Media Business

MSNBC’s boosters in the liberal media have a way of exaggerating their ratings victories. On Monday, The Huffington Post gushed in a headline “MSNBC Makes Network History With Stretch Of No. 1 Cable Ratings: The channel enjoyed a week as the winner.” But a look at the full calendar week shows Fox News won the ratings race for the full calendar week, both in prime-time and total-day measurements. 

The mainstream media has a way of either embellishing or omitting information as they see fit. On AMC’s TURN: Washington’s Spies, we see a very similar scenario taking place way back during the American Revolution.

There’s probably nobody to root for in the sudden diplomatic standoff between Qatar and the rest of the Arab Middle East. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the rest are accusing Qatar of supporting terror. In other news, the pot had some interesting things to say about the kettle. But something good can come out of the situation: buh-bye Beheading Channel.

A 77-year-old man died the other day, and, according to The Nation’s Walsh, it should have been a major learning moment for the Republican Party. In a Thursday piece about the career and legacy of former Fox News Channel boss Roger Ailes, Walsh mused that the passing of the GOP’s “intellectual patron” might “serve as a warning to the party” that “anger, arrogance and seething resentment of a…

Calling in to Thursday’s NBC Today during a special report on the death of former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, New York magazine’s Gabe Sherman bid the media executive good riddance as he launched into an incendiary rant calling Ailes a “terrorizing figure” whose “quest for power consumed him.”

The long-standing relationship between Univision Executive Chairman Haim Saban and Hillary Clinton reached its apex last year, as the network colluded on various levels with the Clinton campaign. Despite catastrophic failure on Election Night 2016, there are fresh, telltale signs that the alliance is being renewed.

Irony alert: Fear of conservative media bias made the front page of the New York Times. The front-page story in Saturday’s edition. featured media reporter Sydney Ember taking another bite out of Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns local television stations in many markets: “TV Titan’s Tilt On the News Roils Its Staff.” The Times, you see, is worried about political bias – not the obvious…

For a real-life example of how to succeed in business without really trying, check out the “Lean Forward” channel, suggests The Week’s Ryan Cooper. Cooper asserts that MSNBC is “attempting to ditch its entire brand as a liberal network just as it is starting to pay off handsomely,” and indicated that the driving force behind the ditchery is Andrew Lack, chairman of NBC News and MSNBC.

At one time officially, and since then unofficially, the “S” in “ESPN” stood for “sports,” and, according to Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum, that’s entirely fitting. As for the frequent complaint from conservatives about the channel’s liberal bias, Drum says, “I don't really get it...I'm not a heavy ESPN viewer, but I watch enough to have some sense of its political leanings. And I haven't…

Just as it’s exceedingly tricky to know the dancer from the dance, it’s awfully hard to separate Fox News Channel’s program content from its hypermacho, litigation-generating workplace. That was the word from Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall in a Friday post. In Marshall’s words, FNC on the air and FNC in the office are “almost umbilically tied…If you’ve watched Fox for…

This week’s avalanche of layoffs at ESPN has been a story in search of an explanation. Some say that a major reason for the network’s financial woes over the past few years has been, as Clay Travis noted, its “absurd decision to turn into MSESPN, a left wing sports network.” The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis, who endorses the recent leftward drift of sports media, thinks that whether or not ESPN is “a…

BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith appeared on the CNN podcast “The Axe Files” to proclaim that President Trump’s attacks on the press had “breathed new life” into them, and “singlehandedly…postponed the collapse of a fair share of the legacy media in an interesting way.” Smith is just the latest liberal to insincerely praise Trump for reviving a dormant media elite – without admitting they were…

This is the closest Brian Williams will ever get to having a Pulitzer Prize: talking about them. Wrapping up Tuesday’s The 11th Hour on MSNBC, Williams joked with a hint of seriousness on the day the Pulitzers were awarded that the Trump presidency is known as “the 2017 Full Employment Act for Journalists.”

A mind is a terrible thing. No, that’s hardly the United Negro College Fund slogan. (“A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”) It is symptomatic of the more extreme areas of the alt-left. They and their demented influence are spreading rapidly and it’s hardly good news. They are like dumping crack houses in a ritzy neighborhood. Imagine D.C.’s Georgetown or LA’s 90210 and then drop in drug houses…