Every day this week as Scholastic has become embroiled in the ABC controversy, the text book company's share price (Symbol: SCHL) has fallen, and volume of trade in the stock has exploded.
Right after Scholastic's announcement yesterday that it would replace its controversial materials, Wall Street "guru" Jim Cramer's company even issued a special announcement.
Does all this somehow indicate that Wall Street cares about the truth behind ABC's miniseries? No.
But it does suggest a "profitable" way forward in our fight with ABC.
Scholastic, ABC and Disney are all publicly traded, for-profit companies whose major shareholders care about one thing more than anything else in the world: profit.
Earlier this week, when Wall Street investors began to perceive a threat to Scholastic's text book sales and profits resulting from the ABC controversy, they rushed to sell the company's stock. And when Scholastic's executives (who own a lot of that stock) saw Wall Street sell-off, they moved to ameliorate the threat.
Of course, some amount embarrassment and even old-fashioned good-will on the part of Scholastic execs could have played a role, but I would bet that greed, not shame, is what drove most of our victory.
Moreover, it was our work convincing school boards not to buy from Scholastic that specifically drove all this. Our efforts to crimp Scholastic's sales threatened Wall Street profits, creating pressure for the company to respond, much more pressure probably than was created by our direct pleas.
And so it is with ABC (and parent company Disney) too.
A lot of attention has been paid on dkos lastnight and today to the fact that New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley decided to recommend ABC's film saying, "All mini-series Photoshop the facts."
Stanley is in the minority among TV critics in her opinion.
Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales labeled the film "a reelection campaign movie."
Chicago Sun-Times' TV critic Doug Elfman blasted the miniseries in his review, "Accuracy aside, ABC's '9/11' deserves to bomb": "This is the most anticlimactic, tension-free movie in the history of terrorist TV....Idiots."
And even The Houston Chronicle editorialized: "It's unfortunate that ABC would trust the depiction of a still painful and politically volatile subject such as 9/11 to a writer best known for fantastical storytelling. The least ABC officials can do is remove segments found to be fictitious before distributing the movie to impressionable schoolchildren and a national audience."
But the main thing to note here is that no TV critic's opinion, good or bad, is going to have any significant impact on what millions of viewers see or don't see on ABC this weekend.
What matters is what ABC executives decide to air in response to market pressure.
And the good news, according to New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, among others, is that our pressure is starting to have some effect.
According to the Times, for example:
[C]hanges to the mini-series are still being made inside an editing suite in Los Angeles.
[P]arts of the film are ... under review.
[And] editing ... "will continue to, if needed until we broadcast."
We're simply not where we want to be yet. ABC is still planning to air their political fantasy without major edits.
Bottom line: We need to maintain enough pressure on ABC's "customers"--primarily including ABC advertisers--to convince ABC and Disney executives, and preferably Wall Street itself, that ABC's and Disney's profits are going to fall if the network airs this travesty of a miniseries.
For example:
1. Convince at least 2 or 3 national advertisers, such as AT&T or Hewlett-Packard, to pull all of their advertising on ABC if the company does not relent. Rather than spreading our efforts too widely, we should agree on our targets and hit them together, hard. Who are the biggest 2 or 3 national advertisers on ABC? Someone on here will know how to find out. Please help.
2. Convince a larger number of local or regional advertisers to do the same thing. As an example, last night I spoke to 3 different representatives of the Meijer's grocery store chain in the Midwest. They were very receptive to my concerns, and one even said that if they get enough calls, they will pull their ads. Local and regional advertisers like Meijer are easier to reach and convince than the national advertisers, so we should target more of them.
If we can do these 2 things today, ABC will relent. Watch the stock price.