of COURSE they want to end residuals

I have been stewing about a piece in the NYTimes Media and Advertising section (link here).

The press briefing was conducted by Barry M. Meyer, CEO of Time Warner, Anne Sweeney, president of Walt Disney-ABC TV Group, and J. Nicholas Counter, president of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, an industry bargaining group. The press conference was held as a kind of opening salvo in the upcoming contract battles with the WGA. Media companies are proposing to end the way residuals are calculated, in a manner designed to reduce residual payments almost to nothing. I imagine that directors, actors, and anyone else who receives residuals is next. Perhaps we'll begin to see ads on Craigslist for writers for vehicles for big stars, paying $12 an hour, or a dollar a script page. (None of these figures appear in the NYTimes article; they are my extrapolation from watching remuneration for regular writing jobs plummet.)

Well, this clears up a question that has been mystifying me for a while now: Why are the networks so eager to thrust "reality TV" on the public? I know it's cheap, that's a powerful reason, but I didn't realize until I read this article that it's part of a concerted effort to lower the standard of television and develop in the TV audience a tolerance, even a craving, for complete crap. Which, of course, is what we'll see more and more of, if they cut back on residual payments.

It looks like what has happened to the rest of us over the last decade -- showing up for work one day and finding that either your job has been eliminated entirely or that your company only wants to pay you a half to a third of your salary for the work you've been doing, while the top executives of your company are paid vast amounts of money for their work -- is happening to the enormously profitable media industry. Of course they don't want to pay writers. That is money out of some CEO's compensation package and golden parachute fund.