After completing her first successful season as host of the Amazing America series on the cable TV Sportsman Channel -- and being renewed for a second run of 12 episodes -- is former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin also interested in joining the depleted ranks of panelists on ABC's The View?
Judging from an email interview with Marisa Guthrie of The Hollywood Reporter, Palin has already given some serious thought regarding how to revitalize the weekday morning series: give it “a punch of reality and a voice of reason from America's heartland.”
Latest from Randy Hall
July 7, 2014, 9:20 PM EDT
July 3, 2014, 10:00 PM EDT
It's only July of 2014, but two panelists on the Morning Joe program expressed concern during Thursday's edition that people within the media are already suffering from “Clinton Exhaustion” even though the former secretary of state has yet to announce whether she will be a candidate in the 2016 presidential election.
If that's the case, then one of the worst offenders is the staff of that MSNBC morning show, which usually finds a way to spend up to 15 minutes a day discussing the latest “news” about Hillary Clinton, ranging from her “Hard Choices” book -- which is suffering from poor sales -- to question if she's a victim of “sexism” and “ageism.”
July 1, 2014, 10:45 AM EDT
What a difference 12 months can make! Just ask Wendy Davis, the Texas state senator who was cheered on by the “mainstream media” for conducting a “passionate” filibuster against a bill to restrict abortions in the Lone Star State. While the law eventually passed, the obscure official was instantly catapulted into the national spotlight and encouraged to run for governor in the 2014 election.
One year later, the Democratic candidate's campaign is losing momentum despite the fact that she recently celebrated the anniversary of her attention-grabbing tactic by wearing her “comfortable pink sneakers” at a rally that led Manny Fernandez of the New York Times to declare: “For Wendy Davis, a filibuster goes only so far in the race to be governor of Texas.”
June 27, 2014, 11:28 PM EDT
During the Wednesday evening episode of The O'Reilly Factor, Fox News Channel host Bill O'Reilly slammed conservative activist Jason Mattera's “ambush journalism” of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, calling it “unacceptable” to use “a horrendous act of terror to make a political point.”
After Martha MacCallum, another Fox anchor, appeared in the segment and agreed with O'Reilly. Mattera tweeted: “Rather than invite me to debate the Hillary video, @oreillyfactor brings on someone else to parrot his points. Yeah, 'fair and balanced.'"
June 25, 2014, 10:52 PM EDT
In Tuesday's contentious runoff contest, senator Thad Cochran, a Republican who has represented Mississippi since his first election in 1978, defeated Tea Party challenger Chris McDaniel in part because the “open primary” allowed African-American Democrats to cast ballots in the GOP contest.
As a result, John King -- host of CNN's Inside Politics program -- wondered during Wednesday's edition whether Cochran will simply say “Thank you” and forget the votes he received or use the victory as a “turning point” for a larger conversation within the Republican Party about issues like voting rights.
June 24, 2014, 7:37 PM EDT
Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton told ABC's Diane Sawyer on June 9 that when she and her family left the White House in 2001, they were “dead broke.” The reaction to that remark took an interesting turn on Tuesday, when her husband and former president Bill Clinton leaped into the fray by asserting that his wife's comment “is factually true” and the potential 2016 Democratic presidential candidate is “not out of touch.”
The former Democratic occupant of the White House made his remarks during an interview with David Gregory, host of NBC's Meet the Press Sunday morning program, as part of an event for the Clinton Global Initiative in Denver.
June 21, 2014, 4:08 PM EDT
In the aftermath of Megyn Kelly's tough interview with Dick Cheney, the Fox News Channel anchor has received praise from some unusual sources. One of these was Chris Matthews of MSNBC's Hardball weekday program, who said the host of the weeknight Kelly File show was “great” when she threw some hardballs of her own at the former vice president over his role in the Iraq War more than a decade ago.
Also approving Kelly's behavior during the interview was faux conservative Stephen Colbert, who “defended” her questions, including her quoting a leftist blogger and asking: “With almost $1 trillion spent there, with 4,500 American lives lost there, what do you say to those who say you were so wrong about so much at the expense of so many?”
June 20, 2014, 7:39 AM EDT
The debate over whether the National Football League team in the District of Columbia should change its name from the Washington Redskins to something “less offensive” was the subject when CNN Newsroom weekend anchor Don Lemon was a guest during The Tom Joyner Radio Show on Thursday.
Lemon started his commentary by talking about “bad words, words that you shouldn't say,” comparing the “N-word” to “the dreaded 'R-word'” as racially offensive terms. However, comedian Kevin Hart disagreed, noting that the only people being called “Redskins” are players on the professional football team.
June 18, 2014, 7:52 PM EDT
It's not hard to tell where the host of Real Time With Bill Maher stands on the issue of “animal rights.” As with most topics, the comedian hasn't held anything back since before 2003, when he received the Celebrity Animal Advocate of the Year Award at the Animal Rights National Conference in Los Angeles.
During the past week, however, the HBO host set his sights on two interesting targets: the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA -- which he said is a “wonderful cause” -- and actor Liam Neeson, who “should just shut up” about his support for the horse carriage business in New York City.
June 16, 2014, 10:27 PM EDT
The Washington Post editorial board used the tragedy on Tuesday morning, June 10, in Troutdale, Oregon -- where a 15-year-old boy armed with an AR-15 rifle shot and killed a 14-year-old student before taking his own life -- to declare in a June 13 editorial that “such senseless violence shouldn't happen” and put the blame on Congress for not passing “any kind of responsible gun control.”
“A Congress that’s more terrified of the National Rifle Association than another Sandy Hook needs to be pushed to change by a public willing to vote out those who won’t act,” the editors declared. “It’s clear from the countless locales that have been scarred by gun violence that no place is really safe.”
June 14, 2014, 5:35 PM EDT
While acknowledging that racism “isn't limited to Texas,” a Democratic activist from the Lone Star State told guest host Michael Eric Dyson during Thursday's edition of The Ed Show on MSNBC: “We're just more out and proud with it” and “don’t segregate and live apart from each other, like they do in the Northeast.”
Sarah Slamen -- a party official from Fort Bend County -- made the remark while discussing the comments of two-term La Marque City Council member Connie Trube, who is under fire after an audio of her calling for removal of “those blacks off the school board” was leaked to the public.
June 13, 2014, 7:32 AM EDT
Even though Hillary Clinton has not yet announced her presidential ambitions for 2016, she is still the subject of many online postings -- some of which are flattering, while others are ... not so much.
On Thursday, the former secretary of state's memoir, Hard Choices, became the first entry in MSNBC's new book club, which led many posters to call the group a Hillary Clinton “fan club” instead. Meanwhile, she was also the target of a Mad Magazine satire comparing the “Dead Broke” Democrat to a waitress in the CBS TV situation comedy 2 Broke Girls.
June 11, 2014, 11:02 PM EDT
Like many analysts in the “mainstream media,” New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters sought to explain how David Brat -- a 49-year-old economics professor and virtually unknown candidate -- won the Republican primary in Virginia on Tuesday, unseating Eric Cantor, a seven-term incumbent who has served as the majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Peters' explanation? During a lengthy article the following day, he asserted that the upset victory was made possible by the intervention of “potent voices of the conservative media,” including GOP radio talk show hosts Laura Ingraham and Mark Levin.
June 10, 2014, 9:28 PM EDT
Most surveys regarding cable news channels focus on ratings and the opinions of their viewers. However, a recent poll conducted by the Brookings and Public Religion Research Institute sought the views of all Americans toward all news sources in the nation.
A mere 5 percent of the respondents called the left-wing MSNBC cable channel their “most trusted” TV news outlet. On the other end of the spectrum, the Fox News Channel was named by 25 percent of the people surveyed, surprisingly more than the 23 percent who pointed to the “mainstream media” broadcast networks and the 21 percent who said they trust the Cable News Network.
May 29, 2014, 9:57 PM EDT
As the circulation of weekly newsmagazines continues to decline, their editors and staffs hope to draw in new readers -- as well as the people they've lost over the past few decades -- with covers that focus on controversial topics.
The latest example of this ploy is the new issue of Time magazine, which depicts transgender African-American actress and “sexual diversity advocate” Laverne Cox on its cover next to the title “The Transgender Tipping Point: America's Next Civil Rights Frontier.”
May 24, 2014, 7:34 PM EDT
Along with hosting MSNBC's weekday PoliticsNation program, Al Sharpton plays many roles, ranging from community activist to harsh critic of his opponents, whom he regularly refers to in such emotion-charged terms as "white interlopers" and "Greek homos."
However, when Jason Mattera -- publisher of the Daily Surge website -- confronted Sharpton earlier this month and asked if he “should be banned from TV for the racist stuff you've said over the years,” the talkative politician tried to avoid admitting he ever used such epithets and then tried to dismiss one remark because it was directed at just one Jewish businessman.
May 21, 2014, 8:29 PM EDT
Despite the fact that National Public Radio is a publicly supported network, its long-term financial struggles claimed another casualty on Tuesday: Tell Me More, a program “expressly designed to have a primary appeal for African-American listeners and other people of color” will air its last episode on Friday, August 1.
The move will leave 28 people unemployed, and program host Michel Martin admitted to having “scar tissue” before releasing a statement in which she asserted: “I hoped we could have found a way to save the show, but NPR news management has assured me that the mission that we’ve undertaken will continue in new ways, and I’m sticking around be a part of making that happen.”
May 19, 2014, 11:01 AM EDT
The people who watch The Ed Show, a weekday afternoon program on MSNBC, are regularly invited by bombastic host Ed Schultz to participate by tweeting comments regarding the topic under discussion and take part in polls that are so slanted, they're bound to overwhelmingly mirror the host's wildly liberal views.
While being interactive with your audience is a laudable goal, the process also provides viewers with the opportunity “for some good ol’ fashioned trolling” that leads to getting comical and nonsensical tweets on-screen during airtime.
May 14, 2014, 11:58 PM EDT
The old saying goes that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder," but during Tuesday night's edition of Comedy Central's The Daily Show, the same principle was applied to hypocrisy.
Jon Stewart charged that Senate majority leader Harry Reid has criticized Charles and David Koch more than 140 times this year but said during an interview that people shouldn't “pick on” Sheldon Adelson, a gambling billionaire and supporter of the Nevada Democrat. [See video below.]
May 13, 2014, 9:07 PM EDT
Even though baseball season has finally arrived, the focus of last weekend's TV sports was the annual draft of college players to join teams in the National Football League. This year's selection was the first of its kind since Michael Sam, an open homosexual who “came out” in February, was among the hundreds of young men hoping to make the leap to professional sports.
After the African-American candidate joined the St. Louis Rams as the 249th pick, Sam's enthusiastic hug and kiss of Vito Cammisano -- his male partner -- became the focus of liberal comedian Stephen Colbert during Monday's version of The Colbert Report, when the host used a football theme by blowing a whistle and tossing a yellow penalty flag in the air for “Holding!” and “Unnecessary Tenderness!”