I was more or less letting the White House’s efforts to send the left-Sphere out to shill its medical rationing program*slide – after all, having the President personally lie to you is a step up; usually you get that through intermediaries – but in the process of reading up on this Don Surber linked to this funny article on the network well running dry for the administration.  The White House wanted to schedule a last-minute press conference on health care:

CBS, which airs only repeats that evening, agreed early Monday to cover the conference.

But for NBC, Fox and ABC, the decision was tougher. During a summer that’s otherwise strewn with repeats, Wednesday includes all of their top-rated reality programs.

Fox declined outright to air the news conference. NBC and ABC fell into line late Monday after the White House shifted the event’s time from the previously announced 9 p.m. to the lesser-watched hour of 8 p.m.

The stakes were particularly high for NBC, which airs the most-watched show of the summer, “America’s Got Talent,” at 9 p.m. This week, the reality hit includes a heavily promoted interview with “Britain’s Got Talent” singing sensation Susan Boyle.

Let’s make this into a teachable moment. 

You see, Mr. President: this is what people are talking about when they speak about ‘market solutions’ to problems.  There are three products that you can provide:

• Your speech.
• The inherent dignity and luster of your office.
• Your forbearance in not making the networks’ lives miserable.

And you wished to use the networks’ valuable air time in order to provide this service.  The networks, looking over what is being offered, and contemplating their own product (the programming that would have used that air time) have made the following determinations:

• CBS rated your products as being more valuable than theirs, in the specific case.  They freely accepted your offer.
• Fox rated your products as being less valuable than theirs, in this specific case.  They freely rejected your offer.
• NBC & ABC rated your products as being less valuable as some of theirs, and more valuable than other of theirs.  They therefore made a counter-offer, which you accepted.

So, now we know how much your products are actually worth: not as much as a first-run episode of a hit television show, but more than its reruns.  This is valuable feedback, and it will help you learn to improve your product in the future, so that you can provide more value.  So everybody wins, and nobody had to micromanage the results.  Isn’t that amazing? – And the best part is: allowing the market to come up with its own solution to problems works on just about everything.

You should try it, sometime.

Moe Lane

*Don Surber called it ‘Obama releases his flying monkeys;’ only, it’s been a while since I watched The Wizard of Oz, but I’m pretty sure that the aforementioned winged avians simians [D'Oh! - ML] were just as happy to see the Wicked Witch of the West get watered down as everybody else was.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.