AS one who writes words for a living, I find it gratifying thatalmost two-thirds of the public says they support the writers'strike. Thanks, America. We humble scriveners salute you.
If you have not heard about the strike, here's why Jay Leno andDavid Letterman have been telling jokes about President Bush thatsound six months old:
The TV and movie writers represented by the Writers Guild ofAmerica walked out in early November. The move by the 12,000-memberunion shut down production of more than a dozen sit-coms and almostall late-night entertainment shows.
Recent polls by Pepperdine University, Fox News, SurveyUSA andthe show business newspaper Variety showed about 64 percent publicsupport for the writers. At a time when organized labor seems to beflat on its back, that sounds like a blow for old-style industrial-age solidarity with what the entertainment industry calls the"creative" types.
Or maybe it's a backlash against the corporate show biz bigwigsand their obviously low regard for good writing.
"In television, you are one of two things, either a beggar or achooser," the late NBC programming genius Brandon Tartikoff oncesaid. "If you want to create, you are by definition a beggar." I gota taste of that during my own brief spell in a network-owned TV newsshop in Chicago, where Tartikoff began his career. There werecertain unions that struck terror into the hearts of TV management.The writers guild was not one of them. Still isn't.
This year's strike, the guild's first since their five-month 1988walkout, is an effort to stop begging and start demanding. What'sinteresting is how effectively they've harnessed the power of thenew media that lie at the heart of their dispute with the networksand big media giants, particularly the Internet.
Many issues are on the table, but both sides reached an impasseover a new demand. The writers want a slice, just a tiny 2.5 percentof the money that media conglomerates are making from re-use oftheir material on the Internet, smart phones, iTunes, moviedownloads and other viewing. They also want a larger share ofprofits from DVD sales than the 0.36 percent for which they settledin 1988, when home videotape was a new thing.
The media companies claim they can't negotiate a share ofInternet profits because they have no idea how much this newtechnology will earn. Yet even we home viewers know that they mustbe earning something, judging by the ads that pop up on the TVnetworks' heavily-promoted Web sites.
That's where the writers have given a new Internet age spin tothis strike by doing what they do best: writing. They've written andproduced dozens of clever videos to boil down the complicated strikeissues into terms that even dimwits like me can understand.
Then they post them on YouTube, among other sites. Three of thebest are titled "Voices of Uncertainty," "Why We Fight" and "Not theDaily Show with Some Writer." That last one is produced by strikingwriters from "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart."
Each is highlighted by soundbites from major media corporateheads like Rupert Murdoch of NewsCorp and Sumner Redstone of Viacomboasting to investors and others about the billions of dollars peryear that digital technology is beginning to bring in. In what theDaily Show writers call "a moment of zen," Redstone declares,"Getting paid is the name of the game." You said it, Sumner.
There's nothing new about bosses pleading poverty to theirworkers while boasting to investors about how their companies arerolling in dough. What's new is the ability of strikers to show bothfaces of their employers to the world via the Web.
It appears to be having an effect. Negotiators for the mediaconglomerates last week announced they were hiring a team of highlypaid spin doctors to polish up their public image. Most of usviewers would settle for a few more shows that didn't insult ourintelligence.
Clarence Page (cpage@tribune.com) writes for the Chicago Tribune.
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