Dana Blankenhorn

The Coming Disney Breakup

Walt Disney Co. is in play. (I remember getting one of these sent to me after the Disney Channel's launch in 1980.)

CEO Bob Iger fired his replacement and can’t find another one. The company is killing its streaming service by reducing content and raising prices. Its deal with Penn Entertainment, directly running a sportsbook, means ESPN is now incompatible with the main company’s business model. The resorts business is tanking, thanks mainly to climate change.

My guess is that the entertainment company will be sold to Apple, probably within a year. ESPN, ABC, and the parks will be spun out as separately traded companies. It might happen all at once.

The only reason to keep the whole thing together was “synergy.” A bad year for one division might be offset by a good year in another. The combination would then be a better investment than the parts.

But that’s not working. The movie business is dying. Disney is doing all it can to hasten that by refusing to bargain with its unions. If management and labor aren’t partners, you can’t do business.

The TV business was dead years ago. This includes cable.

The resorts business is increasingly divorced from the rest of the company.

The Internet is doing to the streaming business what it did to print. Paywalls take away 90% of your audience. Advertising rates keep declining because there’s too much free content. Live sports are viable but the billionaires who control teams and leagues keep pricing fans out of the market. If it’s all just about money, the players will gravitate to whoever offers more of it.

The Streaming Winners (And Losers)

This is something I saw coming years ago at Investorplace.

Streaming will be owned by the Cloud Czars.

All the entertainment companies with their lawyers, producers, and lobbyists are going to fade away. Together, they’re worth a fraction of what Amazon or Alphabet are. Amazon and Alphabet are, in turn, worth barely half what Apple is.

It’s game over.

The reason is simple. Think of the cloud as the operating system of our time. Control what’s beneath and you control what’s above. IBM understood this in the 1960s. Microsoft understood it better in the 1980s.

Propaganda for Good

Russia thought it was attacking a Russian province.

Turned out it was attacking Europe.

Europe is a state of mind. It’s egalitarian, but it’s fractious. It’s united, but not entirely. It’s western civilization in microcosm – messy, slow to anger, but mighty when provoked.

The invasion revealed that Putin’s Russia wasn’t even a nation-state. It was a medieval Empire, gilded by 20^th century ideologies, wealth, and technologies.

What makes this Empire so dangerous is that it has used all it had to attack America. Until recently it was successful. Putin ran our government, through Trump. Had we not beaten Trump he would be sitting in Kiev right now.

The Putin threat to this nation is still alive. It can still win. That’s because Trump was never Putin’s most dangerous puppet.

Rupert Murdoch is.

Without Fox News, Trump would have gone nowhere. Without Fox News, racism could not still be rising. Putin is a King. He won’t be satisfied until he rules everything. Murdoch is an oligarch. Rich man wants to be King.

Find me three issues on which Murdoch and Putin fundamentally disagree. I’ll wait.

I’ve written this before. It is time for Americans to become Ukranian in the defense of our heritage and rights. I’m not talking about grabbing guns and heading for Kentucky. I am talking instead of using what Ukrainians have taught us, in their hour of need, about propaganda.

The video above teaches this lesson. The song is about mothers, how they grow gray but still treat us like children, protecting us. What we see are women soldiers rushing into the war zone to take children to safety.

Then note the twist. These aren’t their own children they’re saving, or not just their own. When the children are safe, the women go back to the war. They seek their faith. They go on. They are soldiers. Everyone is a soldier.

What America is going through is a struggle. It’s a struggle that can be won. But it will take every weapon at our disposal, including propaganda. We have 5 ½ months and, if we win this time, anything is possible. If we fail, nothing may be possible for a long, long, long time.

The Death of Cable (and what comes after)

On March 25 Apple announced the death of the cable television model.

What replaces it is, in a word, the Internet. Streaming services, yes, but with far more interactivity than cable or broadcasting ever offered. True integration between audiences and programming, whether you need news, sports, or entertainment. Available wherever you happen to be. All you need is a mobile phone.

This is the entertainment model of the future.

Sounds great. People are now paying $200-250 per month for bundled Internet and TV service, with the TV taking up two-thirds of that bill. They’re paying another $60 or so for mobile Internet service, with calling bundled in.

There’s a lot of money at stake.

I covered the birth of the present world. I covered it twice.

The Streaming Crash of 2019

For the last several years, a lot of companies have been trying to fit through a very narrow door.

That door is streaming.

The success of Netflix, and of podcast stars like Marc Maron, has caused a heart attack in the entertainment world. Suddenly everyone, and every company, is aiming for a taste of this action.

They can’t all get it.

There aren’t enough hours in the day to listen to a fraction of the podcasts available now. I have a half-dozen in my phone, and I can’t get to all of them. Long-haul truck drivers can get to a lot, and people who work as security guards may listen for 8 hours per day. But a single Joe Rogan podcast can run 4 hours. Maron does 3 hours every week.

CBS, NPR, the BBC and others are hitching their wagon to podcasts. Spotify plans to spend $500 million on podcasts, an industry that generates $700 million in annual revenue.

These numbers make no sense.

Unions and Management

Unions are, by their nature, conservative organizations.

Their aim is to protect members from change. Workers whose skills drive change, like computer programmers today, don’t need unions. Biology researchers don’t need unions.

But most other people do, because without unions competing in the marketplace, without labor being as organized as capital, imbalances grow that can tear any society apart. That’s what is happening now. The imbalance of power, between labor and management, between workers and owners, is tearing the fabric of American society apart as we watch.

I’m often asked whether I’m liberal or conservative, left or right. I’ve been both. Mainly, I’m for balance. I’m for muddling through. I’m for open competition, and for maintaining competition after the capitalist game ends and most players lose. Only government can maintain that balance, when it’s supported by the people and their interests. Unions are one such interest.

To say, “I’m for the unions,” however, as many liberals do, isn’t an adequate answer. Because, as I said, unions are conservative. Give them power and they’ll slow progress. Union bosses can be corrupted, and can corrupt everything they touch, because like managers, like entrepreneurs, like government officials, and like writers, they’re human beings.

Are Movies the Textiles of the 21st Century?

Think of this as Volume 18, Number 44 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

---

When I was a kid, I was taught that Georgia’s nickname was “The Empire State of the South.”

Back then Georgia had an umbilical relationship then with my home state, New York, the original “Empire State.” Georgia, and the states around it, were where New York outsourced manufacturing that required large amounts of labor. Georgia was the original India.

Back in the 1950s the South was filled with textile mills of all kinds, and Atlanta was the regional center to which all those plants reported. One reason the Atlanta business community was so anxious to do business with this city’s black leaders, and advertise itself as “the city too busy to hate,” was to protect that relationship with New York, which didn’t much care for overt racism. For all his faults, the original John D. Rockefeller believed in racial equality. His wife was the Spelman of Spelman College. And throughout the years of my upbringing our governor was Nelson Rockefeller, a grandson of John D.

Defending an Atlantan

Having lived in Atlanta for nearly 30 years, I have been witness many times to the degrading attitude my original hometown of New York takes to this place.

Of course, it's the same attitude New York takes to every other place in America. It looks down at us. It assumes a right to define us, to buy and sell us, to treat us as its economic and cultural subjects.

New York does not know best. You have only to look at the fate of Turner Broadcasting in the hands of Time Warner to know that. CNN is crap. The company disinvested in The Cartoon Network, which had been successful, for short term gain. It's sad, and I know Ted Turner would agree.

Usually Atlanta falls meekly under the gaze of the Big Apple. At least white Atlanta does. Black Atlanta -- that's something else. You don't see black rap or R&B artists kowtowing to their New York counterparts. They have succeeded in bringing a little power down here, and that's actually good for everyone, white and black.

Something similar has finally happened in TV thanks to Tyler Perry. He came here less than 20 years ago from his birthplace of New Orleans, penniless. Now he's worth a great deal of money. He has built his own production studio on property formerly owned by Delta Airlines in southwest Atlanta.

Squeal Like a Pig

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 43 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

The recent dust-up between the Obama Administration and Fox News deserves a proper response from someone who knows a little political history.

Squeal like a pig! (This is a family blog. Those who wish to can learn why actor Bill McKinney is smiling at y'all on his Web site.)

Regular readers will know I've been pushing this quite some time. I have actually been looking forward to comparing someone like Joe Biden to Spiro Agnew. And for good historical reason.

The most important thing a Thesis must do, not for validation but just to get its program through, is to change the formula of what is acceptable.

The boundaries were pretty easy to set in our nation's first generational crisis, the Civil War. Supporting the South was treason, supporting peace giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

The job was done most subtly by FDR. Many people think of the Hays Code as having been about sex. But has anyone asked why the Roosevelt Administration endorsed it? It was because the Code demanded that movies support the government, saying that "Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed."

After Dinner

While all the news shows were covering the Inaugural Balls this evening, Turner Movie Classics (known at my home as the Dead Movie Channel) re-ran a classic from 1967, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.

It's a movie that has lived many lives. It won Spencer Tracy his 9th (and last) Oscar nomination -- he died shortly after filming ended. It then killed Sidney Poitier's career as a Big Star, as black folks who had moved from King to Malcolm X decided he was just an "Uncle Tom."

Nothing could have been further from the truth, but the character he played, a brilliant black doctor with honors as long as your arm, was very much in keeping with what critics call the Magic Negro, an incredibly gifted, infinitely patient, almost godlike black figure who is nevertheless not the center of the story, but a means by which some white character finds their own soul.

There are many examples in contemporary cinema. The caddy in "Bagger Vance." Morgan Freeman in "Driving Miss Daisy," or as God himself in "Bruce Almighty." Queen Latifah in Steve Martin's "Bringing Down the House." (In fact Poitier's characterization is more nuanced. He is, in fact, conflicted about his own choice, and how others will react. It's Katharine Ross' Joanna who is truly unruffled.)

The problem, in other words, was that Sidney Poitier's character was not at the center of the story, but that Spencer Tracy's was. Of course that's the way with drama -- it's the one who changes whom we focus on.