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 manipulated abortion and the way in which it is viewed, changing it from a medical procedure to an exhausted topic of debate.”

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 eschewing expensive cable TV bills and streaming everything online." While that might explain flat viewership or even a modest decline, cord-cutting is only a minor part of the problem. Someone needs to explain why ESPN's ratings have fallen by a stunning 30 percent in the past 12 months.

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 Scarborough was pointing the finger at least partially at MSNBC itself.  But as he continued, Scarborough also identified other unnamed cable networks that he accused of "glorifying" Vester Flanagan and "promoting the next Roanoke-style shooting" by displaying his Twitter feed and other such info, which is what killers like Flanagan seek. 

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 about Hillary was "liar."  Asked what was the worst thing said about him in such polling, Scarborough answered "he works for MSNBC." But Joe then added, his hands steepled in a gesture of gratitude: "not any more though, cause things have changed. Thank you, Andy. Thank you very much." 

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 the American Copy Editors Society to the Virginia Professional Communicators criticized Obama for not following through on a promise he made during his presidential campaign in 2008.