Media Business

MRC intern Joe Steigerwald wrote the following post.You've got to give credit to Al Gore, he certainly knows how to play the mass media like a fiddle, particularly NBC.Eight days ago, NB editor Brent Baker picked up on an NBC Universal press release about how the peacock network and its sister networks will cover the upcoming Live Earth concerts a grand total of 75 hours.That doesn't count the…

 Update Below:Fox News and Variety have reported that Larry Register, former longtime CNN producer, resigned Friday from Al Hurrah, which is a US government-funded TV station in the Mid-East that is supposed to be a type of Mid-East Voice of America combating the pervasive anti-US and anti-Israel rhetoric in on TV stations like Al Jazeera. As I noted here at NewsBusters in March, “within weeks”…

This was a rare treat. Seeing a self-described liberal hitting the Washington Post for liberal bias. In this case the writer, one Philip Evans of Kensington, Md., sees the bias stemming from a case of lazy reporting:

As the negotiations about whether to sell the Wall Street Journal's parent company appear to be moving along between Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and the Bancroft family, owners of a special class of stock which gives them control over Dow Jones.Whenever Murdoch is going hard for a media asset, it inevitably sets off concerns among those on the left (such as the employee unions at Dow…

Conservative blogs are abuzz with a controversial remark MSNBC's Joe Scarborough made on his Friday "Morning Joe" program about Jeri Thompson, the wife of former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), who is mulling over a White House bid. [More Scarborough coverage linked below the fold]Hot Air has the video.Here's the relevant transcript:

It's generally bad for business to have a flippant employee who insults your loyal customers. Now if someone could just give that newsflash to the Associated Press. The AP today picked up on the plight of one David Noordeweir, who was fired in late February from a Michigan Wal-Mart for an entry on his MySpace page that insulted the intelligence of Wal-Mart shoppers. Here's the lede.:A former Wal…

Castro's censors like CNN in Spanish. That's one of the nuggets that makes today's "Public Eye" interview with Havana-based CBS producer Portia Siegelbaum a worthwhile read. It's particularly timely in light of dictator Fidel Castro's comrades in ideology running roughshod over the free press in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia.[Update/related MRC study: Rich Noyes reminded me of his 2002 study…

It never ceases to amaze me to see how ignorant The Washington Post is about Catholic teaching---the latest example being staff writer Peter Slevin's liberally biased slam against Abp. Raymond Burke on p. A2 of the May 29 edition. The ignorance (or anti-Catholicism?) is clear in the very first sentence, which is false, in the first paragraph. "When it comes to expressing his views of church…

"The Anchoress" had an excellent item yesterday about how some news wires are downplaying the authoritarian, anti-free speech nature of Hugo Chavez's move to shut down a private television network that often criticized the Venezuelan thugocrat. She notes that the bland headlines give little reason for the casual reader to sit up and take notice:The initial headlines are either unclear or they’re…

For those who prefer their news fair and balanced instead of imbalanced and biased, the demise of the Big 3 networks' evening newscasts can't come quickly enough. Though their imminent end seems unlikely (see the reasons at the end of this post), the latest May sweep results strongly indicate that their march towards irrelevance may be completed sooner than originally thought. All the happy…