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Damage control at Miller

"We took a hard look at the situation and realize where we fell short," said Virgis Colbert of Miller Brewing Company, discussing the flap over the company's Rock & Roll commemorative cans, which failed to include any African American artists.

The company has pointed out that the multi-faceted campaign has other elements besides the artwork on cans of beer which do pay tribute to the contributions of African Americans to the music. Still, it did not duck responsibility for the gaffe and issued a formal apology.

"Miller Brewing Company sincerely apologizes to the African-American community, to music fans and to our valued customers for this occurrence," said Miller in a statement. "African Americans obviously have played a formative role in the development of Rock & Roll, and despite our efforts, we did not manage this component of the promotion appropriately."

Slant-o-meter says nets lean left

A group called Media Tenor has a metric it calls the Slant-o-meter, which it says objectively measures coverage of the presidential campaign. It is based on content keys which are rated positive, neutral or negative, and are applied to news reports in a way that minimized interpretation from the report compilers. Media Tenor says the method is 90% accurate.

The Slant-o-meter was applied to ABC, CBS and NBC for the period from 8/2/04 through 8/10/04, and it found significant differences in the presidential campaign reporting. However, in all three cases, Kerry was the beneficiary of a more positive overall approach.

Winning top neutrality honors was CBS. Its reporting on Bush was completely neutral, while its Kerry coverage was 8% positive.

Both NBC and ABC leaned heavily toward Kerry, according to the Slant-o-meter. It pegged NBC's Bush coverage as 15% negative compared to being 11% positive on Kerry coverage. ABC was slightly less negative toward Bush, at 14%, but much more positive toward Kerry, at 20%.

RBR observation:

This is not a metric we've seen cited anywhere else. We came across it, and we're presenting it for your consideration. We are somewhat leery of techniques which try to overlay a predetermined set of parameters over real-life conditions. For example, we've had pollsters ask a question and then provide only three simple answers for us to choose from - - more often than not, our answer is not there at all, or we would want to offer a more nuanced answer than they are prepared to deal with. They may say their method is scientific and accurate, but we'd argue that they sure didn't get OUR response in there accurately. That said, this study would be a whole lot more interesting if it included, at a minimum, Fox and CNN. And perhaps PBS, for good measure.

Appeals court: Grokster, StreamCast don't violate copyrights

The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week that online file-sharing companies are not responsible for copyright infringement taking place through their network, saying they do not violate copyright laws, even though their users may swap copyrighted music and video files.

Grokster, Streamcast Networks and Sharman Networks (Kazaa) were the defendants in a case brought on by dozens of motion picture and music companies. The companies had hoped to force the file-sharing nets to place filters in their systems to prevent the sharing of copyrighted music and movies.

The plaintiffs claimed that over 90% of the files exchanged through use of the peer-to-peer file-sharing software, 70% of which was owned by the plaintiffs, the court says.

But unlike the original Napster, which lost a series of legal battles with the music industry, including appeals to the Ninth Circuit, the court sided with Grokster and StreamCast. The difference was a lower court ruling which found the two companies are not liable because they don't maintain centralized indexes of files available for sharing. Three years ago the Ninth Circuit ruled that Napster's centralized system was illegal.

CC Radio SVP/Southeast Jay Meyers speaks on Hurricane Charley

RBR spoke Meyers, whose office is in the Miami/Ft. Lauderdale market, about preparations and reparations, before and after Hurricane Charley, and more on how WCVU-FM "Seaview 104.9" (8/19 RBR Daily Epaper #162) has been the beacon for citizens left in the path:

How did the stations prepare?

We were on high alert across the state beginning Friday morning because we didn't know where this thing was going to go. After it went through, I was over in Punta Gorda personally all day on Sunday. Our radio stations were right in the middle of the damage.

During the storm, what happened at the stations?

The storms hit Punta Gorda roughly at 3PM on Friday. The town had only a little bit of notice, because up until around noon, those storms were supposed to stay out to sea, causing in Ft. Myers and Punta Gorda tropical storm force winds. It really was supposed to slam into Tampa.

The area here went into a massive evacuation. Our GM there, Mike Moody, the engineers and the folks on the ground, before they had to evacuate the building, they put all five stations onto a simulcast and then set up a studio-to-cell phone link. Mike essentially continued broadcasting as the storm began to hit, from the FEMA bunker at the Punta Gorda airport, alongside the FEMA director and other emergency officials that were in there. That broadcasting went on for about 20-25 minutes until the storm took out cell towers and the cells went dead. So at 3:20, essentially all the stations were off the air in town. They had to stay hunkered down at the airport until 7:30PM after the storms moved through and the FEMA director cleared them to go back to the stations.

A couple of the stations technically never went off the air. The carrier signal was there, there was just no way to feed them any programming. They got back about 8PM and started broadcasting emergency information. They were able to find one land line working and they actually started taking some calls from folks in the area to report damages and things like that. And the way they were able to do it was the most primitive of all broadcasting-Mike talked into the fax handset and held the earpiece up to the mic so the people listening on the radio could actually hear the caller.

More in tomorrow's RBR.