The positioning of the candidates at last night’s NBC News / Politico debate at the Reagan library told you all you needed to know: squarely in the center were Mitt Romney, the longtime varsity letterman in the GOP primary race, and Rick Perry, the hotshot new quarterback just transferred to the school who suddenly has his pick of …
News Media
The Freakout Before the Storm
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After a welcome vacation and a less-welcome hurricane-related flight cancellation (which, luckily, set us back only a day), I’m back. Kind of! Like the New York metropolitan transportation grid, Tuned In is gradually and fitfully restoring its regular schedule. Expect delays, …
Piers Morgan and Christine O'Donnell's Mutual Aggravation Society
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Because the whole world (where “whole world” = media-obsessed people like me) seems to be talking about it this morning, I feel obligated to post the video of former Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell walking off the set of The Piers Morgan Show on CNN last night.
Though honestly? …
Credit Downgraded, Intensity Upgraded on Cable Biz News
As you know, the stock market is way down. Or way up. Or in between, or both—I’m going to have to hedge my bets, because as I write this, the markets are whanging up and down like a telephone wire that an elephant just jumped off. Within the past hour or so, the Dow has been down about 200 points, because traders were apparently …
MSNBC Leans Forward Into the Post-Olbermann Era, And Chris Matthews Has a Lot to Say
Keith Olbermann, former MSNBC star / bete noire, did not come up explicitly in the questioning at the MSNBC panel today at the TCA press tour. But his mutually negotiated departure earlier this year was a subtext of many of the questions addressed to news chief Phil Griffin and hosts Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell and Chris …
Dead Tree Alert: The Humbling of Murdoch; Also, On the Price of Dead Trees
My column in the print edition of TIME this week is about this week’s travails of News Corp. and Rupert Murdoch, and how his empire has been rattled by the very forces with which he built it: tabloid gossip, political access and the sharp-elbowed pursuit of both. It includes a disclosure statement so long I decided to make it the lede …
From "Humble" to Pie as Murdoch Takes the Stand
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“This is the most humble day of my life,” declared Rupert Murdoch to a parliamentary committee today, and I can see why he would want to say that. They say you should always begin with a joke.
You can say what you want about the embattled CEO of News Corp.* and his performance, his …
Murdochalypse or Schadenfreude? The Wall Street Journal Defends Its Boss
When Rupert Murdoch‘s News Corp. acquired the Wall Street Journal in 2007, a big question was how editorially independent the newspaper would be able to remain. If nothing else, the Murdochalypse (not my coinage) precipitated by the British phone-hacking scandal has provided a test. First, Murdoch favored his national American newspaper …
More Executives Flying Out the Window at News Corp.
In the crisis-public-relations business, they often say you dump bad news to the media on a Friday afternoon. This apparently is also the case if the crisis is in the media, as some high-level executives have exited News Corporation in the continuing phone-hacking scandal. First, Rebekah Brooks, erstwhile editor of News of the World, …
The Hacking Scandal and the Two Faces of Murdoch
The News of the World phone-hacking scandal in Great Britain is getting juicier and more astonishing. The long-runner paper was summarily killed by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. in an apparent damage-control attempt; the legal investigation is widening; and the list of the paper’s purported snooping targets has widened to include crime …
Chewed Up, Spitzered Out at CNN
The bad news: Eliot Spitzer has lost another job. The good news: there’s no legal investigation involved this time! In a big shakeup of CNN’s trouble primetime lineup, the former New York governor’s In the Arena has been cancelled, to be replaced, beginning Aug. 8, with Anderson Cooper’s AC 360, now at 10 p.m. ET. In the fall, CNN will …
Casey Anthony Is Acquitted; the Media Trial Is Just Beginning
You could have watched the Casey Anthony verdict on another channel besides HLN,* but that would have been like watching election returns on ESPN.
Other networks covered the trial, some more fervently than others — notably TruTV, formerly known as Court TV. But it was HLN that threw itself into the trial with lust and bloodlust, that …
Fox News Hoax Attack Shows Need to Treat Twitter As Serious News
The 4th of July tends to be a slow news day, but that wasn’t the case on Fox News’ politics Twitter feed—for all the wrong reasons. Early in the morning, a hacker group commandeered the account and posted a series of hoax messages indicating that President Obama had been assassinated in Iowa. (The President was not in fact even in the …