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HBO paid for exclusive rights to Monday's concert for President Obama's 2-day, inauguration celebration. No discretionary income. No HBO subscription. No concert viewing.
Trickle up, economic incentive theory. Make money so you can afford HBO.
Is it just me or is there something extremely fishy, well, not fishy, but nauseating, well, not nauseating, but outrageous that the Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC) and the Joint Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies (JCIC) sold off inaugural event coverage real estate to commercial media rather than the commercial media covering the events for the benefit of its audiences and using the usual advertising vehicles to make costs and profits?
My wife and I saw the concert promoted for several days, then couldn't find it. Nowhere was it clear that it was an exclusive HBO deal (a station I do not subscribe to). I only found this out when I was traveling and, by chance, saw it repeated on HBO.
The PIC argued that selling the exclusive rights to HBO was the only way to pay for the extravaganza in these tough economic times. Really!? Obama and the Democratic party raised how much money, for the campaign, $750,000,000? Guess they lost their touch. Hell, the head of the JCIC, Senator Diane Feinstein, could have paid for it herself...with a little help from her Knob Hill, San Francisco friends.
The Inauguration should have thought through the concept of letting a corporation own Obama's inaugural concert. After all, wasn't it performed at the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall? Wasn't it touted as an official event of the inauguration of our president? And now HBO owns the record of that event?
Moreover, according to the NYPost, top executives at ABC were upset that cable news networks aired footage of the Obamas dancing at the Neighborhood Inaugural Ball. Reportedly, ABC paid $2 million for exclusive rights to broadcast President Barack Obama's speech and the couple's dance, although later agreed to let other networks air his speech, but not the dance.
Crass and petty.
Do you like this trend? I don't. Wasn't one of the tenets of Obama's campaign poetry that if you can't afford to do something, don't do it, especially if it's not necessary. Covering expenses of the concert by gate keepering it to those who can afford HBO was an idea that should have been jettisoned just like Bush's myopic and discredited idea of making America safe for democracy by shopping? Isn't the implication here that, if you can't afford to do it, don't find a way by prostitution or sub-prime mortgages? Hell, the PIC should have ginned up the fund raising engine called the Internet. They Democratic party did it during the campaign, why not to pay for the celebration of the success of that campaign?
If this is Obama's idea (he must have approved it, even if he didn't originate the idea) of how to economize,
by showing that history is for sale (so Bushy), by selling off bits of our celebration of his election to the highest bidder, one has to worry about where this musical chair of values ends.
Will it only be the public, the ones who voted out of power or access to power, the political mercenaries, the lobbyist culture, the self-annointed, economy-raping,Wall Street uber menches. Is it only to be the hope-filled citizens who believed the poetry and didn't anticipate the post-election prose, who are left without a seat to our nation's history unfolding in the media?
This door of monetizing historic events must be closed, this precedent declared non-precedental. If this is the open, transparent presidency that Obama declares it to be, it should be closed to these ill-conceived, Faustian bargains. What's next, paying for the right to view presidential press conferences?
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