Media Business

Many products long not advertised on television now are commonly promoted during ad breaks. Writer Danielle Campoamor would like to add one more type of commercial to that list. “Why is it that I never see an ad for abortion services?” wondered Campoamor in a Sunday piece. “Why are we willing to use women’s bodies in ads, but rarely see ads that would benefit women’s bodies?...Society has…

Rupert Murdoch is in a pickle, and the famously abrasive lefty writer Taibbi is loving every minute of it. In a Tuesday article for Rolling Stone, Taibbi portrays Murdoch as “desperate… because he senses his beloved audience of idiots” abandoning Fox News in favor of Donald Trump, “a onetime Fox favorite who is fast becoming the network's archenemy.” Taibbi argues that Fox News must routinely…

Word on the street is that ESPN is planning to lay off "200 to 300" employees in the coming months. The go-to euphemism surrounding the impending layoffs, according to Variety's Brian Steinberg, is "the changing media landscape," primarily the "cord-cutting" phenomenon. In July, the Big Lead blog, in discussing Keith Olbermann's expected departure from ESPN, explained that "millennials are…

Appearing on Wednesday’s CBS This Morning, former Meet the Press moderator David Gregory shared the inside story of his 2014 ouster from NBC: “Things happen in television news, we know that. It's a tough business....it’s just that it was handled in way that was unnecessary. NBC made a business decision which you can agree with or disagree with and it just didn't need to be handled that way....I…

You wish he had named names . . . On today's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough flatly stated "I do blame it on cable news" for "people wearing uniforms being a lot less safe today than they were before Ferguson." So just which cable networks did Scarborough have in mind? Until last week [when he was relegated to the Sunday morning desert], Joe's own MSNBC was the Al Sharpton network. So surely…

Two weeks ago, cable and broadcast giant Comcast announced that its NBCUniversal unit would invest $200 million in Vox Communications, thereby "creating a partnership to help the television giant better connect with younger audiences." Based on what follows and far more examples than one could hope to cite in a single post, Comcast should consider asking for their money back. Apparently trying…

The morning after Al Sharpton was exiled to the Sunday morning desert from his evening show, and not long after Ed Schultz and Alex Wagner were relieved of their hosting duties, Joe Scarborough has profusely thanked NBC News honcho Andrew Lack for making those changes. On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough was discussing stunning poll results in which the first word that came to voters' minds…

"Al Sharpton is leaving MSNBC's weekday dayside lineup, and moving to Sunday mornings," Politico's Alex Weprin reported this evening at CapitalNewYork.com

A coalition of 53 press and open government organizations has “once again” urged President Barack Obama and the people in his administration “to stop practices in federal agencies that prevent important information from getting to the public.” According to an open letter sent to the Democratic occupant of the White House on Monday and released to the public the following day, groups ranging from…

CNN has hired a conservative commentator.  Me.

Here we go again – the FEC has launched another attack on free speech.

In the second part of her 16,000-word Harvard report on the dangerous extremes of "conservative media," New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes offered a skewed history of talk radio, seeing the dark shadow of right-wing hate hovering over its birth, and lamented that "However frustrated Republican leaders are by this piling on from the far right, they have little choice but to pay heed." And…

According to The New York Times, Will Dana, the managing editor who oversaw Rolling Stone’s trumped up UVA gang rape story, is leaving the magazine.

There soon will be sixteen Republicans officially seeking their party’s 2016 presidential nomination, but Gabriel Sherman probably would replace “officially” with "nominally." In a Sunday post, Sherman suggested that many of those sixteen are CINOs (Candidates in Name Only) who really are running for the title of big-bucks “political celebrity.” He opined that “when it comes to presidential…