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Jenny McCarthy to Join ‘The View’ on ABC

July 15, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The show’s creator, Barbara Walters, announced on the air Monday morning that Ms. McCarthy would become the next co-host on the program.

Her selection had been widely expected; she has been a frequent guest host on the program and her name was at the top of the list for prospective permanent hosts.

Ms. McCarthy will fill one of the empty chairs left by the departures of Joy Behar and Elisabeth Hasselbeck, both of whom had long been regulars on the program. Ms. Hasselbeck left for Fox News last week and Ms. Behar is scheduled to leave in August.

Ms. McCarthy will start on “The View” on Sept. 9.

To accept the position, Ms. McCarthy had to win a separation from the VH1 network, where she had been hosting a late-night show. That show has not been scoring big ratings.

Ms. McCarthy, 40, has had roles in a few short-lived situation comedies but is probably best known on television for the game show “Singled Out” on MTV, where she was a host in the 1990s.

In a statement, Ms. Walters said, “Jenny brings us intelligence as well as warmth and humor.”

“She can be serious and outrageous,” Ms. Walters added. “She has connected with our audience and offers a fresh point of view.”

But Ms. McCarthy has also been the subject of intense criticism from groups associated with autism for her frequent statements tying the condition — from which she has said her son suffered — to vaccines for immunization. That much-debated and widely disproved theory has led to unnecessary illnesses in children, according to child health experts.

One group, Every Child by Two, which has begun a campaign to urge parents to vaccinate their babies, sent a letter on Monday to producers of “The View,” including Ms. Walters, saying:

“Ms. McCarthy’s unfounded claims that vaccines cause autism have been one of the greatest impediments to public health in recent decades. These false assertions, in addition to her condemnation of public health officials and the medical community over all, has spread fear among young parents, which has led to an increased number of children who have not received lifesaving vaccines.”

Lauri Hogan, a spokeswoman for “The View,” said the show had made no request to Ms. McCarthy that she keep the vaccine issue off limits.

“All the hosts speak openly on a variety of topics and as has been stated repeatedly, Hot Topics are not scripted,” Ms. Hogan said in an e-mail message, referring to the part of the show in which the hosts discuss issues in the news.

Even after naming Ms. McCarthy, “The View” will still have decisions to make, first to fill the other current vacancy, and then whether another person will be added when Ms. Walters herself leaves the show a year from August.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/business/media/jenny-mccarthy-to-join-the-view-on-abc.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Holder Faces a New Round of Criticism

May 29, 2013 by Leave a Comment

This time it is the news media and even some Democrats who are upset with Mr. Holder, who in recent days has taken steps seemingly aimed at assuaging them. He endorsed the enactment of a “media shield” law and invited leaders of news organizations to meet with him Thursday to discuss tightening rules on warrants and subpoenas for reporters’ records as part of leak investigations.

Even as Mr. Holder has sought to regain his footing, Republicans have resumed their criticism, accusing him of misleading Congress in testimony over whether the Justice Department has considered prosecuting journalists under the Espionage Act for publishing government secrets.

In a letter Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee chairman, Representative Robert W. Goodlatte of Virginia, and a Republican colleague, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, expressed “great concern” about Mr. Holder’s testimony before the committee this month, saying it “appeared to be at odds” with court documents that have come to light involving a warrant for e-mails of James Rosen, a Fox News reporter.

The prospect of a new round of perjury accusations from Congress has underscored that the furor over the leak investigations might pose a new threat to Mr. Holder, who surprised many Democrats by choosing to stay on after Mr. Obama’s re-election. For now, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are standing by Mr. Holder, even though the ranking member, Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, pronounced himself “deeply troubled” by some of the investigative tactics used in recent leak cases.

“Certainly, it is fair to ask additional questions about the Rosen investigation, and any role the attorney general may have played in it, but I do not believe it credible to level charges that he may have intentionally misled the committee on this matter before we know the facts of the case in question,” Mr. Conyers said.

In his only recent interview, Mr. Holder told The Daily Beast that the investigations obeyed existing laws and guidelines, but he also said the rules “need to be updated.” He called the furor “an opportunity for the department to consider how we strike the right balance between the interests of law enforcement and freedom of the press.”

The Daily Beast article also paraphrased unnamed aides as saying Mr. Holder was “also beginning to feel a creeping sense of personal remorse.”

Reid Weingarten, a lawyer who has been a friend of Mr. Holder’s for three decades, said Mr. Holder had discussed no such feelings with him. Rather, Mr. Weingarten said, the disclosure to Fox News of the existence of a rare intelligence source in North Korea was “a horrible leak and he was charged with the responsibility to get at it.” That raised what he said Mr. Holder described to him as a trade-off between press freedoms and the need to identify leakers — a problem for which there are no easy answers because it pits “two laudable goals” against each other.

“He’s not immune from the criticism, but I think he sees this First Amendment-security conflict as almost impossibly difficult,” Mr. Weingarten said, adding: “He hasn’t confessed or cried to me, that’s for sure. What I sense in conversations with him is how horribly difficult the dilemma is when you have this situation. It’s important to get it right, and if we didn’t get it right — and that’s a big if — let’s button up the process now.”

Matthew Miller, a friend and former top aide to Mr. Holder, portrayed the attorney general’s proposal to tighten laws and guidelines on when news media records may be obtained as coming out of a realization that one cannot expect law enforcement officials to do anything less than what the rules permit when pursuing a particular case.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/us/politics/holder-faces-a-new-round-of-criticism.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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The Lede: Kremlin-Owned Network Hires Larry King

May 29, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The Russian government’s satellite news network Russia Today, or RT, announced on Wednesday that it had hired Larry King to “host a mold-breaking political talk show” for its American channel.

A brief online trailer for the new show featuring Mr. King, 79, displayed a series of words associated with the host in the minds of his new employers — “critical thinker,” “hard-nosed,” “depth,” “intelligence,” and “suspenders” — that some of his critics might take issue with. (Readers who want to brush up on their Russian can view a copy of the trailer subtitled and dubbed into that language.)

Given that the Kremlin-owned network devotes considerable airtime to critics of the American government, and finds fault with President Vladimir Putin’s rule about as often as Fox News produces exposés on the Republican Party, the hiring of the 79-year-old American prompted a stream of mocking comments from Russian skeptics and the foreign press corps in Moscow.

While the Irish editor of the Russian network’s Web site, Ivor Cotty, mocked the mockers, and said that he was enthused about the new hire, a business news blogger based in Moscow suggested that Mr. King’s record as an interviewer of Mr. Putin did not inspire confidence.

Indeed, during an interview in New York in late 2000, Mr. King did not get very much from Mr. Putin when he asked about an embarrassing episode, the sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk that year, which had cost 118 crew members their lives.

In fact, as Max Read recalled in a Gawker post on Mr. King’s postmodern defection, the host even said in an interview with RT in 2011 that he is something of a fan of Mr. Putin.

Asked in that interview how Mr. Putin had come to be one of the final guests on his CNN talk show in late 2010, Mr. King replied:

I got along with Mr. Putin very well. When I met him at the U.N. conference, some years ago, I didn’t know it was 10 years ago, I immediately had a good rapport with him. I liked him very much. And so we thought of who would be the best guests.

And, I don’t know if this is generally known, but he asked to come on. He said he watched the show almost all the time and he knew I was leaving and he’d like to come on. And then he invited me to come — I’m coming next May to Moscow to spend some time with him. I had a — hard to explain, I had an affinity with him. You try to get that with a lot of guests, but I really had it with him.

As I said to some friends of mine, Vladimir Putin, if he were American, would be a successful American politician. He has a quality, this has nothing to do with politics … They change a room. They have a certain magnetism. And he has “it,” whatever “it” is. He has “it.”

Later in the same interview with RT, Mr. King shared more of his first impressions of Mr. Putin, saying: “I liked him right away. The crew liked him … I loved his answer when I asked him what happened with the submarine and he just said, ‘it sunk,’ but that wonderful pause he took. I find him engaging, I liked him right away. You know there’s certain people that come into your life that you like. I liked him.”

As my colleague Ellen Barry observed in a report on Mr. Putin’s 2010 appearance on one of the last episodes of “Larry King Live” on CNN: “Mr. King, whose program is carried on CNN’s channels around the world, has long had a reputation for softball questions. So Mr. Putin’s decision to appear on the program allowed his voice to be heard both in the United States and abroad while avoiding being challenged on contentious topics like his own grip on power and the limits on human rights and free speech in Russia.”

The new talk show, which is a collaboration with the producers of Mr. King’s current program for the online network Ora.tv (a site financed by Carlos Slim Helú, the Mexican billionaire who also owns a minority stake of The New York Times) is not the host’s first work for RT. Last year he hosted a debate among third-party candidates for the American presidency that was broadcast on RT.

Although the Kremlin-owned network, which broadcasts in English, Spanish and Arabic, is promoted on the Russian foreign ministry’s Web site as a source of information alongside other official channels, a detailed news release about the new show from Ora.tv made no mention of the network’s government sponsorship at all.

Margarita Simonyan, the young editor in chief of RT, gushed about hiring Mr. King on her Twitter feed on Wednesday, and accepted congratulations from the network’s fans.

Although RT aims to present the news from a Russian perspective to viewers abroad, and so does not broadcast inside the country, the opposition activist and blogger Aleksei Navalny did retweet a series of jokes about Mr. King’s salary posted online by other bloggers. One of those jokes compared Mr. King’s wages to the money paid to a series of fading soccer stars who have recently signed lucrative contracts to play for a professional team in the troubled Russian republic of Dagestan.

Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.

Follow Andrew Roth on Twitter @ARothmsk.

Article source: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/29/kremlin-owned-network-hires-larry-king/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Cablevision Picks Up Glenn Beck’s Internet Channel

May 2, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The announcement on Wednesday night came two months after TheBlaze began a campaign to get onto cable and satellite systems across the country. Cablevision, which has about three million subscribers in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, is the largest system to sign the channel up since then. It is unclear if Cablevision was influenced by the campaign.

Cablevision said TheBlaze would be available to subscribers of its cable service, called Optimum TV, starting in late May. In a statement, Cablevision’s vice president of video product management, Bradley Feldman, said, “Optimum TV is the only cable provider in the tri-state area to bring our customers original programming from Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze, and the independent network will add more diversity to our strong lineup, providing our customers with more choices that our customers appreciate.”

Having access to cable lineups in New York is a goal of many aspiring channels. Along with Cablevision, Time Warner Cable and Verizon FiOS also provide television service in the metropolitan area.

Mr. Beck started his Internet channel, originally named GBTV, after his 5 p.m. talk show ended on Fox News. TheBlaze now has more than 40 hours of programming a week, including simulcasts of Mr. Beck’s radio show, a nightly show of his just for the channel and a nightly panel conversation about the news.

In September 2012 Mr. Beck began to return to television through a carriage deal with Dish Network. Dish had a period of exclusive TV distribution of TheBlaze, but that period has evidently ended, since TheBlaze has cut deals with a number of small cable operators, including Blue Ridge Communications, which has about 170,000 subscribers in Pennsylvania.

Mr. Beck’s cable push has gained attention from other Internet channel proprietors because they hope his strategy will serve as a blueprint. Earlier this week the Internet channel Huffington Post Live announced a six-hour-a-day carriage arrangement with the cable channel AXS.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/business/media/cablevision-picks-up-glenn-becks-internet-channel.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Fox Reporter Faces Jail Over Refusal to Identify Sources

April 9, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Jana Winter, a 32-year-old investigative reporter with FoxNews.com, has said she will not disclose the names of two law enforcement officials she quoted in an article on July 25, when she reported that the suspect, James Holmes, kept a notebook filled with violent notes and drawings that he sent to his psychiatrist days before the shootings.

The case is in the pretrial phase, and a Colorado judge said last week that Ms. Winter could be held in contempt of court and serve up to six months in prison if she does not reveal who told her about the notebook. Lawyers for Mr. Holmes are eager to know who revealed the information to Ms. Winter.

Ms. Winter will attend a hearing in Colorado on Wednesday when lawyers are expected to interview a law officer to try to learn more about the leak. But the judge said late on Monday that he was not yet ready to decide whether he would order Ms. Winter to reveal her sources

Ms. Winter, who joined FoxNews.com four years ago from The New York Post, declined to comment for this article. Her lawyer, Dori Ann Hanswirth, said that disclosing the names of those who helped her would damage Ms. Winter’s career.

Cases involving potential prison time for reporters are often viewed as tests of press freedoms and the role of the First Amendment. But the Colorado case has attracted much less notice than the one involving Ms. Miller, the former reporter for The New York Times who in 2005 spent 85 days in jail for refusing to name her source behind a C.I.A. leak.

Still, journalists and civil liberties advocates have been calling attention to it, with some complaining that prominent media outlets would have given it more coverage if Ms. Winter worked for a news organization more liberal than Fox News.

On Twitter, Ms. Winter thanked reporters for their supportive posts. She also attracted the support of Ms. Miller, who wrote “Don’t let reporter Jana Winter go to jail.” Ms. Miller is now a contributor to Fox News.

While journalists commonly receive subpoenas, few actually end up going to jail for refusing to testify. George Freeman, a First Amendment lawyer with the law firm Jenner Block, who represented Ms. Miller when he worked for The Times, said that Ms. Winter’s case did not seem to warrant jail time.

Mr. Freeman said courts should be able to force journalists to reveal their sources only in “extraordinary circumstances,” adding, “The facts in this case don’t seem to warrant it at all.”

Ms. Winter, who is based in New York and has covered other prominent criminal cases like the Newtown, Conn., shootings, received a subpoena on March 7 and was asked to report to Colorado for a hearing on April 1. She was then asked to return for Wednesday’s hearing. Judge Carlos Samour could eventually ask Ms. Winter to testify, but on Monday he said that he would not rule on Ms. Winter’s testimony until he decided whether the notebook was admissible.

Ms. Hanswirth, her lawyer, said the case had been “very hard emotionally on Jana” and also had been costly for taxpayers. She added that because Mr. Holmes’s public defenders had requested that Ms. Winter testify, expenses for her travel were being paid with public money.

In an 18-page affidavit written in support of Ms. Winter’s position, Mark Feldstein, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, said there were too many flaws in the argument for compelling her testimony. He said revealing Ms. Winter’s source would not increase the fairness of Mr. Holmes’s trial because “once the news has broken, it cannot be unbroken.” He added that other news outlets had also reported the same news.

“The notion that this minor story on Fox could taint the jury pool is ludicrous,” Mr. Feldstein said. “The story that Fox did is not just a drop in the bucket, it’s a drop in the ocean.”

“If you required reporters to disclose their sources every time there was a minor leak in a high profile criminal case, the jails would be filled in America with journalists,” he added.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/business/media/fox-reporter-faces-jail-over-refusal-to-identify-sources.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: HLN’s Jodi Arias Coverage Helps Bolster Ratings

March 18, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The cable news channel HLN, which had some of its highest ratings during the trial of Casey Anthony two years ago, has become fixated on another: the trial of Jodi Arias, a woman accused of killing her ex-boyfriend, Travis Alexander, in Arizona in 2008.

The length of the trial — it is about to enter its 12th week — has had a kind of snowball effect, helping the channel entice new viewers. “This trial has lasted much longer than we ever anticipated, and it’s been richer and deeper than we would have ever imagined,” said Scot Safon, the executive in charge of HLN, which is a sister channel to CNN and is owned by Time Warner.

By some measures, the channel’s ratings are almost back to where they were when Ms. Anthony stood accused of killing her daughter, Caylee. It seems that the HLN segment in January that asked, “Is Jodi Arias the Next Casey Anthony?” has been answered, at least from the channel’s point of view.

On Wednesday, when HLN added a temporary 10 p.m. talk show about the trial, it outperformed CNN, MSNBC and Fox News in the 25- to 54-year-old age group, which it rarely does. It also came close to beating Fox for the full day in that group, thanks to daytime trial coverage. The ratings were almost as strong on Thursday. (Friday’s ratings will be released later this week.)

HLN started to talk about the case on television and on its Web site more than a year ago. Many news organizations have tracked the case, but the lurid sexual and criminal details disclosed in court have caused some others to temper their coverage. But HLN’s coverage has been exhaustive — and has stood out for that reason.

The 10 p.m. talk show, called “HLN After Dark: The Jodi Arias Trial,” conducts a mock trial of its own, gathering 12 people in Atlanta for what it calls a “live studio jury” to review some aspect of the case. The jurors hold up “guilty” or “not guilty” placards toward the end of the hour.

“We were just responding to the behaviors we were seeing on social media, out in the world, in people’s homes: as a trial unfolds, the people who watch start to become jurors, deliberating with each other all over the place,” Mr. Safon said.

If the Casey Anthony trial is any indication, the high viewership will recede after this trial concludes. But until then, HLN can showcase its brand-name hosts like Nancy Grace and Dr. Drew Pinsky as well as its newer hosts like Vinnie Politan and Ryan Smith.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/hlns-jodi-arias-coverage-helps-bolster-ratings/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Common Sense: High Taxes Are Not a Prime Reason for Relocation, Studies Say

February 15, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Sochi may not be St. Tropez, but it does have winter temperatures in the 60s and even palm trees. Mr. Putin’s deputy prime minister confidently predicted a “mass migration of wealthy Europeans to Russia.”

Here in the United States, the three-time Masters champion Phil Mickelson recently walked off the 18th hole at Pebble Beach and said he might move from California because the state increased its top income tax rate to 13.3 percent from 10.3 percent.

“Hey Phil,” Gov. Rick Perry of Texas wrote in a Twitter message, “Texas is home to liberty and low taxes … we would love to have you as well!!” Tiger Woods later said that he had left California for Florida for just that reason years ago. Mr. Mickelson can “vote with his Gulfstream,“ a Wall Street Journal editorial noted, and warned California to “expect a continued migration.”

It’s an article of faith among low-tax advocates that income tax increases aimed at the rich simply drive them away. As Stuart Varney put it on Fox News: “Look at what happened in Britain. They raised the top tax rate to 50 percent, and two-thirds of the millionaires disappeared in the next tax year. Same things are happening in France. People are leaving where the top tax rate is 75 percent. Same thing happened in Maryland a few years ago. New millionaire’s tax, the millionaires disappeared. You’ve got exactly the same thing in California.”

That, at least, is what low-tax advocates want us to think, and on its face, it seems to make sense. But it’s not the case. It turns out that a large majority of people move for far more compelling reasons, like jobs, the cost of housing, family ties or a warmer climate. At least three recent academic studies have demonstrated that the number of people who move for tax reasons is negligible, even among the wealthy.

Cristobal Young, an assistant professor of sociology at Stanford, studied the effects of recent tax increases in New Jersey and California. “It’s very clear that, over all, modest changes in top tax rates do not affect millionaire migration,” he told me this week. “Neither tax increases nor tax cuts on the rich have affected their migration rates.”

The notion of tax flight “is almost entirely bogus — it’s a myth,” said Jon Shure, director of state fiscal studies at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonprofit research group in Washington. “The anecdotal coverage makes it seem like people are leaving in droves because of high taxes. They’re not. There are a lot of low-tax states, and you don’t see millionaires flocking there.”

Despite the allure of low taxes, Mr. Depardieu hasn’t been seen in Russia since picking up his passport and seems to be hedging his bets by maintaining a residence in Belgium. Meanwhile, Russian billionaires are snapping up trophy properties in high-tax London, New York and Beverly Hills, Calif. “I don’t hear about many billionaires moving to Moscow,” said Robert Tannenwald, a lecturer in economic policy at Brandeis University and former Federal Reserve economist. Along with Nicholas Johnson, he and Mr. Shure are co-authors of “Tax Flight Is a Myth,” a 2011 research paper.

Of course, some people do move for tax reasons, especially wealthy retirees, athletes and other celebrities without strong ties to high-tax locations, like jobs and families. In renouncing his French citizenship, Mr. Depardieu follows other French celebrities, the chef Alain Ducasse, the singer Johnny Hallyday and Yannick Noah, a former tennis star. Several Paris hedge fund managers have decamped to London and the fashion mogul Bernard Arnault applied for Belgian citizenship, though not, he has said, for tax reasons.

Stars like Mr. Depardieu and Mr. Mickelson certainly have incentives to move. Mr. Depardieu complained that he paid 85 percent of his income in taxes in France last year and has paid 145 million euros over 45 years. France has a top rate of 41 percent as well as a wealth tax, and the Socialist president, François Hollande, is trying to impose a temporary surcharge of 75 percent on incomes over 1 million euros. Mr. Mickelson earned more than $60 million last year, Sports Illustrated estimates, which means the three-percentage-point California tax increase could add up to an additional $1.8 million in tax.

Gregory Mankiw, an economist at Harvard, said that tax rates did affect migration, at least of certain groups. “Rich people can pretty much live anywhere,” he said. “If you’re a retired person trying to decide between Palm Beach and Santa Barbara, the tax difference between Florida and California is huge. If you’re an academic choosing between Stanford and Harvard, it might be a factor.” (Massachusetts has a flat income tax rate of 5.3 percent.)

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/16/business/high-taxes-are-not-a-prime-reason-for-relocation-studies-say.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: Scott Brown Becomes a Fox News Contributor

February 13, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Fox News on Wednesday added the former Republican Senator Scott Brown to its contributor ranks, two weeks after Mr. Brown decided against another run for a Senate seat in Massachusetts.

Mr. Brown will make his debut as a paid pundit on Wednesday night’s edition of “Hannity,” the channel’s 9 p.m. program. “I am looking forward to commenting on the issues of the day and challenging our elected officials to put our country’s needs first instead of their own partisan interests,” Mr. Brown said in a statement.

Politico reported last week that Mr. Brown was in talks with the network. His hiring is the latest in a series of contributor changes Fox has made this winter; last month the network renewed Karl Rove’s contract and parted ways with Sarah Palin and earlier this month it declined to renew Dick Morris’s contract.

Mr. Brown became something of a hero to Republicans in 2010 when he won a special election for the seat formerly held by Edward M. Kennedy, thereby becoming the first Republican senator to represent Massachusetts since 1972. But his time in the Senate was brief: he lost to a Democrat, Elizabeth Warren, last November.

Another Senate seat in the state opened up when John Kerry was nominated to be secretary of state, but on Feb. 1 Mr. Brown said he would not seek that seat.

He could instead seek the Massachusetts governorship in 2014, but for now he’ll appear pretty much exclusively on Fox, a powerful platform for anyone in the Republican party.

It’s not exactly a parallel, but on Tuesday, Fox’s competitor on the left, MSNBC, added a contributor to its ranks as well: Robert Gibbs, the former White House press secretary and a close confidant of President Obama’s. Mr. Gibbs will be a paid pundit for both MSNBC and its parent network NBC.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/13/scott-brown-becomes-a-fox-news-contributor/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: Fox Says Its 3-Year Relationship With Palin Is Over

January 26, 2013 by Leave a Comment

“Sarah, where are you?” one of Sarah Palin’s 3.4 million Facebook fans wrote on her wall last week. “Has your contract with Fox ended?” another fan asked the day before.

Sarah Palin on “Real American Heroes” on Fox News in 2010.Fox News Channel Sarah Palin on “Real American Heroes” on Fox News in 2010.

Fox News has indeed parted ways with Ms. Palin, the former Alaska governor and Republican vice-presidential nominee, a Fox spokeswoman confirmed on Friday, reducing if not altogether ending her exposure to the channel’s millions of loyal viewers.

It was unclear whether the parting was Ms. Palin’s choice, but several people described it as amicable. Bill Shine, an executive vice president at Fox, said in a statement, “We have thoroughly enjoyed our association with Governor Palin. We wish her the best in her future endeavors.”

Ms. Palin, a prominent contributor to programs like ”On the Record,” last appeared on Fox News in mid-December. As of last week, she was negotiating with the network for a new contract. Her original contract, which started in January 2010 and ended this month, was reportedly worth $1 million a year to Ms. Palin. She had a small television studio built in her home in Wasilla, Alaska, for easy access to Fox’s viewing audience. Fox had no comment on the terms that had been offered during this round of negotiations.

A spokeswoman for Ms. Palin referred a reporter to an article by Real Clear Politics, the Web site that broke the news of the split on Friday. The article quoted an anonymous source as saying that Ms. Palin had decided not to renew with Fox, but “will be expanding her voice in the national discussion.”

Ms. Palin was represented in the negotiations by Robert B. Barnett, a Washington lawyer who has handled contracts for any number of television and political stars. Mr. Barnett did not respond to a request for comment.

Tensions arose several times between Ms. Palin and Fox, leading to speculation that the two parties might part ways this month. At one point last year, she took to Facebook — her most direct way to communicate with fans — to complain about what she said was Fox’s decision to cancel her appearances during the third day of the Republican National Convention.

She did not post any comments on Facebook about her separation from Fox, but some of her supporters did. “Hope you will keep your Facebook updated,” one wrote.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/25/fox-news-and-sarah-palin-part-ways/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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The TV Watch: TV Watch: The Silly and the Sublime

January 21, 2013 by Leave a Comment

It said something about the déjà-vu effect that some network anchors covering Barack Obama’s second inauguration on Monday had almost as much to say about the president’s mother-in-law as they did about the president.

While the camera focused on the rarely seen Marian Robinson standing with her two granddaughters after church, Bob Schieffer of CBS News kvelled over the fact that Michelle Obama’s mother moved into the White House four years ago. “What grandma, and I speak as a grandfather, doesn’t want to be there?” he exclaimed. “I think it’s just beautiful.”

Perhaps speaking more as a son-in-law, Matt Lauer of NBC offered a different perspective. “A lot of people wondered how long that would last,” he said dryly, referring to the Obamas’ decision to have Mrs. Robinson to move in. He added quickly, “It seems to be working quite well.”

Second inaugurations are rarely as exciting as the first ones, and when the first was a never-before-seen historic moment, television has a hard time trying to whip up a similar sense of wonder and novelty. (Even MTV carried the 2009 event live, but not this year’s.) The result was a weird combination of canned statements about the majesty and pageantry of democracy and more spontaneous rubbernecking at celebrity faces — and Justice Antonin Scalia’s choice of poofy Renaissance headwear.

Even on Fox News, anchors immersed in parsing the president’s speech — one said it was “a call to arms for the liberal agenda” — were pulled off point by the sight of Jay-Z and Beyoncé. The normally imperturbable Brit Hume seemed so star-struck while describing Beyoncé as “stunning” that his colleague Chris Wallace reminded him what happened recently to an ESPN football commentator who gushed a little too wolfishly over a Miss Alabama. “Watch out, Brent Musburger got into trouble for that, my friend,” he said.

Inaugurations are long, the coverage is continuous, and the prattle that anchors and commentators have to deliver in a steady stream can at times get trite and tiresome. Even though in this case Mr. Obama was returning to office, not taking over from a rival, news personalities so marveled over the nation’s peaceful transfer of power — “uniquely American,” in the words of an ABC promo — that it almost seemed as if most foreign heads of state routinely set their successors on fire.

What helped the coverage was the fact that the inauguration fell on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, 50 years after King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech during the march on Washington. The timing lent extra resonance to the president’s speech and gave commentators a historic context. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on CBS on Monday that the ceremony reminded her of how far the country had come since 1963, and also how much was left to be done to correct “the birth defect of America’s slavery.”

Ms. Rice was one of scores of former officials, experts and well-known journalists tapped to fill the time: the presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin was so ubiquitous on NBC, MSNBC and CNN that she became hoarse before Mr. Obama took the oath of office on Monday.

And it is not always easy to move smoothly from an interview on the set to live images coming over the monitor. Brian Williams of NBC was talking to former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell about political intransigence when former President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, suddenly appeared on the screen. “There’s nastiness out there in the land,” Mr. Williams said. “There’s nastiness between these two parties — there’s President and Mrs. Carter — and how do we fix that?”

It can also be tricky to try to identify famous faces. On ABC, George Stephanopoulos spotted an older African-American man with a white beard and a Celtics cap. “That’s Morgan Freeman, I think,” he said. His guest, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, gently informed him that it was actually Bill Russell, the legendary former center for the Boston Celtics.

During the parade, when Mr. and Mrs. Obama got out of their limousine to walk past fans and wave, the NBC weatherman Al Roker positioned himself behind a barricade and hollered “Mr. President!” so often and so loud that Mr. Obama turned, gave him a thumbs up and said the weather was great. From the set, Mr. Williams said sardonically, “Wow, there you have it, the first interview with the newly reinaugurated 44th president of the United States.”

Watching this kind of ceremony on television is a little like being invited to someone’s skybox at the Super Bowl — the view is amazing, but the host is still going to jabber throughout the game. It was worth it, because some scenes captured on camera spoke more eloquently than any commentator.

One was after the swearing-in ceremony, when Mr. Obama was leaving the stand to go back into the Capitol, and then turned to stare at the huge, celebrating crowd jammed on the Washington Mall. “I want to take a look, one more time,” Mr. Obama said. “I’m not going to see this again.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/22/us/politics/tv-watch-the-silly-and-the-sublime.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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