Outside Cable News

>Somebody forgot to drop that pesky L3.

NBC reprimands employee for Obama error

By David Bauder
via BusinessWeek

New York

NBC News said Tuesday it has reprimanded the employee responsible for mistakenly flashing a picture of Osama bin Laden on MSNBC as Chris Matthews talked about Barack Obama.

“This mistake was inexcusable,” MSNBC spokesman Jeremy Gaines said.

It happened during the opening of “Hardball” Monday evening. Matthews was previewing a story on the controversy over Obama’s use of another politician’s words, and a picture of bin Laden briefly flashed on the screen beside him with the headline “Words About Words.”
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Full Court Press
Charles Kaiser on Howard Kurtz’s conflicting interests (and the CNN pundit’s love affair with the right)
By Charles Kaiser

>This is 2 pages and extra juicy.

via Radar Online

Do you give money to panhandlers?
Rarely. I’d rather spend my money on people who work. That’s why I’m a good tipper.

Read the rest at NY Mag

MSNBC PREMIERES “DECISION 2008: THE CANDIDATES” SERIES

NEW YORK – February 19, 2008 – In light of what is considered to be one of the most historic presidential elections this country has ever seen, MSNBC premieres “Decision 2008: The Candidates,” a three-part series on the lives and careers of the 2008 presidential hopefuls. The “Decision 2008: The Candidates” series premieres Wednesday, February 20 at 10 p.m. ET/PT.

>Read the full release here

Via The Buffalo News

by Jeff Simon
COMMENTARY

FoxNews has fired Eric Burns and declined to renew the contract of Neal Gabler. They were, respectively, the moderator and star panelist of its show “Fox News Watch.”

Let us freely admit that as media stories go, that twofer isn’t exactly up there with Dan Rather suing CBS for nonsupport or Katie Couric taking the CBS anchor chair, only to wobble on it ever after.

But it’s as fascinating as any TV news story I know at the moment. That’s because “Fox News Watch” — the network’s “critical look at the media” — was the one weekly show on the entire network that even the family Beagle could see was genuinely “fair and balanced.” Burns, as moderator, spent years discussing weekly issues of media performance with Gabler, perhaps the most original talking head in all of TV news, and Jane Hall, Cal Thomas and Jim Pinkerton.
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via Washington Post

>An interesting read at 3 pages and highly recommended.

via The Times Picayune
By Dave Walker
Staff writer

It’s been three days since Barenaked Ladies saluted Wolf Blitzer from the stage of the House of Blues, and getting to write this sentence alone makes all the downtown traffic restrictions during All-Star Weekend worth it.

The Saturday night event was sponsored by TNT, the game’s cablecaster and corporate sibling of CNN, Blitzer’s network.

Blitzer was here for the weekend in part to stoke corporate TNT-CNN synergy by participating with other news-network co-workers (including Anderson Cooper and Soledad O’Brien) in the NBA’s sidecar Technology Summit.
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