Outside Cable News

Via Silicon Alley Insider
CNBC: Cramer Up In Turbulent Markets, Donny Down
By Michael Learmonth

Advice for Donny Deutsch: scream a little more.

CNBC is positioning the super-tan ad man as the Oprah for entrepreneurs, but his show, “The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch,” cratered in May, averaging 114,000 viewers at 10 p.m., down 25% from last year, according to Nielsen.

Jim Cramer’s hyperactive “Mad Money,” however, had a good month despite turbulence in the financial markets. Cramer was up 21% to average 214,000 viewers at 6 p.m.

Cramer (SA 100 #19) has the advantage of catching the market faithful at 6 p.m. when they’re still in that frame of mind. At 10 p.m., Deutsch has stiffer competition across the dial — like CBS’s CSI — and his show is dragging down CNBC’s primetime, which was down 19% year-over-year. (Overall CNBC ratings, including daytime, are up 17% y/y.)
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Via Yahoo News
CNN sole network to get Puerto Rico polling
By Paul J. Gough

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - When Puerto Rico Democrats go to the polls Sunday for their island’s potentially historic primary, CNN will be the only network to have access to exit polling.

The network decided to foot the entire bill, which will run to about $100,000, after its National Election Pool partners initially decided against splitting the costs. CNN declined to discuss the cost.

CNN, along with Fox, NBC, ABC, CBS and the Associated Press, comprise the NEP, which coordinates exit polling for distribution on each network and the AP. The companies usually split the costs six ways.

But in April, a meeting of NEP representatives decided not to field an exit-poll team in the June 1 primary in Puerto Rico. (Although there is a primary, Puerto Rico residents don’t have the right to vote in the November election).
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Via Politico
Donahue agrees with Couric and Yellin
By Avi Zenilman

Phil Donahue – whose MSNBC show was canceled in February 2003, a time when opposition to the war was a rare perspective on television – says he’s not surprised by comments that surfaced in the past day from CNN’s Jessica Yellin or CBS’s Katie Couric (or Scott McClellan) about the media’s coverage of the lead-up to the war in Iraq.

“Both Katie and Jessica [who were also both working under the NBC umbrella in 2002] are absolutely correct. Is it a shame that we don’t have this kind of commentary from more of the male anchors who were at the center of the coverage in October 2002”, Donahue said by phone from Kansas City, where he’s visiting Tomas Young, the paralyzed soldier and subject of his recent documentary “Body of War.”

“The board members of the large megamedia companies, while America is waving the flag and supporting the President, do not want their cable or television channels to be occupied by dissent, protest, all the rights that have been fought for and died for in past wars,” he continued.
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Via CNN
Commentary: Slavery alive and well in U.S.
By Glenn Beck

Editor’s note: “Glenn Beck” is on CNN Headline News nightly at 7 and 9 ET and hosts a conservative national radio talk show.

NEW YORK (CNN) — “Jobs Americans just won’t do.”

I can’t stand that line, but more importantly, I don’t even understand it.

Americans spend months at a time at sea fishing for crab or drilling for oil; two of the most dangerous jobs in the world. Americans clean bathrooms, subway stations and crime scenes. Americans man toll booths, pave roads, embalm bodies and inspect sewers. Yet people really expect us to believe that they won’t pick strawberries or oranges?

It just doesn’t add up.

Earlier this week The Wall Street Journal published a story about a shortage of H-2B visas, which are issued twice a year to nonagricultural seasonal employees. Because our government can’t get out of its own way, they recently let an important “returning workers” provision expire resulting in thousands of foreign workers being shut out of the country this summer.

That’s inexcusable. I know this will come as a huge shock to those who only like to hurl insults, but I think we should be issuing more work visas, more student visas, and more green cards. And I think we should cut the red tape and bureaucracy that’s constantly blocking the front door.

>Read the rest at CNN.

Via phillyBurbs
By Eric Gargiulo
MSNBC V.P. field of 64 bracket

MSNBC.com has gotten cute with the GOP V.P. sweepstakes. Chuck Todd or “Chuckie T” as he is known in the rap community, helped develop a contest similar to the NCAA 64. Users can go on MSNBC.com and pick from a bracket of 64 potential John McCain running mates.

The contest breaks down the candidates by seeds and matches them up like the NCAA 64. The four first seeds are Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, John Thune, and Mark Sanford. Long shots include; Collin Powell (7), Lindsey Graham (4), Condi Rice (2), Tom Ridge (3), J.C. Watts (6), Mike Huckabee (2), David Petraeus (4), Rudy Giuliani (5), Joe Lieberman (2), and Jeb Bush at (4).

I played it out and my final came down to Mitt Romney and Charlie Crist. Check it out, and keep in mind it is for fun only. Unfortunately the only prize available would be a Jeb Bush win for the DNC.

Click here to play.

Via CJR
Yellin: News Execs Pushed For Positive Bush Stories
By Liz Cox Barrett

Everyone’s in tell-all (confessional?) mode, it seems.

An on-air exchange last night between CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Jessica Yellin (now at CNN, formerly of ABC News), prompted by discussion of Scott McClellan’s memoir and his assertion that White House reporters didn’t do their jobs in the lead-up to the war in Iraq:

YELLIN: When the lead-up to the war began, the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war presented in way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president’s high approval ratings….

And my own experience at the White House was that the higher the president’s approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives–and I was not at this network at the time–but the more pressure I had from news executives to put on positive stories about the president, I think over time….

COOPER: You had pressure from news executives to put on positive stories about the president?

YELLIN: Not in that exact…. They wouldn’t say it in that way, but they would edit my pieces. They would push me in different directions. They would turn down stories that were more critical, and try to put on pieces that were more positive. Yes, that was my experience.

(Hat tip, Michael Calderone).

Via THR
Lisa Ling to join CNN
Will report on follow-up to ‘Planet in Peril’
By Paul J. Gough

“Oprah” special correspondent and National Geographic host Lisa Ling will join CNN for a documentary this year that follows up on the network’s “Planet in Peril.”

Ling will report from countries where battles are being waged over oil, land, water and food. Also reporting for “Planet in Peril: Battle Lines” will be anchor Anderson Cooper and chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta. It will be televised in high definition at year’s end.

The docu will focus on the conflict over the ownership of the North Pole; food shortages and disease in Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and Indonesian shark fishing. The first “Planet in Peril” aired in October and visited 13 countries to see the environmental impact of overpopulation, deforestation, species loss and climate change.

“We continually get lots of feedback from the ‘Planet in Peril’ audience: ‘What are you doing next? Where are Anderson and Sanjay going this year?’ ” senior executive producer David Doss said. “At the end of the day, the response was overwhelming, so it was a no-brainer.”

via PR-inside

The American Business Awards are the only national, all-encompassing awards program honoring great performances in business.

Stevie Award winners will be announced during the annual gala on Thursday, June 12 at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City. More than 600 executives from across the U.S.A. are expected to attend. The ceremonies will be broadcast on radio nationwide by the Business TalkRadio Network and hosted by Liz Claman of FOX Business Network.

>Read the rest at PR-inside.

Via NYT
CNN Reporter’s Interview Raises Ethical Questions
By JACQUES STEINBERG

When Howard Kurtz invited Kimberly Dozier, the CBS journalist wounded in Iraq, onto his program, “Reliable Sources,” on CNN on Sunday, he was not a disinterested interviewer. Mr. Kurtz’s wife, Sheri Annis, had been paid to serve as a publicist for Ms. Dozier’s memoir, “Breathing the Fire,” which Ms. Dozier had come on the program to discuss.

After the interview, in which he also read aloud from the book, Mr. Kurtz told his viewers that he considered Ms. Dozier “a remarkable woman.” He then added, “I should mention that my wife has done some promotion work for Kim Dozier’s book.”

The interview represented another complicated tangle in the complex world of Mr. Kurtz. He is paid by two of the nation’s largest media entities — The Washington Post Company, which employs him as a media reporter, and Time Warner, which owns CNN — to cover the doings at their news organizations, and those at their competitors’. But several media ethicists interviewed in recent days said that, given the financial arrangement between Ms. Dozier’s publisher, Meredith Books, and Ms. Annis, Mr. Kurtz should not have done this particular interview at all. (Ms. Annis said she was actually paid by a subcontractor hired by Meredith.)
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