No news on the strike front, and there may not be any for a while. We're still on strike and the other side is still trying to send out scary messages about not dealing with us for a decade or two. I would advise everyone not to believe rumors that come with no credible name attached…especially the ones that start "I was at a party and this guy said he'd heard that someone at CBS was saying…" It has been my experience that during a strike, a rumor that comes with no identified source has less than a 15% chance of having any basis at all in reality. This applies just as much to anonymous messages posted on Internet forums. Messages with identified sources or real signatures have a slightly better rate of accuracy, sometimes verging on as much as 50%.
The point is that just because someone announces "I just talked to Nick Counter and he said…" does not mean that Nick Counter said it or even that the person actually talked to Nick Counter or to anyone who had ever talked to Nick Counter. Come to think of it, even if Nick Counter really said it, that doesn't mean it's true, either.
(Speaking on Nick Counter: Have you seen his nickel counter?)
Our little labor dispute seems to bring out essayists with views I do not quite comprehend. A couple of them can be explained as just sucking up to (or working for) the studio heads, and I've read a few that seemed to me that the author had emotional issues with his own career and those who he thought were more successful. I'm especially dubious of those that rush to say "the Writers Guild has handled this all wrong" without suggesting any sort of scenario as to what we could/should have done differently. My pal Bob Elisberg penned a nice rebuttal in the L.A. Times to an op-ed piece that didn't make a lot of sense to me, either.
At the moment, the AMPTP is trying to sell the idea that this strike is about the WGA making unreasonable demands in the areas of Animation and "Reality" programming. It's not. It's about New Media and about the fact that the studios are simultaneously saying (a) that there's no money in that area and (b) that they're willing to lose many, many billions to not share that no money with us or any other union.