Year in Review

NEW YORK, January 2: As
the Holiday Season comes to a close, we have decided to offer our readers a
special treat with a selection of the best quotes from a wide variety of
interviews we conducted during the last year. They come from top executives,
creators, producers and filmmakers. Hopefully, they will provide food for
thought as we enter the New Year, which will undoubtedly foster much more
change in this ever-evolving media landscape.

“What we have discovered is
that of all the available channels, which on average are about 60 or 70,
viewers tend to watch about 8 to 10 percent of them. No doubt there are niche
channels, like the horse channel. I wouldn’t be very interested in it, but I’m
sure horse fans would be. However, you have to take into account technology and
distribution. For example, we are seeing that broadband is increasing the
quality of video consumers can view via the Internet. Therefore, a niche
service like the horse channel, instead of being just a niche channel in the
U.S., can become a niche channel with global distribution and appeal to,
perhaps, 30, 40 or 50 million viewers. Technology will also help these niche
channels be better managed than they are today because it will be more economically
viable to launch and maintain them. Compared to a worldwide population of 6
billion people, 50 million viewers is not very much, but having a channel reach
50 million viewers can be a very interesting business proposition.”

—Emilio Azcárraga Jean, Chairman of the Board and CEO, Grupo Televisa
(January 2006)

“Well, it’s the difference
between the public as citizens and the public as consumers; all these
broadcasters face the same pressures. The public always seems to want what some people think they ought to want.
The traditional view is that broadcasting, and news in particular, has a public
service to fulfill through serious news and information. But do the viewers
want it? They appear—over a period of 10 to 15 years—to have been
switching off that kind of programming. It’s a dilemma we all face. The BBC has
a pretty clear mandate to produce a diet of serious news and information, but
we have to do it in a way that we hope will be appealing and attract audiences.
Because we are publicly funded, we can’t afford to become a niche broadcaster
with very few people watching. There was a BBC executive many years ago who
coined the phrase, “Our role is to make the popular good and the good popular.”
In other words, try to make the important interesting, and I suppose that is
very much at the heart of how we approach news and current affairs.”

—Richard Sambrook, Director, BBC Global News (April 2006)

“Bias is not what you say;
it’s what you eliminate. We don’t eliminate anybody. Everybody gets equal time.
They do eliminate a conservative voice at many of these other networks,
therefore we appear to be more conservative, because we treat the conservative
point of view with as much respect as we treat the liberal point of view. We
have as much bashing of the current administration over here. Bill O’Reilly
harangues the president every night on our number one show—about the
ports, about his brother in Florida—O’Reilly is an equal-opportunity
basher! What I say [to the staff] is, have the facts and stay out of trouble.
Our competitors had to pay off an anti-military documentary, or had to fire
people because they made up the news, or because they didn’t listen to their
own sources. We’ve had none of that, so therefore I think our journalism is
very strong and they are wrong.”

—Roger Ailes, Chairman and CEO, FOX News; Chairman, FOX Television Stations (April
2006)

“CNN International covers
news better, faster and with greater emphasis on live breaking news. We try to
be the network of record. And we are also committed to pursuing reports from
places like Iran, using our expertise and contacts to get places and interview
people other networks either cannot or do not. I believe that on a big breaking
story—international or U.S.—CNNI wins every time. Our name brand
and our credibility, plus the trust that has been built by years of our
dedicated effort, pays off in these cases…Another major effect of global
24-hour television news is that things just simply don’t happen in a vacuum
anymore. Let’s say there is a maniac as the head of a country [conducting] a
terrible genocide. Well, he may be able to do that, but he can’t do it with
impunity. He can’t do it in a vacuum, he can’t do it without fearing the
eventual consequences—because now everybody is watching.”

—Christiane Amanpour, Chief International Correspondent, CNN (April
2006)

“At the end of the day,
our customers buy the product and deal with us because of the quality of the
programming that we offer, both in terms of the breadth of our own channels and
of the third-party channels that we distribute, but also through the range of
different genres we offer. So our business is really about super-serving a
whole variety of audiences in different ways, be it the audiences who will
watch England’s international cricket tours, or drama audiences who really
enjoy watching UKTV, for example, which is one of our core partners in the
third-party channel space, all the way to the audiences of our own general
entertainment and movie channels. So the key thing is to continue to invest
on-screen, to continue our leadership in programming, which will put that much
more distance between us and our competitors as we go forward.”

—James Murdoch, Chief Executive, BSkyB (April 2006)

“Increasingly, the
difference between The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The New York Times is blurred in the public mind, and that’s of
concern. Just as it’s of concern that two-thirds of the public thinks that
journalists have a bias. If the public really thinks that, and if we don’t
attack that, and change that perception, then people are not going to believe
what they read. They will say, “I’m a conservative, I want to get my news from
FOX News.” Or “I’m a liberal, I want to get my news from The New York Times,”
and that’s terrible because democracy presumes that we have a common set of
facts, but if people don’t accept what journalists write as factual, then how
does a democracy function? We don’t need more partisan news; we need better
news.”

—Ken Auletta, Columnist, The New Yorker (April 2006)

“There’s definitely been
an upsurge in interest in documentaries in the cinema. You know the penguin
film and Moore’s films are very successful, but for the rest of us, it’s a bit
of a struggle. There is more awareness of documentaries and people certainly
seem to enjoy them, but you’re never going to make any money unless you’re hit
by lightning or penguins.”

—Michael Apted, filmmaker, director (Up
series, Gorky Park) (April
2006)

“The news we deliver each
evening is a compromise between what we think our viewers should see and what
the viewers want to see. But the most important thing to say to oneself is that
in 10 years if researchers or journalists want to know what happened today,
they should be able to watch a newscast and say, “Yes, that is exactly what
happened that day.” We must not sidestep what is essential – and what is
essential is major international issues and even social issues.”

—Patrick
Poivre d’Arvor, Anchorman, TF1 (April 2006)

“I’m sure you’ve heard the
mantra of getting the content to the consumer, every which way, when they want
it, how they want it. We’re [platform] agnostic, but we have to be sure it’s
copy-protected, that’s how we get compensated for the use of our content. We
spend a lot of time figuring out what is the right business model and
exploitation model for all this content. It’s everything from iTunes to ABC
putting some series on our broadband site, and the consumer can watch them for
free…But we have to figure out the right business models with our content that
work for all of our clients and that work for us as well. It’s exciting, and
pretty complex, and fast moving, and you hope you don’t make any real
fundamental boo-boo in the course of it, which I don’t think [will happen].
People are pretty open in talking about what they’re doing. Consumers all of a
sudden have a lot more say than they used to. They had a voice before by
switching the dial, and even with the remote control that’s how they voted, but
now they’ve got a lot more input as to whether something succeeds or not.”

—Laurie Younger, President, Buena Vista Worldwide Television (May 2006)

“Somebody asked me the
other day, 'Don't you want to be number one?' Our interest is growing the young demographic …[which is] getting
younger, more educated, more affluent. [Our competition’s audience] is going
the other way. Being diplomatic, we are right on the audience composition that
we set out to attract. We're appealing to a broad audience, but the demographic
that is really driving our ratings growth is again, the younger, more affluent,
higher educated audience that appeals to advertisers.”

—Don
Browne, President, Telemundo (May 2006)

“You don’t think of your
time slot or the pressure—that’s with the gods. The gods of television
are mercurial motherf**kers. [Laughs] They’re wicked, there’s nothing you can
do about that. You just put out the best show you possibly can.”

—Paul
Haggis, Creator, The Black Donnellys (October 2006)

“You look down the list of
the large blue-chip, big-cap companies, and there just hasn’t been a lot of
movement in their stock for the last four or five years, because the
marketplace is looking for clear growth stories. And they’re saying, “These
things are so big and their futures are so uncertain, how do you get growth?”
So a simplistic way of responding to that is just to say, “Break it up into
small companies again. From a smaller business it is easier to grow, but if you
think it through to the next level, that doesn’t make any sense. Is a movie
company going to grow any faster if it were on its own or as part of Time
Warner? No… So, I think what’s really happening is that the terminal multiples
on all the major media businesses are being chopped. There’s an old adage, the
market can price good news; the market can price bad news, but they can’t price
uncertainty.”

—Richard
Parsons, Chairman and CEO, Time Warner (October 2006)

“I believe the secret is
really in the formula of CSI:
fractured-time storytelling with interesting, compelling scientific mysteries
and a timeless cast. It’s really a “howdunit” and a “whodunit”, and I believe a
lot of people in the world do love a good mystery. We give them the
satisfactory of following a cast they care about and a mystery that intrigues
them and eye-candy that surprises them, and as they watch they learn more about
science and crime solving. It’s a timeless formula that when done correctly can
be enjoyed by many for years and years to come.”

—Anthony
Zuiker, Creator, CSI (October
2006)

“If you think that public
service broadcasting can be good, you want to reach as many people as possible.
If you have really outstanding news that takes the great issues of the day
seriously, the more people who are in touch with that the better. Where I think
the BBC’s commercial rivals have got a point is that there is no need for the
BBC to do exactly the same style of entertainment programming as every other
channel. In other words, if all the BBC were to do would be replicate very mainstream
and generic entertainment, I think you could rightly ask the question whether
that is good use of public money. But over the last few years we have tried
very much to aim away from that. We have not taken part, to the extent to which
the commercial broadcasters in the U.K. and U.S. networks have, in the wave of
reality programming. There are one or two BBC programs that have used reality
techniques, I’m not denying that, but we haven’t followed the fashion in the
way that most of the other broadcasters have. In entertainment we try to be
pretty selective about what we do. The BBC is trying to be distinctive, but at
the same time, we were created as a mass-audience broadcaster and we are one of
the public service broadcasters around the world who still believes that there
is a real place for mass-audience public service as well as niche public
service. —Mark
Thompson, Director-General, BBC (October 2006)

“So many people use humor
to get through things, to get over things, to hide things. And satire done well
is a formidable weapon. Comedy is drama, comedy is contextual, you need
conflicts for drama and you need drama for comedy. If there’s a decapitated
character that doesn’t care or interact with the world, he’s not as funny as if
he does. Someone coming out and slipping on a banana skin is funny, but if he
does that, and his wife has just left him, and she’s standing there with her
new boyfriend—do you know what I mean? The more you up the conflict and
the drama, the funnier it is—in a weird way.

I love the comedy of
embarrassment; I absolutely love it. I love asking, What’s the wrong thing to
say now? What’s the worse thing for this chap to say? But you can’t just have a
character come in and say something stupid, because you don’t know him. So
you’ve got to know what he’s got to do. David Brent thought that he had become
someone; he thought he’d impressed someone—this was his jeopardy. His
life was in free fall, it hadn’t turned out like he wanted to, he had loads and
loads of jeopardy, whereas if he had just danced in, done a funny turn and
walked away, you might have laughed, but you wouldn’t have cared.”

—Ricky
Gervais, Creator, The Office,
Extras (October 2006)

“Isn’t it Shakespeare who
said, “The play’s the thing?” That must always be the most fundamental truth:
when the play is great, it can be exploited in many, many different fashions.
And never should it be done otherwise. To me it’s an anti-creative process to
say, “OK what can we do now to exploit the digital opportunities that exist?”
No, the question is, “What’s the show? What’s the play? What are we trying to communicate?
Who are the characters? What’s the story? Who are the writers? Who is executing
the property?” That’s what we concentrate on, and then there are others who can
exploit that and do it very effectively.”

—Peter
Roth, President, Warner Bros. Television (October 2006)

“Television has been a
tremendous connective tissue in the culture. For a long time, I could describe
a character as an Eddie Haskell type. Anyone my age would know what that was
because they had all watched Leave It to Beaver. And you can still do that now, you can say, He’s
like a Kramer, and everybody would know what that means because they have seen Seinfeld. But that’s becoming more difficult to do as time
goes on. You realize there is not as
much connective tissue out there because there is so much available and the
audience is very, very stratified. Steve Carell may be well-known because of
his movies, but the other actors in The Office could probably sit in a coffee shop in Manhattan
and not be bothered much. That is one of the things that have changed, and it’s
a bad thing, in a way, because, even though it’s great to have choice, it’s
also interesting that we don’t have as much shared experience.”

—Bill
Carter, Reporter, The New York Times (October 2006)

“I’m most perplexed by
this desire to watch TV and movies on smaller screens like iPods, phones and
laptops. If this really catches on and the industry decides to write directly
for the mini-multiplex, directors will subliminally begin to abandon wide shots
for extreme close-ups and everything will start looking claustrophobic. This
nice habit of appointment television and looking forward to a Friday-night
movie could be replaced by entertainment on the run and then the movie and TV
industry would completely merge with America’s growing penchant for
drive-throughs instead of sit-down experiences.”

—Steven
Spielberg (October 2006)

“You do get the feeling
that all television shows, or most of them, are more fast-paced now than they
used to be. Even we’re more fast-paced now than we were. Those things pervade
the industry as a whole and they get in our DNA as you’re writing or producing.
I don’t think it’s a conscious reaction to what’s going on, but you certainly
can’t afford to bore anybody and you better get on with the story pretty
quickly and you better come up with twists and turns of whatever kind that keep
people watching. We don’t say to ourselves, there’s a lot of two-minute
episodes on cell phones and iPods out there, we gotta compete with that. But it
enters into the way things are done in a more subtle way.”

—Robert
Cochran, Co-Creator, 24 (October
2006)

“We really believe in the theory
that most of these shows start with a great idea from a writer and we don’t
really believe in giving writers assignments. The shows need to come from their
gut and be about something that they really understand and are so passionate
about, that they can dig deep enough to get to the essence of the relationships
and the essence of the stories. We think this is a key ingredient to making
shows resonate for an audience. So there’s nothing that makes us happier than
when a pitch starts off “I base this pitch on my family,” or “I base this pitch
on my first job” or some such thing. We find this always seems to have much
deeper emotional cores and we’re fans of that.”

—Gary
Newman, Co-President, Twentieth Century Fox Television (October 2006)

“Do we copy?! [Laughs] Look, it’s part of the business. Everybody copies everyone else. It’s just sour
grapes on behalf of everyone else when we get a hit show. But this summer
alone, there was Rock Star: Supernova, The One, America’s Got
Talent––they are all variations on a theme and they were taken from
American Idol, but you haven’t heard us cry.”

—Mike
Darnell, Executive VP, Specials, Alternative and Late Night Programming,
FOX Broadcasting Company (October 2006)

“After a while there is
only so much of the reality shows that you can watch before it gets mind
numbing. The only thing that I can be thankful for is that there is a large
number of people out there who want to be entertained but they also want to
learn something, and that’s where we [come in]. Everybody needs to watch
something that is entertainment for entertainment’s sake, but at some point,
people do come back and say, you know what? If I’m going to spend time watching
something, I want to learn something, too.”

—Laureen
Ong, president, National Geographic Channel U.S. (October 2006)

“To really nurture talent,
you have to be in the boat with them. And you have to create an environment so
they feel very protected and very safe, where they can spend the bulk of their
time creatively and generating great stories and great scripts. We take on a
lot of the day-to-day management, the minutia and dealing with larger issues
that they don’t have time for. And we protect their vision. A lot of time
writers feel themselves very left alone to battle either a studio or a network
that might all of a sudden have a different viewpoint of how the series should
go that wasn’t necessarily what the writer had conceived of originally. It’s a
tough process—the amount of layers you have to get through to get a show
from concept to air—it’s a lot of layers in it, and we find that we can
be very helpful in just guiding and standing right with the writers and saying,
“You know, we’re here to protect you and we’re here to help you understand.”
And I think that the writers that work with us really respond to that. They
always feel that they have a safe haven. To get great work out of people you
first have to get them relaxed and comfortable.”

—Jonathan
Littman, Head, Jerry Bruckheimer Television (October 2006)

“My philosophy on that is
that it’s dangerous for any TV programmer to rely entirely on self produced
programming, because no matter how good you are having the access to the
variety and different thinking is an important part of the programming mix.”

—Jim
Samples, Executive VP and GM, Cartoon Network (October, 2006)

“There is always somebody
at work, in any job, who is annoying. Usually we enjoy the job aspect of our
job, but there is always somebody around who just makes us miserable. Then we
go home and bitch about that guy or we bitch to a co-worker about that guy. It
seemed really cool to me to have somebody do that bitching while the guy was
still in the room.”

—David
Shore, Creator, House
(October 2006)

“The kids were so
talented, and they’ll work themselves till they fall over. Working with adult
stars there are considerations, because they have their own lives and
commitments. When you are working
with 16-, 17- and 18-year-old kids, you can say, “Run and throw yourself
against that wall!” And they go, “OK!” They’re great!”

—Bill
Borden, Creator and Executive Producer, High School Musical (October 2006)

“I really trace a lot of the
amazing sea change in the industry back to last October when Disney announced
that they would be making available some of the ABC shows on iTunes for a $1.99
per episode. And from that announcement we went through a period where it felt
like once a week, if not every day, there was yet another announcement. No one
has really figured out what the real business model will be, so the commercial
networks are just putting money in lots of different areas, trying to hedge
their bets.”

—Paula
Kerger, President and CEO, PBS (October, 2006)