Two related items: Tonight, MTV premieres a show about teenagers who actually look like the teenagers who watch MTV, as opposed to teenagers who look like the cast of a TV soap. The Paper is a reality show about the staff of a Florida high-school newspaper, the first episode of which is not about boyfriends or sex or throwing a …
Television
Report: CNN, CBS Seek Innovative, Exciting New Ways to Lay Off Journalists
So over here you’ve got CNN, which has a big international newsgathering organization, but whose corporate daddy (and mine), Time Warner, is like, too totally cheap to buy it a sibling broadcast network, like all the other kids have, which is, like, totally unfair.
And over here, you have CBS, the network that has a decades-long …
Liberal Nielsen Ratings Attack Fox News
Following up on my column of last week about the malaise of Fox News in the waning days of the Bush era come the first-quarter ratings for 2008, and they continue the trend I mentioned: CNN beat out Fox in prime time for the quarter, among the prime advertiser demographic of 25-to-54-year-olds. It was also a fairly big quarter for MSNBC, …
Thumbs Down for Pro Movie Critics?
I Am David Carr’s Publicist Week continues this morning, as the prolific New York Times writer pens an interesting piece on the disappearance of print movie critics. (I should note, self-servingly, that print TV critics have been downsized or bought out left and right lately also—and, less self-servingly, that much the same has been …
In Which I Admit That Bill O'Reilly Is Right
In my column about Fox News last week, I referenced a controversy last month in which “Bill O’Reilly caught flak for using the phrase ‘lynching party’ in a critique of Michelle Obama.” A producer for The O’Reilly Factor wrote to complain that my wording—specifically, the word “critique”—misrepresented O’Reilly, because he wasn’t …
Fox News' Obama Problem
I’ve been watching an inordinate amount of Fox News lately for an upcoming column, and Friday there was a bizarre incident in the saga of The Great Fox Jeremiah Wright Pile-On of 2008. Fox and Friends had Fox Sunday host Chris Wallace on as a guest, and Wallace began his segment by giving the hosts an on-air tongue-lashing for unfairly …
Olbermann Scolds Clinton
On last night’s Countdown, Keith Olbermann weighed in–in no uncertain terms—on Ferrarogate, castigating Hillary Clinton and her campaign for not repudiating Geraldine Ferraro’s claim that Barack Obama was “lucky” to be a black candidate in this primary [Update: The embedded MSNBC video was, annoyingly, causing the Tuned In homepage to …
Spitzer: The (Tabloid) Media Angle
In New York City, people play the New York Post front-page game: the day after some major scandal, you guess what the banner headline on the front page of the Post will be. (After the Hugh Grant hooker case, e.g., I guessed “HOW COULD HUGH?” though I think they went with “BLUE HUGH” instead.)
There were a lot of possibilities, but you …
Monstergate: What Is "Off the Record"?
Not to get too Swampland-y in here, but the political press is abuzz this morning over the resignation of Samantha Power, an Obama aide adviser (and TIME contributor) for having called Hillary Clinton a “monster” in an interview. (A smoke monster? A Godzilla / Cloverfield type creature? Where was the follow up?)
The Tuned In aspect–and …
One More Post About Reporters and Voting
As long as we’re navel-gazing on the subject here this week, I should point out that political reporter Chris Cilizza at The Washington Post blogged yesterday that he does not vote, and asked his readers whether they thought that was the right decision for a reporter or not.
There are over 200 posts as of now. By my count, the vote got …
More on Journalists and Voting
Last week I wrote a post on why journalists should disclose who they vote for in elections. As you might have guessed from the fact that almost no journalists do disclose who they vote for in elections, mine is still a minority view.
Such a minority view, in fact, that there’s still a debate raging (well, mildly raging) about whether …
Dead Tree Alert: Becoming Ms. Big. Also: Why Do You Hate Newswomen, America?
Katie Couric interviews Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire. / CBS
My Time magazine piece about Cashmere Mafia, Lipstick Jungle and how they relate to the Hillary-era zeitgeist–i.e., what are the standards, and double standards, society sets for powerful women–is up here.
In the piece I briefly mentioned how women like Martha Stewart …
Diversity Lesson of the Day: Mocking Chinese More Offensive Than Mocking Indians
Gung Hey Fat Choy! Salesgenie.com is celebrating Chinese Lunar New Year by pulling its Super Bowl ad, featuring pandas speaking in exaggerated Chinese accents, because it turns out that people get offended by that sort of thing.
Exaggerated Indian accents, though? Not so much. The company has no plans to retract its other newly-debuted …