NYSE halts trading for over 3 hours. Nothing much happens.

I know that title sounds a little weird, because if a stock exchange stops trading for over 3.5 hours, you don't expect much to happen in that time, and nothing much did happen, but not in the sense you might think.

What happened was this, at around 11.30am EDT, trading on the New York Stock Exchange floor was halted, due to what the exchange called an "internal technical issue", saying that a cyber attack was not the cause.

And yet, despite this, trading seemed to pretty much continue almost as normal on NYSE stocks.  But how is that possible?

The New York Stock Exchange trading floor might be an iconic image, and a central point of trading in NYSE stocks, but it is by no means the only point for trading NYSE.  In fact only 13% of all NYSE stocks that are traded during the day are actually traded through the NYSE trading floor.

There are about a dozen other places where NYSE stocks are traded, plus the options are on a separate platform, as is the OTC (Over The Counter) market, and the alternative market.  The whole NYSE trading floor, is just one place where NYSE stocks are legally traded and the other trading floors were able to pick up the slack.

This story in itself provides us with two lessons, which is pretty rare to be fair.  The first is the simple, always have back up plans, at least 1 and preferably more.  That's a lesson that NYSE owners ICE obviously knew about and their back up plans were already in effect before the NYSE trading floor was halted at around 11.30am EDT.

My main problem with all these other backups is that they are all technologically based.  In other words, it's all the same basic technology, just differently written systems that manage to talk to each other, and yet manage to maintain enough separation that when there was a problem, the other systems managed to keep going.

The second lesson I take from this story is not to be over-reliant on technology.  Technology is actually a very useful thing, but especially these days with all the smartphones that I see people constantly staring at, we are in serious danger of taking this technology for granted.

When I first started doing radio back in 1990, computers were not being used to playout the music or the jingles or the adverts, in fact, they were barely more than a fancy text messaging system between studios.  That all changed in 1992 with the arrival of Pirate FM 102.

In the past 25 years, computers have become a major part of the radio industry, with everything from news production, traffic management, music scheduling, station administration, playout and every other aspect just about handled by computers, and although I'm okay with it being that way, I am okay with it, because I was trained in the old fashioned methods, splicing tape with razor blades and joining together with sticky tape, cueing up records, cassettes and CDs manually, slamming carts into cart machines.  All of these were standard things to learn when I started out in radio and now, they are techniques that many in the industry today wouldn't have a clue how to do, because they've never learned how to do them, because everything is done with computers.

But we are in an era where technology is pervasive, and we need to be aware that we need to be able to cope without it.  The US TV series 'Revolution' dealt with that concept, and it didn't do a bad job of it, but the show was cancelled after 2 seasons and didn't really explore the basic concept as well as maybe it could have, by choosing to start the series 15 years after the permanent blackout had happened.

Maybe the most reassuring thing about this whole situation, is the very fact that despite the main trading floor going down for over 3.5 hours, stocks continued to trade as though nothing had happened.  It suggests to me that all the systems did what they were supposed to do, and kept things going until the system got back up.

Indeed, the NYSE trading floor came back online 50 minutes before the official close, probably giving them just enough time to make sure that nothing else bad was going to happen with their temporary fix, before the close, and then they could spend the next 16-17 hours working on improving upon the temporary fix.

The real acid test will be tomorrow's trading day from 9.30am New York time.  Then we will see if the system repairs have truly worked.

Sepp Blatter finally resigns, a few days too late!

Let me start by saying this.  I’m glad that Sepp Blatter finally found it within himself to do the honourable thing and step down as FIFA President.  But he should have done it Thursday, to save FIFA the embarrassment and humiliation of re-electing him to the top job there, only to then face another election process in quick succession.

But the whole debacle over the arrests and how FIFA responded to them, showed up the organisation as completely corrupt, and thinking themselves untouchable.  It showed up an organisation that had no transparency and no accountability to the people that ultimately pay their wages, the fans around the world who watch football, and play the FIFA branded video games.

In the aftermath of the arrests, the election should have been postponed, or at least Sepp Blatter should have announced that he was not going to stand for re-election.  He might have had a vision for Football, or Soccer as it’s known in some countries, but he had no vision when it came to the optics of the situation both he and FIFA were facing.

The optics were only made worse by Vladimir Putin offering his support to Blatter.  That should be a warning sign in itself.  If Putin offers you his support, turn it down.  It makes you look a hell of a lot worse.

Now he has stepped down and an emergency congress will elect a replacement, maybe we will actually start to see the change that is necessary in FIFA to bring it into the 21st century.  Maybe we’ll even see them take the decision to move the 2018 and 2022 World Cup venues due to the corruption allegations.  But progress in these sorts of matters is always slow, and I won’t hold my breath waiting for them.

Ian Beaumont's Saturday Special: James Bond movie music

I've started a new programme on The Source FM, it's called the Saturday Special, it airs from 8am to 11am every Saturday morning, and today's edition featured music from the James Bond films.

Ian Beaumont's Saturday Special: Saturday 9th May 2015 by Ian Beaumont on Mixcloud

Fox News Channel: Now in self parody.

Crooks And Liars reported an interesting incident on Sean Hannity’s show on Thursday where Missouri’s Lieutenant Governor Peter Kindler (Rep) yes, a Republican, said to someone off-camera in what he thought was an off-air moment, "God, that is terrible TV,"

When one of your core audience starts calling it terrible TV, that should be setting off some alarm bells at Fox News HQ.  Unfortunately, it probably won’t and here’s why.

Long ago, when I first saw Fox News, prior to the 2006 US Congressional Election, Fox News was no less extreme right wing than it is now, but because there was a Republican President, it was far less crazy, and actually managed to come across as semi-sensible sometimes, although Bill O’Reilly was already descending into craziness and madness, and Sean Hannity’s craziness was balanced out, at least a little bit, by Alan Colmes, who was a moderate Democrat, but could at least talk sensibly on some issues.  Since they split up Hannity and Colmes, Sean Hannity’s descent has gone faster than Bill O’Reilly’s, which is kinda disturbing actually.

Nowadays, the craziness is like a pandemic.  It’s everywhere, from Fox & Friends First, through all the so-called news shows, Outnumbered, Your World with Neil Cavuto, The Five, Special Report, to all the opinion shows, On The Record, The O’Reilly Factor, Hannity & Red Eye, there’s no escape from it.  Well, there is one, Shepard Smith Reporting.  It’s not an entirely crazy free zone, but there is far more sanity in that programme, than there is anywhere else on the Fox News schedule.

The channel has gone from semi-sensible, to a complete crazy, bouncing-off-the-rubber-walls self parody, and whilst it remains successful in TV ratings terms, the rest of the conservative media that feeds off it, is doing less well, and eventually, those problems may come to affect Fox News as well.

One of the biggest signs that Fox News may end up falling like the rest of the Conservative Media, is what is happening currently to the biggest name in American talk radio, Rush Limbaugh.  For years, Rush Limbaugh was the biggest thing in the Conservative Media, way bigger than Fox News, with way more listeners, and way more impact than Fox News has ever had.  Even in 2012, it was reported that Rush LImabugh had over 15 million listeners, compared to the 3 million or so who watch Fox News. 

But in 2012, the descent into madness that Rush Limbaugh had been going through since 2003, hit home to most of the American public, with a commentary Rush did on his show on February 29th 2012, yes, on leap day, when Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke, a student who had given testimony to a congressional comittee, a “prostitue” and a “slut”.  How appropriate that on Leap Day, Rush Limbaugh jumped the shark.

Since that day, a campaign has been underway to get Rush Limbaugh off the air, by informing sponsors and advertisers that they’re advertising on his show, and advising them to pull their sponsorship and their adverts.  And this campaign isn’t just focused on the national advertisers, but on the local advertisers on each of the stations that takes The Rush Limbaugh Show. 

The campaign, known both as Stop Rush and Flush Rush, has had a major impact.  Rush’s show lost stations quickly in the aftermath of the Sandra Fluke controversy, and has continued to lose stations since, with rumours of Chicago talk radio powerhouse, WLS AM, about to drop the show, being merely the latest in a long line of stories about stations dropping the show.  The show once aired on over 900 stations, now it’s more like over 500, and even then, in some markets, it was dropped by the major news/talk station and picked up by a smaller one.

Of course, there are problems with trying to shame advertisers away from Fox News Channel.  For instance, Fox deals with its own sales for all of its national television operations, so you can’t go after Fox News Channel on its own, you have to go after all of Fox, which might be more difficult to do given they have some of America’s most popular programmes on their network.

On the other hand, given now that Roger Ailes now runs the local stations side of the Fox Television operation, as well as Fox News and Fox Business, that might give an opening to say to advertisers, you are advertising on Fox’s news output, and hurt Fox News that way, especially if backed with a boycott of said companies and products. 

Perhaps the more lucrative angle here, is going after cable companies.  Fox News is distributed by cable companies and satellite broadcasters, so the best way to starve it of cash, maybe by not buying the packages it is in.  Where it is in basic TV packages, then write in campaigns should be used to persuade cable companies that there is a large market out there for a package that doesn’t include Fox News, and that both it and Fox Business should be pushed to a higher level package, so that if people don’t want to pay for it, they can avoid paying for it, or indeed, drop it altogether. 

The more people highlight the controversial stuff that Fox News spreads, the lies, the propaganda, the craziness and the complete and utter contempt for the real world, the more likely it will be that advertisers and cable companies, will slowly drop Fox News or move it to higher end packages where it will have less subscribers and less revenue. 

We can’t shame Fox News themselves, they have no shame, they are completely shameless.  So others who pay for them, must be persuaded not to pay for them.  TV is the only industry where you are forced to pay for products you don’t want, don’t watch and never will watch.  Would Fox News be able to survive on it’s revenue it would get if those who wanted it, had to pay a separate subscription to get it?  It’s not certain that it would, after all, television is an expensive business. 

Time to end "batting practice" aka trolling

I have to agree with Keith Olbermann here.  Social media should be for respectful debates, not trying to hit people out of the park.



As Anita Doth sang back in 2000, Enter Love, Delete The Hate #deletethehate

Sun News Network shuts down.

I’ve been somewhat out of the loop for a few days, but Friday, I got the shock of my life, when I found out that the owners of Sun News Network had decided to shutter the struggling channel.

Viewing figures were never great, their mix of so-called “Hard News & Straight Talk” was in fact mostly Conservative-leaning propaganda, the same blend and style propagated by Fox News Channel, and they never garnered enough momentum to become an essential channel, a basic cable channel.  They requested basic cable status from the CRTC time and again, and were refused.

But, the polarities of the commentaries online and on social media have been, as usual, at either ends of the scale.  On one side, you have those like the Facebook group that was trying to generate momentum to create a movement to save Sun News.  But just under 700 members, as significant a group as that is in Facebook terms, is never going to be enough to overcome any problems the broadcaster faced.

On the other side, you have those who hated it, like they hate Fox, and were basically cheering its closure, saying things like “good bye and good riddance”, and “Bye Felicia”.

As always in these situations, these are the polar opposites.  Reality is somewhere in between.  But where?

Well, as much as Sun News wants to blame the CRTC for their problems, that’s the wrong thing to do.  UK broadcast history will point to TWW, a station called Television West & Wales in the mid 1960s, who tried to take on the ITA, the regulator at the time, after being told that their licence would not be renewed in 1968, despite the ITA having asked TWW to essentially take over neighbouring company WWN (Wales West & North), which collapsed in 1964.  The ITA had decided to go with a new company called Harlech Television. 

Letters were exchanged between TWW head honcho Lord Derby, and the head of the ITA at the time, both privately, and in the London Times Letters Page.  Such behaviour was never going to go down well, and TWW made a decision to leave the air 6 months early, and sold their studios and airtime to Harlech.

So, taking on the regulator was not a good idea.  What about the programming?

This is one of the most important areas for any broadcaster.  Fall down here, and it’s curtains no matter what else you do.  And unfortunately, they fell down here badly.  And not for the reasons you think either.  It had nothing to do with having shows that had an editorial agenda.  Let’s face facts, every news broadcast has some kind of editorial agenda behind it, so the fact that they had opinion shows with a right wing slant, wasn’t enough of a reason on its own to bring about its downfall. 

They used the positioning statement, “Hard News & Straight Talk”, and whilst there was lots of talk, there was very little real news.  Yes, it had lots of flashy sets, and flashy graphics, but it didn’t really have any reporters doing any beat reporting.  Most of their coverage came from talking heads that they interviewed, and a lot of those had the same kind of editorial bias that Sun News did, so it looked like they were editorialising the news, which they were.  Now they would get some experts in, and unlike Fox, they would treat them with respect, but too many talking heads, and not enough reporters and expert voices, meant that their “Hard News” was more often “Hard to swallow” than real Hard News. 

I’d say the budget was shoestring, but they spent so little, that they actually had change from the shoestring.  If instead of having several different studios for every show, they had had one decent set, that could serve every show, and did enough to give the set a slightly different look for each show, then it would have helped.  They might have then considered putting together bureaux in Vancouver and Ottawa as a minimum, with options to create Bureaux in Montreal, Calgary and Winnipeg.

The other thing that might have contributed to their downfall, was their aggression and their attitude.  The station was basically a clone of Fox News Channel, and that contravenes the Golden Rule of all broadcasting, Be Yourself.  Don’t copy others.  They tried to copy the Fox News Channel style, with flashy graphics, multiple studios, regular talking heads, and a desire to create controversy, and Conservatives in Canada, are very different to the extremist Republicans in America.  And whilst there are a small minority of extreme right wingers in Canada, the prospective audience in a country of over 30 million, compared to a country of over 300 million, was just too small to make such a channel sustainable.

Fox News Channel does such a good job of spreading Conservative propaganda, that they basically are the home of Conservative propaganda worldwide.  Sun’s problem was it was trying to clone that for a Canadian perspective and audience, an audience that understood better than the people producing it, that Sun News wasn’t for Canada.

It’s never a good thing to celebrate the loss of 150 jobs, that’s not good optics.  But, Sun News Network, was never anything to write home about, or indeed, get worked up about, because it never made the impact in the broadcast firmament, that it’s flashy style made it appear to have.

More tone-deafness from another American police department

In the aftermath of the incidents involving black men and white police, you'd think that Police across the US would be aware not to do anything that could potentially stir up race troubles again, but you'd be wrong.

The tone deafness of the police in this story is breathtaking and shocking. 

NBC 6 in South Florida reports that police in North Miami Beach are using mugshots of black men, some of them only teenagers, from their archive, as target practice targets in their shooting range, and the Police chief ACTUALLY defended the practice.

Sad to say, it's unfortunately no different to what I expect from the Police in the US.  The police are charged with a duty to "Protect & Serve." and that means EVERYONE, not just those that happen to look like them. 

I sometimes wonder if instead of actually catching criminals in the US, the Police there hire them and give them a badge.  You do wonder at times who the criminals really are.

Let me say this, loud and clear.  It isn't just White lives that matter, Black Lives Matter too, and Hispanic lives, and Asian lives, and everybody else's lives too.

Every Life Matters.

The Viewpoint Podcast Extra: Margaret Corvid's New Statesman article.

I mentioned this in the latest edition of The Viewpoint Podcast, my good friend Margaret Corvid has writen an article for The New Statesman about men's rights activism, feminism, and the real problems that men face in a patriarchal society. 

This is the most intelligent and balanced article, that I have read in a long time, and the most balanced I've read on this subject ever.  It is well worth a read.

Quick Viewpoints: Tuesday 13th January 2015

A few quick thoughts from the Viewpoint OpsCentre…

Facebook are presenting warnings on the front of videos that contain violent imagery, making them the only videos that don’t autoplay.  Apart from having all videos not autoplay automatically, there should be a warning on videos that will actively reduce your IQ by a few points…

A bitcoin entrepreneur who renounced his US citizenship to avoid paying taxes, is now unable to re-enter the US, because he doesn’t have enough ties to his new home country of St Kitts & Nevis.  Tragic irony, or poetic justice?  You tell me…

Ireland’s Director of Public Prosecutions is to appeal the four-year sentence, with the last two years suspended, handed down to a Co Donegal man found guilty of dangerous driving causing the deaths of eight people.  I should think so too, that sentence is a travesty of a sham of a mockery.  Human life should not be so poorly valued.

Nigel Farage made another Fox News appearance to say there are no go areas for non-muslims in France, just days, after another pundit said Birmingham in England had no non-muslims.  Heck, he’s making more appearances on Fox News than he has cast votes in the European Parliament…

Viewpoint Eyewitness News: Fire on Union Street.

One person has been killed and another is missing after a fire broke out in a flat on Union Street in Plymouth.

Devon & Somerset Fire Service crews were called to the scene at around 02:00 hours GMT.

3 people were rescued, and 35 more were evacuated from the building.

From what I could see as I passed by the scene this morning, the fire damage was limited to the top floor flat where the fire broke out.

Other flats in the building looked to have escaped any noticeable damage.

BBC News has more on the story.  Edgcumbe Road, and Union Street all the way down to the Octagon, have been blocked by Police, and no traffic is currently being allowed in that area.  Other routes around the effected area are available.  Devon & Cornwall Police are also on the scene, and an investigation will begin soon.  Plymouth Herald also have more, including an eyewitness video.