Media Business

Appearing on NBC’s Today on Sunday, Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd acknowledged that “the optics look terrible” for Hillary Clinton after her campaign roped off the press during a 4th of July parade in New Hampshire, but he added: “Look, I am sympathetic to the campaign's complaint. She has a large media horde following her around that it makes it hard, because of the media, for her to…

Remind me: before her View gig, did Nicolle Wallace work for Republicans or Democrats? I ask because on today's Morning Joe, she was the sole voice downplaying the significance of Hillary's minions having roped off the press during her July 4th parade walk. According to Wallace,"we pay a little bit too much attention to [press] access to Hillary Clinton . . . just as an image, I don't that it…

"Fox News has officially dropped 'The Five' co-host Bob Beckel from the network, saying the show could no longer be held 'hostage' to his personal issues," Dylan Byers of Politico reported earlier this afternoon, citing initial coverage by Mediaite.

In his first interview since being suspended and removed as anchor of NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams told Today co-host Matt Lauer on Friday that he “was not trying to mislead people” when he fabricated stories about news events he covered.

On Thursday, NBC News officially named Lester Holt as the new anchor of NBC Nightly News, permanently replacing suspended anchor Brian Williams. In a just-released statement, Williams apologized for his dishonest accounts of news events: “I'm sorry. I said things that weren't true. I let down my NBC colleagues and our viewers, and I'm determined to earn back their trust.”

Did Joe Scarborough just suggest that the suits at his own network are craven cowards who put bucks over ethics? On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough predicted that if Matt Lauer had pulled a Stephanopoulos, NBC would hesitate to punish him [just as ABC hasn't disciplined Steph], because Lauer's morning Today show "is where they make the money."

Rush Limbaugh posted an interesting pair of questions at his web site yesterday: "How can CNN still be on the air with no audience? How can MSNBC have been on the air with no audience? In the old days, they're gone, kaput. Something else is tried. But they stay. And they double down on what they're doing that's losing audience." A large part of the answer, as I noted on March 30, is that those…

This Friday, April 24, will mark 100 years since the beginning of the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Ottoman government in what is present-day Turkey. The Washington Post apparently saw it a fitting occasion to accept a full-page A-section advertisement by an organization which essentially denies the holocaust of millions of Armenians by the Turks.

Will they just stand there and take it? Or will the Republican candidates for president push back against the fawning media coverage of Hillary Clinton?

Usually liberals have the decency to wait a few months after one of their rape fantasies collapses to start citing the case as "unresolved" -- it was a tie, the game was rained out, we'll never know what happened. But with the apocryphal University of Virginia gang rape, lefties started in right away with the "I guess we'll never know what happened" rewrite.   

Esquire’s Pierce considers the web site/newspaper Politico an embarrassment to journalism (he habitually refers to it as “Tiger Beat on the Potomac”). Recently, Pierce found more fuel for his ire, a Politico story that to his disgust 1) merely hinted, rather than stated, that Scott Walker is an “unprincipled scoundrel,” and 2) virtually endorsed Walker’s “fundamental mendacity” as long as it’s…

Sharyl Attkisson, the former CBS investigative reporter whose book Stonewalled exposed liberal bias, has been no wallflower when it comes to speaking out about the kind of standards (or lack thereof) seen in journalism today. In former NBC reporter Lisa Myers, she finds a kindred spirit. On Friday, she wrote “Lisa Myers sounds like me. She is also a former network news investigative journalist.…

The front page of Friday’s Washington Post wasn’t at all objective about the FCC’s imposition of a “net neutrality” regime. The headline was “FCC makes Internet history: PROVIDERS DEEMED PUBLIC UTILITIES / New regulations aim to keep Web fair and open.” The same thing happened on the cover of the Post’s Express tabloid, where liberal HBO host John Oliver was honored. “Net hero: The FCC’s ruling…

MSNBC boss Phil Griffin has sent around a memo to staff admitting the obvious: that 2014 was a very difficult year for MSNBC. But he blames technological change -- not the rejection of the MSNBC agenda at the polls. America is "leaning backward" at the moment.  “It’s no secret that 2014 was a difficult year for the entire cable news industry and especially for MSNBC,” Griffin wrote. “Technology…