clients to promote the company’s products or public image.

For example, the makers of Zicam, a cold remedy product, put together a VNR about the inconvenience of catching a cold while traveling. It was taped just like a news report, except that the surveys and reports it refers to are all company-sponsored, there are lots of Zicam product-placement opportunities, and their expert interviewee states, “in my research I found that homeopathic zinc products can shorten the duration of your illness.” You think you’re watching a report that includes unbiased scientific research, but it’s really just a clever commercial for Zicam.

CMD quotes a public notice from the FCC that states VNRs “must clearly disclose to members of their audiences the nature, source and sponsorship of the material.” The problem is, there are many TV news programs using VNRs without ever disclosing that their source material is simply a PR video hawking a specific product. Worse, CMD shows examples on its website of stations that “disguise VNRs as their own reporting”:

Newsrooms added station-branded graphics and overlays, to make VNRs indistinguishable from reports that genuinely originated from their station. A station reporter or anchor re-voiced the VNR in more than 60 percent of the VNR broadcasts, sometimes repeating the publicist’s original narration word-for-word.

CMD identified over 100 stations that aired what they consider “fake news.” No Peoria stations were listed. However, the owners of most of Peoria’s commercial stations were represented on the list (the one notable exception being Barrington Broadcasting, owners of WHOI) because stations they own in other cities did misuse VNRs.

The FCC has taken notice, and recently levied a $4,000 fine on a Comcast cable channel for failing to identify a VNR they ran as a news story. This one was for an herbal remedy called Nelson’s Rescue Sleep. Comcast defended its use of the VNR material, saying, “The segments in question were chosen by journalists in the course of reporting, and Comcast received no consideration or benefit by using the material.”

Indeed, since these types of news releases are provided for free to stations and with no limitations on how they can be edited, some newsrooms find them to be an easy source of content for “news” reports. Neither CMD nor the FCC says TV stations can’t use VNR material in their broadcasts, only that the source of the material should be clearly disclosed so viewers can make informed judgments as to the claims of such material.

I’m looking forward to watching the new documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, “The War.” It’s a seven-part series that starts tonight at 7 p.m. on PBS. Watch it and maybe we can discuss it here on the blog. There’s a viewer’s guide (PDF) available, too, and here’s an excerpt about the first episode from that guide:

After a haunting overview of the Second World War, an epoch of killing that engulfed the world from 1939 to 1945 and cost at least 50 million lives, the inhabitants of four towns — Mobile, Alabama; Sacramento, California; Waterbury, Connecticut; and Luverne, Minnesota — recall their communities on the eve of the conflict. For them, and for most Americans finally beginning to recover from the Great Depression, the events overseas seem impossibly far away. But on December 7, 1941, their tranquil lives are shattered by the shock of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and America is thrust into the greatest cataclysm in history. Along with millions of other young men, Sid Phillips and Willie Rushton of Mobile, Ray Leopold of Waterbury, and Walter Thompson and Burnett Miller of Sacramento enter the armed forces and begin to train for war.

I watched Ken Burns and Lynn Novick answer questions about the film at the National Press Club (on C-SPAN), and it was very thought-provoking. Burns quoted a statistic that 40% of graduating high school seniors think the U.S. and Germany fought together against Russia in WWII. That’s really sad.

When I was going through school, I had some older teachers who were WWII veterans. I suppose the fact that they’re all retired now is part of the reason education on WWII is so impoverished today. In addition, if you are a retired veteran who wants to venture into another educational path, you might want to consider taking a look at these online colleges for military.

When I was in sixth grade at Rolling Acres School (it was K-8 back then), there were several of us boys who liked to play war. We would draw up battle plans on paper and then try to steal each others’ plans. My friend Jason decided he was going to be on the “bad guys” side and put swastikas all over his notebook. Keep in mind we were only 11 years old and, while we knew it wasn’t a good symbol, we had no idea the real gravity of what the symbol stood for (incidentally, I was on the “good guys” side). I never saw my teacher, Mr. Brunner, more agitated than when he saw Jason’s notebook one day. I don’t remember verbatim what he said (it was a long time ago), but a close paraphrase is, “You have no idea what you’re drawing. Do you know how many hundreds of thousands of men died to defeat the evil that that symbol represents? You will not show that symbol in my classroom again.” Even as a sixth-grader, I could tell this was a very heartfelt reaction from someone who had first-hand knowledge of how bad that enemy was. I’ve never forgotten it.

There aren’t many of those men and women with first-hand knowledge left, which is why this documentary was made — to capture their memories before they’re gone.

This is a TV ad from 1949 that made me laugh. Especially where they ask, “What cigarette do you smoke, Doctor?”

In 2000, only 3% of doctors surveyed said they smoked cigarettes, 4% said they smoked cigars, 1% said they smoked a pipe, and 92% said they do not smoke at all.

General surgeons are the biggest smokers in our survey. More than 6 percent smoke cigarettes, while another 6 percent smoke either cigars or pipes. The highest cigar use was among ob/gyns—7 percent. Pediatricians and internists smoke the least.

Only 23% of the general public smoke cigarettes, according to the same survey.