March 29, 2024

‘G.M.A.’ Beats ‘Today’ Over a Full Season

As Ben Sherwood, the president of ABC News, pushed “Good Morning America” in a heated competition with NBC’s “Today” show for ratings supremacy, he had three goals: first, to win just one week; second, to win one of the television industry’s so-called “sweeps” months; and third, to win for a full television season. He dubbed it “the trifecta” in conversations with colleagues.

And on Friday, ABC achieved it: a full-season win for “G.M.A.” for the first time since the early 1990s.

G.M.A.’s lead over “Today” has been acknowledged several times already, both by the network and by the viewing public. Still, the full-season triumph is something that ABC chose to trumpet on Friday as the network news division positioned itself as one that is growing, or at least holding steady, at a time of fracturing television audiences.

The 2012-13 television season, as measured by Nielsen, started in mid-September 2012 and ended earlier this month. The final seasonal viewership figures for the morning shows were released on Friday. They reflected a once-in-a-generation change: “G.M.A.,” which had lost to “Today” for 852 straight weeks before notching a one-week win in April 2012, has taken a decisive lead among total viewers, with an average of 5.3 million viewers on a typical weekday. That is nearly 700,000 more than the “Today” show, which had an average of 4.6 million.

One season earlier, “Today” had 5.1 million viewers and “G.M.A.” had a little under 4.9 million.

“CBS This Morning,” which was rebooted in early 2012 and is now hosted by Charlie Rose, Gayle King and Norah O’Donnell, had an average viewership of 2.77 million. For CBS, that’s a big improvement: one season earlier, the network had 2.44 million viewers in the mornings.

Among 25- to 54-year-olds, the demographic that really determines success or failure for morning shows, the ratings race remains tight. “G.M.A.” had almost 2 million viewers, about 85,000 more than “Today.”

According to ABC, “G.M.A.” has not led “Today” for a full season since the 1993-1994 season.

Some, though not all, of “G.M.A.’s” gains can be attributed to missteps by the “Today” show, including the dismissal last year of Ann Curry, a longtime member of that show’s cast. “Today” is now trying to lure former viewers back; it has resisted the temptation to dismiss any other cast members, and instead has added two, Willie Geist and Carson Daly. Earlier this month it introduced a remodeled studio and a new graphics package.

Some of “G.M.A.’s” gains can also be attributed to content choices. The show has become more entertaining in the last few years, sometimes eschewing serious news for stories about sensational court cases, celebrities and trends, especially after 7:15 a.m. While its rivals dismiss the show as being too tabloid-oriented, ABC defends its story selections as a reflection of what viewers want to see when they wake up.

“G.M.A.” has tried not to get too comfortable in first place. Through a spokesman on Friday, Mr. Sherwood said: “Our immediate goals are to keep building on our strengths, to stay hungry and humble, and to keep our eyes on the prize.”

When the 2012-13 season was starting, the “G.M.A.” co-host, Robin Roberts, was in the hospital, undergoing a grueling bone marrow transplant. In February she returned to the show on a part-time basis, but it was not until this month that she resumed hosting full-time.

While the mornings are the most lucrative day part for the network news divisions, the evenings remain essential as well, and there NBC ended the season ahead, as it has for 17 years. “NBC Nightly News” had more than 8.3 million viewers on an average night, 700,000 more than ABC’s “World News.” ABC has crept quite close in the 25- to 54-year-old demographic, however, and in July actually beat the NBC newscast for one week. NBC has avoided a repeat loss since then.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/28/business/media/gma-beats-today-over-a-full-season.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Should Reddit Be Blamed for the Spreading of a Smear?

At 5 p.m. on April 18, three days after the bombs went off at the marathon finish line, the F.B.I. released grainy photographs of two suspects. For the past month, the Tripathis had been renting a house and spending their days working with F.B.I. agents, Brown administrators and an organization dedicated to finding missing persons. Early on in the search, the family created a Facebook page called “Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi,” which included video messages from family and friends and recent images of Sunil — walking the beach with his older brother, Ravi; attending his sister’s graduation ceremony; posing with his mother at a Phillies game.

Minutes after the world first saw the suspects’ photos, a user on Reddit, the online community that is also one of the largest Web sites in the world, posted side-by-side pictures comparing Sunil’s facial features with the face that would later be identified as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The pictures were accompanied by speculation about the circumstances surrounding Sunil’s disappearance and the F.B.I.’s involvement in his search. By 8 p.m., three hours after the F.B.I. released the suspects’ photos, angry messages began to appear on the Tripathi’s Facebook page, and at 8:15 Ravi received a phone call from a reporter at ABC News in New York, who asked if Sunil had been spotted in Boston and if Ravi had seen the F.B.I. photos of Suspect No. 2. Ravi, unclear at what she was getting at, told her there had been no word from Sunil. As the minutes passed and the volume of threatening Facebook messages increased, the Tripathis finally called their F.B.I. contact in Providence, who assured them that nobody within his office believed that Sunil was Suspect No. 2.

The family had been told that missing people sometimes go to libraries or other places with free Internet service, where they type their own names into search engines to track their cases. The Facebook page was created with the hope that if Sunil searched for himself, he would find loving messages from his family and friends. Now they worried that he would see what was being written about him and take drastic measures to harm himself. Around 11 p.m., at roughly the same time that the news came out that Sean Collier, a 27-year-old police officer at M.I.T., had been shot and killed, the Tripathis closed the page so that no more messages could come in.

The removal of “Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi” was noted by several people in the media, including Sasha Stone, who runs an inside-Hollywood Web site called Awards Daily. At 10:56 p.m., Stone tweeted: “I’m sure by now the @fbipressoffice is looking into this dude” and included a link to the Facebook page. Seven minutes later, she tweeted: “Seconds after I sent that tweet the page is gone off of Facebook. If you can cache it . . .” For Erik Malinowski, a senior sportswriter at the Web site BuzzFeed, the takedown of “Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi” was noteworthy enough to pass along. At midnight, Malinowski, whose Twitter following includes a number of journalists, tweeted: “FYI: A Facebook group dedicated to finding Sunil Tripathi, the missing Brown student, was deleted this evening.” Roughly 300 Twitter users retweeted Malinowski’s post, including the pop-culture blogger Perez Hilton, who sent Sunil Tripathi’s name out to more than six million followers. From there, the small, contained world of speculation exploded on every social-media platform. Several journalists began tweeting out guarded thoughts about Sunil’s involvement. If the family had taken down the Facebook page, the reasoning went, it must mean that the Tripathis had seen their missing son in the grainy photos of Suspect No. 2.

Jay Caspian Kang is the author of ‘‘The Dead Do Not Improve’’ and an editor at Grantland. He last wrote for the magazine about the shootings at Oikos University.

Editor: Joel Lovell

 

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/magazine/should-reddit-be-blamed-for-the-spreading-of-a-smear.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Economix Blog: Bruce Bartlett: Keynes and Keynesianism

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Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. He is the author of “The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform – Why We Need It and What It Will Take.”

Before the recent brouhaha about John Maynard Keynes fades from memory, I’d like to make a few final comments about Keynesian economics.

Today’s Economist

Perspectives from expert contributors.

When I began studying economics in the early 1970s, the term “Keynesian” was already losing its luster. In fact, one can date the precise moment when it became passé: Jan. 4, 1971. On that day, President Richard Nixon gave a joint interview to several television journalists. After the cameras were off, he made on offhand comment to Howard K. Smith of ABC News that he was “now a Keynesian in economics.” The New York Times reported this statement in a brief article on Jan. 7, 1971.

The article says Mr. Smith was taken aback by Nixon’s statement, because Keynes was viewed as being well to the left, politically and economically, and Nixon was viewed as an arch-conservative. Mr. Smith said it was as if a Christian had said, “All things considered, I think Mohammad was right,” referring to the prophet who founded Islam.

The Times’s economics columnist Leonard Silk quickly noted the significance of Nixon’s remark and said the president was actually carrying out Keynesian policies at that moment. His budget for the next fiscal year, which would be released in a few weeks, would be “expansionary,” Nixon had said in his television interview. Instead of aiming for budgetary balance in nominal dollar terms, Nixon said he would aim to balance the budget on a “full employment” basis.

This statement was really no less controversial than the one Nixon made about Keynesian economics. Conservatives viewed it as a license to run budget deficits forever. The idea, now called the “cyclically adjusted deficit,” is to separate the share of the budget deficit resulting from a downturn in the economy, which automatically raises spending and reduces revenue, from its “structural” component, which is a function of the basic nature of the budget itself.

The point of looking at the deficit on a cyclically adjusted basis, which the Congressional Budget Office calculates regularly, is to avoid cutting spending that is only temporarily high and will fall automatically as the economy expands, or raising taxes that will automatically rise. Such actions would exacerbate the economic downturn.

According to the C.B.O., the economic downturn has increased the budget deficit by about 2.5 percent of the gross domestic product annually since 2009. It also calculates that if the economy were operating at its potential based on its productive capacity – what used to be called “full employment,” a term now in disuse among economists – G.D.P. would be $1 trillion larger this year.

Conservatives still don’t like calculating the deficit any way except literally. All adjustments are assumed to be tricks to make it look smaller, they believe. But back in 1971, having a Republican president talk about an expansionary budget policy and balancing the budget on a full employment basis was radical stuff indeed.

The irony, of course, is that Keynesian economics, which had dominated macroeconomic thinking since the war, was already dying. For decades it had been under intellectual assault by economists associated with the University of Chicago known as “monetarists.” Their most well-known spokesman was Milton Friedman, who argued against the Keynesians’ focus on fiscal policy – federal spending and taxing policy – and their inattention to monetary policy, which is conducted by the Federal Reserve.

As it happens, Friedman had said in 1965 that “we’re all Keynesian now” in the Dec. 31 issue of Time magazine. He later complained that his quote had been taken out of context. His full statement was, “In one sense, we are all Keynesian now; in another, nobody is any longer a Keynesian.” Friedman said the second half of his quote was as important as the first half.

But it wasn’t only those on the right, such as Friedman, who were abandoning Keynes; so were those on the left such as the Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, an early and energetic supporter of Keynesian economics. In July 1971, he said that Keynes was obsolete because big business and big labor so controlled the economy that Keynesian economics didn’t work.

Galbraith said that it was “sad that Mr. Nixon has proclaimed himself a Keynesian at the very moment in history when Keynes has become obsolete.”

By 1976, it was common to hear world leaders denigrate Keynesian economics as primarily responsible for the problem of inflation. That year, Prime Minister James Callaghan of Britain, leader of the left-wing Labor Party, gave a speech to a party conference that repudiated the core Keynesian idea of a countercyclical fiscal policy. It only worked, he said, by injecting higher doses of inflation that eventually led to higher unemployment.

The following year, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, of West Germany’s left-wing Social Democratic Party, likewise repudiated Keynesian economics. The German economy, he said, had avoided inflation by resisting the temptation to implement countercyclical fiscal policies during economic downturns. “The time for Keynesian economics is past,” Mr. Schmidt explained, “because the problem of the world today is inflation.”

On his blog last week, Paul Krugman took me to task for misconstruing the generality of Keynesian theory. My point was that policy makers in the early postwar era routinely accepted the idea that Keynesian stimulus was justified whenever the economy wasn’t doing as well as they wanted.

I acknowledge that this view derived mainly from economists who called themselves Keynesians rather than Keynes himself. He was, in fact, a strong opponent of inflation who would have opposed many “Keynesian policies” of the 1950s and 1960s, which contributed to the problem of stagflation in the 1970s that ultimately discredited those policies.

Economists and policy makers mostly forgot that Keynes prescribed budget surpluses during economic upswings to offset the deficits that he correctly advocated during downturns. In his 1940 book, “How to Pay for the War,” he advocated balancing the budget over the business cycle.

I think Milton Friedman was right that in a sense we are all Keynesians and not Keynesians at the same time. What I think he meant is that no one advocates Keynesian stimulus at all times, but that there are times, like now, when it is desperately needed. At other times we may need to be monetarists, institutionalists or whatever. We should avoid dogmatic attachment to any particular school of economic thought and use proper analysis to figure out the nature of our economic problem at that particular moment and the proper policy to deal with it.

Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/keynes-and-keynesianism/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Media Decoder Blog: Robin Roberts Returns to ‘Good Morning America’

Robin Roberts, left, was back on “Good Morning America” Wednesday after taking a medical leave of absence so she could undergo a bone marrow transplant.ABC Robin Roberts, left, was back on “Good Morning America” Wednesday after taking a medical leave of absence so she could undergo a bone marrow transplant.

11:30 a.m. | Updated Nearly six months after signing off ABC’s “Good Morning America” to fight a life-threatening illness, Robin Roberts made her return on Wednesday to the top-rated morning show, describing herself as thankful and a bit relieved to be back.

“I keep pinching myself and I realize that this is real. This is really happening,” she said on the broadcast. “Faith, family and friends have brought me to this moment and I am so full of gratitude.”

The moment, promoted two weeks ahead of time by ABC, was celebrated by fans of the show, thousands of whom sent well-wishes on social networking Web sites. Many of them watch the show specifically for Ms. Roberts, who is, according to industry research, the most-liked host on any American morning news show by a wide margin.

“After 173 very long days, it’s beautiful to get back to business as usual with our full team and two more wonderful regulars,” said Ben Sherwood, the president of ABC News, in an interview before Wednesday’s broadcast. The two regulars he mentioned were Elizabeth Vargas and Amy Robach, who took turns filling in while Ms. Roberts was away. They will continue to show up regularly on “G.M.A.,” he said.

But the “G.M.A.” co-host chair next to George Stephanopoulos is Ms. Roberts’s chair once again, as Mr. Sherwood pledged it would be when she signed off.

Her return on Wednesday defied the expectations of some television industry observers who predicted she’d be unwilling or unable to anchor ever again. It also gave ABC fresh optimism that “G.M.A.,” with Ms. Roberts back in her chair, can continue to beat NBC’s “Today” show, which last year was dislodged from the top spot in the morning ratings after 16 straight years.

Most of all, her return closed a chapter in a story that started almost exactly one year ago, when Ms. Roberts felt exhausted while covering the 2012 Academy Awards in Los Angeles for ABC. Subsequent tests by her doctors found that she had M.D.S., short for myelodysplastic syndromes, a rare and debilitating blood disorder, likely resulting from her treatment for breast cancer five years earlier.

Ms. Roberts was officially given the diagnosis on the same week in April that “G.M.A.” beat “Today” for the first time. She told “G.M.A.” viewers about the diagnosis two months later, in mid-June, and took a medical leave of absence at the end of August so she could undergo a bone-marrow transplant.

Ms. Roberts told viewers she’d be back on “G.M.A.” as soon as she could. But no one knew for sure how long she would be away, if she survived at all. Nor could anyone at ABC think of any precedents for a lengthy leave of absence like hers.

“It was completely uncharted territory,” Mr. Sherwood said. The closest things to it were weeks-long maternity leaves, and the one thing ABC was determined not to repeat: a departure like that of Peter Jennings, the longtime “World News Tonight” anchor who abruptly came onto his newscast one day in April 2005, announced he had lung cancer, said “I will continue to do the broadcast,” but never came back.

Mr. Jennings died four months after making the announcement, and the circumstances were traumatic for viewers as well as for ABC staff members. For that reason – as well as for the more obvious ones involving ratings and reputation – ABC decided to make Ms. Roberts a part of “G.M.A.” even while she was in the hospital recuperating from the transplant. Mr. Stephanopoulos and the other co-hosts mentioned her by name at least once every half-hour, and they shared her Twitter messages and photos on TV regularly.

ABC executives and producers emphasized that they were taking their cues from Ms. Roberts every step of the way, and she has said the same thing in interviews. She’s returning now, they said, only because her doctors say she is ready.

On Tuesday night, Ms. Roberts had a quiet dinner at home with her sisters, one of whom was her bone marrow donor. “We laughed and told old family stories,” she said in an early morning text message. “This is a wonderful new chapter for all of us.”

Nonetheless, morning TV is big business, and there have been grumblings that ABC has exploited her condition for ratings gains. Last July, two weeks after NBC removed Ann Curry from “Today,” spurring a big lift in the ratings for “G.M.A.,” the “Today” show executive producer Jim Bell wrote in an e-mail to senior producers that the competition was “using Robin’s illness and the accompanying public interest in her health as a new weapon in its arsenal.”

More recently, some media critics have censured “G.M.A.” for over-covering Ms. Roberts’s impending return; a steady stream of commercials featured a bevy of celebrities welcoming her back. But for the most part, viewers have been rooting for Ms. Roberts and for her television family, which remained No. 1 in the morning ratings race while she was away.

Among total viewers, “G.M.A.” celebrated six straight months of wins earlier this month and started to describe it as a streak, mimicking the way “Today” used to talk. Among the 25- to 54-year-old viewers that help the shows make money, “G.M.A.” stayed slightly ahead of “Today” while Ms. Roberts was absent. Within ABC, there is a quiet hope that her return will propel the show to a firmer victory among 25- to 54-year-olds.

Mr. Sherwood ducked questions about the ratings, but said, “This experience has reminded us to take nothing for granted – and, like Robin herself, in many ways we feel like we’re just getting started.”

Even the most cynical “G.M.A.” producers – interviewed on condition of anonymity, because they were not authorized by the network to speak – pointed out that Ms. Roberts’s story could have ended very differently. “It doesn’t matter about ratings” on Wednesday, one such producer said in between emotional expletives. “She is alive!”

She came closer to death last year than ABC readily acknowledged at the time. For three months after the transplant, since her newly-booted immune system was like a newborn’s, she stayed in isolation, first in a New York hospital and then in her home.

Interviewed by People magazine, which put her on the cover last week, Ms. Roberts said she was warned that “at one point I would feel like dying.” Shortly after the transplant, that came true, she said: “I was in a pain I had never experienced before, physically and mentally. I was in a coma-like state. I truly felt like I was slipping away. Then I kept hearing, ‘Robin! Robin!’” The voice belonged to a nurse, who Ms. Roberts said was “pleading for me to stay here. And thankfully I did. I came back.”

In December, Ms. Roberts stepped out in public view, and a few weeks ago she started coming to the “G.M.A.” studio on so-called dry runs for her return to the co-host chair. She’ll re-emerge gradually, for a few days a week at first, depending on how she and her doctor feel about how it’s going, which partly explains why Ms. Vargas and Ms. Robach will remain regulars on the show.

On Tuesday afternoon, the “G.M.A.” staff were briefed by Tom Cibrowski, the show’s executive producer, about what one staff member called the “rules of Robin’s return,” which include health tips to ward off the transmission of the common cold and other illnesses. Among them: “elbow bumps instead of hugs and kisses,” the staffer said, and ample use of the hand sanitizer dispensers around the studio.

There was long and sustained applause for Mr. Stephanopoulos during the meeting. “George is really the unsung hero,” said another staff member. “He kept the team together.”

Ms. Roberts’s return was even cause for a temporary cessation of hostilities between “Today” and “G.M.A.” “Today” sent a gift basket to the “G.M.A.” studio and welcomed Ms. Roberts back to the morning beat during the show’s 8 a.m. hour. Don Nash, who succeeded Mr. Bell as executive producer of “Today” two months ago, said in an e- mail on Tuesday night, “Robin is an outstanding broadcaster, a great colleague and friend to so many. All of us at ‘Today’ wish her continued good health and years of hitting the 3 a.m. snooze button!”

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/robin-roberts-returns-to-good-morning-america/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Media Decoder Blog: Katie Couric to Interview Manti Te’o

1:42 p.m. | Updated Katie Couric has landed the first television interview with Manti Te’o, the Notre Dame football star who said he was tricked into believing first that he had a girlfriend and then that the girlfriend died of leukemia. The girlfriend never existed.

The oddity of the preceding sentences explain why Mr. Te’o has received so much attention in recent days, and why the first interview of him has been so hotly pursued.

The ESPN reporter Jeremy Schaap interviewed Mr. Te’o for two and a half hours on Friday night, but Mr. Te’o’s representatives insisted that it take place off-camera. Now, it seems, they are ready for him to go on-camera.

Ms. Couric’s interview will be televised on Thursday on “Katie,” the syndicated talk show she began last fall, a spokeswoman for the show said on Sunday. Excerpts from the interview will be broadcast in advance on “Good Morning America” and other ABC News programs.

Mr. Te’o will be joined by his parents, Brian and Ottilia, for the interview. Mr. Te’o apparently misled his father about the girlfriend, claiming at one point that he’d met her in Hawaii.

Mr. Te’o told Mr. Schaap on Friday that he was the victim of an elaborate hoax. “I wasn’t faking it,” he said. That possibility was brought up three days earlier when the Web site Deadspin published an investigation into his claims about the girlfriend.

Ms. Couric and her staff beat out a number of other interviewers who tried to secure an interview with Mr. Te’o, including Oprah Winfrey. Ms. Winfrey’s much-anticipated interview with Lance Armstrong was televised last Thursday and Friday on her cable channel OWN.

The spokesman hired by Mr. Te’o’s family in recent days, Matthew Hiltzik, is also the longtime spokesman for Ms. Couric.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/katie-couric-to-interview-manti-teo/?partner=rss&emc=rss

U.S. Networks Add Britons to Royal Wedding Coverage

Ms. Nachmanoff, the executive in charge of talent for NBC News, knew what she wanted: an eminent British historian; a tabloid editor with deep knowledge about the royal family; a person who played a part in Princess Diana’s wedding 30 years ago. And she knew that other television networks wanted the same.

Because every network will be sharing the same camera feeds of the royal wedding on Friday morning, they have competed fiercely to sign up on-air talent in an attempt to make their hours and hours (and hours) of coverage stand out.

The most sought-after pundits have been signed to long-term contracts worth over $100,000; some even have deals with several outlets. The author of one book about the couple, Katie Nicholl, was the subject of a bidding war; she will be simultaneously working for ABC News, CNN’s “Piers Morgan Tonight” and the entertainment newsmagazine “Extra.”

The networks opened their wallets partly out of necessity: there is a long history in Britain of people being paid for interviews, and of giving short- and long-term contracts to experts is one way to meet that expectation. Fortunately, there is no shortage of talent to pick from in England, where reporting, gossiping and opining on the royal family is a full-blown industry.

But the costs have quickly added up for network news divisions, some still understaffed after years of cutbacks. Having sold special advertising packages for the event, networks are betting viewers are as interested in the wedding as their news anchors and producers evidently are.

As soon as the wedding date was set, “you would be shocked by how many e-mails we got from agents pitching their client as the royalty expert because they once saw Prince William, or once met Kate Middleton, or have once had dinner in the same restaurant,” said Rob Silverstein, executive producer of “Access Hollywood,” which is moving to London for a week.

Hollywood agencies including WME, CAA and ICM not only pitched experts for the wedding day, they sold what were effectively packages of experts for the television documentaries that are leading up to the ceremony.

“As long as you have an English accent,” Mr. Silverstein joked, “you’ll work.”

The pitches have not stopped, said Brent Zacky, a vice president at TLC, recounting a New York agent who pitched a “wedding expert” to him just last week. “There’s last-minute jockeying going on,” he said, even for one-time guest appearances.

The guest booking wars “have been ferocious,” said Piers Morgan, the CNN anchor.

But for the most part, each network’s plans are firmly in place. Along with A-list anchors, there will be Britons (the reality show host Cat Deeley will be on CNN), celebrities (Goldie Hawn will be on ABC’s “The View”) and journalists who covered Princess Diana’s wedding in 1981 (the former “Good Morning America” co-host Joan Lunden will be on Fox News).

TLC hired Amanda Byram, a native of Ireland who now lives in Britain and hosts television shows there, because “it’s important to have a local voice alongside our American voices,” Mr. Zacky said, echoing executives at other networks.

Those executives said in interviews that they doubted specific experts would actually sway the ratings on the wedding day.

“For the most part, this is a festivity that you don’t see a lot in life, so you just let it speak for itself,” said Bill Shine, an executive vice president at Fox News. But there are still hours of air time to fill before and after the ceremony.

“The palace has said that no friends can talk, so we have to rely on our knowledge, on our correspondents’ knowledge and experts in different fields,” said Barbara Walters, who will be co-anchoring with Diane Sawyer on ABC. On Friday afternoon, Ms. Walters was packing her bags for London, since many American news programs and entertainment shows will be in royalty mode starting on Monday.

After her first trip in December, Ms. Nachmanoff was back in London at the end of February to firm up NBC’s deals with experts like Camilla Tominey, the royalty editor for the Daily Express newspaper, and Andrew Roberts, the historian.

Perhaps NBC’s biggest coup was signing a long-term contract with Ben Fogle, a British television host who traveled in Africa with Prince William last year and who will be attending the wedding. (He will be hurrying to a camera position outside Westminster Abbey to recount his attendance afterward.) NBC calls Mr. Fogle a “special correspondent” and says he will stay on at least through the Summer Olympics in London next year.

No one would comment on the costs of all this expertise, citing confidentiality, but privately some agents and executives said thousand-dollar appearance fees for a segment were far more common than the six-figure salaries that “special correspondents” have received.

ABC’s biggest booking was probably Ms. Nicholl, whose book “William and Harry: Behind the Palace Walls” was published a week before the wedding date was announced. Like Mr. Fogle, Ms. Nicholl has been deemed a “special correspondent.”

ABC’s other contributors will include Tina Brown, the Newsweek and Daily Beast editor, who has a long-term contract with “Good Morning America;” one of Princess Diana’s bridesmaids, India Hicks; and a former press secretary for Prince William, Colleen Harris.

CBS, which is spending less than NBC or ABC to cover the wedding, has fewer contributors on its payroll. Its top “royal contributor,” Victoria Arbiter, who was raised in Britain but now lives in New York, also has deals with CTV in Canada and Channel 7 in Australia.

Among other experts working for several outlets is Mr. Morgan’s wife, Celia Walden, who writes for The Daily Telegraph. She will be appearing on NBC and “Extra” in the United States as well as on ITN in Britain.

Mr. Morgan, who is British, said what he wants out of his guests on “Piers Morgan Tonight,” his 9 p.m. show on CNN, are personal stories and anecdotes. He said he would be recalling a private lunch he had with Princess Diana and Prince William when the prince was 13 years old. Of the bookings, he said, “It’s less about A-list faces. It’s ‘Do they know the royals or not?’ ”

The royal couple’s closest friends, presumably, will be at the wedding, not at the multistory media complex beside Buckingham Palace.

And that is partly why producers like Mr. Silverstein, of “Access Hollywood,” are having fun with the affair — and with the appointed experts who will be crowding onto television to talk about it. In a nod to Harry Potter, Mr. Silverstein has called his in-house expert, Neil Sean, a “royal wizard.”

“There are royal wizards everywhere,” Mr. Silverstein exclaimed. “They truly materialize anywhere you want them.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/25/business/media/25royals.html?partner=rss&emc=rss