If you're one of those chronic malcontents who think your taxes go to support idle, do-nothing bureaucracies, take heart in a story on the FBI posted at CBS.com. For 18 years and 239 pages of investigative reports, the G-men tirelessly tracked the subversive activities of humor columnist Art Buchwald. The Bureau's conclusion: Buchwald was a “sick, alleged humorist." Which, it seems, did not violate any federal statute, since he was never charged with anything.
CBS producer Daniel Carty wrote the story after obtaining Buchwald's FBI file, which is full of summaries of Buchwald columns and interviews, including one he did with Playboy magazine. ("Typical trash," the investigating agent sternly noted.) The FBI started looking into Buchwald in 1956 after learning he had traveled to the Soviet Union -- to attend an air show with a delegation of U.S. Air Force officials, it turned out -- and stuck with it because his columns didn't strike Hoover as very funny. “Let me have summary on Art Buchwald,” the director wrote on a clipping of a 1961 Buchwald column that satirically claimed claimed American conservatives were doing such damage to the cause of anti-communism that they must be part of a Soviet plot.
If Carty's story puts Hoover and the FBI in an unflattering light, they have plenty of company -- including the television networks. Among the memos in the file is one relaying a request from an ABC reporter (the name is blacked out) who was hosting a poker game in his Washington home and wanted Hoover to call there and threaten Buchwald with arrest in order to disrupt his play.
The other group that doesn't exactly come off great is the American public. After Buchwald wrote a column speculating that Hoover was merely a fictional character dreamed up by Reader's Digest and named after a vacuum cleaner, the FBI was swamped by letters asking if Hoover really existed. Yes, Virginia...
Tim Russert, the dean of Sunday morning television, died Friday while taping voiceovers for Meet The
Press, the program he hosted for 17 years. Russert suffered an embolism during the early afternoon at the NBC bureau he ran in Washington D.C. Veteran NBC anchor Tom Brokaw announced the news shortly before 4 p.m.
Calling Russert “one of the premier political journalists and analysts of his time,” Brokaw added: “This news division will not be the same without his strong, clear voice.”
Brokaw's words were echoed at rival networks. "Tim Russert was a great newsman who helped set the standard for political reporting and public affairs programming," said ABC News President David Westin. "His fine work made all of us better and benefited the nation as a result."
The 58-year-old Russert not only hosted Meet The Press and directed NBC's Washington bureau, he was a network vice president, a fixture in political coverage on both NBC and its corporate cousin MSNBC, and a regular presence on the MSNBC website. (He filed his final piece, a discussion of how Internet rumors are affecting the presdiential race, just hours before his death.)
But he started out not in journalism but politics. After graduating from law school, he worked on the New York campaigns of Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Gov. Mario Cuomo before joining NBC in 1984. "I didn't have any training," he admitted to Canada's National Post in a 2004 interview. "I had never done local television. Most people have rugged jaws; I have these cheeks. And I had never taken voice lessons or coach lessons or any of that kind of thing."
But his political background was his enormous strength as an interviewer. The same skills that made him a sharp political operative -- prodigious background research, meticulous attention to detail, and a relentless determination to get the answer he wanted -- made him a formidable foe for the politicians who came to Meet The Press expecting to spin things their way. Russert didn't invent the show or its format -- Meet The Press, the longest-running program on television, had been around more than four decades before he took over -- but he was better at it than anybody who came before him, and probably than anybody who will come after for a long, long time.
Before sitting down with a Meet The Press guest, Russert watched hours of videotape of speeches and other interviews. If the guest had written a book, Russert read it. If the guest had flipped a position, Russert was prepared to make him flop right back. No shouter, Russert was inevitably civil and even friendly to his guests -- until the moment he slipped the stiletto into them.
When Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean was blustering on defense issues, Russert casually asked him how big the U.S. armed forces were. Dean didn't know. When independent presidential candidate Ross Perot launched one of his cracker-barrel tirades about cutting the federal budget, Russert made such arithmetical mincemeat of his numbers that Perot stopped giving interviews.
Not that Russert didn't have an occasional yen for the flippant. During
a 2002 appearance on Meet The Press, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
was dumbfounded when Russert pulled out a copy of National Review and
held the cover headline -- The Stud: Don Rumsfeld, America's New Pinup-- up to the camera. "Sixty-nine years old, and you're America stud?" he asked. "Come on," sputtered Rumsfeld. "Get on to something serious, Russert."
"On to Enron," replied Russert without batting an eye. "Thanks for the segue."
However remote it was, the chance of a floor fight between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton at the Democratic convention late this summer had the broadcast networks hedging their bets slightly. In recent years, as the conventions have turned into little more than pre-packaged commercials for their parties, broadcast coverage has shrunk from gavel-to-gavel to barely an hour of highlights each night. Though there may be an exception for the acceptance speeches of Obama and John McCain, coverage of the 2008 conventions is shaping up much the same way.
The big exception will be PBS, where The News Hour With Jim Lehrer will produce more than three hours of coverage each night. Anchor Lehrer will be joined by correspondents Gwen Ifill, Ray Suarez, Judy Woodruff and Margaret Warner; political columnists David Brooks and Mark Shields; and presidential historians Michael Beschloss and Richard Norton Smith. Andy Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, will chip in polling information.
That's good news if only because it should shut up any whining about about television shirking its civic duty. (The cable news nets will be covering the conventions much more extensively than the broadcast nets, too.) But I wonder if anyone will actually be watching? Unless, of course, PBS takes a cue from ABC's coverage of the 1968 Democratic convention, where Gore Vidal called William F. Buckley a Nazi, Buckley called Vidal a queer, and the whole thing came this close to ending in a fistfight. Anybody who wants to volunteer a list of epithets and smears, I'll forward it to Brooks and Shields to try to get something started.
It looks as if Mike Wallace has finally decided to hang up his microphone at age 90. A pretty good source -- son Chris -- has told U.S. News & World Report that his father has decided that triple-bypass surgery coupled with injuries from a fall serious enough to hospitalize him are enough. Mike officially retired from 60 Minutes in 2006 but continued popping up occasionally on the show until his recent health troubles.
If Wallace is really retired -- I can't quite believe it -- then it's the end of what was almost certainly the longest career in the history of television news. A former game-show host and actor (surely you remember ABC's Stand By For Crime, the big hit of 1949, a cop show in which viewers got to phone in their guesses about who committed the murder), Wallace launched his TV journalism career in 1951. All Around The Town was a live interview show on CBS on Saturday nights where Wallace and his wife Buff Cobb bopped around New York chatting with people anyplace from Coney Island to the New York City Ballet. He got tougher on Night-Beat, a half-hour interview show on the old Dumont Network's New York affiliate. And the time he started doing Mike Wallace Interviews on ABC in 1957 (subjects included gangster Mickey Cohen, segregation Arkansas Gov. Orville Faubus, and UFO wingnut Donal Kehoe), the network was billing him as "the Terrible Torquemada of the TV Inquisition," which sounds pretty much like the guy you know from 60 Minutes.
I remember as a little kid listening to him narrate a syndicated half-hour documentary series called Biography (the great-grandpa of the A&E show that eventually spun off into its own cable network) back in 1961. Who could have imagined he wouldn't sign off for another 47 years?
No laughing matter? That's not the way Jeanne Moos sees it
Oh, man. One little joke about Barack Obama and that Middle Eastern fellow with the rhyming name, and her inbox is piled high with squawky offended e-mail. It's enough to make make Jeanne Moos wish she were back interviewing three-legged pantyhose or even two-headed turtles. ''I'm used to doing dog stories,'' says CNN's queen of quirk, shaking her head as she leafs through outraged denunciations ranging from not particularly bright to how low can you sink? ``Dogs don't write in. I've never gotten any angry e-mails from dogs.''
If there's one lesson Moos has learned in the 12 months since becoming a regular on Situation Room, the network's daily campaign roundup, it's that political activists have much less of a sense of humor than the average canine. Read the rest of my story from Monday's Miami Herald.
When I talked to Barbara Walters for a story for last Sunday's Herald, she was pretty blunt about why she left 20/20 after a quarter of a century: the eternal, infernal pressure for "the get," the big interview -- particularly the Parises and Britneys and Lindsays of the world. "The fact that it’s mostly celebrities out of rehab that’s interesting to people," Walters told me, ticking off the reasons TV news magazines are headed in a direction she didn't want to go. "The fact that it’s 18 to 49 where our ratings come from, all of that plays a part. And now the Internet, blogs, cable, YouTube, it’s a whole other industry."
If there was a moment that summed it all up, she said, it was the final interview she did for 20/20 in September 2004. Walters trying to get President Bush, then locked in a bare-knuckle race for reelection against John Kerry. ABC told her instead to talk to former schoolteacher Mary Kay Letourneau, just out of prison for having sex with one of her students.
"People are not interested in heads of state," Walters said. "It’s not a big coup to get an interview with a president or a politician. We are much more celebrity-oriented. In part it’s because of the 18 to 49 [demographic], attracting younger viewers." Even on the specials that she continues to do four times a year, she has trouble getting ABC's attention for political stories. "The last time I interviewed a head of state was what, a year ago, Hugo Chavez, who people are interested in because he’s like another Fidel Castro," Walters noted. "And he had done no interviews. But there’s just not the interest in it, in general."
Still, she doesn't necessarily share the conventional wisdom that network news is a dinosaur lumbering toward the tar pits.
"People have been announcing the death of network news now for at least the past five years," she said. "But there still seems to be an audience. There still seems to be an audience for network [news] programming. Somehow or other, they’re still going."
And if she were starting out her career all over again, Walters says, she'd probably still go into TV news.
"The good thing is that there’s so much more opportunity for women now," she said. "In front of the cameras, behind the cameras, even as executive producers. So I’m sure I would be [interested in TV]. But the difference is that if I was on top of the game, I was also ahead of the game. I had no mentors. There was certainly a glass ceiling. There were very few opportunities for women. You had a terrible struggle.
"Today there is much less of a struggle. But there is also much more competition. It’s a wonderful field. And you have to work very hard. You did when I was doing it, and you do today. A lot of travel, a lot of long hours, but it’s a wonderful field. And there are so many women when you turn [TV news] on. You almost can’t listen to a program that doesn’t have a woman on it. That’s great. When I see all the young women who made it and they say you paved the way, that’s my reward. I’m terribly proud if I made even a little difference. Not just in television but maybe for women in general. What a reward."
Carol Lin, the first anchor to go on the air with the news that an airliner had crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, has been missing in action for about 18 months now since parting ways with CNN. She resurfaces Tuesday on NPR's noon-hour Day To Day show with a personal report: an account of reconciliation in her sometimes-troubled relationship with her mother, who is battling cancer. It is, unfortunately, a subject on which Lin has some expertise. Her husband, CNN producer Will Robinson, died of the disease in 2003, just six weeks after their daughter Chloe was born.
30 years BC (Before Couric), there was Barbara Walters
She left The Today Show where everybody loved her for an anchor chair on an evening newscast. After months of hype over her gender and her paycheck, half the country tuned in to watch the first night. But the viewers never came back. The show stayed in a distant third place, right where it was before the network spent all that money on her, and soon the critics began sniping about her delivery, her interviews and -- as if it were some kind of sin against journalism -- her salary. Soon it wasn't a question of whether the plug would be pulled on her show, but when.
Nope, this isn't a story about Katie Couric and her troubles at CBS. It's about Barbara Walters, whose short and unhappy career anchoring ABC's evening newscast three decades ago was eerily, painfully similar. If there's one person in the world who truly understands what Couric is going through, it's Walters. Read my full Miami Herald story.
The May Nielsen sweeps ended this week, and it's party time at WPLG-ABC 10. Not only did the station have South Florida's top-rated 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. newscasts (sending Dwight Lauderdale, who retired Wednesday night after 23 years in the anchor chair, out on top), but seven of the top 10 prime shows air on WPLG. The station's spell over viewers was so total that even mean old Judge Judy on WPLG whupped that sweet Oprah Winfrey on WFOR-CBS 4 in their head-to-head battle at 4 p.m.
"For the final time, goodnight," Dwight Lauderdale told viewers at the end of WPLG-ABC 10's newscast Wednesday night -- and with those five little words, ended 35 years in South Florida television. A long goodbye that began in February, when the 56-year-old Lauderdale announced he would retire at the end of the May Nielsen ratings sweeps, was finally over.
The farewell messages that have dotted WPLG's newscasts for the past month reached a crescendo Wednesday, with the final 21 minutes of the 11 p.m. program being devoted to collages of some of his memorable stories as well as so-long-pal messages -- both from colleagues and newsmakers like Gloria Estefan ("You are the only other man in my life for 32 years").
Lauderdale, who came to South Florida in 1973 to report for the station that's now WSVN-Fox 7, moved to WPLG in 1976 and started anchoring the main newscasts in 1985, said he never expect his retirement would trigger such an outpouring. "Frankly, I didn't realize you cared that much," he said as he addressed the cameras for the last time. He closed not with a lofty soliloquy on the future of journalism but thanks to those who helped him over the years, especially his wife Minnie. "Thank you for sacrificing a lot of the time we could have spent together," Lauderdale said. "Thanks for always putting the demands of my career ahead of yours."
Turning to his partners on the set, Lauderdale promised: "Tomorrow night at this time I'm going to be home watching you." Retorted his laughing co-anchor Laurie Jennings: "Oh, sure you will. You'll be out having a nice dinner." Maybe a very liquid one -- as the closing credit rolled, Lauderdale was eying a four-foot-tall gift basket from his colleagues, stacked to the top with bottles of wine and martini fixings.
Guess who CBS just signed to a long-term contract? (Hint: his name doesn't rhyme with 'matie')
CBS has just announced a new long-term deal with Bob Schieffer. No details were revealed, but CBS News boss Sean McManus did say: "I’m extremely pleased that Bob will continue to play a key role at CBS News for years to come." Yes, indeedy. Good to have a guy like Bob around in case of an emergency, like, say, a sudden vacancy in the CBS Evening News anchor chair.
O'Reilly and Olbermann: It's getting ugly -- well, uglier
The feuding between MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Fox News' Bill O'Reilly has escalated into a clash between GE/NBC and News Corp./Fox News, according to this piece from the Washington Post. The Post reports that executives of the two companies are calling one another to complain about the viciousness of the commentary on one another's networks. O'Reilly, on the air, has accused GE boss Jeffrey Immelt of bearing responsibility for the terrorist deaths of U.S. troops because of the company's business deals with Iran; Olbermann has accused Fox New boss Roger Ailes of a secret role in Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign.
NBC's squawking that everything was just good clean fun until O'Reilly started calling Immelt an accomplice of terrorists. But I don't think anybody at Fox News was too amused at Olbermann's frequent comparisons of the place to Nazi Germany, or his habit of holding a photo of O'Reilly over his face while giving "Seig heil!" salutes. Each network needs to lash its loose cannon a little more tightly.
And you thought he was tough on 'The O'Reilly Factor'
Here's an old outtake from Bill O'Reilly's Inside Edition days where he gets a wee bit impatient with the performance of his teleprompter. Of course, if my computer could talk, it might tell some similar stories about me when I'm trying to upload photos to this blog. They would be lies, of course. Bleepin' lies. Bleepin' thing bleeps. But let's get back to O'Reilly here.
There is something about Jon Stewart and The Daily Show that just makes brains turn to mush. A couple of years ago, the Television Critics Association even gave Stewart an award for "outstanding achievement in news," which if nothing else should confirm the deep conviction of many of the folks who email me regularly that TV critics rank only slightly above single-celled organisms on the evolutionary ladder.
The latest example of IQ drainage over Stewart comes from the Pew Research Center, which says its surveys show that "16 percent of Americans said they regularly watched The Daily Show or the Comedy Central spin-off, The Colbert Report." Either the Pew folks misplaced some decimal points, or they distributed their questionnaire only to sociopathic liars. If 16 percent of Americans watched The Daily Show, that would give it an audience of 48 million viewers and make it the biggest television hit since the days of three-channel television. Here on Planet Earth, the Nielsen folks reported in January that The Daily Show audience averages around 1.5 million viewers, and The Colbert Report about 1.3 million -- that is, even poor forgotten Katie Couric trounces them by a margin of around 4 to 1.
Anybody at Pew with a faint trace of common sense should have questioned those polling numbers. The reason no one did, I imagine, is that everybody around the Pew offices does watch Stewart. This idea that he's delivering the real news has real traction among the chattering classes, who fancy that Stewart is some kind of heroic lone gunslinger standing up against the corporate leviathans who control network newscasts. (Pay no attention to the Viacom/CBS suits behind that Daily Show curtain!) A number of Pew's I absolutely do believe is the one showing that much of Stewart's audience also watches news on PBS and listens to it on NPR.
In reality, of course, The Daily Show is not a newscast at all, neither in structure nor substance. It's a (very funny) show of left-wing political satire -- the Pew Center's content study showed Republican are three times more likely to be the butt of jokes than Democrats -- put together not by reporters and editors and producers out in the field but by gag-writers sitting in a studio. Stories that do not lend themselves to scathing attacks on the Bush administration, like the Virginia Tech shootings, are barely mentioned at all.
Ordinarily, I'd simply pass this all off as a ephemeral fad, the media equivalent of Hula-Hoops and Pet Rocks. But when the Pew Center report was crossing my desk today, I happened to be watching CNN, where correspondent Cal Perry and his crew were pinned down by gunfire in Beirut while trying to cover a battle between Hezbollah and the Lebanese army. Perry and his team eventually came away unscathed -- but they were lucky to do so. Journalism has never been more dangerous than it is right now: Nearly 200 employees of news organizations have died in Iraq alone during the past five years. The biggest risk Jon Stewart faces, on the other hand, is getting some bad sushi from the craft services table. To compare him to reporters getting shot at overseas is an unspeakable insult. Cut it out.
How thin is the line between recklessness and prescience? About 22,000 votes.
Loyal NCIS viewers probably didn't think so, but when Katie Couric broke into the show at 8:09 p.m. Tuesday to announce that CBS was projecting a Hillary Clinton victory in the Indiana primary, she was actually introducing them to a much more compelling drama than the one they were watching. CBS was the only network to call the tingly-tight Indiana race -- in which Clinton and Barack Obama were never separated by much more than 50,000 votes -- on Tuesday night.
Everybody else held off...and by midnight, with Clinton's lead shrinking to 17,000 as Obama's stronghold precincts in Gary finally began reporting in, it looked like Couric might have to break out the Tabasco sauce in preparation for eating her words. “I have some sympathy for the people on the decision desk over at CBS News tonight, who probably have made the right call, but they’ve made it early and I wonder as the results tighten, if there’s some tightening in the blood veins of some of those people over there who I certainly identify with,” jibed Fox News' Brit Hume.
In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, Clinton's lead at last edged back out to about 22,000, and other networks began making their own projections for her: MSNBC and Fox News at 1:09 a.m., CNN three minutes later. CBS says nobody there was sweating over the network's early call. “When we made the projection, we remained confident Senator Clinton would carry Indiana based on the information we had gathered about vote projections and the demographic composition of the vote that was yet to be counted,” declares Kathy Frankovic, who directs CBS surveys and sits on the network's decision desk. It's a thin line between recklessness and prescience when it comes to making election projections, but Tuesday night, CBS stayed on the right side by 23,000 votes.
The Current perspective: another way to watch political coverage
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a story about how cable TV has become the go-to place for political coverage during the 2008 presidential campaign. My piece concentrated on the cable news networks, but the paradigm shift extends to other cable channels -- and their web counterparts as well. Niche networks are exploring what the campaign means for their audience, in a way their audience can relate to.
There's no better example than Current TV, an interactive cable net that concentrates on under-35 viewers. It's had a team of half a dozen or so young "collective journalists'' out on the campaign trail since the New Hampshire primary, looking at the race through twentysomething-eyes.
"Our focus is on issues important to young adults," says Andrew Fitzgerald, manager of the unit. "Our audience demographic is a major portion of the electorate that's underserved by traditional media outlets."
He's not talking about idiotic MTV-style reports on boxers or briefs, but covering the real issues from a different perspective.
"Our audience certainly shares the concerns of other age groups, it just has a different take on them," says Fitzgerald, 27. "Our demo is the age group that has the highest percentage fighting in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That makes it uniquely personal to them. They have a unique perspective on health care, too, because so many of them are recent college graduates who don't have full time jobs, so they don't have access to health insurance."
Current tailors its coverage to that audience perspective.
"For instance, we've paid a lot of attention on the retiring of the Baby Boomer generation will affect this younger generation behind it -- financially, socially, every other way," Fitzgerald notes. "We had a package of stories asking our contributors to show us, in 60 seconds, the debt they've already accrued, the generational debt. This generation is steeped in credit-card debt and student-loan debt. How will that affect the landscape in an election year?"
When Hillary Clinton unveiled her proposal on universal health care, most political reporters concentrated on the cost. Fitzgerald's staff instead looked at how that cost would be borne -- by younger, healthier workers forced to buy insurance to subsidize their older counterparts.
"Her plan would coerce people into buying health insurance," points out Fitzgerald. ‘‘Many young adults don't feel like they need health insurance. That wasn't a point made in many news reports."
The work of Current's reporters is supplemented by the audience itself, which also provides much of the network's content on other subjects as well. Many stories (or pods, as the channel refers to them) are collaborations between members of the audience and Current reporters -- hence the word collective.
"Collective journalism is our citizen journalism effort," says Fitzgerald. "The way that citizen journalism has been treated in recent years on news channels is to focus on the gotcha video, the off-guard moment caught by somebody on their cellphone. That's what CNN's iReport is, videos from people who happen to be at the scene of breaking news before a news camera crew gets there.
"Collective journalism is more of a network-journalism model. We work with contributors around the world to tell stories as a group. Reporters from, say, The Miami Herald are journalists, who work on a story from start to finish and have the skills necessary to do so. We're not asking that of all our contributors. Some are talented freelance journalists, but some are college students getting a degree in engineering who happen to have access to part of a story that they share with our audience."
Current got off to a slow start, distribution-wise, when it was launched by Al Gore and others three years ago. But it's now available in more than 50 million homes via cable and both big satellite-TV systems. Or you can check out some of the political stories on its website -- or even just watch an episode of its satirical series The Democratic Messiah, in which Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama ask God rather than the voters to choose a nominee, right here:
People complain to me all the time about the dumbing down of television news -- the obsession with celebrity and the allegedly unprecedented empty-headedness of a young generation of anchors and reporters who got their jobs not by tramping around live battlefields in Europe like Walter Cronkite, but by mastering the art of hair gel.
Well, maybe. But the television news business -- and let's make that just the news business, period -- has never been short on either small brains or outsize appetite for celebrity news. In Barbara Walters' new autobiography Audition, she recounts a moment right out of a Ron Burgundy movie -- except it took place back in 1953, during television's alleged Golden Era. Walters had just broken into the business at WNBT, the NBC affiliate in New York that a few years later would change its call letters to WNBC. One of her first assignments was to "produce" a talk show for gossip columnist Igor Cassini, who wrote for the New York Journal-American under the name Cholly Knickerbocker.
Her duties as producer mostly consisted of writing out Cassini's introduction and questions on cue cards. "I assume, fool that I was, that Igor Cassini would know his own name," Walters writers. "So I simply wrote his initials on the cue card for the introduction." Thus it was that several hundred thousand New Yorkers got to watch Cassini ponderously intone: "Good evening. I am I.C."
If you think you were seeing a lot of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on Fox News even before their appearances on The O'Reilly Factor and Fox News Sunday during the past week, you're right: Clinton has given 13 interviews to the network, Obama 10, in an effort to reach the increasingly important white working-class wing of the Democratic Party. Seems the party's lefty fringe isn't very happy about it.
When Hillary Clinton and Bill O'Reilly squared off in an interview for Wednesday night's The O'Reilly Factor, some hard words were spoken...about Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Clinton really teed off on Barack Obama's former pal and pastor over his claim that the U.S. government cooked up the AIDS virus. "I take offense at it," Clinton said. "I think it's offensive and outrageous. And, you know, I'm going to express my opinion, others can express theirs. But, you know, it is -- it is part of, you know, just an atmosphere that we're in today where all kinds of things are being said. And people have to, you know, decide what they believe. And I sure don't believe the United States government was behind AIDS.”
Among other highlights of the interview, which airs at 8 p.m.:
** She called for a broad crackdown on illegal immigration. "It's broken," Clinton said of U.S. immigration policy. "I share the frustration. I have voted for tougher border controls. I've voted to put more money, more personnel, even a physical barrier where appropriate. I'm 100 percent in favor of tightening our borders, of enforcing the laws against employers, of going after the kind of abuses that we see in the job market, of making it clear that we have got to figure out what we're going to do with people.”
** She promised to play hardball with Iran: “If Iran were to ever obtain a nuclear weapon, that would be unbelievably bad for us and the world. And I'm going to do everything I can to prevent that from ever happening."
** Clinton blamed rising gasoline prices not on the weakening dollar, growing worldwide demand, or even the oil companies, but on OPEC. "OPEC is a cartel, it's a monopoly...Nine of the 13 biggest oil-producing countries that are in OPEC are also members of the WTO. I would file complaints. I would also change the law so that citizens and businesses could file antitrust actions. We're going to begin to hold them accountable.”
** The war in Iraq has been a military success, Clinton said, but a political failure."I believe that our military has fulfilled all their military missions," she said. "There's no doubt in my mind. They got rid of Saddam Hussein, which they were asked to do. They gave the Iraqis free and fair elections. They gave the Iraqi government the space and time to make the decisions that only the Iraqis can make for themselves. There is no military solution to what we face in Iraq, which is unprecedented."
Hillary Clinton. Bill O'Reilly. Pigs fly. Hell freezes over.
How time flies! It was just a year ago that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama refused to participate in a televised debated sponsored by Fox News, resulting in its cancellation. But when you're locked in a death struggle over each and every one of a handful of remaining delegates, perspectives change. Obama on Sunday finally accepted a longstanding invitation to appear on Chris Wallace's Fox News Sunday. And now Clinton has agreed to journey to the very heart of darkness -- she's sitting down for an interview with the Great Satan himself, Bill O'Reilly. It will air in two parts on The O'Reilly Factor, Wednesday and Thursday at 8 p.m. Only problem is figuring out which is the lion and which is the Christian.
Her ratings tumbling lower than ever, trading threats and counterthreats with CBS executives in the New York papers, Katie Couric certainly doesn't seem destined to stay in the network's anchor chair much longer. But one popular scenario -- Couric moving to CNN to take over Larry King's show -- was apparently ruled out Tuesday when King signed a new contract that will keep him on the air until at least 2011.
The excruciatingly public war-by-leak between Couric and her CBS bosses over the past two weeks (We're getting rid of her after the election! No, I'm quitting before the election!) has fascinated and appalled TV news executives at other networks. When I visited New York and Washington last week on a reporting trip, it was all anybody wanted to talk about. "If I were in charge over there," one senior executive told me, "the first thing I would do would be to get everybody together in one room, put my arms around their shoulders, and TELL THEM TO SHUT THE BLEEP UP!"
Like nearly everybody else I talked to, he said the public recriminations have damaged both Couric and the network, giving her the appearance of a lame duck and making the network look like it's got another loose Dan-Rather-style cannon on its deck. No wonder the CBS Evening News ratings hit an all-time low last week, with an average of less than 5.4 million viewers tuning in each night.
The Couric-for-King swap was a nonsensical scenario from the start. For one thing, King's show has the best ratings in CNN's lineup, so that's not where the network wants to tinker. For another, King has long made it clear that the only way he's leaving his microphone is in a pine box. Even somebody as PR-tone-deaf as Couric can see what a disaster it would be for her to shove CNN's most beloved personality out the door before he's ready to go.
Couric might still wind up at CNN, though, provided she's not too attached to that $15 million a year or whatever she's making at CBS -- a paycheck that size would melt every computer in CNN's accounting department. But look for her to host a different show -- maybe a newsy afternoon talk show where she can move back toward the Today Show Katie that viewers loved so much.
It seems unlikely to me that this will really happen before the election. No network news chief in his right mind wants to be retooling his evening broadcast during the middle of what's expected to be a hard-fought and exciting campaign. But if too much blood has been shed for Couric to stick around, CBS does have somebody in-house who not only could add some political heft to the Evening News but is a proven winner with viewers. Does the name Bob Scheiffer ring a bell?
American democracy: One step forward, one step back
If you need a warm-up for Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary, TV offers a couple of them on Monday night. One is a pleasant surprise: Tony Snow, who left his job as White House press secretary last September after his colon cancer spread to his brain, has regained enough of his health to join CNN as a conservative commentator. Snow, who hosted shows on Fox News before taking the White House job, will make his first CNN appearance during the second hour of Larry King's Monday night show, then sit in as an analyst on CNN's primary coverage Tuesday.
If you think King's Hollywood gab fest is a slightly declasse venue for Snow's first gig, then stop reading right now. Because the other news is that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are appearing on the USA Network's pro-wrestling brawl Monday Night Raw at 8 p.m. No word yet on what they'll do -- dodge Bosnian sniper fire and taunt NRA gun nuts, maybe. Whatever happened to kissing babies?
Best line from Wednesday night's Radio & Television Correspondents' Association Dinner in Washington D.C.: Vice President Dick Cheney urging reporters to take it easy on Hillary Clinton's story that she came under sniper fire during a visit to Bosnia. "She confused the Bosnia trip with the time I took her hunting," Cheney explained.
Al Jazeera: A nice place to watch, but you wouldn't want to work there
The headline in Monday's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel makes it sound like some irate journalism professor is tediously climbing on the soapbox again: TV news creates ignorant Americans. And certainly you've heard it all before:
Overseas coverage of television news has never been more costly. The plunging value of the U.S. dollar, the surging price to be paid for security, the shrinking, aging audience for news, the coming recession, all give TV news executives reasonable excuses for neglecting international coverage. And the uniquely interesting and uniquely extended presidential campaign of 2008 has in itself taken a double toll, displacing both budget and air time that might have gone to covering the world.
What makes this indictment a little more stinging is that it's written by Dave Marash, a veteran broadcast newsman who has worked at ABC, ESPN and Fox and won Emmys for his Nightline stories on terrorism. So when he writes about "campaign coverage sealed in its own intellectual bubble, picking up every candidate 'gaffe' or 'conflict,' like pennies off the pavement, while the world the winner will have to deal with rolls down the street, unobserved," you pay attention.
At least until you get to his solution: getting your news from the Qatar-based Al Jazeera network. If it strikes you as unlikely that a network owned by a an Arab royal family halfway around the world would be doing a better job covering the U.S. presidential campaign than CBS or NBC or CNN or Fox News, you're not alone. Marash himself just quit a two-year gig as the main anchor of Al Jazeera's English-language channel because, he said, the channel was becoming not only anti-American but provincial. "They started covering the whole world very well, but from the point of view and the interests of Doha and the surrounding region,” Marash told the New York Times.
So Marash thinks Al Jazeera's journalism is below his standards, but not yours. Well, I guess TV news really does create some ignorant Americans, but possibly not the ones Marash was thinking of.
CNN finds a real expert on sex scandals: Kendall Coffey
When it came to getting informed comment Tuesday on New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's involvement in a sex scandal, CNN got a real expert -- with more experience in the field than he let on. Billing him only as "a former U.S. attorney," without any reference to how he achieved his former-ness, the network interviewed Miami's Kendall Coffey, who had to resign the job in 1996 after biting a dancer during the process of running up a $900 bill at a strip club.
Neither Coffey nor CNN anchor Tony Harris mentioned the incident at the strip club as they talked about Spitzer's encounter with a prostitute in a Washington D.C. hotel last month.
But Coffey's observations on the case certainly had some ironic overtones for anybody who remembers his own brush with a lithe young blond stripper known as Tiffany in a private "champagne room'' at the old Lipstik club on South Dixie Highway.
He warned that it was Spritzer's alleged attempts to cover up a transaction with the prostitute that would probably lead to the biggest legal problems. "This wasn't a cash transaction where he reached into his pocket and paid some somebody for something that would have been illegal anyway," Coffey said. "Apparently there was a byzantine maze of transfers, some of which may have been concealed. There may have even been attempts to use a certain amount of cash to avoid reporting requirements."
That was precisely Coffey's undoing in 1996. Ejected from the club after his failed attempt to kiss the stripper ended with him biting her instead, he used a credit card to pay the $900 bill. Later he sent his father to the bar to buy the credit-card slip back at a premium price of $1,200, which tipped the irate stripper and her even-more-irate husband off that they'd been dealing with someone anxious to conceal his identity. Their complaints eventually attracted an investigators from the office of the U.S. Justice Department's inspector general, and Coffey was soon toast.
One other thing Coffey said on CNN that Spitzer might want to heed: "This is not survivable."
Tucker, Tucker Carlson's early-evening show on MSNBC, has been canceled, Carlson's previous shows on PBS and CNN (where he co-hosted Crossfire with James Carville) had buzz, if not necessarily a lot of viewers; Tucker had neither. It will be replaced by a new show of political coverage hosted by NBC White House reporter David Gregory.
Shelley Ross, much-ballyhooed when she was named senior executive producer of CBS' The Early Show six months ago, was unceremoniously dumped Thursday. Ross, a 1974 grad of the University of Miami, was supposed to lift the early newscast out of its ratings doldrums (it languishes instead as a distant third to NBC's Today and ABC's Good Morning America). But instead of adding viewers, she mostly subtracted staffers: Reportedly, more than 20 have quit since she took over. Her interim replacement is Rick Kaplan, who also produces Katie Couric's evening newscast. Seems unlikely he'll be able to do both for long.
David Shuster is still suspended from working at MSNBC or mothership NBC News for remarking that Chelsea Clinton was being "pimped out" by her mother Hillary on the campaign trail. "NBC News takes these matters seriously, and offers our sincere regrets to the Clintons for the remarks," a network spokesman said last week as Shuster was booted from the air.
Oddly, though, MSNBC's top host Keith Olbermann used the same expression five months ago referring to President Bush and Gen. David Petraeus -- and he was neither suspended nor required to make an on-air apology, as Shuster was. Is that because there's one rule for reporters and another for $4 million a year hosts? Or is there one rule for the Clintons, and another for U.S. soldiers?
For the second time in two weeks, an MSNBC host will offer a public apology to the Clinton family. This time it's David Shuster, who will take to the air at 6 p.m. today for metaphorically comparing Chelsea Clinton to a hooker and her mother Hillary to a pimp.
Shuster, while filling as a guest host for Tucker Carlson on MSNBC's 6 p.m. talk show Tucker, noted that Chelsea Clinton has become an important cog in her mother's campaign machine, regularly speaking as well as lobbying unelected superdelegates whose votes are up for grabs at the Democratic convention, but refuses to do interviews. (Chelsea even turned down a pint-sized reporter from Scholastic News a few weeks back.) Said Shuster: "Doesn't it seem as if Chelsea is sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?"
Clinton's campaign went postal, threatening to pull out of a Feb. 26 debate staged by MSNBC, and Shuster agreed to apologize. Last month Chris Matthews, the host of MSNBC's Hardball show, did the same after Clinton backers accused him of a pattern of sexist remarks about Clinton, particularly a claim that most of her support among voters was due to sympathy over her husband's shenanigans with Monica Lewinsky.
UPDATE: Shuster's televised apology might be the last you see of him for awhile on ether NBC or MSNBC. He's been indefinitely suspended for the "pimped out" remark.
Super Tuesday projections: Fox was quick as a, well, fox
When it came to projecting winners during Super Tuesday election-night coverage, Fox News was usually first, and CNN usually last -- sometimes, way last. Fox News beat CNN by nearly an hour in calling winners in the Democratic primaries in both Missouri and Massachusetts. Take a look at these projection times:
Missouri for Barack Obama: Fox 12:32 a.m.; MSNBC 12:40; CNN 1:23.
New Jersey for Hillary Clinton: Fox 9:10 p.m.; MSNBC 9:20; CNN 9:49.
Massachusetts for Clinton: Fox 8:52 p.m.; MSNBC 9; CNN 9:46.
Missouri for John McCain: Fox 11:52 p.m.; MSNBC 12:16 a.m.; CNN 12:27.
California for McCain: Fox 12:13 a.m.; MSNBC 12:14; CNN 12:25
New York for McCain: MSNBC 9:10 p.m.; Fox 9:18; CNN 9:20.
Massachusetts for Mitt Romney: Fox 9:01 p.m.; MSNBC 9:02; CNN 9:09.
California for Clinton: MSNBC 12:12 a.m.; Fox 12:13; CNN 12:14.
On the other hand, some calls didn't take long at all, for anybody. When the polls closed in New York at 9 p.m., all three cable news channels within seconds named Clinton the winner of the Democratic primary.
Being the fastest in making projections sometimes comes at the expense of accuracy, but none of the networks blew any calls Tuesday night. The same cannot be said for their print brethren. Both big wire services, AP and Reuters, mistakenly proclaimed Clinton the winner in Missouri shortly after 11 p.m.
It's been more than 60 years since Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Ernie Pyle was killed in an ambush on an island just off the Japanese stronghold of Iwo Jima. Now photos of his body have surfaced.
Fox News is riding on the coattails of its corporate cousin Fox Broadcasting's presentation of the Super Bowl on Feb. 3. About 90 percent of the TV stations affiliated with the Fox network will carry a three-hour bloc of political coverage previewing Feb. 5's Super Tuesday, when 22 states hold presidential primaries.
The news show will kick off at 9 a.m. Eastern time with a special edition of Fox News Sunday With Chris Wallace. Then Bill Hemmer and Megyn Kelly will join Fox anchor Shepard Smith for two hours previewing some of the key Super Tuesday primaries. The political stories will be interspersed with some Super Bowl news coverage, including an advance peek at some of the high-priced commercials that will air during the game.
Fox's sports division hasn't announced its plans for pre-game shows yet. But based on past history, it's a safe bet that when the political show ends at noon Eastern time, various pre-game shows will air the rest of the day until the 6:20 p.m. kickoff.
A common complaint about the news media is that it overlooks good news in favor of bad. But showcasing the former certainly didn't pay off for CNN. Its heavily promoted four airings of Heroes last week, which spotlighted people with extraordinary accomplishments chosen by viewers, all tanked. The most successful edition, on Dec. 6, drew less than 600,000 viewers and ranked as the No. 71 show on cable news nets for the week.
At least one of the various labor problems plaguing television has been settled peaceably. ABC has just signed a new four-year contract with the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, the union that represents newswriters, engineers and some other workers -- about 1100 in all -- at the network's owned-and-operated affiliates in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Chicago. Though the talks took 10 months (the old agreement expired in March) and there have been rumblings of a strike during the past few weeks, the employees never actually walked out.
ABC cameraman Ralph Binder, who started with the network 33 years ago, was killed Thursday while driving from Denver to Omaha to cover the mall shooting story there. Binder was traveling with soundman Dan Johnson when their car swerved to avoid an out-of-control car on Interstate 80 near Grand Island, Nebraska. Johnson was treated at a local hospital and released.
It's been less than a year since another ABC cameraman, Doug Vogt, suffered extensive shrapnel wounds to the head in the same ambush in Iraq that nearly killed network anchor Bob Woodruff.
CNN is rerunning six of its most popular documentaries on Thanksgiving Day, starting at 1 p.m. They include Growing Up Diana, on the childhood of Princess Diana; James Brown -- Say it Proud, on the Godfather of Soul; Fed Up: America’s Killer Diet, on why we keep eating food that's bad for us; Chasing Life, on the longevity industry's various potions and exercise regimens; Larry King -- 50 Years of Pop Culture, a celebration of the network's top host; and Danger: Poisoned Food, on how tainted products enter the food supply.
Walter Cronkite's commentaries on the Retirement Living TV cable channel start November 20. They'll air on Daily Cafe, a live two-hour show based in Washington D.C. and hosted by former CNN anchors Bobbie Batista and Felicia Taylor. On hand to introduce of Cronkite's pieces: Katie Couric.
NBC's Brian Williams took a lot of criticism for hosting Saturday Night Live a couple of weeks ago. But viewers responded. With an average of 9.22 million viewers per newscast last week, the NBC Nightly News had its biggest audience of the past nine months -- and edged out Charlie Gibson's ABC newscast for the first time in several weeks.
Somebody new to blame when it rains: Julie Durda, who joins WSVN-Fox 7 Monday as weather wizardess of the station's 5 to 9 a.m. news bloc. Replacing Elita Loresca, who jumped ship for a Los Angeles station, Durda comes from KPHO, the CBS affiliate in Phoenix.
A career path that began 50 years ago when lightning struck his treehouse drew near to the end Thursday night when WPLG-ABC 10 weatherman Don Noe announced his retirement during the station's 11 p.m. newscast.
''I'm always going to get up in the morning and check the forecast,'' Noe -- who's been a TV meteorologist for 34 years, 27 of them at WPLG -- told The Miami Herald. ``But I want to do other things in my life. . . . I'm weathered out. I'm old and weathered. I don't want to work for somebody anymore. I don't want a boss.''
Noe will deliver his last forecast Nov. 28, then give way to Trent Aric, his understudy at WPLG the past 3 ½ years. His bosses say they'll miss him, and that viewers will, too.
''South Florida was lucky to know Don Noe for 27 years,'' said Bill Pohovey, WPLG's news director. ``He was always the calm, reassuring voice when hurricanes were threatening our community. He worked around the clock, catching the occasional nap on the floor, because he knew he had such a tremendous responsibility.''
Not that it's all been grim hurricane duty for Noe, 56. Stunts like doing a broadcast standing on his head -- we'll get to that in a minute -- won Noe a national reputation for unconventionality. He appeared in a People magazine spread on ''wacky weathermen,'' even did a guest shot on Hollywood Squares.Read the rest of the story from Friday's Miami Herald.
In an encounter guaranteed to kill 15 percent of your brain cells in the first 30 seconds, a camera crew from The O'Reilly Factor caught up with Rosie O'Donnell at a weekend book signing, for a discussion of Sept. 11 that airs tonight. You've been warned.
Jim Cramer's catchy new slogan: 'Destroy and mutilate'
CNBC wildman Jim Cramer will be a guest judge on an episode of Donald Trump's resuscitated The Apprentice early next year. It will be interesting to see how Cramer, whose show Mad Money is kind of a one-man bar brawl (he shrieks and throws things and smashes stuff while picking stocks), interacts with Trump. Maybe they'll use baseball bats and tire irons to batter pinatas -- Trump can bring one that looks like Rosie O'Donnell, and Cramer one that looks like Rupert Murdoch, whose new Fox Business Channel is high on Cramer's list of unspeakable evils. “We have a competitor now in Fox and it is really important to destroy and mutilate them,” he told the industry journal Broadcasting & Cable.
Put your bumper stickers away before watching Facing Reality: Choice. This sad, sobering documentary about abortion has no shouting politicians or preachers or activists of any kind, no references to the sacred texts of either the Bible or Roe v. Wade. In fact, maybe it's not even really about abortion at all, but rather, the question of why some women make such poor choices, and others have no choice at all. Read the entire review from Saturday's Miami Herald.
Kind of a rough day to be a Miami broadcaster Tuesday. WPLG-ABC 10 reporter Jeffrey Weinsier got busted for trespassing, carrying a gun on school property and resisting arrest after he stepped on the grass while covering a story at a high school. I'm sure that by tomorrow the cops will have managed to link him to the Kennedy assassination, too. Meanwhile, Joel Feinberg, who owns sports-talk radio station WAXY was arrested in California and charged with beating up his fiance. Glad I stayed off the streets.
Before the blog: bashing the mainstream media, 1930s-Berlin-style
Look at that poor fellow over there on the right, rendered senseless by the depradations of the mainstream media. Only catch: He's German, and the year is 1930. Yeah, the first anti-MSM blogger was a photomontage artist named John Heartfield, an ace propagandist with the German Communist Party. Read my review of an exhibition of his work at Miami Beach's Wolfsonian Museum. It includes a gallery of Heartfield's photomontagees and a section on an appallingly interesting display of propaganda targeted on children -- a display available for a virtual tour in case you're part of the Pepsi generation and find brick-and-mortar museums too tedious to contemplate.
Bloodsucking Cinema (8 p.m. Friday, Starz)-- The great thing about a documentary on vampire films is that you can call it "sucky'' and editors, no matter how puritanical, can't really cut it out. This one's got interviews with everybody from vampire auteurs John Landis and John Carpenter to Cheech Marin, who inhaled blood rather than his customary controlled substances in From Dusk Till Dawn. The documentary kicks off a 24-hour marathon of horror flicks including Scream, Blade and the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead.
Rock and Soul Night (8 p.m. Sunday, Gospel Music Channel) -- Five hours showcasing the churchy roots of rock and soul music, including concerts by such artists as Calvin Cooke, Mike Farris and the Blind Boys of Alabama. To top it off there's an airing of the documentary Gotta Serve Somebody: The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan.
Facing Reality: Choice (9 p.m. Saturday, Fox News) -- This documentary about abortion is a rarity: no politicians or activists of any kind, just three pregnant women facing a choice and its consequences. It turns out to be tougher than you might think from a bumper sticker.
So Liz Claman wasn't kidnapped by space aliens after all, unless Roger Ailes has some tentacles we don't know about. Claman, who mysteriously vanished from her anchor desk on CNBC's top-rated Morning Call this summer, popped up on the Fox Business Network Thursday afternoon. She'll be coanchoring (with David Asman) the FBN afternoon slot on weekdays from 2 to 5 p.m.
The Fox Business Network opens for -- well, business
New television channels usually launch with a blizzard of sneak peeks at their programming, but barely 24 hours before the Fox Business Network goes on the air, we don't know much more about it than the name. And even that, says Fox boss Roger Ailes, is too much.
''CNBC's got 90 million homes compared to our 30 million,'' he says of the entrenched rival whose turf he's invading. ``They've got a 17-year head start, they've got GE and Microsoft, they've got Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal and a two-year warning that we're coming. They know the time and date we're going to hit the beach. We've got to hold a little something back.''
New York was nice, Shireen Sandoval thought, but she sure missed that mean little show of hers back in South Florida. "Deco Drive -- it's full of sardonic humor, making fun of themselves, a little bit sick," she says. "I like that."
So, 13 months after deserting us for the Big Apple -- and, perhaps not coincidentally, just before the winter weather returns -- Sandoval is returning to her old job as a reporter and fill-in anchor on WSVN-Fox 7's gossipy entertainment show. Her first night back on Deco Drive, which airs weeknights at 7:30, will be Nov. 1.
"I really like New York," says Sandoval, who spent the year freelancing for Extra, ESPN and WNBC's movie gabfest Reel Talk. "It's completely different than anything I've ever been around, growing up in the West. I like the hustle and bustle. I like the ‘You talking to me?'
"You've got to learn to learn to be more aggressive, in a good way, in New York. But I miss Miami more than I like New York. Miami felt like home. And I will so not miss December in New York."
So she's coming back, looking for a cheap place in Aventura -- man, has she been away from South Florida. (‘‘That's what everybody tells me. I'll probably end up sleeping on a cot at the station.") But she'll bring back at least one souvenir of New York: Husband Ken Slotnick, a talent agent who will commute between offices of the William Morris agency. Hmmm. Shireen Sandoval Slotnick? "Yeah, don't try to say it when you're drunk," she warns.
Nope, it's not the start of a joke. The next edition of HDNet's Dan Rather Reports features a rare in-depth interview of the exiled Tibetan leader. The show airs October 9 at 8 p.m., but to tide you over until then, here's a little preview clip.
When I hear people say that what this country needs is a national conversation on race, I shudder. Don't they listen to the one we have? Every attempt to discuss the subject ends in race-baiting and cheap shots.
The latest example is the controversy brewing the past week over remarks made by Bill O'Reilly last week on his radio show. Chatting about race relations with Juan Williams, a black (and ye
bureaucracies, take heart in a story on the FBI posted at CBS.com. For 18 years and 239 pages of investigative reports, the G-men tirelessly tracked the subversive activities of humor columnist Art Buchwald. The Bureau's conclusion: Buchwald was a “sick, alleged humorist." Which, it seems, did not violate any federal statute, since he was never charged with anything.
