Media Business

It’s official: the Hollywood elite has zero moral authority in attacking sexual abuse of minors that occurred decades ago in the Catholic Church. This weekend, the voters of the Daytime Emmy awards granted three Emmys to Clash, including the trophy for Outstanding Performer In a Children’s Series to Kevin Clash, recently accused of serial sexual pursuit of teenaged boys.

AP reported it, and recycled the claim: “Clash's lawyer has said that related lawsuits filed against the entertainer are without merit.” They quoted no one attacking the Emmy voters or Clash for their lack of morality.

While government spying on citizens has been a hot topic of conversation lately, it’s worth noting that such snooping can also happen in the private sector. The Bloomberg wire service, founded by anti-gun nut New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, has admitted that its reporters have been spying on customers of its business data service for years and using that information to generate news stories.

Through an established company policy, reporters for the news service were given exclusive access to private customer records for anyone they wanted to look up. Once they pulled up a user’s records, they had the ability to see that person’s last login date, his contact information, view her requests for technical support, and even see what types of data that the customer was calling up within the vast Bloomberg financial database.

After being able to avoid ups and downs in the economy, the PBS NewsHour nightly newscast is laying off employees for the first time in nearly 20 years. According to the New York Times, the show's production company will close its two offices outside of the Washington, DC area.

The show is facing a significant budgetary shortfall of almost one-fourth of its $28 million annual budget:

Hating Breitbart, a documentary filmed during the last several years of the late Andrew Breitbart’s life, is about one man’s struggle against the left-dominated media.

How perfect that the film about the man is about to set a record in and of itself thanks to liberal media bias? According to the Hollywood Reporter, Hating Breitbart will soon set a record on the movie ratings site Rotten Tomatoes for the biggest gap between its establishment film critics score and the score given to it by the general public.

He's not involved in the content production side but it's still worth noting that there is quite a bit of discussion about how HBO executive James Costos has been angling for an appointment to be President Obama's ambassador to Spain.

According to the Associated Press, Costos and his boyfriend were some of the most successful "bundlers" for Obama, people who combine their donations with others' to really raise cash quickly. It is quite common for presidents of all parties to give ambassador positions to their financial contributors.

Of late, many left-wing media critics have been ostensibly interested in protecting the independence of journalism from hypothetical conservative media ownership. Unfortunately, as Howard Kurtz pointed out over the weekend, these people are remarkably cavalier when the left-leaning billionaires like Warren Buffett start buying up media outlets.

Another example of how such critics are not very sincere is one George Norcross, a man known within the Philadelphia area as a long-time Democratic donor, activist, and fundraiser. He also happens to be the co-owner of the region’s two largest newspapers, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Philadelphia Daily News.

It’s hard to pity someone as smarmy and self-righteous as Jonathan Alter. Still, with all the bad luck that the left-wing pundit has faced lately, it almost makes you want to consider it. Well, ok, not really.

May has been a tough month for the MSNBC contributor. First, an anecdote from his latest book was proven beyond doubt to be an outright fabrication. Yesterday, he was revealed by radio host Don Imus as a conniving, two-faced jerk. Now his reporting is being denounced as “patently, provably false” by Fox News president Roger Ailes.

Billionaire conservative philathropists David Koch and Charles Koch officially confirmed news reports that they are interested in getting into the media business through an interview with the Wall Street Journal and in a post on their website KochFacts.com.

In a statement, Charles Koch stated an important point about the brothers' intentions for media: to provide actual unbiased news to customers, an exceedingly rare commodity in America today, particularly at the local level where many regions of the country are served by a single newspaper which is not open to ideological diversity.

Liberals thought their fondest dream had come true on Feb. 29, 2012, when weekday radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh referred to Georgetown University Law Student Sandra Fluke as a “slut” and a “prostitute” after she testified the week before to House Democrats in favor of forcing insurance companies to pay the full cost of contraceptives.

Democrats quickly urged sponsors to boycott the conservative icon's program, and that hurt advertising for the rest of the year. But Limbaugh's distributor -- Dan Metter -- said on Thursday that the radio host is not only drawing new advertisers, but he's also welcoming back a number of long-time sponsors.

In early 2012, after the breast cancer charity Komen for the Cure announced it would end its relationship with Planned Parenthood, the group quickly saw a 100 percent spike in fundraising. But alas, defenders of the nation's largest abortion provider and their accomplices in the liberal media, chief among them MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell, struck back with a vengeance and the group eventually reversed itself under intense pressure from the Left. Ever since the epic Komen cave, however, the organization has seen faltering fundraising.

"Komen can't outrun Planned Parenthood controversy as race enrollment drops," the New York Daily News reported last September. Fast forward to today as the Lena Sun reported in the June 5 Washington Post that Komen is dropping "its signature 3-Day walk in Washington and six other cities next year, slashing the number of the fundraising events by half, as participation continues to drop more than a year after a funding controversy involving Planned Parenthood." By contrast, however:

Since practically its inception, NewsBusters has been informing readers that MSNBC is not a news network.

In an article to be published in Monday's New York Times, national media reporter Bill Carter actually asked if MSNBC is "being damaged by a perception that it is not really a news channel anymore."

The owner of Newsweek, the troubled liberal weekly news magazine, has confirmed reports that it is trying to unload the money-losing operation even despite the fact that it jettisoned its print edition last year. In a letter to employees, CEO Baba Shetty and editor-in-chief Tina Brown confirmed that the parent company of Newsweek, InterActiveCorp, is trying to find potential bidders.

In the letter, Shetty and Brown claimed that Newsweek, which was sold by the Washington Post in 2010 for $1 and an assumption of outstanding debt, was going to become profitable by the end of this year. The confirmation of the efforts to sell the online-only magazine comes as no surprise considering that IAC president, leftist media mogul Barry Diller, stated last month that he believed "it was a mistake" to purchase Newsweek and that "I don't have great expectations" for its long-term success.

Last Tuesday, the Washington Post's Walter Pincus did his level best to dutifully defend the Obama/Holder DOJ's handling of the Associated Press phone records subpoena. Ol' Walt is back at it again this week, chastising the media for "circling the wagons" around Fox News correspondent James Rosen, who was virtually treated like a criminal by the Justice Department when he was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a leak investigation.

"When First Amendment advocates say Rosen was "falsely" characterized as a co-conspirator, they do not understand the law," huffed Pincus. "When others claim this investigation is 'intimidating a growing number of government sources,' they don't understand history." Lucky for us we have Pincus to school us all, I suppose. But the fact remains that when you consider the timeline of the investigation, there appears to be no legitimate reason for the FBI to have gone on a fishing expedition through Rosen's emails and phone records, considering what they already knew from their investigation of government records that narrowed down the leak to one suspect: intelligence adviser Stephen Jin-Woo Kim.

Paul Bond at The Hollywood Reporter described what happened at the annual Comcast shareholders meeting in Philadelphia when Tea Party conservatives stood up to ask about the dramatic left-wing slant of MSNBC.

On the webcast of the meeting, Tom Borelli asked Comcast CEO Brian Roberts "Why would a conservative person in any state want their money to go pay for Al Sharpton’s salary?"

CNN anchor Ashleigh Banfield and HLN anchor Nancy Grace gave eagle-eyed viewers some mild laughs following yesterday's verdict in the Jodi Arias trial as they appeared in a split-screen setup talking via satellite uplink even though they were seated right next to each other.

The Atlantic Wire's Dashiell Bennett and Philip Bump caught the "Anchorman"-esque bit of comedy and documented it with several animated GIF images showing various vehicles passing in the background from each anchor's camera.

"Mainstream media" are alarmed by reports that billionaires Charles and David Koch are considering the purchase of Tribune Company's eight daily newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times.

When Warren Buffett spent $344 million to purchase 28 newspapers, there were mostly sighs of relief from journalists glad to keep their jobs. However, reaction to reports of the Koch brothers' interest in buying the Tribune papers was quite different. Charles and David Koch, you see, are conservative libertarians, not liberals. Will the Kochs, gasp, force their conservatism on readers? Will they sully journalism's good name? Truth is, no one knows what the Kochs plan to do.

Former CNN president Jon Klein and former NBC News president Steve Capus are reportedly among the finalists to take the helm of Al Jazeera America.

"One of the biggest jobs in media is a new position and a high-risk opportunity: running Al Jazeera America," Sharon Waxman of TheWrap.com reported this morning (emphasis mine):

Integrity in journalism is not only optional, being dishonest is actually commendable. That was the message sent last night by the American Society of Magazine Editors as it gave one of its highly coveted National Magazine Awards to Mother Jones, the far-left publication which published a surreptitiously recorded video of former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaking to a Florida fund-raiser in 2012.

The Romney speech, in which he made his infamous reference to “47 percent” of Americans being willing to support President Obama because of their dependence on the welfare state, was secretly recorded by a hotel bartender and then released subsequently by Mother Jones.

When MSNBC announced in March that Ed Schultz's weeknight program, “The Ed Show,” was being replaced by “All In,” which is hosted by 34-year-old Chris Hayes, the executives of the "Lean Forward" network hoped that the new hour-long program would hold onto the channel's liberal audience and even draw in younger viewers.

Instead, the ratings for Hayes' broadcasts in April were down 18 percent in total viewers from that month's numbers in 2012 for “Ed,” and it appears that “All In” is also dragging down the viewership for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” which was off by seven percent from its ratings during that period a year ago, and “The Last Word With Lawrence O'Donnell,” which also fell eight percent in a year-to-year comparison.

Politico’s Dylan Byers reported “The Daily Beast is dropping Howard Kurtz, the veteran media critic who made headlines this week for his erroneous report about NBA star Jason Collins.” Kurtz erred in suggesting Collins hadn’t been forthcoming about his fiancee, even though he discussed her on both ABC and in the Sports Illustrated cover story that made “history.” Kurtz’s story was retracted on Thursday.

On top of Kurtz losing his $300,000-a-year Beast gig (which started in October of 2010), TV Newser reported “A source at CNN tells TVNewser that Kurtz’s current deal with the cable channel will likely be his last.” The New York Times had a source claiming it wasn't just a Collins thing:

"If you're going to say that a known conservative entity like the Koch brothers should not be getting into the business of dictating what a news operation should do, what does that tell you about Warren Buffett," or the Sulzburger or Graham families behind the New York Times and Washington Post respectively, Brent Bozell argued on the April 30 edition of CNBC's Kudlow Report. Bozell also noted the vast sums of money leftist billionaire George Soros pumps into media outlets, while the liberal media raise no concerns about him somehow corrupting journalism with ideological influence.

The NewsBusters publisher and Media Research Center founder was on the program opposite Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post, who last week offered up an uncharacteristically blustery column -- headlined "How the L.A. Times can stop the Kochs" -- in which Pearlstein coached Times reporters to threaten to quite en masse rather than work for libertarian publishers. [To watch the full segment, click play on the embedded video below the page break]

Bob Herbert: columnist from the Planet Benzar?  Seriously, what the former New York Times op-ed writer had to say this morning is enough to make you wonder whether he occupies the same orb as the rest of us.  Appearing on Melissa Harris-Perry's MSNBC show, Herbert literally laughed out loud at the notion that American media leans liberal.  According to Herbert, the bias in the American media is "overwhelmingly" to the right.

Herbert's snicker came in response to a statement by New York Times reporter Amy Chozick, also an MH-P guest.  Chozick recently wrote an article reporting on the Koch brothers' possible interest in buying the Tribune Company, which among other media outlets owns the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. According to Chozick, the brothers' interest was in part sparked by their outrage in seeing the liberal bias when they pick up American newspapers. View the video after the jump.

On his podcast Friday, as the networks were going wall-to-wall with live coverage of Boston, comedian and pundit Adam Carolla questioned whether Boston coverage was excessive. Matt Wilstein at Mediaite transcribed the conversation, which should be a journalism-school topic in the weeks to come.

“Boston is three people dead, and quite a few injured,” Carolla said, “but it’s three people dead. There’s that many people during the course of this podcast, that many people times ten that die out on the highways.” Meanwhile, he pointed out, the death toll in the Texas explosion was up to 15 or higher.

During an emotional pre-game tribute to the fallen and the heroes of the Boston Marathon bombings Saturday, Red Sox slugger David Ortiz dropped an f-bomb in front of the Fenway crowd.

The FCC quickly voiced its approval Saturday via Twitter: