Oregon Media Insiders

That gleeful shrieking you heard last night? It was me.

What's up?

As reported here in the comments and at PDXRadio, the CBS Radio stations here in town have begun layoffs in advance of the expected sale of most if not all of the Portland cluster. Reports so far are that KUFO MD and midday guy Dan Bozyk is gone as of yesterday, along with KHits morning show team Dave Hood and Carol Batchelor.

The layoff list is assumed to be larger, though. Anyone have the full scoop?

This past Tuesday, August 12, 2008, I happened to catch the 6:30-7:00 PM block of the Channel 9 News out of Eugene. The new anchors seemed in the vein of the old anchors. The weatherman appeared a bit subdued. Given the whirlwind pace of muggings that have occurred in the newsroom recently, his state of mind should seemed apropos. Everything was in its place until the Sports Report. The sports segment opened cold out of a station break. There was no Sports announcer on-set. No anchor-to-anchor bonhomie. But then, it’s only sports.

I am stuck some place without internet for a few days, so if you've been waiting for your comments etc to be approved, you'll have to be patient. If I'm lucky I'll be able to hop on once a day. Things will be back to normal, or as normal as they ever are around here, by Monday.

Here's your open thread.

Being a serious student of the human condition, I am always on the lookout for tendencies and patterns. Since I began my tumultuous career on the Oregon Media Insiders web site, I have spotted what can only be described as a most disturbing exemplar, an anti-intellectual orthodoxy that seems to have tunneled to the very core of Portland media members.

The content of locally created media web sites has always been regulated in one form or another, however between sometime in the most recent past and now, OMI, in conjunction with the Fairy Blog Mother and “cablenut” formed what the OMI Anti-Media Activities Committee (AMAC)- (known colloquially as A-Mack).

Were the Portland stations still too busy congratulating and criticising themselves over Gearhart coverage to get the story of the day Wednesday? At least 9 people from Southern Oregon killed in the worst air firefighting disaster in American history. The Oregonian was all over it. So guess we'll see you today?

“ When you work in television, you never get to really sense the experience of the audience – you can’t see them or hear them or know what they think.”
Grant McOmie

This quote, taken directly from the Forest Grove News-Times, caps what this critic has said all along about the elitist Portland media. In that crowded coterie of self-congratulatory asses, the honor of the most inflated egos goes to the broadcast television news types. Talk about out of touch.

The Plot Quickens

After wading through myriad comments on Hunter Thompson’s last posting having to do with the lambastation of the Portland Drive-By media, two comments caught this writer’s eye. The first was a comment by the now familiar TALPDX.

TALPDX proclaimed annoyance at my existence. In the course of said critique, TALPDX employed a number of mixed metaphors, a sign of amateurish composition. Of course, if one has followed TALPDX for any length of time, one knows that TALPDX toils in one of the Portland television sweatshops. Hence the hackneyed writing.

Winston Churchill pointed out that, “Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.”