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Tag: Alabama

  • Three million homes have no CBS service via TWC

    Three million homes have no CBS service via TWC

    MUMBAI: As Time Warner Cable and CBS continue their negotiating deadlock, Starcom MediaVest researcher Sam Armando has discovered how widespread the blackouts are individually in the New York, Los Angeles and Dallas markets. TWC has refused to make the figures available.

     

    Armando writes in a blog post that 17 per cent of homes in both New York and Dallas are without the local CBS station, while the figure climbs to 26 per cent in the Los Angeles market.

     

    On a national level, the number of homes with CBS-owned local stations blacked out is around 3.2 million, according to CBS. Showtime is off the air across TWC’s national footprint, as TWC and CBS continue to battle over terms of re-upping a carriage deal. The blackouts started 2 August.

     

    CBS has called on talent to encourage TWC customers to switch providers and on Monday brought the Manning brothers into the fold. A newspaper ad in New York might suggest CBS thinks the blackouts could continue until 15 September.

     

    “You could miss this historic matchup,” the ad reads, referring to the New York Giants vs. Denver Broncos game on that Sunday, with Peyton and Eli Manning facing off.

     

    The ad also suggests viewers could miss the much-anticipated college game between Alabama and Texas A&M on 14 September “featuring Heisman winner Johnny Manziel.” That copy could become moot any day now as Manziel is under NCAA investigation for receiving payments for his autograph; he could be suspended for the game.

  • TV anchorman Walter Cronkite expires at 92

    TV anchorman Walter Cronkite expires at 92

    MUMBAI: Walter Cronkite, the first TV anchorman of the US networks’ golden age, died of cerebral vascular disease at the age of 92 on Friday.

    Incidentally, he died just three days before the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, another earth-shaking moment of history linked with his relentless reporting.

    From 1962 to 1981, Cronkite was the face of the “CBS Evening News”, when stories ranged from the assassinations of President John F Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to racial and anti-war riots, Watergate and the Iranian hostage crisis.

    It may be noted that it was Cronkite who read the bulletins coming from Dallas when Kennedy was shot on 22 November 1963, interrupting a live CBS-TV broadcast of the soap opera As the World Turns.

    Cronkite was the broadcaster on whom the title “anchorman” was first applied, and he became so identified with that role that eventually his own name became the term for the job in other languages (Swedish anchors are known as Kronkiters; in Holland, they are Cronkiters).

    Cronkite followed the 1960s space race with open fascination, anchoring marathon broadcasts of major flights from the first suborbital shot to the first moon landing, exclaiming, “Look at those pictures, wow!” as Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon’s surface in 1969. In 1998, for CNN, he went back to Cape Canaveral to cover John Glenn’s return to space after 36 years.

    “It is impossible to imagine CBS News, journalism or indeed America without Walter Cronkite,” said CBS News president Sean McManus in a statement. “More than just the best and most-trusted anchor in history, Cronkite guided America through our crises, tragedies and also our victories and greatest moments.”

    Cronkite was scheduled to speak last January at the 50th anniversary celebrations of the US Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, but ill health prevented him from doing so. 
    Paying his condolence to the celebrity TV anchorman, US President Barack Obama said, “He was there through wars and riots, marches and milestones, calmly telling us what we needed to know. And through it all, he never lost the integrity he gained growing up in the heartland. But Walter was always more than just an anchor. He was someone we could trust to guide us through the most important issues of the day.”