MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry chastised her guests for being too serious just before the controversial segment about former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney's adopted black grandson.
She told viewers the panel of comedians would "be forced to drink during the commercial so they can get their funny back."
Harris-Perry would tearfully apologize for the resulting jokes a week later.
"My intention was not malicious, but I broke the ground rule that families are off limits, and for that I am sorry," Harris-Perry said Saturday.
The apology comes weeks after MSNBC host Martin Bashir lost his job because of remarks about former GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.
Controversial comments by journalists about an American politician's family are not new. Harry Truman threatened physical violence against a Washington Post critic who famously wrote in 1950 that the president's daughter "cannot sing very well."
While Margaret Truman put herself into the public eye with her performance, Romney's grandson Kieran James only sat on his grandfather's lap for a family Christmas card photograph. And this instance involved race.
Harris-Perry asked her panelists to come up with captions for the photo of Romney, his wife and their 21 grandchildren, all white except for Kieran.
Comedic actress Pia Glenn sang a Sesame Street song: "One of These Things Is Not Like the Others."
Comedian Dean Obeidallah joked that the photo "really sums up the diversity of the Republican Party."
Harris-Perry described the baby as "gorgeous" and suggested Kieran could someday marry North West, the daughter of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. "Can you imagine Mitt Romney and Kanye West as in-laws?" she joked.
Unlike Truman and the critic, Romney quickly forgave Harris-Perry. "People make mistakes, and the folks at MSNBC made a big mistake and they apologized for it," Romney said in an interview on "Fox News Sunday." "They apologized for it. That's all we can ask for."
Daily Beast political columnist Sally Kohn, a guest Sunday on CNN's "Reliable Sources," blamed the growing competitiveness and immediacy of media today for the increase in such incidents.
"There's always this incentive to say something that's newsworthy, attention-getting, but it's real easy to cross the line into offensive and stupid," Kohn said. "And that's a split-second judgment sometimes."
Harris-Perry, who is a political science professor at Tulane University, was surrounded by four comedians and no professional journalists. The live, unscripted show, which she said was her second annual "Look Back in Laughter" edition, seemed more like a night at the improv than a cable news program.
"This is the show where we dispense with the serious and sober coverage of the year in politics," she promised viewers. They would look back on "some of the political absurdity of 2013 with the ridicule and mockery it so rightly deserves."
Harris-Perry delivered an opening monologue loaded with obvious sexual puns about the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal.
Comedian Judy Gold joked about Sen. Ted Cruz, saying it was scary that the Texas Republican had daughters. Other comments came about the daughters of "rich, white Republicans."
The mandate for more punch lines was made clear by Harris-Perry after one somewhat serious segment.
"My comedians are all going to be forced to drink during the commercial so they can get their funny back because they've got real serious about sexism and feminism," the host said.
"We are basically ratings whores," Harris-Perry added.
Politico media reporter Dylan Byers said the MSNBC brand has been damaged by these controversies, considering the channel was "supposed to elevate the discourse" with smart, well-educated progressives who "lean forward."
"It's leaning backward and it's totally, it's not what MSNBC, I think, was supposed to be about originally, and I think it's doing real, severe damage to the brand," Byers said on CNN's "Reliable Sources."
Boston radio host Callie Crossley told "Reliable Sources" that Harris-Perry's brand has been damaged by the controversy as well. "Her brand is to exactly be on top of the kind of ignorant and other kind of racist commentary."
The Society of Professional Journalists has a code of ethics that says journalists should "use special sensitivity when dealing with children" and "show good taste." Students learn it in most journalism schools.
But the rule book in the rough-and-tumble world of politics and media is an unwritten common law of precedents that evolves partly through apologies, resignations and firings.
Harris-Perry's Apology makes one rule clear: the kids are off limits.
Distrust of the mainstream media has been among the strongest sentiments uniting philosophically diverse tea party activists, who almost universally believe the national media have purposefully underestimated their ranks, highlighted their extremes or portrayed them as racists, rednecks or worse — that is, when it wasn’t ignoring them completely.
What then, to make of the fact that an increasing number of media outlets appear to be devoting increasing resources to chronicling the movement, culminating in a massive media presence at this weekend’s self-proclaimed National Tea Party Convention?
Organizers initially moved to limit access to outlets deemed friendly to the cause, including Fox News Channel, The Wall Street Journal, Breitbart.com, Townhall.com and World Net Daily. But they later relented and now say they’ve issued 200 press credentials, including multiple passes each to many of the elite national media organizations regularly disparaged by conservative activists as Democratic shills — the hated liberal mainstream media, or MSM.
Both the organizers and convention participants have seemed to revel in the media spotlight and have used the attention to chastise the press for what they view as shoddy coverage, though some refused to talk to reporters at all.
“The mainstream media is the enemy,” declared Bob Bunting, a retiree from Hilton Head Island, S.C., attending the convention with his wife, Nancy Bunting. “You are for socialism and Barack Obama.”
Convention organizer Judson Phillips, who in the run-up to the convention was the subject of some tough stories examining his finances and those of the for-profit company he set up to run the convention, said he doesn’t think most mainstream journalists are deliberately mischaracterizing the movement but simply do not understand it.
“There are a lot of studies out there saying that journalists tend to be significantly more liberal than the general populace,” he said. “So when you are coming from a liberal mindset — for a majority of those folks — I don’t think you understand conservatism.”
Speculation about political ideology aside, the tea party story does present some unique challenges for many political reporters It is a diffuse national movement composed of activists with a variety of philosophical motivations that lacks clear leadership to turn to for analysis or leaks and that has little presence in Washington, where most national political reporters and their sources are based.
Still, in recent weeks, The New York Times, the paper conservatives love to hate, has had its reporter who covers conservatives, Kate Zernike, produce a couple in-depth pieces analyzing countervailing efforts by tea party activists to take over local Republican parties from the ground up and Republican Party efforts to harness the energy of the movement.
Meanwhile, The New Yorker magazine, the bible of liberal intellectuals, ran a nuanced 7,500-word analysis of the movement called “The Rise of Tea Party Activism,” which the thoughtful conservative blogger Dan Riehl assessed as fair, even as he noted it highlighted “fringe elements” that some tea partiers see as embarrassing anomalies held up by critics to marginalize the movement.
“All in all, one might have expected much worse given the source,” Riehl wrote.
Even PBS’s "Frontline" is doing a documentary about the movement and is here doing interviews.
CNN, which embedded a reporter on a cross-country tea party bus tour in September, aired its own three-part tea party series last week, with segments about rifts in the movement and an unusual tea party cruise. The network, which some convention goers somewhat grudgingly praised for fair coverage, sent some name talent to cover the convention, including correspondents Mary Snow and Randy Kaye, deputy political director Paul Steinhauser and political analyst John Avalon.
In all, the network was granted credentials for 11 journalists and crew members, according to a convention list reviewed by POLITICO.
That’s more than the eight granted to Fox News, which drew early criticism for crossing the line between covering the movement and actively promoting the tea party movement. (though Fox News Sunday got five additional credentials to facilitate host Chris Wallace’s interview with former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the convention keynote speaker).
“The tea party movement was clearly something that was an important political story that we wanted to cover and try to capture for our viewers,” CNN political director Sam Feist told POLITICO. “We wanted to cover it the appropriate amount and appropriately — not to become advocates, not to become critics but simply to cover it as we would cover any other political story.”
A Fox spokesperson rejected the suggestion that the network promoted the tea party movement, and differentiated the network's news coverage from the treatment given the movement by some of the network's opinion commentators, who have actively encouraged participation in protests.
The convention credential list — which reflects granted press-pass requests, not actual attendees – also included five journalists and crew members from NBC News and four from ABC. Time magazine was allotted passes for a total of four journalists (likely including at least one photographer), while The Washington Post and The New York Times had a couple journalists each included on the list, and The Associated Press, Bloomberg News and Newsweek each had a reporter on the scene (as, of course, did POLITICO).
And C-SPAN, which has a crew at the convention, aired hours of live sessions and speeches, and intends to carry Palin’s Saturday night speech live, as do Fox, MSNBC and CNN.
That’s to say nothing of the foreign journalists from 11 countries, or the conservative media outlets Big Government (which is affiliated with Breitbart.com), PJTV and Human Events, which were credentialed for nine, five and two people, respectively.
Andrew Breitbart, founder of Breitbart.com and Big Government, said he didn’t request the credentials but was happy to be at the convention — during which, on Friday night, he was approached by a steady stream of fans thanking him for his work and wanting to shake his hand or buy him a drink — and he stressed the need for conservative outlets to chronicle the movement.
“Every time I’ve spoken to this crowd, I ask them how many of you hold the media in contempt,” he said. “And they all raise their hands. It’s almost absurd the degree to which these people can’t stand that they’re portrayed as racist and sexist and homophobe and retrograde knuckle-draggers.” He said his goal is “to break through this New York-Washington-Hollywood, Columbia Journalism School ‘we’re the elite and you need to hear it through us’ axis of media control.”
To be sure, media bashing has always made good conservative rhetoric.
But tea party activists generally point to a few specific grievances to highlight their distrust of the media, dating back at least as far as the first widespread protests on April 15, 2009, when MSNBC’s David Shuster and CNN’s Anderson Cooper had some fun with the double entendre "Tea Bagging".
In their coverage of the explosion of protests at congressional town hall meetings last summer, some media outlets, notably MSNBC, focused heavily on the roles played by a few corporate-funded Washington conservative groups in facilitating the protests to label them as “Astroturf,” a characterization that minimized the grass-roots opposition to Democratic plans to overhaul health care.
In the wake of the Sept. 12 “Taxpayer March on Washington,” many tea party activists alleged attendance at the rally was vastly and purposefully under-reported by media outlets, which — always reluctant to wade into the charged game of giving precise crowd sizes — generally described the crowd as numbering in the “tens of thousands” or “between 60,000 and 75,000,” while conservative bloggers asserted there more than a million people.
And since then, tea partiers have grown weary of a hardening media narrative holding that in-fighting is tearing the movement apart, a theme that took hold after POLITICO revealed philosophical and personal disputes among activists nationwide.
But Chuck Smith, a 66-year-old retiree from the Knoxville area who attended the conference, acknowledged that the occasionally extremist rhetoric, combined with the overwhelmingly white composition of many tea party crowds — including the one gathered in Nashville — make it “easy to paint us as racist or extremist, and I can’t fault the mainstream media for that, but that misses the point.” Smith said reporters "don’t understand what’s happening. We’re not exclusionary. We’re everyday, hard-working Americans fighting back against big government.”
The demographic make-up and extremist sentiments are part of the movement and deserve to be covered as such, said MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, who has been among the leading antagonists of the movement on the left-leaning network, and is not attending the convention.
“Certainly there must be a large percentage of disaffected, overtaxed minorities, too. How many of them have we seen at any of these events?” he said. He also pointed to the incendiary opening convention speech Thursday by former Colorado congressman and Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo, who declared American values under siege from the "cult of multiculturalism," as well as "Islamification" and asserted President Barack Obama was elected because "we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country."
“Thank God for Tancredo: He really tore off the mask of this thing,” said Olbermann. He asserted the speech should “wind up changing everybody's coverage” of the tea party movement. “You cannot invoke the 'literacy tests' of the Jim Crow South, or claim a president was elected by people who don’t speak English, without revolting decent Americans — conservative, liberal, and otherwise.”
Sources: Politico, AP, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Washington Post, NY Times, Biggovernment.com, Twitter, Countdown, NY Magazine, TIME, Newsweek Sources: Politico, CNN, MSNBC, Media Matters, Youtube
Keith Olbermann defended his show Thursday against reports that it is in danger of being canceled over declining ratings.
Several recent reports, from outlets including Daily Finance, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Post's Page Six have focused on Olbermann's January demo rating, which dropped 44% from January 2009 (the month of Barack Obama's inauguration).
Ratings for Olbermann's Countdown have been soft recently, and the 8 p.m. shows on CNN and HLN have narrowed the gap. In the important demographic of adults 25 to 54 -- the group advertisers are looking to reach -- Countdown was down 44% year-over-year in January. It averaged 268,000 viewers in that demo, only 3,000 more than Nancy Grace's show on HLN, and 12,000 more than CNN's Campbell Brown. Fox News's O'Reilly Factor dominated the hour with 964,000 viewers age 25 to 54, and was the only cable news show in the time period to increase its audience, by 55%.
Olbermann branded Daily Finance a "right-wing site" after that report — an allegation that was batted down by the writer, Jeff Bercovici — but it was used as the basis for the LAT commentary "Countdown begins for end of Keith Olbermann's 'Countdown'?" and the Page Six item, "Olbermann's sinking ship." Both of those items hinted strongly that Olbermann's run as MSNBC's leading man in primetime may soon come to an end, even though MSNBC president Phil Griffin said in the original ratings post that he is "pleased with where we are" at 8PM.
Thursday night, Olbermann responded to the rumor that his show is in jeopardy on both his show and on Daily Kos.
"The show isn't about to be cancelled," he wrote. "It isn't slumping. MSNBC isn't worried about it. NBC isn't worried about it. It is making them a ---damned fortune, in fact (and they'd owe me a ---damned fortune if they did cancel it, which they aren't going to)."
Olbermann blamed the storyline on a right-wing smear campaign, noting that the New York Post is "Rupert Murdoch's vanity newspaper" and that the Los Angeles Times writer, Andrew Malcolm, was once Laura Bush's press secretary:
It's the route by which the thing got seized by the sleaze blogs like Breitbart and NewsCorp and the like that so beautifully, almost diagrammatically, illustrates how Conservatives come to believe the crazy, nonsensical, totally fact-free things they believe, how they transform discernible, provable lies, into their wishful-thinking version of the truth.
Olbermann also accused Bercovici of cherry-picking his data and described the longtime media writer as "Daily Finance's extremely thin-skinned media writer, always hostile, and snickered at behind his back by his rivals."
Olbermann claimed his ratings actually grew in January, citing month-to-month figures showing that "Countdown" grew 5% over December 2009 (though year-over-year numbers are much more standard than month-to-month).
"And yet the right wing believes that Countdown is about to be cancelled, because it so desperately wants it to be cancelled, that the facts, and the ratings, and the profits, become irrelevant," he wrote. "And it is better for them to pretend they are getting their way, than to acknowledge that they are not."
Keith Olbermann was already a renowned sportscaster when he rose to prominence as a political commentator. This was during the Bush Administration, when the left was badly in need of a forceful voice to rally around. Such was his popularity that MSNBC reoriented its entire primetime lineup around it.
But now the Democrats control Congress and the White House, and there are creeping indications that the world may not have quite as much need of -- or patience for -- Olbermann and his shtick as it once did.
Ratings for Olbermann's Countdown have been soft recently, and the 8 p.m. shows on CNN and HLN have narrowed the gap. In the important demographic of adults 25 to 54 -- the group advertisers are looking to reach -- Countdown was down 44% year-over-year in January. It averaged 268,000 viewers in that demo, only 3,000 more than Nancy Grace's show on HLN, and 12,000 more than CNN's Campbell Brown. Fox News's O'Reilly Factor dominated the hour with 964,000 viewers age 25 to 54, and was the only cable news show in the time period to increase its audience, by 55%.
But there are also more subjective signs that Olbermann's stridency and lack of proportion are alienating some of his natural allies. Quite a few eyebrows elevated last week when Jon Stewart, in a parody of one of Olbermann's "Special Comment" segments, called out the newsman for going way over the top in his denunciations of Republican Senator-elect Scott Brown of Massachusetts. The criticism was all the more remarkable, given that Stewart and Olbermann usually take the same side on most issues, especially when it comes to Fox News and the Republicans.
Olbermann's overheated rhetoric also drew a sharp response from Joe Scarborough, MSNBC's house conservative, who called his fellow host's attack on Brown "reckless" and "sad." The exchange (and a few earlier, similar incidents) inspired network president Phil Griffin to issue a stern memo admonishing his charges: "We do not publicly criticize our colleagues. This kind of behavior is unprofessional and will not be tolerated."
Griffin, not surprisingly, says he doesn't believe Olbermann's recent hiccups are part of any larger trend. "Keith has been our tentpole," he says. "I watch the show every night. It's a great show. It's as smart and clever and fun as any out there, and I'm pleased with where we are."
He attributes Olbermann's January ratings slip to a news cycle in which international news, rather than domestic politics, was the No. 1 story. "On big, breaking international news, CNN tends to do better than us. They did a great job in Haiti, and I tip my hat to them," he says. "We're the place for politics, and there are times when politics does great, and there are times when it doesn't." With primaries in the midterm elections already looming, he says, "I think we'll get our momentum back."
As for the flank attack by Stewart, Griffin points out that Olbermann took the comedian's criticism to heart and acknowledged that he had gone overboard in demonizing Brown. "I thought Keith handled that very well," he says. "That's something to be commended, not just piled on."
I know many who read this will fall into two neat rows: A) Why, dumb-dumb, do you even pay attention to this?; and B) We don't care, stop whining, go take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile.
But nearly 30 years ago I began to have the singular experience of being written about and found it instantly valuable for any journalist or writer, because you get to watch in real-time as other journalists and writers make mistakes, flub facts, mishear quotes, or, often, deliberately lie, leave out inconvenient facts, or throw the ones they do use completely out of proportion. Only you know the literal truth (if you're lucky), and thus only you can fully measure how goldarned wrong the other guy is. It would make me shudder to think that I might be trampling over as many sweet tulips of accuracy in my own work.
Today, of course, there is the added dimension of political character assassination, which turns the game of mistakes and/or misdirections into three-dimensional Star Trek chess. And this is one of those stories.
Forgive me for using a script from tonight's show as a base from which to expand my point. But over the last few days I have watched as a pretty shoddily researched "purpose pitch" of a web piece on my show's ratings has been converted by the rampant right wing bias of the media into actual published reports that the program is facing imminent cancellation.
Let me cut to the chase (since this is besides the point, except insomuch as it contradicts the meme): the show isn't about to be cancelled. It isn't slumping. MSNBC isn't worried about it. NBC isn't worried about it. It is making them a ---damned fortune, in fact (and they'd owe me a ---damned fortune if they did cancel it, which they aren't going to).
It's the route by which the thing got seized by the sleaze blogs like Breitbart and NewsCorp and the like that so beautifully, almost diagrammatically, illustrates how Conservatives come to believe the crazy, nonsensical, totally fact-free things they believe, how they transform discernible, provable lies, into their wishful-thinking version of the truth.
Rupert Murdoch's vanity newspaper, the New York Post, put out one of its typical pieces of crap in its gossip section. I always thought there was a Freudian clue in the fact that "Page Six" is almost never actually printed on the literal page six. But I digress: "Has the countdown begun for the end of 'Countdown'?" Murdoch's minion continued: "even Olbermann's former supporters on the left are tuning out." The Post got this, it writes, from blogs at National Public Radio and the Los Angeles Times, and, quite knee-jerkily, it assumes the reader will be convinced that 100 percent of the content therein is southpaw stuff straight from The Kremlin. It is thus using those organizations as if they are evidence of the supposed 'tune out on the left.'
The NPR blog, it turns out, cites as a source the L.A. Times blog, which it authenticates with the seemingly decisive description "hardly a partisan forum." Except the L.A. Times blog post was written by Andrew Malcolm, a former Press Secretary to Laura Bush, a washed-up political operative, and absolutely the last person on the continent to earn the praise "hardly a partisan." I once had the audacity to call out Mr. Malcolm on one of his most egregious lies, and he has since missed no opportunity to report the slightest glimmer of information that might both cast me in a poor light and not get him or the paper sued. The Times, even in its flush days before the Tribune and the implosion of newspapers set in, was edited with remarkable casualness, and as it manages to snooze away a monopoly in the second largest market in the country, it still is.
Anyway, Mr. Malcolm managed to write a column titled "Countdown begins for the end of Keith Olbermann's Countdown?" which he predicated on the relative ratings last month of my program to CNN, as had been reported in yet another blog from a site called Daily Finance. Daily Finance's extremely thin-skinned media writer, always hostile, and snickered at behind his back by his rivals, had himself cherry-picked the January ratings to report that "the 8 p.m. shows on CNN and HLN have narrowed the gap."
So the New York Post lifted from an NPR blog which lifted from Laura Bush's Ex-Press Secretary's Blog which lifted from Daily-Finance's Blog which left out details that makes the whole meme nonsensical.
Namely: my show's ratings actually grew from December to last month, by five percent at 8 O'Clock and six percent at 10. Grew in a month in which CNN did exceptional, almost continuous coverage from Haiti. Grew to 27 percent ahead of CNN and 24 percent ahead of Headline News. Grew from the end of a year in which MSNBC replaced CNN as the number two rated news network among younger viewers in prime-time. Grew in the past week, too, even as the blog TV Newser reported CNN had dropped in that same demographic to fifth place behind Fox, us, Headline News, and CNBC. One night they were behind The Weather Channel.
And yet the right wing believes that Countdown is about to be cancelled, because it so desperately wants it to be cancelled, that the facts, and the ratings, and the profits, become irrelevant. And it is better for them to pretend they are getting their way, than to acknowledge that they are not.
Sources: MSNBC, Countdown, Huffington Post, Daily Finance, Daily Kos
In the last two weeks we've seen Conan O'Brien become himself again.
We saw him stand up to his bosses and win - sort of.
We also saw the guy be funny in ways he wasn't for most of the seven months he hosted "The Tonight Show."
Now that he's free from NBC, he's got to use that same intestinal fortitude - and comic genius - to create his next opportunity.
Armed with a load of cash, and the benefit of time, O'Brien needs to get back to what made him desirable in the first place - edgy comedy targeted at a younger audience.
Not the kind of stuff he did for most of his seven-month run on "Tonight," but what he did for nearly 17 years on NBC's "Late Night."
O'Brien was different at 11:35 p.m. than he was an hour later, and that's a downside to broadcast TV.
"That's the problem you always face," says analyst Bill Carroll of the Katz Media Group. "We want you for who you are and now we make you who we want you to be."
Reaching a mass audience means softening the edges, a bit, which O'Brien did.
"Every comedian dreams of hosting the 'Tonight Show' and, for seven months, I got to," O'Brien said near the end of his last show Friday night. "I did it my way, with people I love, and I do not regret a second."
Viewers, however, may argue that what they saw was somehow different, at least up until the end, when all bets were off - and O'Brien's ratings soared.
And his final show didn't disappoint. It attracted more than 7 million viewers, according to preliminary numbers released by Nielsen, clobbering David Letterman's 2.8 million viewers and Jimmy Kimmel's 1.4 million.
Part of O'Brien's exit talks with NBC centered on who gets the "intellectual property" rights to stuff he and his team created in his run there. One most often mentioned was the Masturbating Bear, a guy in a bear costume who, well, enough said.
The bear was a huge hit with O'Brien's "Late Night" crowd, yet, wasn't used on "Tonight" for the first time until Wednesday, when, frankly, it was too late.
The point is that while he's losing the bear in the $45 million divorce with NBC, O'Brien has a chance to get something bigger back - his sense of humor.
"The networks never really counter-program in late-night," Brad Adgate, a senior vice president at Horizon Media said of O'Brien's options now that he left NBC. "I would offer his 'Late Show' [the next time]. To do something that's exactly what Leno and Letterman are offering, I don't know if that's what viewers want."
Fox officials have said they're interested in O'Brien. And Fox, no doubt, can provide marketing muscle and reach. Anyone doubting that should look at the way Fox promotes "American Idol" to the point that you half-expect Simon Cowell to anchor the news alongside Ernie Anastos.
Going the broadcast route might provide the most money, and audience reach, but that could be a mistake.
O'Brien would be better off going to a cable network where he could push the boundaries of content and further unleash his creative spirit in ways broadcast networks could never provide.
O'Brien appropriately ended his last "Tonight Show" with an all-star rendition of "Freebird," a song that includes the line, "Cause I'm as free as a bird now, and this bird you cannot change."
He had changed on "Tonight." And, in many ways, though he was leaving, in the end it was good to see an old friend emerge in O'Brien - the same one we'd like to see back in the fall.
With its Massachusetts election coverage and distinguished on-the-ground reporting in Haiti, the network has once again become the news leader. Sir Harold Evans on why straight reporting does, after all, beat spin.
The big win of the week isn’t just Scott Brown ousting Martha Coakley in Massachusetts, despite the appeal of two Democratic presidents. Score a double triumph for CNN. On the election and on Haiti, I’d say CNN has come into its own, once again justifying its slogan “The Worldwide Leader in News” and founder Ted Turner’s faith in his innovation.
I come from the antideluvian branch of Journalism (print), but I'd still argue that even in the whizz-bang age of electronic journalism straight reporting beats spin every time. The cable news channels were so busy canceling each other out with talking heads putting either left or right slants on what might happen in the Massachusetts Senate race, they let CNN steal a march with precinct-by-precinct reporting of the actual results. That’s what we were waiting for.
The networks, of course, were nowhere. They stayed with their prime-time specials. I guess NBC judged that it might set pulses racing more by parading the obese in The Biggest Loser (a useful slogan for the channel as a whole?).
The real drama night after night has been in joining with the CNN crews and the admirable search and medical teams in the nightmare rubble of Haiti and in the pestilential streets among the broken bodies.
Whose heart could not miss a beat as we wait tensely with Anderson Cooper and his CNN cameraman in Haiti as the search dogs go into the ruins and the microphones are snaked through the cracks for any sound of human life? On Tuesday, we saw a 70-year-old woman pulled out alive after seven days buried—and when she was, Cooper didn’t hype it. We got another glimpse of the magnitude of the disaster when he told us that she was retrieved but not yet rescued, for there was no field hospital close for the surgery and rehydration to save her life.
Who could not start getting mad as CNN senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen tracks a tent full of infected children bound to die without treatment and discovers from the Harvard doctors there that the only field hospital that can save any of them is one set up by the Israelis, who came from the other side of the world?
And who could forbear to salute CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Sanjay Gupta, who turned down a chance to be U.S. surgeon general to stay in journalism? When a Belgian medical team of a score or more, fearing for their own security, fled their tented field hospital, abandoning the patients, there was Dr. Gupta on the scene to treat an injured child. And there was Dr. Gupta practicing his profession as a neurosurgeon aboard the USS Vinson, safely extracting a lump of concrete from a broken skull.
Other major domestic news networks have doctor-reporters in Haiti. There’s NBC’s Nancy Snyderman, another surgeon who has been treating and reporting; Jennifer Ashton at CBS, who helped with an amputation of a young woman’s arm; and ABC’s Richard Besser, who helped in the safe delivery of a premature baby. But it was CNN and Sanjay Gupta that set the pace—just as CNN did in 1991, when Peter Arnett stayed in Baghdad, after all the other correspondents had gone, and broke the news to the world that bombs were falling and the Gulf War had started. Covering news live as it unfolds transformed television journalism, and Haiti has shown that CNN still leads, not simply by dispatching teams but by giving them airtime.
The doctor-reporters are not being applauded by everyone. According to Paul Farhi in The Washington Post, Stephen J.A. Ward, the director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin, fears that “emotion-based reporting” can become manipulative and obscure the larger picture. “Is this compassion,” he asks, “or is it congratulations?…It gives me an uncomfortable, queasy feeling.”
It is a fair point. We may be ill-served if journalists become part of the story in the sense of taking sides or grandstanding. Truth to tell, I had an uneasy feeling when I watched Anderson Cooper run up a street and bring out a young boy with blood streaming from his head. It looked like a stunt, but it wasn’t. The boy had been hit on the head by looters hurling blocks into the street, and amid the chaos and the misery nobody was giving a damn about the boy.
Cooper’s impulse was that of a human being first, evidence of an empathy that seems to me to be the impulse informing CNN’s distinguished coverage.
Jay Leno turned serious on his show to discuss the late-night chaos at NBC, telling viewers that he'd been doubtful about launching a prime-time show but was prevented by NBC from going to another TV network instead.
Leno, in explaining events from his standpoint, also said Monday that he had told NBC he'd return to the "Tonight" slot only after Conan O'Brien rejected the network's plan to put both men on in late night.
(Msnbc.com is a joint venture between Microsoft and NBC Universal.)
NBC continued negotiations Monday on an exit deal with O'Brien that would clear the way for Leno to reclaim the 11:35 p.m. EST slot occupied by "Tonight," which he hosted for 17 years before turning it over to O'Brien last spring. According to various reports, the deal with O'Brien could cost the network up to $40 million.
NBC is ending its prime-time experiment, "The Jay Leno Show," because of low ratings and affiliate station complaints.
When NBC told him they wanted to end his new show, Leno told viewers Monday, he asked to be released from his contract.
" 'No, you're still a valuable asset to this company,' " he said the network told him. His reply: "How valuable can I be? You fired me twice."
That was a reference to NBC's decision six years ago to ask him to eventually make way for O'Brien to take over "Tonight," which Leno kept atop the ratings until he left.
He and O'Brien have traded increasingly edgy monologue jokes as NBC tries to extricate itself from its scheduling mess, but Leno told viewers his attitude toward his colleague is unchanged.
"Through all of this, Conan O'Brien has been a gentleman. He's a good guy, I have no animosity toward him. This is all business," Leno said. "You know, folks, if you don't get the ratings, they take you off the air."
Neither of them was a ratings winner, he said, either with "The Jay Leno Show" at 10 p.m. EST or O'Brien's "Tonight."
O'Brien did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday night.
History lesson?
Leno gave his audience a history lesson, or what alternately might have seemed a skillfully timed effort to repair any damage to Leno's trademark heart-of-gold image before the deal is made official, as soon as Tuesday.
In his recitation, Leno opened with an NBC executive telling him in 2004 that he would have to surrender "Tonight" to O'Brien to keep the gangly, redheaded host of "Late Night" from going to a competitor.
"I said, 'Well, I've been No. 1 for 12 years.' They said, 'We know that. We don't think you can sustain it,' " Leno recounted the executive telling him. He joked that he asked if he could at least wait until his show fell to No. 2, but agreed to the hand-over plan.
"Don't blame Conan O'Brien. Nice guy, good family guy, great guy. He and I have talked, and not a problem since then," Leno said.
He told NBC he would retire " 'just to avoid what happened the last time,' " he recounted with a chuckle.
Like a repeat
What's happening now at NBC turned out to be reminiscent of the contest between Leno and David Letterman to win "Tonight" after Johnny Carson's retirement and NBC's similar dithering at the time.
With a plan in place for Leno to leave "Tonight" in May 2009, before his NBC contract ended, he would be prevented from starting at another network for at least a year, Leno said. He asked to be freed but NBC refused, instead suggesting that Leno could do well with a prime-time show that the network acknowledged would get "killed" against first-run episodes of shows like CBS' "CSI" but could get traction against summer reruns.
Leno said he agreed, in part, because it would allow him to keep his staff of about 175 people working. But the network's plan for patience was unraveled by affiliate TV stations, who said his low ratings were sinking their local late newscasts, which the show precedes.
O'Brien had his own ratings woes, which Leno said — pointedly — started in summer before they could be blamed on Leno's poor prime-time performance.
"Tonight" with O'Brien is drawing about half of the roughly 5 million viewers Leno attracted as its host, although O'Brien has gotten a significant ratings bump since the network flap started.
When NBC suggested a half-hour show, Leno told the network he wasn't crazy about doing it but said OK. He asked if O'Brien would agree to be moved to midnight and was told yes — it was almost guaranteed.
Leno may have been restrained with his comments, but he couldn't resist a hard-edged joke at NBC's expense.
"CBS is now developing a new sitcom about the troubles here at NBC," he said. "It's called 'Two Men and a Half-Assed Network.' "
O'Brien let loose on his show Monday, too.
"Last night at the Golden Globes, Julia Roberts said that NBC was in the toilet. NBC was upset and toilets were furious," he said.
In a statement Tuesday, O'Brien says that NBC has given him a scant seven months to try to establish himself as host of "Tonight."
NBC wants to move "The Jay Leno Show" out of prime-time and to the 11:35 p.m. EST daily slot, bumping "Tonight" to 12:05 p.m. EST.
O'Brien said he hoped he and NBC could resolve the issue quickly so he could do a show of which he and his crew could be proud — "for a company that values our work" — raising the possibility he might go to another network. But he said he has no such offer.
O'Brien released the statement below on Tuesday afternoon:
People of Earth:
In the last few days, I've been getting a lot of sympathy calls, and I want to start by making it clear that no one should waste a second feeling sorry for me. For 17 years, I've been getting paid to do what I love most and, in a world with real problems, I've been absurdly lucky. That said, I've been suddenly put in a very public predicament and my bosses are demanding an immediate decision.
Six years ago, I signed a contract with NBC to take over "The Tonight Show" in June of 2009. Like a lot of us, I grew up watching Johnny Carson every night and the chance to one day sit in that chair has meant everything to me. I worked long and hard to get that opportunity, passed up far more lucrative offers, and since 2004 I have spent literally hundreds of hours thinking of ways to extend the franchise long into the future. It was my mistaken belief that, like my predecessor, I would have the benefit of some time and, just as important, some degree of ratings support from the prime-time schedule. Building a lasting audience at 11:30 is impossible without both.
But sadly, we were never given that chance. After only seven months, with my "Tonight Show" in its infancy, NBC has decided to react to their terrible difficulties in prime-time by making a change in their long-established late night schedule.
Last Thursday, NBC executives told me they intended to move "The Tonight Show" to 12:05 to accommodate "The Jay Leno Show" at 11:35. For 60 years "The Tonight Show" has aired immediately following the late local news. I sincerely believe that delaying the Tonight Show into the next day to accommodate another comedy program will seriously damage what I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting. "The Tonight Show" at 12:05 simply isn't "The Tonight Show." Also, if I accept this move I will be knocking the "Late Night" show, which I inherited from David Letterman and passed on to Jimmy Fallon, out of its long-held time slot. That would hurt the other NBC franchise that I love, and it would be unfair to Jimmy.
So it has come to this: I cannot express in words how much I enjoy hosting this program and what an enormous personal disappointment it is for me to consider losing it. My staff and I have worked unbelievably hard and we are very proud of our contribution to the legacy of "The Tonight Show." But I cannot participate in what I honestly believe is its destruction. Some people will make the argument that with DVRs and the Internet a time slot doesn't matter. But with "The Tonight Show," I believe nothing could matter more.
There has been speculation about my going to another network but, to set the record straight, I currently have no other offer and honestly have no idea what happens next. My hope is that NBC and I can resolve this quickly so that my staff, crew, and I can do a show we can be proud of, for a company that values our work.
Have a great day and, for the record, I am truly sorry about my hair; it's always been that way.
As TMZ first reported, after the Olympics, Jay Leno will get his 11:30 PM time period back. We're told network execs have told Conan they will let him decide if he wants the midnight to 1:00 AM time slot. If he does, Leno's show will only be a half hour. If Conan walks, Leno will get a full hour, informed sources tell TMZ.
Our sources say Conan has not decided what he wants. We do know he's pissed, because he was given no advanced warning this was coming. Conan's people told NBC they are considering the offer. Translation: Mr. O'Brien -- I have Rupert Murdoch on line one, Stephen McPherson on line two, John Landgraf on line three, Jeff Wachtel on line four ...
We're told if Conan gets another offer, even though NBC could block the move, they will let him go and give Leno the full hour.
Pressed by affiliates and shrinking ratings, NBC has a plan in the works to radically alter its late-night television lineup, restoring Jay Leno to his old spot at 11:35 each weeknight, while pushing the man who replaced him, Conan O’Brien, to a starting time of 12:05 a.m.
NBC executives held extensive discussions with Mr. Leno and Mr. O’Brien on Thursday about the future of the network’s late-night lineup.
And while NBC officially said no final decision on the plan had been made, two senior NBC executives who had talked to the top management about the moves said that under the plan being discussed, Mr. Leno would definitely shift back to 11:35 but in a half-hour format, while Mr. O’Brien would slide back his start time by a half hour and then produce an hourlong show.
“We remain committed to keeping Conan O’Brien on NBC,” the network said in a statement Thursday evening. “He is a valued part of our late-night lineup, as he has been for more than 16 years, and is one of the most respected entertainers on television.”
The third NBC late-night star, Jimmy Fallon, would then begin his show at 1:05 a.m., the executives said. The revised lineup would go into effect after NBC concludes its coverage of the Winter Olympics on Feb. 28. NBC will pre-empt its prime-time and late-night lineup for more than two weeks to cover the Olympics, creating a natural break in which to put the late-night changes into effect.
Pressed by affiliates and shrinking ratings, NBC has a plan in the works to radically alter its late-night television lineup, restoring Jay Leno to his old spot at 11:35 each weeknight, while pushing the man who replaced him, Conan O’Brien, to a starting time of 12:05 a.m.
NBC executives held extensive discussions with Mr. Leno and Mr. O’Brien on Thursday about the future of the network’s late-night lineup.
And while NBC officially said no final decision on the plan had been made, two senior NBC executives who had talked to the top management about the moves said that under the plan being discussed, Mr. Leno would definitely shift back to 11:35 but in a half-hour format, while Mr. O’Brien would slide back his start time by a half hour and then produce an hourlong show.
“We remain committed to keeping Conan O’Brien on NBC,” the network said in a statement Thursday evening. “He is a valued part of our late-night lineup, as he has been for more than 16 years, and is one of the most respected entertainers on television.”
The third NBC late-night star, Jimmy Fallon, would then begin his show at 1:05 a.m., the executives said. The revised lineup would go into effect after NBC concludes its coverage of the Winter Olympics on Feb. 28. NBC will pre-empt its prime-time and late-night lineup for more than two weeks to cover the Olympics, creating a natural break in which to put the late-night changes into effect.
Earlier today TMZ learned Jay's 10:00 PM show will go on hiatus February 1. After the Olympics, Jay will take back his 11:30 PM time slot. What has not been decided -- whether Jay's show will be a half hour, followed by Conan, or whether Jay's show will be an hour and NBC says sayonara to Mr. O'Brien.
Jay and Conan have both been told of the changes. As for Jay, interestingly, he'll get what he always wanted -- his 11:30 PM time slot.
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