Free Republic

Couric Furious At CBS Suits. She Claims "They Are Stabbing Me In The Back." Katie Couric is not a happy camper this morning. The Suits at CBS have sent a strong signal throughout the news department that they have already lost faith in her. Here are the details as reported to me this AM from an old friend at West 57th. (Here beginnith the First Lesson.) “Promos” (short for promotional announcements) are advertisements a station or network runs to promote their own programs. A 30 second televised message advertising Veg-O-Matic is called a “spot” (short for spot advertisement.) A 30...

http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/articles/060814roco02 Must read...

At first everyone thought they were just blowing smoke, but the debunking of a Reuters photograph by a group of Web sites has launched a fiery online war in which bloggers have taken on the mainstream media. Bloggers, or writers on web logs, were the first to reveal that a Reuters photograph depicting plumes of black smoke rising over Beirut was doctored to enhance smoke above the city. The Web site www.LittleGreenFootballs.com is credited with first revealing the scandal, which has been dubbed Reutersgate, but the affair has spread far wider than the Reuters News Agency and into several of...

How Much Does It Cost to Buy Global TV News? The vast majority of the TV news pictures you see are produced by two TV news companies. Presented here is a case for how a large amount of money has been used to inject a clear bias into the heart of the global TV news gathering system. That this happens is not at question, whether it is by accident or design is harder to tell. You may not realize it, but if you watch any TV news broadcast on any station anywhere in the world, there is a better than...

8/1/2006 - This is a really interesting 60 minutes segment from a few yeas ago about how the Palestinians use their own camera crews and actors to basically set up war scenes in their favor. Their calling it Pallywood and I thought it was pretty relavent considering whats happening now in the middle east.

Infighting and Weak Ad Sales Hurt Both New Companies; Questioning a Media Fad 'I Have No Second Thoughts' On Jan. 3, Viacom Inc. Chairman Sumner Redstone stood on the balcony of the New York Stock Exchange and heralded the split of his media conglomerate. "The world has changed," he declared after he rang the opening bell. Seven months later, the world indeed has changed -- but not entirely in the way Mr. Redstone predicted. The decision to separate the fast-growing MTV Networks from the more mature CBS TV and radio operation coincided with a sudden slowdown in cable-TV ad sales....

"I think we'll have a newscast that evolves over time," Katie Couric told the press in Denver Thursday, on day four of her cross-country tour. Couric will spend time in San Diego today before heading up the road to Los Angeles for the TCA Press Tour this weekend. At the town meetings, Couric and potential viewers have been talking about the Internet, among other subjects. The AP reports: "The changes, she said, could include expanding segments and breaking traditional time constraints of newscasting. The network is also focusing on how the Internet can enhance the nightly news, offering a place...

Dow Jones yesterday offered a clue to the possible next editorial overseer of The Wall Street Journal, its flagship publication, as the company twinned an announcement of the retirement date of the newspaper’s managing editor with the creation of a committee to reassess the ways it delivers news across all its print and online properties. Paul E. Steiger, The Journal’s managing editor since 1991, will step down at the end of 2007, the year he turns 65, in accordance with the company’s retirement policies. Meanwhile, Paul Ingrassia, president of Dow Jones Newswires, will lead the companywide project as part of...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- A prominent businessman who turned the sale of the San Francisco Chronicle into a drawn-out legal drama six years ago is now suing to prevent McClatchy Inc. from completing a $737 million deal to sell three of the newspapers it picked up in its recent acquisition of Knight Ridder Inc. Clinton Reilly, a millionaire real estate investor, plans to file an antitrust lawsuit Friday that could derail or at least delay McClatchy's plan to unload the San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times and Monterey Herald, according to his lawyer, Joseph A. Alioto. The lawsuit, to...

Normally genteel Santa Barbara convulsed with another round of recrimination Thursday over its daily newspaper — with owner Wendy McCaw accusing journalists who quit her newsroom en masse of using the paper to air their biases, while one of the defectors slammed the wealthy owner as an amateurish meddler. Much of the fighting was conducted on the front pages of the Santa Barbara News-Press and the alternative weekly the Santa Barbara Independent. Even one-time Washington political columnist Lou Cannon joined in the print-lashing of the daily newspaper's operators. While the week-old battle raged, an eighth News-Press journalist resigned Thursday and...

We wonder if the folks over at Truthout.org are rethinking their affiliation with reporter and serial fabulist Jason Leopold. Leopold, you may recall, is the freelance reporter who was caught making stuff up in a 2002 Salon.com article, self-admittedly "getting it completely wrong" in pieces for Dow Jones, and had his own memoir cancelled because of concerns over the accuracy of quotations. Leopold's latest addition to his application for membership in the Stephen Glass school of journalism came on May 12 of this year, when he got what appeared to be the scoop of a lifetime. Now writing for Truthout.org,...

THE ratings-starved Maury Povich and Connie Chung weekend show on MSNBC ended its short, six-month run with a bizarre send-off - sure to live on as a tone-deaf stunt Chung will not soon be allowed to forget. Perched on the edge of a white grand piano and decked out in a full-length evening gown, the former CBS and CNN anchorwoman warbled a farewell song that put down Dan Rather (with whom she co-anchored the CBS news in the early 1990s), her husband and cable TV - all at the same time. "Thanks for the memories," she sang to the tune...

THE ratings-starved Maury Povich and Connie Chung weekend show on MSNBC ended its short, six-month run with a bizarre send-off - sure to live on as a tone-deaf stunt Chung will not soon be allowed to forget. Perched on the edge of a white grand piano and decked out in a full-length evening gown, the former CBS and CNN anchorwoman warbled a farewell song that put down Dan Rather (with whom she co-anchored the CBS news in the early 1990s), her husband and cable TV - all at the same time. "Thanks for the memories," she sang to the tune...

CHICAGO (MarketWatch) -- As newspaper publishers convene in New York on Tuesday for the Newspaper Association of America's annual midyear review, one theme that will standout among many will be whether or not impatient and frustrated shareholders can be placated while the industry makes the long transition to an online-driven model. Judging by the way things unfolded at Knight Ridder (KRI), and may now possibly be unraveling at Tribune Co. (TRB), the answer appears to be no. Last November, Knight Ridder put itself on the block after its two of its biggest institutional shareholders demanded that that the company pursue...

A drive-by Media (sometimes referred to merely as a MSM) is an attack on a person carried out with one or more reporters, usually automatic RNCFL (ReportNowCheckFactsLater) or sub-standard reporting from a news briefing room, (or a cubicle on the 40th floor of an unnamed MSM headquarters). They often result in the falsely Reporting of innocent conservatives because the objective is to overwhelm the target by a sudden, massive amount of false reporting without attention to accuracy. The CBS - American News Anchor, ""Gunga Dan" Rather, is believed to have invented the drive-by Reporting. Drive by reportings were popular in...

Wednesday, Jun 07 Rick Kaplan Resigns: "He Has Led MSNBC Through A Period Of Impressive Growth" "I want to thank Rick for his service to MSNBC," NBC News president Steve Capus said in a message to MSNBC employees at 4pm. "Over the last two and a half years, Rick has been a tireless champion for the network and all the hard work you do each and every day. He has led MSNBC through a period of impressive growth especially in primetime. You, the staff at MSNBC, are enormously dedicated and have built a rock-solid foundation for our future growth. MSNBC...

Web media is the dominant at-work media and No. 2 in the home, according to a new report from the Online Publishers Association. A research project, conducted by Ball State University's Center for Media Design, tracked the media use of 350 people every 15 seconds. The subjects represented each gender, about equally, across three age groups: 18 to 34, 35 to 49 and 50-plus. The people were monitored by another person for approximately 13 hours, or 80 percent of their waking day. "Someone actually came into their homes and workplaces and had a handheld computer, every 15 seconds registering their...

Peter Handke, perhaps the most preeminent and creative European playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist alive today, has recently been embroiled in a cultural scandal that involves character assassination (his) through ad hominem attacks and calumny, censorship by a faceless theatre bureaucrat, and the relentless abuse of the Parisian bien-pensants, those guard dogs of French palatial conformism. Like in America, getting out of the core political line in France leads to either being utterly ignored or, when famous, being dragged into the mud and punished for crime of lese-majesty. The confluence of intellectual cowardice, financial and strategic interests, and navel-gazing, backslapping...

RICHMOND, Va. -- The Richmond Times-Dispatch said Saturday it fired a reporter for fabricating part of a story and has begun investigating his other work. Paul Bradley, 51, who worked in the newspaper's northern Virginia bureau, was dismissed Friday, the newspaper reported. The article, published May 17, was intended to gather reaction in Herndon to President Bush's speech on immigration. Bradley's fabrications, the Times-Dispatch said, included an interview that did not occur with the director of a center for day laborers and the misrepresentation that he had visited the center by using a Herndon dateline. Managing editor Louise C. Seals...

Truthout doesn't say they were wrong, they don't say they were right. They say: The Rove Indictment Story as of Right Now By Marc Ash, Fri May 19th, 2006 at 04:23:39 PM EDT :: Fitzgerald Investigation On Saturday afternoon, May 13, 2006, TruthOut ran a story titled, "Karl Rove Indicted on Charges of Perjury, Lying to Investigators." The story stated in part that top Bush aide Karl Rove had earlier that day been indicted on the charges set forth in the story's title. The time has now come, however, to issue a partial apology to our readership for this story....