Silly Season

Our Irrational Clock Is Ticking

Happy Monday War & Peaceniks! It’s Silly O’Clock and here’s the news…

Silly Season was originally coined to describe this very time of year, August, when Congress is on break, all of Europe goes on vacation, and not much gets done. Through the years, this period kept the name silly because, during slow news days of the late summer Media outlets have tended to cover silly stories like kittens up trees and potato chips that look like Jimmy Hendrix.

No, especially this summer, it’s hard to imagine a “slow news month.” It’s difficult to even remember that they ever existed.

Today, though, I use Silly Season to describe where we are in the Media Calendar: In the middle of a topsy-turvy 2Q Earnings Season, deep into some of the biggest and weirdest news cycles in Media History, and at the generational cross-roads of the entertainment industry. Paramount may or may not be transferred between Boomer and Millennial Nepo Babies. After 40 years, Turner Sports is losing the NBA to Amazon. Live football is coming to Netflix. The Murdochs, without irony, are reenacting the last season of Succession - live! Fifteen seconds ago AI was everything. Now AI is nothing! 2024 is a year of austerity and profit… unless it isn’t!

This is Media’s Silly Season: Where panic drives many decisions and confusion filters most reactions. To understand what’s actually happening in Media, though, you must wade through all the whirring silliness, ignore the rising din of confusion, and touch the real grass of fact. And that is what this newsletter is for.

Take a hard look at this chart of 2Q Media Earnings Results and tell me who you think had good market reactions to these results and who had bad. Click on the image to expand. Read the numbers. I’ll wait…

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