Outside Cable News

Via Digital Spy
ASA clears Fox News “balanced” claim
By Dave West, Media Correspondent

News Corporation is free to claim its Fox News channel is “fair and balanced” in adverts describing the service, the Advertising Standards Agency has ruled.

Two people complained after the media giant placed adverts celebrating its achievements in the British national press.

The advert was headed “defying conventional wisdom for six decades” and said: “Time and again, they said it couldn’t be done. Time and again, we did it. In the process, we’ve given new choices to billions of people around the world.”
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Via CNN
CNN’s Candy Crowley wins New Hampshire Primary Award

The New Hampshire Political Library is awarding CNN’s Candy Crowley with a New Hampshire Primary Award Wednesday for her outstanding political coverage.

Serving as CNN’s Senior Political Correspondent, Crowley braved the New England cold to report extensively on the New Hampshire primary earlier this year.

Former Sen. Bill Bradley, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and former New Hampshire Gov. Walter Peterson are also among those who are to be honored Wednesday evening.

The New Hampshire Political Library describes itself as a non partisan, non-profit organization with a mission of promoting the state’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary status.
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Via Examiner
Fox correspondent getting married

>Thanks to Cella for the tip.

Jim Angle, Fox News’s chief Washington correspondent, is finally taking the plunge. Angle is engaged to Patrice Pisinski, a former senior adviser at the Department of Energy.

“We met at a charity dinner,” Angle tells us. “Then she and a friend tried to set me up with a third person and she and I wound up getting involved instead.”

“This is a pretty big deal for me inasmuch as I am a lifelong bachelor,” he said. Plus, he adds that she has two children, ages 6 and 11. “So I am not only taking the plunge, I’m diving into the deep end of the pool.”

The May 17 wedding will be a small, private affair in the D.C. area.

Via BlackVoices
Tips for J.C. Watts to Become The Black Ted Turner
By Madison J. Gray

Turns out that of all people, conservative Republican former Congressman J.C. Watts is trying his hand at what BET has said loud and clear that they didn’t give a crap about: the news and black people.

So enter Watts and his new enterprise the Black Television News Channel, which he hopes will fill the void of African American-focused news and features. Great idea, actually. But it’s not the first time someone has attempted to do news aimed at black people.

BET actually had an excellent news department that focused quality journalism on topics pertinent to our community, as well as throughout the African diaspora. However, once executives at the network decided to pull the plug on its broadcast news division, we were left without a major national television news outlet. TV One, the black-owned media company headed by radio entrepreneurs Cathy Hughes and her son Alfred Liggins offers news programming through their daily schedule, as does BET, but not on the scale that Watts is talking about. This is a deal with Comcast Cable for a multi-city market to launch in 2009.

Now the question is: how will Watts successfully fill the gap left by BET when they decided to replace legitimate news with gold teeth and booty shaking?

Here’s some tips for the BTNC that will help them to grab and keep a hungry black news audience …
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Via Telegraph
The most influential US political pundits: 30-21

>Earlier: 40-31

Via TV Barn
By Aaron Barnhart
Good lord! Read your Bible, Major Garrett
>EXCERPT

Anyway, this is leading into a video clip that the leftie watchdog group Media Matters just posted of Fox News Channel’s Major Garrett, trying to give Sen. Barack Obama a Scripture lesson.

The Golden Rule is “not exactly rooted in Scripture but in the ballpark,” Garrett asserts. Actually, it’s more rooted in Scripture than a lot of things that so-called “values voters” hold dear. Perhaps Garrett is confusing this with the old Ben Franklin aphorism, “God helps those who help themselves,” which is not in the Good Word but often gets cited as though it is.

What carries over Garrett’s error from Unfortunate Goof to Appalling Misstatement is the fact that Obama’s response is exactly the one I would make if I had an embarrassing mentor or brother (Roger Clinton, Neil Bush) whose exploits were in the news.

Plus, what the heck church was Major Garrett brought up in that didn’t teach that the Golden Rule were the words of Jesus?

>Check out the video at TV Barn.

Via B&C
Fox News Channel to Take HD Leap
Time Warner Cable to Begin Carrying Fox News HD in Select Markets Thursday
By Glen Dickson

Fox News Channel will become the latest cable network to launch an HD service when it begins broadcasting in the 720-line progressive HD format Thursday.

Fox News HD, which will be a simulcast of Fox News’ standard-definition service, will initially be carried by Time Warner Cable in “select regions,” Fox News vice president of affiliate sales Tim Carry said.

Fox News HD will launch on Time Warner Cable in various parts of New York including Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island (channel 744) and Hudson Valley (channel 762). Time Warner also agreed to carry the new HD channel in San Antonio on channel 152.

Video from the Fox News studios and stand-up locations at the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ Exchange will originate in true HD for the new service, with additional field footage in HD planned for later this year. Fox News HD will also provide the HD pool feed for coverage of the Democratic National Convention in Denver this summer.

The new HD service will include added content on the screen in the form of an “HD wing” graphic, which will display national and world headlines, financial-market news, weather updates and sports scores. Fox Business Channel, which launched in HD last fall on DirecTV, also uses graphics to display additional content on the HD picture screen.

Via Jossip
David Gregory is Supposed to Be Phil Griffin’s Key to Removing Chris Matthews
The plan that’s not working out so well
JOSSIP REPORTS

There’s a big reason why MSNBC would like to quiet any knowledge of David Gregory’s off-camera behavior and sluggish ratings. David Gregory, you see, is supposed to be the next Chris Matthews.

Oh, did we say next?

We meant he’s supposed to replace Chris Matthews.

Promise not to tell?

MSNBC head Phil Griffin has been pushing for Matthews’ exit for months, if not longer, we’re hearing. Though Matthews remains a large part of MSNBC’s brand, he hasn’t been delivering the ratings; Hardball regularly comes in third in its timeslot. And the rise of Keith Olbermann’s Countdown proves MSNBC can remain competitive, and perhaps Matthews isn’t the one for the job.

Which is why Gregory’s installation as a 6pm talking head is so crucial to Griffin’s strategy. By ramping up Gregory’s image now, before the election, he’s better suited to take over Matthews’ slot when his $5 million-per-year contract is up next year.

>Read the rest at Jossip.

Via AOL News
Rachel Maddow: Number 50 With a Bullet!
By Tommy Christopher
>EXCERPT

I contacted Rachel about landing on the list, and she was generous enough to indulge me.

Update: This is for you, Rachel. Thanks.

Here is our exchange, over the course of 2 emails: .

Tommy Christopher: Rachel, you were named to the UK Telegraph’s Top 50 Most Influential Political Pundits list. What’s your reaction?

Rachel Maddow: My reaction can be roughly summed up by the phrase “Woohoo!”. Nice to be noticed. I was particularly thrilled to see myself described as “cute” — before I reread it and realized that what they actually said was that I was “acute” — I’ll take it anyway.
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Via NYT
Clinton to Appear on O’Reilly Factor
By Brian Stelter

Hillary Rodham Clinton will be interviewed by the Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly for the first time on Wednesday.

The interview will be shown on “The O’Reilly Factor” in two parts on Wednesday and Thursday. Expect plenty of media references to Mrs. Clinton’s entrance into “The No-Spin Zone,” a moniker for Mr. O’Reilly’s broadcast. “The O’Reilly Factor” is the most popular program on cable news, averaging 2.58 million viewers in March.

Mr. O’Reilly and his producers have been pursuing interviews with the Democratic presidential candidates for months. (Dennis Kucinich is the only Democratic contender that has appeared on “The O’Reilly Factor” during the primary season.)

Mr. O’Reilly’s interview of Mrs. Clinton will come days after Barack Obama appeared on “Fox News Sunday,” a weekly political program hosted by Chris Wallace.

Via NY Sun
A ‘Hardball’ Senator?
By SETH GITELL

The possibility of the host of MSNBC’s “Hardball” Christopher Matthews, running against Senator Specter of Pennsylvania, a Republican, for Mr. Specter’s senate seat in Pennsylvania is intensifying.

Although Mr. Matthews said to Bill Maher of HBO that he’s “not getting involved in it” when asked about whether he would seek the position in 2010, it is odd to employ his television program in a way that would make him a favorable candidate to run for senator of Pennsylvania as a Democrat.

Mr. Matthews, who is from the Philadelphia area, broadcasted his show from Philadelphia during the week of the Pennsylvania primary. Political figures that appeared on his national show were the mayor of Philadelphia, Michael Nutter, and an African-American congressman of Philadelphia, Chaka Fattah. In addition, Mr. Matthews interviewed on “Hardball” the chairmen of the Democratic committees of Allegheny, Montgomery, and Lackawanna counties, James Burn Jr., Marcel Groen, and Harry McGrath, local figures vital to any statewide candidacy.
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Via Telegraph
The most influential US political pundits: 40-31
Telegraph.co.uk unveils the second installment of its list of the 50 most influential political pundits in America.

>Check out 40-31 at Telegraph.

>Earlier: 50-41

Via Newslab/Guardian
Hispanic congressmen demand corporate action against CNN host
By Elana Schor

The anti-immigration views of CNN host Lou Dobbs have made him a darling in the ratings but a nemesis among US Latinos, whose frustration has risen to the Washington corridors of power.

After their requests for a meeting with the chief executive of CNN’s parent company were rebuffed, Latino members of Congress condemned the TV network for failing to recognise the “potentially dangerous” consequences of Dobbs’s “divisive commentary”.

Dobbs has become a sensation thanks to his populist outbursts against undocumented immigrants, whom he calls “aliens” and accuses of “invading” America to steal jobs.

The TV host also has targeted the Democratic presidential candidates, naming one segment “Hillary’s hypocrisy” and describing Barack Obama’s endorsement by Latino governor and former Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson as “pandering to ethnocentric special interests”.
(more…)

>Guess which anchor blogged that line and win! But, what do ya win? Nothing, eh.

Via CNN
Glenn Beck: U.S. is a suicidal superpower
By Glenn Beck

Editor’s note: “Glenn Beck” is on CNN Headline News nightly at 7 and 9 ET.

NEW YORK (CNN) — If you’re a poor sap who needs to eat or drive in the near future, then you might want to consider taking out a second mortgage (assuming you could even get one) pretty soon.

Food and gas prices have been all over the news lately, and even a big dumb rodeo clown like me can see that it’s all connected. Our policies, which try to cater to everyone from oil company executives to environmentalists, end up benefiting no one — and now we’re all paying the price.

I know that real economists probably will say that the causes of these skyrocketing prices are extremely complicated to understand, but the truth is that it’s actually pretty simple: We’ve done this to ourselves.

I don’t know if it’s because of our arrogance, our stupidity or maybe both, but I believe that history may one day judge America as the most suicidal superpower of all time. After all, what country that cares about its future would do what America has done to its supply of food and fuel, two of the most critical things that any civilization needs to survive?

For example, look at the way we treat our food supply. We’ve spent decades giving billions of dollars in government subsidies with incentives for the wrong things, we’ve mandated that huge areas of farmland stay open for “conservation” and we’re using grains that could feed tens of millions of people to make a crappy biofuel that you can’t even buy anywhere.

That’s not arrogance?

>Read the rest at CNN.

Via Newslab/TVWeek
CNN Seeks to Level Peaks and Valleys
News Network Sets Post-Election Sales Plan
By Jon Lafayette

The cable news networks, which are getting a ratings boost from presidential politics, still will have to sell ads after the election’s been decided.

At CNN, that means packaging shows and multimedia features to minimize the boom-bust dynamic.

“In any post-election year, you’ve always seen a dropoff in news,” said Greg D’Alba, chief operating officer for ad sales at CNN. After this election cycle, he hopes it will be different.
The key to Mr. D’Alba’s strategy is 40 “programming platforms” that he will be selling to advertisers during the upfront, which for cable news networks kicks off next month and tends to run through September. The platforms consist of content on specific subjects that consumers can watch on cable or access on the Internet, via broadband or on mobile devices.

CNN has pulled in new viewers during the election, closing the prime-time audience gap it has with Fox News, the No. 1 cable news network. During last week’s Pennsylvania primary, CNN’s campaign coverage drew more viewers than Fox’s.

Translating those ratings gains into revenue is the challenge for CNN, with analysts predicting Fox News will bolster sales more than its competitor does this year.
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Via Telegraph
The 50 most influential US political pundits
By Toby Harnden

With just over six months before United States citizens choose their 44th president, the 2008 election is already proving to be the most fascinating and potentially one of the closest contests in living memory.

>The list is only 50-41.. The Telegraph is going to “stagger” the release throughout the week. Also you’ll find a write up at the link.

Via PRWeek
By Elizabeth Toledo
Citizen journalism affects nonprofits

Profound changes in the way that advocacy groups interact with mainstream media outlets is on the horizon, yet most organizations have not restructured to take advantage of this new frontier.

As a long-time media strategist on the nation’s most controversial social issues - such as abortion, sex education, and affirmative action - I have often helped organizations wade through the muddy waters of dealing with inflammatory claims.

Recent investments by CNN and other mainstream outlets call for a radical reassessment of the way that many nonprofits approach the media. Any organization with a vocal base - either in opposition or in favor - ought to rethink its media strategies.

In the old model, advocacy organizations influenced the media by sending press releases, holding press events, submitting letters to the editor, and publishing newsworthy information. That model worked because an editor or columnist determined what was “newsworthy.”
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Via AP
Ex-CNN anchor Aaron Brown returns to TV on PBS’ `Wide Angle’
By LYNN ELBER

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Aaron Brown, the former CNN anchor who found cable TV an awkward fit, is joining PBS’ “Wide Angle” series and ending his on-air absence of more than two years.

“If I was going to do broadcast journalism again, be a public person again … then it had to be something different from what I’d done,” Brown told The Associated Press. “You can count on one hand how many gigs there are like this.”

Anchoring “Wide Angle,” a weekly public affairs series with a global focus, offers the chance “to work in an environment where people just think about making good TV and good journalism,” Brown said.

“By the end (of an episode), you understand the world you live in and how it’s connected to you,” he said Saturday.

Brown, 59, who left CNN in November 2005 during a shake-up that gave his time slot to rising star Anderson Cooper, said he was contractually barred from working in TV until last June. He’s been teaching at Arizona State University as its first Walter Cronkite Professor of Journalism.

“Wide Angle” begins its seventh season July 1. PBS planned to announce Brown’s hiring on Monday.
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Via Sun-Sentinel
Fox’s Chris Wallace happier on cable
By Tom Jicha

Some people wondered what Chris Wallace was thinking — or if he was thinking — when he left a high-profile role at ABC News in 2003 for Fox News Channel.

Wallace had no doubts he was making a smart move: “It was all about air time.” On a broadcast network, it’s extremely limited. On a cable news network, there’s more than enough time available, almost all anyone could want.

If Wallace ever had second thoughts, they were dispelled at one of the 2004 political conventions. “I was the podium anchor for Fox,” he said. “Each of us had a little monitor to follow what our networks were doing. We were covering the convention from beginning to end. When I looked over at Brian Williams’ monitor, NBC had someone eating bugs on Fear Factor.”

If Wallace was happy then, he’s ecstatic now in the midst of the most intensely followed political campaign in TV history. The night of the Pennsylvania primary, he said, “I was on for two hours. Did the networks do anything at all?”

A competitor, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, observed that the big winner in Pennsylvania was cable news. Hillary Clinton’s victory meant the campaign likely will continue for at least another couple of months. This means more all-time-high ratings for cable political shows, such as Wallace’s Fox News Sunday.
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Via AJC
Documenting the media migration to separate corners
By Jim Galloway

Slowly but surely, you and your television are making your way back to the 18th century and those glorious, early days of the Republic, when wigs sat upon Whigs and political campaigns were little more than scorched-earth libel competitions.

Anyone with cable TV — virtually everyone, in other words — has sensed this for some time. Now someone’s come up with the numbers that show just how real the movement is.

Barry Hollander is an associate professor of journalism professor at the University of Georgia. He’s good at crunching numbers.

Hollander recently took five national surveys, conducted from 1998 to 2006 by the Pew Center for the People and the Press, and mushed them together to create an eight-year look at America’s political viewing habits.

What he documented was a quiet stampede.

In 1998, 27 percent of Republicans and 25 percent of Democrats tuned in regularly to Atlanta-based CNN. Eight years later, the number of Democrats had risen to 29 percent.

But the number of Republicans who tuned in to CNN had shrunk to 19 percent. Gosh, where do you think they went?
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Via Denver Post
Cable news dumbs down presidential race
By Joanne Ostrow

You saw it when Barack Obama’s “bitter” comment was elevated to “Bitter-gate” status.

You saw it when Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “sniper fire” comment was dissected, clarified and parsed on the cable news channels, and revisited by Charles Gibson and George Stephanopolous on ABC’s shameful debate.

Blame ABC’s questioners for running with the distractions, but blame the cable networks for driving the minutiae to center stage in the first place.

We see it every day, and there’s no end in sight: Cable TV news has ruined media political coverage.

The 24-hour cable channels have redefined election-year news, seeking a daily narrative that focuses on gaffes and goofs. Any possibly inflammatory charge becomes the talking point of the day. Hour after hour.

Because of the demand to fill endless time in an age when the broadcast networks have largely abandoned live coverage, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC are leading the way to more superficial political coverage. Those with track records in the business say cable reinforces the worst instincts of the political media.

And because the rest of the print and electronic beat reporters watch cable news, that influence is compounded.
(more…)

>I just noticed FNC has 11 of their specials up on Hulu. See the list after the jump.

(more…)

Via Lake Sun Leader
Cable news squawk shows are not journalism
By Jules Molenda

Our news editor, Joyce Miller, stuck her head in my office a week or so ago to tell me that she was moving up in the world: CNN had called her and wanted her for an on-air interview.

That’s pretty impressive for a small-town newspaper scribe, I thought. I asked her what they had called her for and when she’d be on.

‘It’s about my story on the kids in the clothes dryer and I’m not going on,’ she said.

In case you missed it, we ran a story in mid-April about a young woman whose boyfriend had allegedly place her two youngsters (separately) in a clothes dryer and turned it on.

The details that came off the police report that we used as our source were sketchy. The information on it consisted of police interviews with an 8-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy and ‘ not surprising - somewhat conflicting interviews with the two adults involved.

Sadly, child abuse such as is alleged here is pretty common in the U.S., but the clothes dryer angle was somewhat unique.
(more…)

Via UPI
Pentagon ends retiree analyst briefings

WASHINGTON, April 25 (UPI) — The Pentagon has dropped its practice of having the defense secretary brief retired military officers who work as TV news analysts, officials said Friday.

Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Robert Hastings said he suspended the briefings this week after The New York Times published a story on ties between the Pentagon and the retirees-turned-analysts, CNN reported Friday.

The Times reported Sunday that many such analysts — who began appearing on TV during the run-up to the Iraq war — were fed information by the Pentagon, which used the military experts in a campaign to generate favorable coverage of the Bush administration’s wartime performance.

The Times story said some military analysts had business dealings with the Pentagon, contacts that viewers — and even the networks employing the analysts — were rarely informed of.

Rep. Paul Hodes, D-N.H., Thursday called on Rep. John Tierney, D-Mass. — chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs — to look into the matter.

Hodes said it was unacceptable for the administration to try to “manipulate the public with false propaganda on matters of war and our national security.”

Via G4TV
Sessler On Geraldo!
By Jonathan Hunt

X-Play’s very own Adam Sessler will be appearing on FOX News’ Geraldo Rivera this Sunday, talking about the upcoming Grand Theft Auto IV as well as X-Play’s Summer Games Preview.

No doubt you all remember the controversy that began when FOX News incorrectly and irresponsibly reported on the sexual situations depicted in the game Mass Effect and how Adam reacted somewhat adversely.

Well, now it’s time for FOX News to meet The Sess face to face. He’ll be appearing on Gerlado Rivera at 8:30PM ET/5:30PM PT.

In case you don’t remember the controversy, here are some videos to jog your memory.