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By Martha Nussbaum
$15.48
By Dennis Kucinich
$11.95
$35
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colbertnation.com
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On Wednesday, Comedy Central announced that “The Colbert Report,” one of its most successful and perennially popular offerings, would be airing repeats that night and Thursday. Taping of the show on those two days was canceled. No big whoop, except the network didn’t offer much of an explanation for the show’s sudden hiatus. Updated
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Wikimedia Commons / Kyle Cassidy (CC-BY)
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Because this is just what the gravely endangered journalistic profession needs, NBC has elected to pluck former first daughter Chelsea Clinton from her hardscrabble life and groom her to become a special correspondent for “NBC Nightly News.”
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Flickr / derekGavey (CC-BY)
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Since sometime in 2008, more than 12 million computers around the world have been infected by a highly encrypted “worm,” or self-updating type of malware called Conficker, that allows remote access and control of a network of those computers, essentially creating the most powerful computer in the world.
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YouTube
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Friday evening’s edition of “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” turned out to be the bombastic host’s last broadcast, as Olbermann announced on his show that he was leaving MSNBC effective that same day.
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msnbc.msn.com
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Perhaps it was in the name of being fair and balanced, but whatever the reason, MSNBC brass decided to give “Morning Joe” anchor Joe Scarborough the Keith Olbermann treatment for making campaign contributions—but in this case to Republican candidates.
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After a “casually racist” caller made the helpful suggestion that C-SPAN change its name to “Black-SPAN” the other day, that network’s host missed a valuable opportunity to respond properly, according to Jon Stewart, who provides a dramatic re-enactment of the scene in this “Daily Show” clip.
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AP / Kevork Djansezian
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Nobody’s signing anything at the moment, but Fox might be with Coco yet. Executives at the Murdochian network haven’t worked out a deal with departed “Tonight Show” host Conan O’Brien, and in fact, The Hollywood Reporter noted Wednesday that the two parties haven’t been in touch in two weeks, but all is not lost ... (continued)
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Flickr / kainet
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Congress asked the FCC to develop a national broadband plan, and the agency is running with it. Among the FCC’s just announced long-term goals: for every American to have access to affordable broadband, for at least 100 million Americans to have access to 100-mbps download speeds and for the U.S. to have the broadest and fastest wireless networks in the world.
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Jae C. Hong / AP
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Buzz, Google’s answer to Twitter, is getting a lot of bad looks from privacy advocates. The service, which allows users to share short messages or “tweets” (buzzers?) with a network of friends, is faulted for an alleged invasion of privacy that uses e-mail data to automatically create a preconfigured friends list.
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Google
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Unsatisfied with running just your searches, browser, e-mail, calendar, documents, videos, cell phone, turn-by-turn navigation, operating system, electricity monitoring, much of the advertising on the Internet and more, Google has announced that it plans to experiment with providing Internet service that is about 100 times faster than what most Americans are used to.
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How are Middle Eastern media outlets reporting the crisis in Haiti? Mosaic Intelligence Report analyzes how some TV networks are seeing parallels between Port-au-Prince and Gaza, or pointing to the hypocrisy of the U.S. sending aid to one country while bombing others.
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abcnews.go.com/WN/DianeSawyer/
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The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Thursday to loosen corporate restrictions on campaign finance didn’t sit well with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, an international human rights coalition of 56 European nations, but somehow we doubt that the top court’s conservative justices are going to lose sleep over that particular critique.
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wordpress.com
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Now that he’s been cut loose from his contract at CNN, former anchor Lou Dobbs is free to do his thing unencumbered by any constraints imposed by media bosses or by archaic notions of journalistic objectivity. What, you might wonder, would “his thing” be? Well, it seems as if this self-declared champion of the middle class isn’t ruling out a run for office ... yes, even that office.
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Flickr / Alan Light
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So long, “Oprah”—in 2011, that is. Oprah Winfrey’s eponymous show went national in 1986, and, on Thursday, the talk show host and international media mogul gave notice when she’ll call it a wrap: Sept. 9, 2011, just a day over 25 years since her daytime reign began.
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youtube.com
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The folks at Fox News are going to love this one: Lou Dobbs may have left his desk at CNN, but that doesn’t mean he’ll cut out the crazy talk anytime soon. He believes his decline at the network began when President Barack Obama was elected. However, it’s unclear how exactly that might account for the drop in his ratings.
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cnn.com
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We may not have seen the last of him on TV, but Lou Dobbs is done at CNN, having struck a deal to leave his anchor post at the cable channel immediately. In regard to what he’s doing next, Dobbs played coy while announcing his departure on camera Wednesday, saying only that he was “considering a number of options and directions.”
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www.flickr.com/laugurinn
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Former CBS anchor Dan Rather has come up short—$70 million short, in fact—in his bid to sue his ex-employers at the network for relieving him of his desk duty following a 2004 report he delivered about then-President George W. Bush’s National Guard service during the Vietnam War era.
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AP / File
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One of the news industry’s longest-living legends, Walter Cronkite, died of cerebrovascular disease Friday at the age of 92. Over the course of his storied career as the anchor of CBS News, Cronkite covered some of the biggest events of the 20th century. He himself coined his famous and often-quoted sign-off line: “And that’s the way it is. ... ”
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guardian.co.uk
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Now, this is just getting weird: Nearly five years after the shocking (!) “wardrobe malfunction” that shamed exposed nipple owner Janet Jackson and seared the tender eyeballs of select members of the federal government, the FCC is soldiering on in its quest to slap offending network CBS with a $550,000 fine.
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What’s that? An Obama infomercial? Network TV? Wednesday night? Oh, right—here it is, in case you missed it.
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Composite: wikimedia, flickr/coffee monster
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The Obama campaign is running a big media blitz on Wednesday night, with CBS, Fox, NBC and Univision all airing the Democratic presidential candidate’s muy mysterioso half-hour advertisement at 8 p.m., but ABC and the CW won’t be joining in the Obamathon.
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Composite by Truthdig
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While sister company Viacom is still suing YouTube for $1 billion, CBS is hoping to get some cash out of the Web video mecca a more polite way. The Tiffany Network has had some success online, and currently has one of the more popular YouTube channels, but the eyeball business isn’t as straightforward as it used to be.
Posted on Oct 13, 2008
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MTV has become quite the changeling, now resembling not in the least the network that debuted in the early 1980s. Recently, the cable mainstay announced it will start airing political advertisements, and Team McCain seems to be first out the gates with this “Both Ways Barack” attack ad.
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politicsandfunk.com
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According to his Web site, he’s “America’s Truth Detector; the Doctor of Democracy; the Most Dangerous Man in America; the All-Knowing, All-Sensing, All-Everything Maha Rushie; defender of motherhood, protector of fatherhood and an all-around good guy.” Whatever he may be, Rush Limbaugh is also going to be even richer than ever with his new contract to keep talking for the next eight years.
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strike.tv
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During the protracted writers’ strike that gobbled up a good part of fall and winter material for small and big screens alike, some entertainment scribes didn’t let their time in limbo go to waste, such as the group behind Strike.tv, an online network coming soon to a laptop near you.
Posted on Jul 3, 2008
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We’ve gotten used to the idea of independent groups funneling soft money into political campaign ads, but in this election some progressives are trying to do something entirely new. According to a report by NPR and the Center for Investigative Reporting, a band of crafty activists is trying to create a grand network for progressive issues and groups.
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Flickr / soldiersmediacenter
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Coverage of the Iraq war on American newscasts gets a fraction of the airtime it has in past years. Some network journalists complain that they have to beg to get Iraq stories on the air. Although the war in Afghanistan has recently gotten more coverage, no American network has a full-time correspondent on the ground there.
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washingtonpost.com
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The third time’s no charm for Fox News, which has been forced yet again to apologize to Barack Obama for making racist comments against the presumed Democratic nominee. This marks the third “oops” moment for the television channel, all in the span of only two weeks.
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By Eugene Robinson — That might be going too far for a show that still averages 28.7 million viewers, but ratings are down. In part, the cause is the presence of an even more exciting reality show on television, and it’s not even really a show.
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nwitimes.com
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The Wall Street Journal is reporting that CBS News is likely to part ways with its evening news anchor, Katie Couric, who earns about $15 million a year. Consistently in last place among the networks, CBS has been under pressure to right the ship, and was even reported to have considered outsourcing some news operations to CNN. CBS says no such plan is in the works.
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businessweek.com
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With 20 debates between the Democratic candidates already in the books, and another scheduled before the Pennsylvania primary, it’s a little hard to believe that CBS News hasn’t yet had the opportunity to ask a few gotcha questions of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Katie Couric may just get the chance.
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AP photo / Elise Amendola
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Perhaps regardless of Tuesday’s election results, Sen. Hillary Clinton is looking toward the next debate opportunity—this time sponsored by Fox News—on Feb. 11. Barack Obama, however, hasn’t agreed yet to appear on the conservative channel.
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AP photo / Kevork Djansezian
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It’s surprising this didn’t happen earlier: Multimedia mogul Oprah Winfrey is launching a television network, simply and logically called the Oprah Winfrey Network, in conjunction with Discovery Communications. Oprahphiles can look forward to a 2009 launching for OWN, which Winfrey calls “a natural extension of my show.”
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americasreport.com
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Dan Rather himself once warned, “Don’t taunt the alligator until after you’ve crossed the creek,” but he’s still staring down CBS’ toothy maw and refusing to budge in his $70-million lawsuit against his former host network. On Wednesday, a New York Supreme Court justice ruled that (at least for now) Rather’s suit could go forward despite CBS’ bid to have it dismissed.
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guardian.co.uk
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During a panel discussion at the annual consumer electronics show, representatives from NBC, Microsoft and AT&T made the case for filtering Internet content at the service provider level. The idea is to stop the movement of copyrighted material, but there is a large, scary implication: allowing the pipe owner to control what passes through.
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postpolitical.com
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This is certainly a point that has been made before, but the Guardian’s Michael Tomasky performed his own journalistic audit on the U.S.‘s Fox News network, starting with the conservative channel’s overt claims of offering “fair and balanced” news coverage, and finds that it falls short of its mission statement about spin-free reporting.
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www.flickr.com/laugurinn
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The clash of TV titans Dan Rather and CBS execs looked like it might get uglier Thursday after the network filed a motion to dismiss Rather’s $70-million lawsuit and CBS officials released a statement claiming they were “mystified” by Rather’s “bizarre allegations.” Back to you, Dan.
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latimes.com
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Writers began picketing network and studio headquarters on Monday, with the support of several celebrities and, courtesy of Jay Leno, a couple of boxes of doughnuts. There’s no telling how long the strike will last, but parallels to the 1988 walkout that cost Hollywood an estimated half a billion dollars have already been drawn.
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Boy, is al-Qaida ever busy these days! In addition to threatening U.S. troops in Iraq, running riot in the hinterlands of Pakistan and generally requiring huge amounts of money and the potential sacrifice of thousands of lives to thwart its infiltration on several fronts, al-Qaida might even be behind the wildfires currently plaguing Southern California, according to “Fox and Friends.”
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By Andy Borowitz — Fresh on the heels of its reality show “Kid Nation,” in which children are sent to perform hard labor on a ranch with no adult supervision, CBS announced today that it is readying a reality show in which children will be sent to the federal detention camp at Guantanamo.
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AP Photo / Ric Feld
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Ever wonder what Ted Turner might be thinking about, say, Mideast politics, or how to squeak by on just “a couple billion” dollars? How about bunnies? If so, you’re in luck—this GQ interview with the ever-rowdy media mogul has it all, along with a rather startling spat with his publicist captured on the record.
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AP Photo / Suzanne Plunkett
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It’s been 15 months since Dan Rather’s former host network forced him out of the top spot on the “CBS Evening News,” and now he’s giving his erstwhile employer a number of strong reasons why he thinks that was no way to treat an anchor—70 million reasons, to be precise.
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DoD / Tech. Sgt. Andy Dunaway, USAF
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China has denied responsibility for a large raid on the Department of Defense’s computer network, attributing the accusation to a “Cold War mentality.” A senior U.S. official was quoted in the Financial Times as implicating the People’s Liberation Army in the attack, which forced the Pentagon to shut down its network for more than a week.
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Documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald has put together an alarming new short film, “Fox Attacks: Iran,” in which he compares footage featuring Fox News anchors and pundits talking about Iraq before and after the U.S. invasion with the network’s more recent coverage about Iran. The similarities are striking.
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Mark Green, the new president of Air America, tells Truthdig why it didn’t work, what he’s going to do to fix it and what you can expect in the future from America’s largest progressive radio network. Pictured above, Al Franken, who was an Air America host.
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msnbc.com
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Mark Green, the new president of Air America, tells Truthdig why it didn’t work, what he’s going to do to fix it and what you can expect in the future from America’s only progressive radio network.
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The “Enron Explorer” offers the politically inclined voyeur access to all 200,000 e-mails released during the fraud investigation. The “visualizer” is an excellent tool that creates a visual representation of each executive’s social network. Hopefully they’ll map the Abramoff scandal next. (Via boingboing.net)
Posted on Oct 24, 2006
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Illustration by Peter Scheer
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The FCC is considering rule changes that would enable further media consolidation, but several new studies submitted to the regulatory body say limited media ownership has resulted in bland content and a power structure that favors white men.
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Norma Jean Roy
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It has often been said that “The Daily Show” is the major source of news for many Americans, but a recent study found the comedy program to be just as informative as nightly news broadcasts. The only difference: While Jon Stewart and Co. dilute the news with humor, the networks fill their broadcasts with hype.
Posted on Oct 18, 2006
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Too Soon to Tell: The Case for Hope, Continued
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