Media Business

Poor Katie Couric. She's been stuck in a ratings rut since taking over the "CBS Evening News" anchor slot and has been rumored to be departing the Eye network. Now comes more bad news for the former morning star: Barack Obama has begged off on CBS's North Carolina debate.That leaves Couric as the sole broadcast news anchor who hasn't moderated a debate this cycle. That isn't likely to change…

It goes without saying that climate realists around the world believe Nobel Laureate Al Gore used false information throughout his schlockumentary "An Inconvenient Truth" in order to generate global warming hysteria. On Friday, it was revealed by ABC News that one of the famous shots of supposed Antarctic ice shelves in the film was actually a computer-generated image from the 2004 science…

Interesting media news this Monday as Newsweek takes a look at the coming war between the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The mag's piece in turn sparked a newspaper industry news boomlet as other publications rushed to find out whether Newsweek's claim that liberal Democrat Republican New York mayor Michael Bloomberg might give the New York Times Company a cash infusion to "protect…

Dan Gainor appeared on Fox News's "Fox and Friends" to talk about the latest issue of Time magazine, which had a Photoshopped cover of World War II Marines raising a tree instead of the American flag at Iwo Jima. Gainor told viewers of the Saturday morning broadcast April 19, "Time magazine basically tried to co-op an icon of American heroism to push their global warming agenda. They're trying to…

Interest in the presidential election should be driving up ratings for the Big Three networks' evening news shows, right? Wrong. Here is how evening news viewership at ABC, NBC, and CBS for the two most recent available weeks compares to the analogous weeks of 2007 (From Media Bistro's TV Newser: April 7, 2008; March 31, 2008; April 9, 2007; April 2, 2007):

Earlier this week we documented how ABCNews.com used a photo illustration in its top headlines lineup that pictured a Bible, a rosary, and a bare-shouldered woman apparently in the throes of passion. Well, in this morning's ABCNews.com lineup of top stories: John and Cindy McCain's tax returns, Hillary Clinton bashing Barack Obama, Pope Benedict at the UN, and how a company plans to make a…

Vice President Dick Cheney spoke at the annual Radio and Television Correspondents dinner Wednesday evening, and poked fun at members of the news media, gave advice to Mitt Romney about getting himself on the list of potential Republican vice presidential candidates, chided Nobel Laureate Al Gore and his goofy ideas about global warming, and even made fun of himself being referred to by…

MSNBC has refused to air a dishonest anti-gun ad: The cable network MSNBC has refused to air an advertisement from Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the group created by New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg,on the grounds that the ad is too "controversial." The ad, below, features each of the three leading presidential candidates pledging to make it harder to buy guns at gun shows, and images of three…

Never mind nightly TV newscasts are geared toward older generation. Never mind scandals like Dan Rather and the falsified National Guard documents leading up to the 2004 presidential elections have caused people to look for their news from other sources like the Internet and talk radio. Former "CBS Evening News" weekend and fill-in anchor and NBC's "Meet the Press" and "Nightly News" co-anchor…

Not too many commentators seem to have noticed that George Soros is slowly but surely becoming the mainstream media that is the focus of the analysis we do at NewsBusters. The liberal billionaire-turned-philanthropist has been buying up media properties for years in order to drive home his message to the American public that they are too materialistic, too wasteful, too selfish, and too stupid…

It continues. Days after NewsBusters reported that the BBC willingly censored its reporting to fit the agenda of a left-wing environmental activist comes news that reporters at an Australian paper have been forced company-wide to promote climate alarmism by their bosses.In some positive news for journalistic independence though, it looks like the staffers at the Age newspaper have finally had…

The winner of the MRC's 2008 Dan Rather Memorial Award for Stupidest Analysis went to the editors of McClatchy Newspapers for an October 16 headline that spun the good news of the surge's success in Iraq into a tale of woe for Iraqi gravediggers. See, with the success of the surge and the corresponding drop in violence and death, Iraqi cemetery workers were "feel[ing] the pinch" to quote the…

Interesting news coming out of CBS today. First, the Wall Street Journal reporting that Katie Couric is "likely" to leave the network--before her contract expires, possibly after the inaguration of the next president:After two years of record-low ratings, both CBS News executives and people close to Katie Couric say that the "CBS Evening News" anchor is likely to leave the network well before her…