Through the Wire

Contributors: Ted Hearn, Linda Moss and R. Thomas Umstead.

She’s a TV Anchor, Not a Lobbyist

In its noisy quest to gain carriage from Comcast Corp., The America Channel has assembled a few political, legal and financial advisers with Beltway connections.

Kathleen Wallman, a former top lawyer in the Clinton White House, is handling official communications with the Federal Communications Commission. Steptoe & Johnson attorney Pantelis Michalopoulos, who normally hammers away at the cable industry on behalf of Charlie Ergen of EchoStar Communications Corp., is listed on TAC’s Web site as regulatory and public-affairs counsel.

What really caught our eye, though, was the person listed as handling government relations — Barbara Harrison, a morning news anchor for WRC, the NBC affiliate in Washington, D.C. TAC chairman and CEO Doron Gorshein said Harrison was a personal friend he had asked for help.

“No, she is not a lobbyist,” Gorshein said in an e-mail. “ 'Government relations’ is a broad term. It is not her title. She is an adviser to the company and has developed relationships for us, primarily in the D.C. area.”

Within 24 hours of our calls to TAC and WRC, Harrison demanded that TAC remove her from its Web site. “She had no idea she had been listed in this way. She just didn’t know. She said, 'This is impossible. How can this be? I have not agreed to do this,’ ” WRC spokeswoman Angela Owens said.

Harrison, Owens added, received an apology from TAC.

E! Guys and Dolls, Partying Al Fresco

It used to be that Home Box Office was the network for big splashy parties, but other nets are making a splash these days in Hollywood, too. E! Entertainment Television recently took over the spot of the moment, the Tropicana Bar at the pool of the newly renovated Roosevelt Hotel, to promo its late summer series in style.

The guest list was heavy on the Playboy set, given the upcoming seriesThe Girls Next Door focuses on the life of the trio of current girlfriends of septuagenarian Hugh Hefner.

Reality TV was also densely represented by the participants of the currently running Kill Reality and the upcoming Filthy Rich: Cattle Drive, which takes Fox’s The Simple Life concept forward, but hopefully with more likeable millionaire spawn than Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie.

But people without E! series got in too, including Gary Dourdan (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation), Jose Canseco, Jason Priestley, Michael Rapaport, Xzibit and Sara Rue.

Still Working In The Danger Zone

Perhaps it was unavoidable, given that San Diego is the home of the “Top Gun” naval aviator advanced-combat flight school. But at the annual meetings of the American Cable Association and National Cable Television Cooperative last week, the crowd continuously used war-like terms to describe their testy relations with rivals, like broadcasters and satellite TV.

The festivities included a Disney-ESPN sponsored party on the aircraft carrier USS Midway. That apparently brought back memories for ACA counsel Chris Cinnamon, who chalked up seven years of active duty in the Navy, accumulating 1,500 flight hours and flying numerous missions on carrier-based fighter jets.

During his retransmission-consent presentation, Cinnamon showed striking slides of some of his airborne activities with F-14s, including a live-missile exercise.

“This is part of my background, and this background informs my views of how I think about retransmission consent,” Cinnamon, somewhat tongue in cheek, told attendees. Navy fighters about to engage in one-to-one dogfights would exclaim “Fight’s on,” according to Cinnamon, and he said when he thinks of looming retransmission-consent talks, “Two words come to mind: Fight’s on.”

The NCTC’s closing panel was actually called “Top Guns,” and moderator Jeff Abbas, the group’s senior vice president of business affairs, kept the military theme going by giving panelists (several small operators) nicknames like “Viper,” “Maverick” and “Ice Man.”

Then Abbas sounded a real battle cry.

“These guys are combat-ready and fully engaged for the competition,” he said. “Like you, they have seen several years where the cable industry and their businesses have taken total casualties — a total of 25 million subscribers, and growing — that DBS has and we do not. Like you … they see the prospect of fighting a two-front war, with the RBOCs. And like you, they share the same beliefs, that we cannot afford to retreat any further. We cannot afford to play only defense. We must hold our ground and reclaim grown in video and we must storm and attack with new services.”

And you thought it was only business.

From Dish Junk to Artistic Expression

When students were solicited by Time Warner Cable in the Los Angeles area to loose their imaginations on defunct satellite dishes, they did not disappoint.

The division recently concluded its local “Dish it Up!” art contest by presenting $1,000 to a Huntington Beach Community Day School student, the top prizewinner for his creation. Wesley Peterson made a speedy, remote controlled droid out of the former direct-broadcast satellite dish he’d been given by the operator.

The contest was open to high school and college-aged students in Time Warner’s Los Angeles and Orange counties service area. The contest was created, in part, as a way to use some of the dishes that have been accumulating in the operator’s storerooms, victims of its dish buy-back program.

Another Community Day School student was the third-place winner, crafting a working water fountain out of three of the dishes. That artist, Christian Reichert, earned $250 for his creation.

Their assemblages will remain on display at an Orange County mall through September.

A Little Side Gig In Theatrical Fringe

This week Lifetime Television public-relations maven Gary Morgenstein will trade in his ink pen for a director’s chair as his dramatic stage play, Ponzi Man, debuts as part of the ninth annual New York International Fringe Festival for emerging playwrights.

The play, about a strong matriarch who tries to keep both her family and business together, will run several times throughout the month-long festival. But Morgenstein, who has also authored two sports-related novels, says that his playwriting gig is just a hobby and that he’s fully committed to Lifetime and the cable industry.

“I’ll just have to continue writing plays at lunch,” he quipped.