There are a lot of details that have yet to be reported, but this is big: according to The Hollywood Reporter, Nielsen, the company that measures the ratings of television shows, is reportedly planning a significant shift in its ratings measurement system that will capture data about television viewing not simply through broadcast, but through streaming.

By September 2013, when the next TV season begins, Nielsen expects to have in place new hardware and software tools in the nearly 23,000 TV homes it samples. Those measurement systems will capture viewership not just from the 75 percent of homes that rely on cable, satellite and over the air broadcasts but also viewing via devices that deliver video from streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon, from so-called over-the-top services and from TV enabled game systems like the X-Box and PlayStation.

While some use of iPads and other tablets that receive broadband in the home will be included in the first phase of measurement improvements, a second phase is envisioned to include such devices in a more comprehensive fashion. The second phase is envisioned to roll out on a slower timetable, according to sources, will the overall goal to attempt to capture video viewing of any kind from any source.

The details here will be important. Will Nielsen measure viewing on Hulu, the streaming service set up by the networks? And if so, will it be capturing that data through user’s devices, or through reporting from Hulu? Will the pool of people who are measured be adjusted to account for people who don’t have televisions but watch substantial amounts of television through subscription services on devices? How will Nielsen measure clips of news shows embedded in network sites like MSNBC’s versus streams of full shows? What time period will streaming ratings cover? Will the ratings be adjusted based on a three-day viewing period, the way viewing from DVR recordings are now? Or will both streaming and DVR watching over the seven days after an initial broadcast count? That’s something that CBS president and CEO Les Moonves has been pushing for, and in a November earnings call said “we think it will happen in a short time.”
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I wrote last week about how to respond to the hiring of notorious homophobe Orson Scott Card by DC Comics to write Superman. Today, Andy Lewis and Borys Kit at the Hollywood Reporter explore how Card’s noxious, anti-gay views pose a challenge to the movie adaptation of his most famous work, Ender’s Game:

Now Summit faces the tricky task of figuring out how to handle Card’s involvement. The first big challenge will be whether to include him in July’s San Diego Comic-Con program. Promoting Ender’s Game without Card would be like trying to promote the first Harry Potter movie without J.K. Rowling. But having Card appear in the main ballroom in front of 6,500 fans could prove a liability if he’s forced to tackle the issue head-on during the Q&A session.

“I don’t think you take him to any fanboy event,” says one studio executive. “This will definitely take away from their creative and their property.” Another executive sums up the general consensus: “Keep him out of the limelight as much as possible.”

Ender’s insiders already are distancing themselves from the 61-year-old author. “Orson’s politics are not reflective of the moviemakers,” says one person involved in the film. “We’re adapting a work, not a person. The work will stand on its own.”

This seems like the most appropriate way to go in a situation that’s the opposite of DC’s decision to hire him. Summit may have had to give Card money for the right to adapt his material. But they don’t have any obligation to give him a platform. And I hope that Summit feels comfortable exercising their free speech rights as a corporation and as individual executives to make clear what they found valuable in Ender’s Game, and how it’s separate from their opinion of Card’s work to not just oppose equal marriage rights, but to push for the recriminalization of homosexuality. Maybe Card will revel in nine months of condemnation, and he’ll get to feel self-righteous about what’s happening to him. But I do think there’s something fitting about the forthcoming illustration that fiction isn’t bringing more people around Card’s way of thinking. Instead, his bigotry is going to drive people away from some of the best work he ever did.

Playing off its popular “30 for 30″ series of sports documentaries, ESPN Films this week rolled out “Nine For IX,” a series of nine documentaries that will celebrate the legacy of Title IX by telling the stories of female athletes and examining many of the issues women in sports still face today. Its films will explore racial and sexual identities of women in sports, the exploitation of female athletes as sex objects, discrimination faced by female reporters in male lockerrooms, and other issues that aren’t necessarily unique to women athletes, like disability, homosexuality, and the glory and heartbreak that come just from playing sports.

As great as the Nine for IX series will be and as positive as it is that ESPN is shining a bright light on the issues that affect women in sports every day, though, the series somehow manages to reinforce that there is still a wall between the games women play and those played by men. All nine films in the Nine for IX series, which will air from July 2 to August 27 on ESPN, were directed by women. And obviously, all nine are about women. Compare that to the 30 for 30 series, now in its third season. Just four of its 51 films have featured a female director or co-director, and just three have told the stories of female athletes. None of the series’ 10 short features that has aired or is in production is about women, and only one was directed by a woman.

What Nine for IX makes evident is that both stories about women in sports and female directors are readily available. Venus Williams beating racial discrimination, Audrey Mestre overcoming disability, and the U.S. Women’s National Team’s 1999 World Cup victory aren’t just great women-in-sports stories, they are great sports stories. They aren’t just triumphs of great women, they are triumphs of great athletes. The Nine for IX series is aiming to produce the same sort of informative, humanizing, and provocative films 30 for 30 is known for, and it is using the same type of high-quality directors that have made 30 for 30 a success so far, which only makes it more baffling that stories about women in sports and films directed by women have been so absent from the series since it began in 2010.

It seems that ESPN has determined, perhaps unintentionally, that the best way to tell stories about women in sports and the best way to utilize female directors is to tie them to a transformative event that will broadly appeal to women. But while ESPN has taken many positive steps to boost women’s sports and the roles of women in sports, and while it is rightly celebrating the success of Title IX, it shouldn’t need a special anniversary to talk about women in sports and the challenges they still face. And it shouldn’t need a special event to turn the cameras over to female directors. That it does serves as yet another indication of how far women in the world of sports have to go, even four decades after Title IX became law.

The young adult novelist Malinda Lo has, in a post about her efforts with colleague Cindy Pon to spend a year focused on diversity in young adult fiction, in two very concise paragraphs summed up the challenge felt by white creators who have the desire to include characters of color in their work, but are deeply concerned about committing cultural appropriation, falling into stereotype, or performing ugly mimicry that’s actually worse than keeping their stories lily-white:

I really appreciate writers who write outside their racial experience or sexual orientation. For one thing, there are many more white writers being published these days than writers of color, and if white writers can contribute to increasing the representation of people of color in the book market, I’m all for it. Second, I believe part of a writer’s job is to write about people who are different from her. I think it’s important that we do that. That we seek to tell stories that challenge us as writers on many levels — whether in characters or in plot or in style. Otherwise, we don’t grow as writers; we become mired in stories we’ve retold so many times they wear a groove in the stairs of our imaginations. I think that in order to truly fly, writers must do things that can cause us to crash and burn.

But I understand why writers are hesitant to write about characters who don’t share their race or sexual orientation. Cultural appropriation is real, and many of the guest posts about white/straight writers doing their research and attempting to get to the heart of their characters are, I think, sincere efforts to avoid cultural appropriation. I applaud that awareness, because I’ve read books that have been insanely popular, but have turned me off completely because they felt so much like cultural appropriation.

This is an issue that’s come up in debates about the monochromatic nature of the main cast in Girls. And it’s a good explanation for why so many people default to the idea that colorblindness in character writing—essentially, creating characters who are entirely unshaped and whose actions are undetermined by their racial or ethnic background—is progressive. As Marla Daniels put it on The Wire, you cannot lose if you do not play, and when it comes to race, a lot of white creators seem to agree with her: having a non-white character lets a show or movie look like its covering its bases, but refusing to actually create character details that are drawn from or rooted in that character’s race or ethnicity means that a writer or director doesn’t risk getting those details wrong. Race-blindness is more risk management strategy than a means of actually making television, movies, and books more diverse.

The thing about diversity is that it’s really not about numerical quotas—it’s about getting different kinds of experience, and different kinds of details on screen and on the page. And getting those details and experiences right is largely a matter of doing research about matters large and small, something that goes for white characters as well. If you’d make a character read Jewish by having him or her use the occasional Yiddishism and talk about the high holidays—the negotiation over Josh Girard’s TGS contract in 30 Rock, in which Jack offers him Sukkot off, is a great example of doing this—you can write detail that ties a Latino character to a country of their family’s origin in conversations about food, geography, religious practice, or any number of other characteristics. If you want to give an African-American character slang, or preferences, or style that aren’t generically and stereotypically black, think about region, which influences music, food, fashion, and experiences of racism—Boston has expressions of bigotry that are different from, say, those in Georgia.

In other words, treat characters of color like you’d treat white ones: as people who pop off the screen or the page in direct relation to the amount of work and detail that’s gone into building them as believable and complete human beings. If a creator is worried that adding details and nuances that are drawn from a character’s race and ethnicity will swamp that character, making them only legible as black, Latino or Asian, that means you’re not doing enough to develop that character, to think about how they in particular might react to experiences that might be common to someone of their heritage, and what specifically they’d take away from being the subject of a racially motivated traffic stop, an assumption that they’re undocumented, or an incident where someone treats them as if they’re either a genius or sexually inadequate. Running generic scenarios with a specific character in mind, even if those thought experiments don’t make it into a final product, can be a way of testing your own thinking about that character’s identity and uniqueness, and developing a set of consistent behaviors that will guide their reactions to all kinds of events, racially-motivated or no.

This is work I think writers don’t always realize they’re doing with white characters, because the details are familiar and easily available to them. But just because you don’t have to reach for the details of a bar mitzvah, a Lutheran wedding, or tailgating at Ole Miss doesn’t mean those nuances aren’t signifying racial identities, experiences, and allegiances. And just because you don’t know much about Mexican Catholicism, regional Chinese cooking, or the origins and contemporary reception of Kwanza, for example, doesn’t mean those details aren’t out there to be found. You may not be able to lose if you don’t touch race with a ten-foot pole. But your work, and the consumers of it, definitely can.

The bridge is yours.

-James Poniewozik on how the best satire works.

-Kristen Wiig will play a young Lucille Bluth.

-Battle School logos from the upcoming Ender’s Game movie.

-Yellow shirts make you most likely to die on Star Trek.

-Proust playing air guitar.

As the debate over gun violence has heated up in Washington after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, it’s included, quite predictably, multiple calls for the study of the relationship between violent media, particularly video games, and mass shootings. But the subject of video games as an academic subject came up in another context yesterday when House Speaker John Boehner tweeted “Re: #Obamaquester, no one should be talking about tax hikes when govt is paying people to play video games.”

He appears to be referring to a grant two researchers at the North Carolina State’s Gains Through Gaming Laboratory received from the National Science Foundation in 2009 to study how playing World of Warcraft affected brain cognition in senior citizens. Their research dealt with a limited pool of seniors, and had mixed results, but found that some senior citizens who scored low on a baseline test of cognition saw gains after playing the massively multiplayer online game. And it’s not the only grant the NSF has given out to academics who study video games. Bonnie Nardi, a professor at the University of California, got a grant in 2008 to study World of Warcraft players in the United States after doing research on their Chinese counterparts. And Indiana University’s Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing got $686,000 to study the creative communities that form in the World of Warcraft and the online retailer Etsy.

I don’t doubt that Boehner would find all of these studies equally ludicrous. But they’re a reminder of the challenge that serious scholarship about video games faces. Lawmakers—and frankly, many of their constituents—tend to be interested in studying video games when there’s a chance they can be made a scapegoat for larger social issues like gun violence. It’s a predisposition that, as Daniel Greenberg pointed out in a recent piece in The Atlantic, means research that finds positive benefits from video game play gets undercovered, and that studies that point to negative effects of gaming are accepted at face value even when their results are ambiguous:

That “good reason” includes the fact that the tests that some researchers use to measure aggression have never actually been validated for aggression, just for competiveness. At best, all the anti-game researchers can show is that imaginary violence leads only to imaginary violence. At no time can they show that imaginary violence ever crosses over to cause actual violence. Or even real aggression. Just competiveness.

These biases mean, as I’ve written before, that even if the various proposals to study video games and violence are adopted by Congress and signed into law by President Obama, it’s impossible to believe that the resulting research would resolve this debate once and for all. If the results show no relationship, they’ll be ignored, and after the next spasm of gun violence, the calls for research will begin again, with the people behind them hoping that a fresh round of studies will demonstrate a relationship they badly want to be there.
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Over at Vulture, Amanda Dobbins has an interesting post responding to the criticism of Life Is But A Dream, the documentary Beyoncé Knowles produced about herself and largely drawn from footage she either shot of herself via webcam and had shot for her as part of her efforts to archive her life, that it’s boring and stage-managed, a testament to Beyoncé’s perfectionism rather than genuinely revealing. Dobbins suggests that it’s a rebuke to the culture of celebrity meltdown:

Life Is But a Dream is nothing but an exercise in public togetherness; even the webcam confessionals and a tender speech about her miscarriage can’t hide the obvious calculation behind the self-directed film. This is Beyoncé propaganda, a 90-minute self-paean to a pop star whose name is synonymous with control. What’s interesting — interesting enough that Beyoncé feels the need to address it in her own hagiography — is that “control” has become a bad word.

“I don’t have to kill myself and be so hard on myself,” Beyoncé says of her perfectionism at one point. You can take that as a stab at self-improvement, or you can interpret it as a savvy attempt to answer her critics in the middle of a film designed to reinforce her Perfect image. It’s probably a little bit of both — if anything, Life Is But a Dream teaches us that Beyoncé is not much more than a construct of recorded footage. (She is filming herself all the time, after all. Even in the elevator.) But it highlights a troubling celebrity truth: Somehow, being perfect — onstage, on-camera, even at home — is not enough. We expect to see our pop stars fade, even as we shame them for it. We want Britney to fall apart again on national television. We want to lecture Rihanna about her romantic choices. We want unfiltered and “real” celebrity access until we get it, and then we want to punish the celebrities for it, because humanity is a pop-star sin, too.

Tyler Lewis, a dear friend of the blog, and a non-Beyoncé fan had a rather different reaction, that Life Is But A Dream gave him his first real sense of who she is, and how it affects her music:

I didn’t get the sense that she wasn’t interested in being truly vulnerable so much as unpracticed at it. I have this profound sense that this is a 31-year old woman who has never allowed herself, or been allowed, to feel deeply. So this film is an exercise I think in watching her learn to be vulnerable. There’s that moment where she says, almost surprising herself, that she can’t do it alone. Or the way she conveyed more deeply the hurt she feels that people would think she would fake a pregnancy than she does relating what it must have been like to have had a miscarriage.

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Ed Henry, the senior White House correspondent for Fox News who is the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, announced this morning that Conan O’Brien, who’s currently hosting a late-night show on TBS, will host the Association’s dinner this April. Ever since Stephen Colbert hosted the dinner in 2006 and turned it into a brutal critique of President Bush’s performance as president, the Association has made a series of relatively safe choices who are unlikely to make the president and his wife, members of the press, or anyone else particularly uncomfortable. O’Brien, judging by the evidence from his experience hosting the dinner in 1995, knows the score, though there is a pretty good joke about Ira Magaziner, who was President Clinton’s chief health-care policy adviser, having a 6,000-ingredient recipe for veal piccata, in reference to the length of his health care reform bill, which had died the previous year:

But it’s too bad the Association seems to have decided that their choices are between skewering the president and going relatively bland and toothless. There are other ways to be funny than to make the head guest in the room feel uncomfortable, and I wish the Association would think a little bit more creatively about their host choice on that score—and on other ones as well. Since the dinner began having hosts in 1944, only three women have ever hosted the event solo, Paula Poundstone in 1992, Elayne Boosler in 1993, and then no one else until Wanda Sykes in 2009. Why not have Amy Poehler break up that drought a little bit and host in character as Leslie Knope, whose good-government and love of Washington would provide a much kinder framework than Colbert’s to satirize the event she’d be summing up? Want someone who might be able to riff on the idea of President Obama as a symbol and as a man, but who probably wouldn’t go too politically brutal? Why not ask Kevin Hart, in part in recognition of his huge stand-up success—and in part because a black comedian hasn’t hosted the dinner solo since Sinbad in 1991?

I don’t mind O’Brien, but he’s a choice who represents the problems of the Association itself—white, male, catering at this point to a limited audience, and unlikely to offend anybody. His announcement comes at a moment when, as Dave Weigel has pointed out, Henry is throwing a temper tantrum because members of the Association weren’t allowed to take pictures of President Obama playing golf with Tiger Woods, a fight that illustrates the White House press corps’ frequent focus on minutae and color over substance. I’m not saying thinking more creatively and independently about who is going to host the Association’s dinner will come close to fixing all the problems of the White House press corps. But it might help the Association consider who it wants to represent the organization on that dias, what role it thinks its’ members have, and its own capacity to take a joke—and criticism.