Word: cuttingly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Many European nations think that the U.S. approach of putting hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the pot to increase jobs, cut taxes for most citizens, and put a safety net under financial firms is excessive. One of the things that these governments rarely admit is that they may not have the capacity to borrow in the open debt market the way that the U.S. Treasury can. China may not want to own paper from the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and it is hard to blame the communist central government in the big Asian country for that...
...networks cut costs, they're less likely to make the next West Wing (or Knight Rider). But smaller shows survive that once wouldn't have lasted a season. Take NBC's finely detailed small-town drama Friday Night Lights, which draws as few as 4 million viewers a week. It was able to air a third season this year because NBC signed a cost-sharing deal with DirecTV - one of the very satellite providers that have helped atomize the audience...
Broadcast's new enemy is digital media, including venues like Hulu that were created by the networks themselves, which cut into their ad dollars. Last year Heroes creator Tim Kring gave a legendary rant about how viewers using TiVo or DVDs or downloading - legally or not - cut into the show's audience, leaving "the saps and dips____ who can't figure out how to watch it in a superior way" to watch live TV (which still counts most for ad dollars). In one sense he was right, if undiplomatic. But only half right, because technology also makes it possible...
...doubt, TV is changing, and fast. Free TV will become more cut-rate; quality will cost, as movies and books do. There will be more rarefied TV and more craptastic dreck. There will be less middle-of-the-road TV for everybody but more venues for telling stories that don't have to please 30 million people. The old networks (and the people who make shows for them) will struggle to make a buck, but new outlets will rise and thrive. ER will pass, but hospital dramas have birth stories as well as death stories. Broadcast TV may be flatlining...
When, for instance, does a urinary-tract infection become a pyelonephritis (an infection involving the kidneys and ureters)? There's no clear-cut answer. A computer might remind the doctor that the hospital stands to make many thousands more if he simply clicks on pyelonephritis, the more serious condition. Or consider that nearly every patient who has a big hip or knee operation will run a fever for a while afterward. No one really knows why. But if a computer picks up the temperature elevation, it could prompt doctors to record a "fever of unknown origin" - a diagnosis that often...