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In my post on Katie Couric’s interview of Obama, I made one point about the pros and cons of heavy media coverage: “Imagine if Obama had talked about the ‘Iraq-Pakistan border’ while he was in Iraq.” That McCain line is the subject of a Howard Kurtz story in the Washington Post about how the mainstream media are starting …
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When Barack Obama absconded to the Middle East and Europe, taking America’s entire broadcast network-news industry with him, one question was whether he would get an unbalanced amount of coverage compared with John McCain, or an unbalanced amount of scrutiny. As Katie Couric got the first crack at an overseas interview last night on …
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America’s TV critics are picking the cocktail spears from their clothing, heading for LAX and embarking for their home cities, having concluded one of the weirder TV critics’ press tours in a while. Weird because there was relatively little new TV to preview in it. Largely because of the writer’s strike, but partly because it’s starting …
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Estelle Getty, the Golden Girls’ machine-gun-mouthed Sophia, died this morning. I can’t pretend to ever have been an enormous fan of The Golden Girls, but you had to admire the dynamism with which she took over the show: she was a pint-sized tornado of kvetchy sarcasm. (You might have been surprised to find that she was only 84 when she …
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There’s been much talk, particularly with Barack Obama’s overseas roadtrip, about whether the media are paying an unfair amount of attention to the Democratic candidate compared with John McCain. (An argument the McCain campaign is aggressively pushing.) It’s a worthwhile question, but it’s also worth noting that there are motivations …
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I’ve been linking to NBC’s various press-tour announcements about its late-night changes next year, but they add up to an interesting enough big-picture of NBC’s various gambles that they deserve their own post:
* First, where is Jay Leno going, when and how will NBC …
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At least one chain of local TV stations has found a solution for the nobody-wants-to-pay-for-journalism-anymore conundrum: product placements on the local news. The Meredith Corporation has struck a deal that has placed cups of McDonald’s iced coffee on the anchor desks at its Las Vegas affiliate; McDeals are in place at several other …
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* On the final day of sessions, America’s TV critics finally run out of TV networks, and Tim Goodman jumps for joy.
* Tim Kring says that Heroes will only benefit from returning to the air after viewers have spent a long time watching “a lot of stuff on TV that wasn’t of the quality of ‘Heroes.’” Such as season 2 of Heroes, for …
In recent months a team of curators and conservators at the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid has been examining Picasso’s great canvas Guernica. Now the museum’s chief of restoration, Jorge García Gómez Tejedor, has told the Spanish daily El Pais that the picture has suffered damage from …
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It was four and a half years ago that Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” in the Super Bowl halftime show introduced an innocent nation to horrors of the female breast, inspired a frenzy of election-year mania over broadcast decency, and led media observers to wonder if a newly aggressive FCC would reverse the trend toward more and …
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SPOILER ALERT: Before you read the rest of this post, stop time with your freeze ray and watch the final installment of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.
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* Bravo, the “what Project Runway?” network, announces American Artist, a Runway-style art competition; a Top Chef spinoff; and Fashion House, a clothing-design competition. Because it was about time Bravo got one of those. And The Real Housewives of Atlanta are unveiled.
* Jimmy Fallon to use Internet as training wheels.
* At least one …
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The Television Critics’ Association handed out its annual awards over the weekend. This was the first year I’ve voted on them, having just joined the association, but while I don’t agree with all the choices (WordGirl? WordGirl? Yo Gabba Gabba was robbed!) I think we got it more right than the Emmys generally do. Not that that’s a high …
