Free Republic

In his most humiliating setback since his failed coup attempt of 2000, Al Gore is seeing his dreams of creating yet another left-wing media outlet fall like chads from the hands of a ballot-twisting Florida Democrat recount activist. Thank Barry Diller, who despite Gore's begging is refusing to lift his veto over the sale of the News World International cable network from Vivendi Universal Entertainment, the New York Post reported today. Apparently the Democrats will have to be satisfied with NPR, PBS, CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN ...

Primetones offering to host MP3.com files11/26/2003 5:58:56 PMLOS ANGELES, Nov 26 (Reuters) - Start-up company Primetones said Wednesday it is in talks to preserve MP3.com Inc.'s audio library, scheduled for destruction on Dec. 2, just weeks after Vivendi Universal (V) agreed to sell MP3.com to CNET Networks Inc. (CNET) . "The loss of these MP3.com audio files is a catastrophe that may be felt for generations to come," said David Blumberg, director for artist development at Primetones, the Texas company that has offered to transcribe and host the more than 1.2 million tracks, which were uploaded by more than 250,000...

<p>Twentieth Century Fox on Friday will release the first of what it hopes will be a series of movies about a courageous British naval captain named Jack Aubrey. But "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" is just about the opposite of the Hollywood norm for would-be movie franchises.</p>

Mariah Carey's new single, "Through the Rain," has stirred up a squall in the radio world with suggestions that the pop singer's record label tried to revive her career by inflating airplay figures. Island Def Jam Music Group bought radio spots containing 53 seconds of the song, which fooled the computers that monitor and measure airplay, or "spins," for the recording industry. As a result, the ballad seemed to be building momentum in markets across the country when in fact it was losing steam. An album's success can rise or fall on such numbers. If a song appears to be...

Despite efforts by record executives to stanch declining CD sales by releasing a cavalcade of big-name artists during the critical Christmas shopping season, early sales figures show an already struggling industry may now be in even worse shape. In the five weeks since mid-November, when the record labels began their biggest holiday blitz in recent memory, compact disc sales were down 12.9 percent compared to the period in 2001, according to data from Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks music sales. That poor performance comes even as new CDs from artists like Shania Twain, Mariah Carey, Jay-Z and Paul McCartney have sold...

Flashback: It is the year 2000, and Public Cultural Enemy No. 1 is a rapper named Eminem (aka Marshall Mathers III), who has ascended from America's closest approximation of hell (aka his hometown, Detroit). His abundant use of the words ''bitch'' and ''faggot'' has aroused the full spectrum of P.C. police, left and right. The violence in his songs is echoed by headlines of his own arrest on gun charges in two consecutive public brawls. And since he is white, he can't be ghettoized: his music is saturating the suburbs at a faster clip than that of black hip-hop artists....

Filed at 3:23 p.m. ET PARIS (AP) -- For nearly two decades it has been France's Saturday night naughtiness: no-holds-barred pornography, beamed to TV sets in millions of homes across the land. All the while, few people complained about ``le porno du Samedi soir,'' as the French cheerfully call it -- until this summer. Then government-appointed regulators touched off a cultural debate by urging channels to drop the porn, and at the same time lobbying the legislature for the power to force compliance if TV executives don't go along. The TV porn started back in 1984, when pioneering broadcaster Canal...

<p>Paris, July 9 (Bloomberg) -- Vivendi Universal SA is under investigation by French securities regulators over its reporting of financial information since January 2001.</p> <p>The Commission des Operations de Bourse opened a probe ``related to the financial information released by Vivendi'' over the past 17 months, the regulator said in a statement faxed after the close of French trading. Vivendi spokesman Alain Delrieu declined to comment.</p>

LONDON, July 1 — The pressure on Jean-Marie Messier to resign as the chief executive of Vivendi Universal intensified over the weekend, after two French directors asked him to step down, a person close to the board said today. The two directors, Jacques Friedmann, who is also a director of BNP Paribas, the large French bank that is among Vivendi's lenders and Henry Lachman, the chief executive of Schneider Electric, were speaking on behalf of Vivendi's five other French directors, this person said. Mr. Messier, he continued, had lost virtually all support among the 14 non-executive directors, making his resignation...

Filed at 5:38 p.m. ET BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) -- Lew Wasserman, one of the last old-time movie moguls who helped build an entertainment empire while keeping company with presidents and the most glittering of Hollywood stars, died Monday. He was 89. Wasserman died at home from complications of a stroke, said Sue Fleishman, spokeswoman for Universal Pictures. As chairman and chief executive, Wasserman was the undisputed ruler of MCA Inc., the parent of Universal Studios. He owned 6.9 percent of the company's stock and, through a variety of trusts, controlled more than 15 percent. When MCA was sold in...