Fox and Syfy Alter Episodes in Light of School Massacre

The Fox network and the cable network Syfy both quietly changed episodes of series planned for this weekend because of the killings at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., on Friday.

Syfy did not broadcast a scheduled episode Friday night of the show “Haven” because it contained scenes that involved violence in a school.

The Fox network decided on Saturday that it would replace the planned episodes of two animated series, “Family Guy” and “American Dad,” which were to be broadcast Sunday night.

The network made no official statement on the reason, but one executive confirmed that the decision was made because the content of the episodes could have been seen by some viewers as insensitive in light of the events in Connecticut.

In both cases, the networks scheduled repeats to fill those hours.

Bill Carter writes about the television industry. Follow @wjcarter on Twitter.

A Smart Breakaway for Big East Basketball Schools

Matt Slocum/Associated Press Georgetown is among the Big East's seven nonfootball members that could thrive in a new conference.

A variety of reports suggest that the seven Big East schools that do not compete in high-level football may split off to form their own basketball-centric athletic conference.

Georgetown, Villanova, St. John's, Marquette, Providence, Seton Hall and DePaul share a history of relatively successful men's basketball programs, along with a heritage as Roman Catholic colleges. They have more in common with one another than they do with the other members of the Big East, which has diluted its basketball brand in its effort to remain intact as an elite football conference.

A conference composed of these seven teams, along with select others that do not sponsor Division I football programs, could offer a men's basketball league that was roughly as competitive as that of major conferences like the Pacific-12 and the Southeastern Conference. The alternative, to remain attached to the other members of the Big East, would put these schools at risk of being associated with a conference that would come to be regarded as second-tier.

In the table below, I've listed the average power rating for the 16 schools that were to have been Big East basketball members as of the 2014-15 season, based on the < a href="http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/sagarin.htm">formula designed by Jeff Sagarin of USA Today. The power ratings are long-term averages and reflect each team's performance over the past 10 full college basketball seasons, plus the portion of the 2012-13 season that has been completed so far. (The schools that are considering leaving the conference are highlighted in yellow.)

The seven breakaway schools have had better basketball teams, on average, than the nine teams they would be leaving behind. On average, the basketball-only schools have had a power rating of about 81, according to Mr. Sagarin, as compared to 78 for those that also sponsor Division I football.

What do these numbers mean, exactly? Mr. Sagarin's ratings can be used to compare teams with one another, with the difference between two teams representing a point spread. For example, a team with a rating of 84 would be favored to defeat one with a rating of 80 by 4 points on a neutral court.

But the more important comparison is how these ratings match up against those of teams in different conferences. The ratings for individual teams in each conference can be averaged together to determine a conference's overall strength.

Over the past 10 years, the average rating for the six major college basketball conferences has been 80 points or higher, ranging from 80.65 points (the Pac-12) to 83.11 (the Atlantic Coast Confer ence.). In contrast, no midmajor conference has had a rating higher than 77.96.

Thus, the seven breakaway schools, with an average rating of 81.06, sit right at the precipice of being a major or a midmajor conference depending on which teams might join them in the league.

The basketball-only schools would be abandoning the University of Connecticut, which has one of the strongest basketball programs in the country. They would also be leaving behind Memphis, which had been set to join the Big East next year.

But most of the other new additions to the Big East, like Tulane and Southern Methodist, have had weak college basketball teams. Even the strongest college basketball conferences can have one or two members that are usually mediocre in men's basketball and qualify for the N.C.A.A. tournament only once in a great while. However, the Big East would have five such programs - Tulane, S.M.U, Houston, Central Florida and South Florida - all of which have been rated at 75.22 or lower.

These might seem like overly fine points of distinction. But these differences can have an impact when the N.C.A.A. is choosing schools for its 68-team tournament. The N.C.A.A selection committee places a lot of emphasis on strength of schedule. A schedule filled with games against the likes of Tulane may not be viewed favorably when there is a glut of teams that are just on the threshold of being chosen.

Abandoning Connecticut is another matter - but there is no guarantee that it would have remained in the Big East; in the past, it has been linked with discussions to join the A.C.C. and the Big Ten. In the Big East, however, the rule has been survival of the least-fit programs, while those schools with more to offer financially, athletically and academically have been snatched up by other conferences.

By breaking away from the conference, the seven basketball schools would be more in control of their own fate. In fact, they would g o from seeing their conference preyed upon to being the predators of the college basketball landscape. The new conference would be highly attractive to any college that did not sponsor a Football Bowl Subdivision team but wanted to play in a top-tier college basketball league. One route would be for the new conference to become a collection of Catholic colleges and universities, adding programs like Xavier, Gonzaga and Creighton, all of which have had strong basketball programs, to its ranks. (Catholic colleges and universities are highlighted in yellow in the chart below.)

Or the new league could strive to maintain more geographical coherence, adding the strongest Division I basketball-only schools in the Northeast and the Midwest. That could allow it to pair up with schools like Butler and Virginia Commonwealth, which have made successful runs in the N.C.A.A. tournament in recent years.

Either path would allow Georgetown, Villanova and the other programs to remain in a big-time college basketball conference that would attract its share of television coverage, prize recruits and N.C.A.A. tournament positions â€" even if it were one composed of smaller schools.

In Public \'Conversation\' on Guns, a Rhetorical Shift

Friday's mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., has already touched off a heated political debate. Opponents of stricter regulation on gun ownership have accused their adversaries of politicizing a tragedy. Advocates of more sweeping gun control measures have argued that the Connecticut shootings are a demonstration that laxer gun laws can have dire consequences. Let me sidestep the debate to pose a different question: How often are Americans talking about public policy toward guns? And what language are they using to frame their arguments?

There is, of course, no way to monitor the conversations that take place in living rooms around the country. But we can measure the frequency with which phrases related to gun policy are used by the news media.

If the news coverage is any guide, there has been a change of tone in recent years in the public conversation about guns. The two-word phrase “gun control” is being used considerably less often than it was 10 or 20 years ago. But the phrase “gun rights” is being used more often. And the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution is being invoked more frequently in the discussion.

In the chart below, I've tracked the number of news articles that used the terms “gun control,” “gun rights,” “gun violence” and “Second Amendment” in American newspapers, according to the database NewsLibrary.com. (Because the number of articles in the database changes over time, the figures are normalized to reflect the overall volume of database coverage in any given year, with the n umbers representing how often the gun-related phrases were used per 1,000 articles on any subject.)

The usage of all four phrases, but particularly the term “gun control,” has been subject to sharp but temporary shifts based on news events.

In 1993 and 1994, when Congress was debating a ban on assault weapons, the phrase “gun control” was used about three times per 1,000 news articles. Use of the term was even higher after the mass shootings in Columbine, Colo., peaking at 3.7 instances per 1,000 articles in 1999. It reached a low point in 2010, when the term “gun control” was used 0.3 times per 1,000 articles - less than one-tenth as often as in the year after the Columbine shootings.

Averaging the frequency of usage over a five-year period reduces the effect of these news-driven fluctuations and reveals a reasonably clear long-term trend. In recent years, the term “gun control” has been used only about half as often as it was in the 1980s and about one-quarter as often as in the 1990s and early 2000s.

But other phrases related to gun policy have become more common in news coverage.

The term “Second Amendment” was rarely employed in the 1980s, but it has become much more commonplace since then. (Since 2008, the term “Second Amendment” has been used more often than “gun control.”) A related phrase, “gun rights,” has also come into more common usage.

The term “gun violence” peaked in 1999, the year of the Columbine shootings. But it has also been on a long-term increase. Since 2010, it has been used 0.33 times per 1,000 news articles - far more often than during the 1980s, when it was invoked 0.02 times per 1,000 articles.

The change in rhetoric may reflect the increasing polarization in the debate over gun policy. “Gun control,” a relatively neutral term, has been used less and less often. But more politically charged phrases, like “gun violence” and “gun rights,” have become more common. Those who advocate greater restrictions on gun ownership may have determined that their most persuasive argument is to talk about the consequences of increased access to guns - as opposed to the weedy debate about what rights the Second Amendment may or may not convey to gun owners. For opponents of stricter gun laws, the debate has increasingly become one about Constitutional protections. Certainly, many opponents of gun control measures also argue that efforts to restrict gun ownership could backfire in various ways or will otherwise fail to reduce violence. But broadly speaking, they would prefer that the debate be about what they see as Constitutional rights, rather than the utilitarian consequences of gun control measures.

Their strategy may have been working. The polling evidence suggests that the public has gone from tending to back stricter gun control policies to a more ambiguous position in recent years. There may be some voters who think that the Constitution provides broad latitude to own and carry guns â€" even if the consequences can sometimes be tragic.