"The problem isn't YouTube, it's CNN."

The problem is CNN? Don't take my word for it--take the word of someone who works for a corpporate sibling to CNN.

This Cable Gamer has always been a fan of Ana Marie Cox, ever since her Wonkette days. Indeed, since she went to Time magazine, I have worried that her distinctive voice, both saucy and fearless, was going to be lost.

But I felt better when I saw this piece of hers, on the Republican backlash to a future debate to be sponsored by CNN and YouTube.

It would have been easy for Cox to heap all the blame on the Republicans, for being killjoys in the face of new technology. But instead, Cox dived straight into the heart of the issue, which is anti-Republican bias.

Her piece was fair, but it included this important graf:

The view from the right was less favorable about the impact of this technological shift on politics. White House spokesman Tony Snow told reporters that the President had not even watched, saying Bush was "not big on YouTube debates." Hugh Hewitt, a popular right-wing blogger and radio talk show host, got more specific about what conservatives might object to in a CNN/YouTube debate — he alleged that CNN cherrypicked the submissions for biased questions that a "responsible" journalist wouldn't ask: "the CNN team used the device of the third-party video to inject a question that would have embarrassed any anchor posing it." One staffer for a Republican candidate now leaning toward not participating put it this way: "The problem isn't YouTube, it's CNN."

Those last words are worth noting, and repeating, and re-bolding:

"The problem isn't YouTube, it's CNN."

In other words, Republican presidential hopefuls, and the GOP overall, are starting to wise up--CNN is not their friend. In fact, it's an enemy--a bad enough enemy to make some Republican presidential candidates, including Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, say that they won't take part.

But at the same time, hats off to Cox, because CNN, of course, is owned by Time-Warner, which also owns her employer, Time magazine. So for Cox to put this dig at CNN in print--well, she has made a gutsy and important contribution she has made to the proper understanding of media coverage in the 2008 presidential race. And that understanding includes the fact that two of the three cable news networks, "MSDNC" an CNN, are pretty much openly siding with the Democrats now.

Still, TCG hopes that the Republicans attend the debate, becxause on principle, TCG objects to boycotts, by either side. Why? Because they hurt the free discourse of ideas and thus hurt The Cable Game overall. So I don't want to see the GOP boycott the upcoming CNN/YouTube debate--I want to see CNN play it straight.

Even you, La Anderson Cooper!

And yet it seems as though the boycott mania is spreading, viz. this signficant article from the AP's TV veteran David Bauder, headlined, "Liberals Going After Fox Advertisers." The liberals can't change Fox--because as we know, FNC is fair, balanced, and unafraid.

But liberal boycotts can set loose conservative counter-boycotts, and thus cause an escalating arms race of boycotts, which would be bad for all of us who want a lively Cable Game. So TCG hopes that the GOP plays in the next debate, scheduled for September 17, and that CNN earns back at least a little of the trust that it has lost over the last decade or so.

Money Honey, We Hardly Knew Ye...

Update on the Maria B. vs. Erin B. catfight: On Friday night's "NBC Nightly News," Brian Williams, reporting on the big stock market drop, needed a CNBC hottie to help him with the story.

And the winner was...

ERIN BURNETT!!!

Is it "Money Honey" vs. "Street Sweetie"? Or is it "Maria 2.0" vs. "Bank Skank"?

The star of CNBC's Maria Bartiromo seems to be falling, eclipsed by younger, hotter Erin Burnett. All Cable Gamers grow old, of course--no shame in that. The key question is whether or not they can grow old gracefully. And that's what "The Money Honey" failed to do, as she has humiliated her husband, Jonathan Steinberg, in the course of swanning around with various other married men, including, most notoriously Todd "Taj Mahal" Thomson.

In other words, there's a difference between a TV personality who ages in "elder statesperson" status--like, say, Bernard Shaw or Lou Dobbs--and a TV personality who comes across as cheap and over-used. Like, say, MB, or Chris Matthews, or Julie Chen. Sorry, Maria, just as anybody watching Julie Chen thinks of Les Moonves, a anybody watching you now thinks of you on that long jet ride to China with Todd.

Here's a Page Six item on the cable catfighting, worth relaying in full:

CNBC might not be big enough for both the Money Honey, Maria Bartiromo, and the Street Sweetie, Erin Burnett.

Insiders say Bartiromo is in an uproar over her ravishing rival Burnett, who's begun to upstage her at the business news channel.

An inside source tells Page Six the Money Honey has been fuming that curvy Burnett, in addition to her duties as anchor of "Street Signs" and co-anchor of "Squawk on the Street," is getting substantial airtime on the "Today" show, which gives her a much bigger audience. "Maria is like, hey, why isn't it me on the 'Today' show? She's very jealous of all the attention Erin is getting," our source said.

Burnett's star is certainly skyrocketing. Broadcast & Cable magazine called the petite, blue-eyed brunette CNBC's "secret weapon" in its upcoming battle with the soon-to-launch Fox Business Channel, which is owned by News Corp., The Post's parent. Adding insult to injury, the trade journal quoted CNBC senior VP Jonathan Wald as gushing about Burnett, "She's a natural. She's both energetic and solicitous, but she never appears fawning."

Bartiromo is also said to be riled at a July 15 Post profile of Burnett which crowed that in less than two years she has blossomed from a relative unknown into Wall Street's sizzling media darling. Earlier this year, Burnett handily won a poll of the hottest financial news anchors on Wall Street gossip blog Dealbreaker.com. She got 37 percent of the votes while rival CNBC anchor Becky Quick came in second with 22 percent. Bartiromo only got 13 percent.

Some of Burnett's fans have even labeled her "Maria 2.0," while Bartiromo has acquired another nickname, "The Bank Skank."

Not only is Burnett nine years younger than Bartiromo, she also comes with less baggage. Last year, Bartiromo got caught up in an ethics scandal for globetrotting on Citigroup's private jet with its then-wealth-management chief Todd Thomson, who later got the ax.

CNBC rep Kevin Goldman denied any rift between the women, noting that Bartiromo has appeared on "Today" twice this week as well as once on the "NBC Nightly News." He said, "Maria is a major television star." And Burnett? "We like Erin, too . . . There's no issue." Meanwhile, Bartiromo will be feted as the cover girl of Hamptons magazine Monday night at the Friars Club.

Keith Olbermann Can Relax. Is He Finally Getting Some Relief? Or Did He Finally Write A Check?

Here's an item from today's "Page Six":

KEITH Olbermann's one-night-stand nightmare is over. For the past year, the MSNBC blabbermouth has been tormented by the blog of a comely Cuban lass who claimed he courted her, bedded her, then told her to get lost. She even once complained about how unsatisfying their sex was. But the bitter babe, who calls herself Karma Bites, just posted a final entry saying she's letting bygones be bygones. "[I've] closed it down for good . . . It will not make headlines and it won't contain posts about certain newscasters." Olbermann did not return our calls.

TCG wonders what the full story is here. Did Karma Bites really get tired of posting on Olbermann? Or did she get paid off somehow?

Hey, Cable Gamers! Any good dish?

Marvin Kitman on La Anderson Cooper--Look Out Wolf Blitzer!

Here's a bunch more of Marvin Kitman's cutting take on the CNN/YouTube debate, starring the reigning diva of The Cable Game, Anderson Cooper--or, as I like to think of His Preeningness, La Anderson Cooper:

Cooper's main job is as the host of Anderson Cooper 360. He was hired in the waning days of the Walter Isaacson- Jamie Kellner administration's attempt to glitz up the news. Cooper was the major plank in the effort to youthanize the news at CNN, which was perceived as the old fart news network.

Coop was 27 with "the ardent look of a Gap model," as one reporter said of his appearance on the scene in 2003, ignoring the fact that he was undoubtedly wearing Gloria Vanderbilt-designed outfits. He was the glamorous son of two celebrities (Gloria Vanderbilt and Wyatt* Cooper), somebody who could appeal to a new generation of news viewers. CNN managers forgot that 18-34s traditionally did not watch news, as his show's early poor ratings proved.

Ouch! But it gets worse:

Cooper had immediate impact. One target audience at the 2003 homecoming of recent graduates at Lock Haven University voted Anderson Cooper the best looking and dumbest newsman of the year.

And Kitman goes on to predict that Wolf Blitzer will be chased out of CNN by Jon "our gimmick is news" Klein.

*Editor's note: Kitman mistakenly wrote "Gary" here--but the famous actor, who died in 1961, was not the father of Anderson, who was born in 1967.

CNN: The Most MIStrusted Name in News

It's taken TCG awhile to make up her mind about Monday night's YouTube debate. But she does know what the American people thought about the debate, at least as they were watching--or not. As we shall see, the Nielsen Verdict was a big thumbs down, despite all the YouTube hoo-haw.

But first, The Cable Gamer was amused by Cal Thomas' syndicated column in which he jibed, "This was not a real debate. This was a boring version of 'American Idol,' or worse, a political rip-off of 'The Price is Right.' (How much do you think each candidate is worth? Come on down!)"

And TCG also got a kick out of Marvin Kitman's scathing commentary in, of all places, the left-leaning Huffington Post. Kitman, the esteemed former TV critic for Newsday, let it rip:

While all eyes were on that pathetic non-debate on CNN Monday night, and all ears were listening to the network's smarmy self-congratulations for staging the You Tube non-debate the rest of the week, another more important debate is going on in the smoke-filled rooms at CNN headquarters in Atlanta. I'm talking about Blitzer vs. Cooper. Who should be the moderator-general for the remainder of Campaign 2008?

TCG will return to the issue of La Anderson vs. The Wolfman, and who will smack down (or bitch slap) whom, but for now, I have been mulling over the ratings.

Specifically, TCG wishes to parse this assertion, from CNN's own press release:

"CNN continues the trend of record-breaking debates with Monday night's CNN/YouTube Debate posting the highest P18-34 delivery in cable news history."

This, however, is not a true statement from "the most trusted name in news." CNN did not make cable news history. In fact, the debate was actually rated 9th in 18-34 for cable news. For the record, Fox News had the absolute highest rated debates, ever, back in 2004. So, CNN's claim isn't correct, and its spin is well, false. Other than that, I suppose, it's OK.

Indeed, CNN is down in ratings (P2 25-54 and 18-49) from their last debate, which took place just last month, on June 3rd. And that was also a Democratic debate, too, so it's an apples-to-apples comparison.

From 7-9 pm, CNN had 2,552,000 viewers in P2+, down six percent from that 6/3 Dem debate. In the 25-54 demo, CNN had 831,000 in 25-54 (down 21 percent). In the 18-49 demo, CNN got 663,000 (also down 21 percent).

In other words, CNN 25-54 and 18-49 demos are significantly down compared to their last Dem debate--despite all the YouTube hype and promotion.

Bill O'Reilly Shows Some Class...

...more class than Paula Zahn deserves, frankly.

This is from his closer on Wednesday night:

"Time now for the most "ridiculous item of the day." One of our competitors -- CNN's Paula Zahn is leaving that network and I'd just like to say that Ms. Zahn did a nice job with her program. It was very professional. CNN, in stark contrast to the dishonesty at NBC News, is generally a classy outfit and we enjoy the competition because it is honest. I hope good things happen to Paula Zahn. If they don't, it would be ridiculous."

That's O'Reilly for you: always compelling and interesting, even when I don't agree with him!

Matt Groening, Fake Hero

The Cable Game loves "The Simpsons," and can't wait for the movie to open tomorrow. But TCG is less impressed by millionaires who get rich thanks to corporations and then pretend to be anti-corporate subversives. One such pseudo-hero is Matt Groening, who pretends to be brave speaker-of-truth-to-power while, in fact, he just weasels around.

A case in point is Groening's claim, "We love biting the hand that feeds us," which he said on Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" last week. "We love attacking Fox," he said, as the audience cheered.

Well, Marisa Guthrie of Broadcasting & Cable went to the
source: Fox itself.

“It's urban legend,” says a Fox News spokesperson. “While Matt likes to tell that story, it simply never happened. We thought the parody of FNC was funny.”

And TCG can confirm this, from her own sources. Groening is a great creator of fiction, and a funny guy, too.

A Dead Racoon's Last Bounce--So Long Paula Zahn. We Know That You Won't Miss Us.

To this Cable Gamer, Paula Zahn always epitomized what was wrong with TV news--the old model of news, in which liberals could pontificate from the back of limousines.

She was richer, better looking, and thinner than the rest of us--but that's OK, because it's understood that performers have to suffer for their art. If you wish to present yourself to the world, you have to uphold an aesthetic ideal, willing to sacrifice for grace and graciousness. That's the story of anyone, especially any female, who wants to be in the public eye--the camera makes you look fatter anyway, so you have to be ruthless on yourself, diet-wise. But the point of graciousness is not to let everyone else know that you are better than them for having suffered. The point is to be graceful and easygoing about it, to wear your superiority with the understated poise of, say, Queen Elizabeth.

But not Paula. She was better, and she wanted everyone to know it--that was why she could never get ratings than a "dead racoon," as Roger Ailes said about her when he finally got rid of her. Indeed, watching Paula over the years that she was at CBS, then Fox, then CNN, I always had the feeling that she knew that we knew she was of a higher order of being, and that she expected us to bow down to her. So our fandom was't a gift that we could bestow on her, it was tribute that she expected from us. Well, it don't work that way, lady, not in a world of cable choice. So TCG was pleased when CBS let her loose, surprised that Fox picked her up, briefly, and not at all surprised that she has been failing ever since 2001 at CNN. I can still remember that she wore a lime-green outfit as she covered 9-11 for CNN. If she had been at Fox, they would have put her, right away, in dignified and respectful black.

The real problem with Paula was tha she icier and smugger and more obviously liberal than the rest of us. I always got the feeling that she was condescending to be with her audience. Yes, she would be on TV, but only for the purpose of instructing us out of our prole ways--or at least reminding us that she didn't share those prole ways. So when I read, in David Bauder's wrapup for the AP, that she had deliberately moved left in recent months, I wasn't surprised--it made perfect sense, as PZ seeks to emancipate herself, once and for all, from red staters. Here's the way Bauder put it:

She and veteran executive producer Victor Neufeld had found a niche in recent months reporting extensively on issues of race relations, and Zahn said she was proud of that work.

The above passage tells us everything I need to know about her exit strategy from CNN. Zahn knew that she was on her way out--it's been in the rumor mill for a year now--and so she and Neufeld must've figured to themselves "Why not go out with our noblesse oblige heads held high? That way, once again, we can look down on fat-armed Americans? Thus we can pick up the John Edwards guilty-white liberal constituency, and so tell ourselves, when we finally get cancelled, that we were just too far ahead of the prolish, trollish American people?" That was a great plan for being a heroine in Manhattan, the Hamptons, and Martha's Vineard--which, of course, is all that Paula ever cared about. So CNN cut her loose, but don't be surprised if she soon has a gig with PBS and WNYC--or maybe the Pew Center for Media Liberalism or the Harvard Academy for Instructing us Dopes on Being Green.

Yet the decisive,in-your-face reminder that she was different--and held herself to be different--came during the controversy over Pale Male ,, the wonderful red-tailed hawk that roosted in Paula's building on (where else?) Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park. Here's Paula, this big liberal, and her husband, Richard Cohen, trying to destroy this wonderful bird,, which had the audacity to try and live in the same city as her. In other words, she was a total hypocrite when it came to putting her liberal ideals in practice. (And her marriage to Cohen didn't last, either--I guess he, too, failed to live up to her high standards.)

So now PZ is free--free to perfect herself all the more, to become the rich social x-ray that she always was, without having to lower herself to our level. So we, the rabble, can eat cake, while she sips on celery soup.

She wins by being finally rid of us, and we win by finally being rid of her.

Bye bye NBC-U? And you know what that means, MSNBC and CNBC.

The New York Times' Nelson Schwartz is too good a reporter to overplay his news, but nonetheless, Schwartz dropped a major bombshell in his big piece on the front page of the Sunday Times business section. And likely to get hit by the shrapnel from that media-explosion are NBC-U and its Cable Gaming sub-unit, CNBC, and the even subbier MSNBC.

Under the headline, "Is G.E. Too Big for Its Own Good?" Schwartz highlighted a recent report from Citigroup analyst Jeffrey T. Sprague, which called for a breakup of GE, the legendary conglomerate founded by Thomas Edison and led for two decades by Jack Welch. GE is a big enchilada, that's for sure--it's got a stock market value north of $420 billion. And yet let the stock is down 30 percent since Jeff Immelt took over the company, from Welch, back in 2001. (See chart above, which shows how GE has underperformed the Dow Jones Industrial Average in the last five years--GE is in blue, the Dow is in red.)

But here, let Schwartz tell it like it is:

So if the heat is on, why not break up the company? Or at least sell off noncore units like NBC Universal or the consumer finance unit, GE Money, which would not only raise billions but also make this colossus a heck of a lot easier for one man to manage? After all, Mr. Sprague says, “when you visualize G.E., you’re thinking about the meat and potatoes: power, aircraft engines, energy. You might get comfortable with GE Money, but hardly anyone is buying the stock because of GE Money.”

And the same holds true, of course, for NBC-U--nobody buys GE stock because they think that Jeff Zucker is going to make them money. The sad truth is that GE's purchase of NBC, and then the acquisition of Universal, were always vanity efforts, aimed at giving Welch crony Bob Wright a glamorous post from which to operate.

That is, the entertainment purchases never made sense for GE, for the most basic of reasons--as Sprague says, GE is an industrial company, not an entertainment company. There's no shortage of Bob Wright-type engineers who want to go to the Oscar party, but there is a shortage of Wright-type engineers who know how to profitably run an entertainment biz. But that doesn't stop them, right Bob? They are happy to have fun, at the expense of their shareholders. Right Bob?

Yet for as long as Welch was CEO of GE, shareholders barely noticed that the media properties were dogs--cuz GE stock rose an astonishing 4000 percent during Welch's two decades. But as noted, GE's stock is down by a third under Immelt. So now the knives are out, for Immelt, and for his over-extended empire.

Nturally Sprague and other Wall Street analysts--not to mention all those unsentimental hedge funders and hard-nosed private-equity boys--are closely examining non-core businesses. That's what happens in corporate restructuring: You figure out what has to say, and what should go. So now GE is under the hot lights, just as were other underperformers, such as Daimler-Chrysler and Cadbury-Schweppesm both of which sold off big assets.

And so, as Schwartz puts it, in the course of a long and superbly reported piece, "G.E. must continue to cut costs at struggling divisions like NBC."

But of course, they've already cut NBC back in prime time--and seen ratings tumble. Nice work, Jeff Z! So what to do with CNBC, which is profitable but underperforming--especially in prime time? (Remember John McEnroe's show? And hey, does Michael Eisner still have a CNBC program? How 'bout Donny Deutsch? Cable Gamers know that it's never a good idea to give no-talents their own show, even if they are buds.

And what to do with MSNBC, which has always been a loser, for 11 years now? Will GE shareholders continue to lose money so that the Democratic National Committee can have its own pro bono cable network?

Here's a Cable Game prediction: Immelt won't be able to protect any of those nets for much longer. He'll have to sell them off, to keep Wall Street happy. Yes, like Wright before him, Immelt will hate to lose the star-bleeping opportunities that come with being an entertainment mogul, but he'll value his job more.

So NBC-U, CNBC, and "MSDNC" will all be on the auction block soon enough. And TCG wouldn't be surprised to see Rupert Murdoch snap up CNBC--perhaps into some sort of merger with the forthcoming Fox Business News--even as someone puts MSNBC out of its misery.

And oh, by the way: Time-Warner, owner of CNN, might well be next to face de-conglomeration.

"The major flaw looming over the two-hour telecast was that it wasn't a very good telecast."

The Cable Gamer isn't always a fan of The Washington Post's Tom Shales, but when he's hot, he's hott. And his review of the CNN/YouTube debate is a smoker. The whole piece is well worth a read, but here's the good stuff:

Not every candidate was asked every question, so the format was inherently inequitable. At one point Cooper said, "Our next question is for Senator [Joe] Biden," immediately followed by a video in which a man began, "Hello. This question is for all of the candidates."

Cooper was obsessed with the candidates' keeping answers brief, frequently interrupting them or cutting them off. This impulse, supposedly designed to curb long-windedness, leads to "debates" that are just collections of quotes and sound bites, like political commercials, and is precisely the kind of thing that has helped trivialize issues and discourage voter interest.

"CNN's Hype Machine Goes Overboard"

That's not The Cable Gamer saying that--that's the headline from Matthew Felling's post at CBS News' "Public Eye" blog.

I report, you decide, about Felling's lede:

So have you heard there’s going to be a Democratic debate tonight? And one with normal people like you and me posing questions via streaming video? You haven’t? Just turn on CNN. Chances are you’ll find out before the next commercial break.

And he continues, citing the words of Jon Friedman of MarketWatch, as Friedman made the case that Wolf Blitzer was fishing for sensational soundbytes and trying to grab a few extra eyeballs, at the expense of a probing interview:

Lately, CNN has stretched the definition of news to a nearly incomprehensible level. What has genuine news value and what is a thinly veiled ratings grab? CNN may have plenty of company here, but I expect a lot from this network.

That was Friedman. Now here's more from Felling:

I wasn’t quite with Friedman back then, figuring that a conversation about health care was about as good as you’re gonna get in the dog days of summer. But today’s advance coverage of CNN’s YouTube debate hasn’t just jumped the shark – it passed that marker an hour ago – it’s gone all-out “Buckwheat is Shot”

A bit of background, there was a skit on “Saturday Night Live” back in the 1980s satirizing the media’s overkill following the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan. In the skit, they had Eddie Murphy’s Buckwheat get shot, with the point of the skit being that the media was so enthralled by the footage, that they’d look for any attempt to replay it – going so far as to ask the doctor operating on Buckwheat “Excuse me, Doctor. Have you seen the video of Buckwheat getting shot?”

Thus far today on CNN and its affiliate Headline News (as I write this at 10:34am, EDT) there have been 44 reports about the YouTube/CNN debate, according to TVEyes.com. (>DING< there’s another one with Tony “It’s groundbreaking!” Harris interviewing someone who posed a question – we’re up to 45 now.) They’ve got a countdown clock in the corner and everything.

As noted, I transcribe, you decide.

MSNBC to Smack Down CNN for Second Place?

The New York Daily News' juicy gossip columnist, Ben Widdicombe, updates Cable Gamers on MSNBC's effort to gain second place--or at least spin its way into the perception of second-placedom through aggressive flackery.

Bottom line: It looks like good news for CNN's Lou Dobbs; he is likely to move to prime time with Campbell Brown, formerly of NBC.

And it looks like bad news for Paula Zahn, who seems destined to get the axe.

But as TV Newser observes of all this Cable Game to-ing and fro-ing, "That said, Fox News still beats them both, no matter how you define it." That site also usefully updates us on NBC's plan to shuffle folks from headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Center in Manhattan to the boonies of Secaucus, NJ. What's that joke? Something about deckchairs?

An interesting updating to get our week going. And oh, did I mention that Ben Widdicombe is juicy?

Yea for Paul Francis Baier!

TCG just became aware of a hot new gossip site,
"Yeas and Nays," by Jeff Dufour and Patrick Gavin, which appears in The Washington Examiner.

It's full of juicy and nasty stuff, but here's one that's sweet and happy, about Bret Baier, ace White House correspondent for FNC:

Congratulations to FOX News Chief White House Correspondent Bret Baier and his wife, Amy, who recently welcomed a new baby into their lives. Paul Francis Baier was born at 12:34 p.m. June 29 at 6 pounds, 12 ounces.

Paul underwent extensive heart surgery last week at Children’s National Medical Center, but due to Dr. Richard Jonas and the care Paul received at Children’s, he is on the road to recovery, and the Baier family said they are excited to bring him home on Friday.

It’s the first child for the Baiers.

Hey Maria Bartiromo! Todd Thomson Might Need You Again--And You Might Need Him

Remember Todd Thompson? He's the former Citigroup exec who had the closerthanthis relationship with CNBC's Maria Bartiromo. Interestingly enough, Thomson got pushed out, while Bartiromo has moved on to her next "get."

TheStreet.com caught up with the T-man. It seems that Todd has been on safari in Africa with "his family"--who must be tolerant, indeed. And he has formed a company, called Headwaters Capital. I assume that that's an inside joke, between Todd and his old flame, in terms of Ms. Bartiromo's legendary capability to give a licking and keep on ticking. You go, Maria--The Cable Game needs you!

Thanks to TCG reader A!

MSM Bias Against the Bull: Why America Needs the Fox Business Channel

Today the Dow Jones Industrial Average briefly went above 14,000, to close today at 13,971. That means that the DJIA has almost doubled since it hit a low of 7700 in 2002, amidst post-9/11 uncertainty.

Which is to say, the bulls are back, even if few are paying attention, as we shall see.

Indeed, the stock market has picked up 1000 points in just the past three months. For purposes of comparison, it took almost 90 years--from the first publication of the Dow index, in 1884, through 1972--for the Dow to gain its first 1000 points, and now it gained that many points in just a quarter of a year. And all this in the middle of wars, terror threats, and super-high oil prices--now that's hott!

So where and how did this news play on the MSM? "CBS Evening News," with Katie Couric, buried it, giving it just a passing mention. "NBC Nightly News" led with the story, but Brian Williams emphasized the undercutting questions of "who's benefiting," and "who's being left behind?" TCG didn't see "ABC World News," but as of 10:30 PM ET on Tuesday, the DJIA story ranked 12th on the ABC website; the buoyant news was weighed down with this heavy-snarky headline: "Market Booms, But Do You Own Any Duds?"

The truth of the matter, of course, is that when the stock market goes up, everybody wins--from stock-option-holders to pension-fund beneficiaries to all of us who simply benefit from job- and wealth-creating economic dynamism. So that should've been the news, that America is richer than ever. But it wasn't--not tonight, George. Not ever for you, George W. Bush.

This Cable Gamer is old enough to remember when things were different--when the MSM were excited about the bull run. That was back in the 90s, during the Bill Clinton years, of course, when the MSM were happy to give credit to a Democratic president. Back then, the papers were full of articles about how great Clinton was, and how great his treasury secretaries were--especially Bob Rubin.

But now, noting that the market has gone up is the same as giving the incumbent Republican President, George W. Bush, credit for the economic boom. Well, TCG thinks that 43 does deserve a lot of credit. But the MSM won't give him any--the good news about the economy has simply disappeared.

I'm not surprised, of course--nor will a lot of Americans, who are now fully aware of the distorting tricks that the MSM play in order to cast credit on their favorites and cast discredit on enemies. But it matters to the rest of us, because a lot of us know that one of the reasons that the economy has done so well is because the Republicans have cut taxes. I realize that tax cuts, like any economic policy, are controversial, but let's have the debate. But to have a debate, you have to show both sides. And that the MSM simply won't allow.

The MSM joke has been on us, at the expense of we the people, for these past decades. But now an outraged citizenry is wide awake; we will get the last laugh. We watch Fox News as much as we can, and we will be watching Fox Business News when it preems on October 15.

Fox Business News Beefs Up

FBN continues to take shape. The Cable Gamer will predict that FBN has the same seismic shift on business news that FNC had on regular news.

Here's the latest hire:

John McCann has been named Vice President, Advertising Sales for FOX Business Network (FBN), announced Paul Rittenberg, Senior Vice President of Advertising Sales for FOX News. In his new role, McCann will oversee all advertising sales efforts for FBN, which is set to debut on October 15th, while also continuing to manage sales endeavors in Washington for FOX News.

In making the announcement Rittenberg said, “McCann has played a key role in helping the network achieve growth and profitability. He is an asset to FOX News Channel and I am confident that he will continue to excel in his new position at the FOX Business Network.”

McCann joined FOX News in 2001 as an Account Manager, where he was instrumental in helping to increase advertising sales at the network. Prior to FOX, he served as a Senior Account Executive at CNBC. He also previously held the position of New York sales manager at MMT, where he oversaw the national sales efforts for 17 MMT stations.

Meet Alexis Glick

The Cable Gamer will predict that Alexis Glick will emerge as one of the bright stars of cable news in the next year.

Actually, it's not such a daring prediction--just have a look, above. And also check out this "Hot List 2007" profile in the authoritative TV Week.

Fox Business News is going to change the Cable Game--and that's not even counting The Wall Street Journal acquisition. I am curious as to what CNBC and Bloomberg will do--what can they do?

Fox News Then, Fox Business News Now--What a Difference 11 Years Makes!

fo

Ace TV scribe recalls the days then, back in 1996 when Ted Turner (remember him?) said that CNN would squash Fox, "like a bug"--and and the times now:

What a difference 11 years makes. When Fox News Channel launched Oct. 7, 1996, New Yorkers couldn’t see it because Time Warner Cable and Fox News were locked in ferocious talks about carriage of the channel. It took an 11-month battle royale that included a threat by then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani to air Fox News commercial-free on a city-run access channel to break the logjam. Last week, when Fox announced that the long-awaited Fox Business Network will launch Oct. 15, it noted prominently that it will be available on expanded basic cable in the Big Apple, financial capital of the world. An industry insider told Blink not only does Time Warner Cable NYC wants Fox Business Network, it wants the new network so badly it will convert the FBN signal from digital to the quaint and all-but-obsolete analog format in order to lodge it on the expanded platform. Fox News made carriage of FBN a must as it negotiated new distribution deals—which already add up to 30 million subscribers for FBN—with cable operators, who also are anteing up subscriber fees that will rise by as much as a third over the course of the new contracts. But as FBN begins its assault on CNBC and Bloomberg Television for eyeballs on Wall Street and Main Street, it is critical that the so-called "influentials" in the advertising and financial worlds be able to see the channel. A TWCNYC spokeswoman said she was unable to confirm the analog conversion plans.

GUPTA-GATE! How Vinod Gupta Became a "Friend" of Bill, Hillary, and the Democrats -- And Pollster to CNN!

Should CNN's presidential pollster be the same guy who is a notorious FOB, FOH, and FOBDD? That is, Friend of Bill Clinton, Friend of Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Friend of Big Dog Democrats (such as Terry McAuliffe)? The polling company in question is Opinion Research, which, thanks to plucky bloggers, is finally being revealed as the scandalous conflict of interest that it is. To put it bluntly, no news network should have such a tight financial relationship with a company controlled by someone so closely connected to one party.

Opinion Research is owned by Vinod Gupta, pictured above, with one of Big Friends, the Indian-American businessman from Omaha, Neb. Gupta has bought his way into friendship with Bill and Hillary Clinton. Oh, did I say that? Well, it's true.

As Mike McIntire of The New York Times details, Gupta spent, literally, many millions of dollars wooing the Clintons and other top Democrats, plying them with campaign donations, "consulting" contracts, etc. Indeed, he just hired, to take the latest example, one of Nancy Pelosi's sons. No doubt he was the most qualified person, anywhere, for the job!

The Times makes a passing, but telling, reference to Gupta's wheeling in politics and dealing in media: "Because of those close links with Democrats, he stirred conflict-of-interest questions by buying a company that does presidential polling for CNN."

If the media were doing their job right, the Clinton's overall relationship with the Indian business community would be a huge story--maybe even a scandal-story, with millions of dollars coming to Dems from India, and in return, millions of American jobs going to India.

As it is only a few have taken note, including, interestingly, A the Barack Obama campaign, which jibed at Sen. Clinton as "D-Punjab"--recalling a joke that she herself had made at an Indian-American fundraiser. But although Obama was raising legitimate points about outsourcing as an issue, he was quickly shouted down by the MSM. Now, Obama seems content, to run for an honorable second-place showing in the '08 primaries, in hopes of being picked, maybe, as Hillary's vice president.

And so in the meantime, only a few other observers, such as Jim Pinkerton of Newsday,and "Fox News Watch," have called this Clintons-Indian relationship into question.

Maybe the media--MSM plus the blogosphere--will eventually get to the bottom of the Clintons' relationship with Gupta and India. Surely it's as least as interesting a topic as, say, Jack Abramoff.

But in the meantime, we Cable Gamers should keep asking why CNN has made itself into a willing sidebar to Gupta-gate.

Hey Jerry Levin! What do you do after you "vaporize" $200 billion?

That's the question posed by Seth Stevenson in his profile of ex-AOL Time-Warner (parent company of CNN) CEO Jerry Levin in New York magazine.

Under the headline, "The Believer," the profile teases:

Former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin dropped out of sight after the disastrous merger with AOL. Now he’s back, selling brain painting, equine therapy, and soul communion with the dead.

And so the divorced-and-remarried Levin--having "vaporized," as Stevenson puts it, $200 billion in shareholder value--is now the co-proprietor of the Moonview Sanctuary, a spa in (where else?)Santa Monica, CA. The piece describes--maybe I am being harsh here--how the much-younger Laurie Perlman lured Jerry away from his then-wife, leading one Levin associate to muse:

"The merger drove him to reinvent himself because it was such a public failure,” says a former colleague, who knew and worked with Levin for many years. “After that, he left his job, his industry, his city, and his marriage.”

Of course, no profile of Levin can be complete without mentioning the tragic death of his son, an idealistic young man who was brutally murdered by thugs in 1997. Without a doubt, that event affected Levin deeply, and we should all offer our condolences and perhaps pray, if we wish, for the soul of Jonathan Levin, who seems to have been an exemplary young man.

But now, back to Jerry Levin, who obviously has made some enemies in the business world. Here's more from Stevenson's piece:

“No one has ever left a company more disliked than he was,” Fuchs tells me. “He didn’t have one friend in the company. Or one friend outside the company. Nor has anyone left such a powerful company in worse shape. He killed everyone in the way of keeping or getting his job. We called him Caligula.”

Ouch! I might need some brain-painting if someone called me that, even though I don't have the $175,000 a year one needs to be a client at Moonview.

Stevenson, obviously an emerging star at New York, shows a great ability to get inside the head of the reader, to articulate what the reader might be thinking:

I’ve sensed only genuine love and devotion between them, but it’s clear to me that their relationship could be construed by some as distasteful, or perhaps even sinister. Cast in the coldest, most cynical terms: Laurie sought a meeting with a wealthy man and, after laying a bit of groundwork, told him she’d communicated with his tragically murdered son. The wealthy man believed—no doubt wanted to believe—in her supernatural tale, and within months, he became both her lover and her business partner.

Then he gives the two lovebirds, Jerry and Laurie, a chance to refute the allegation--very fair & balanced of him. But next comes this--I report, you decide:

Despite Jerry’s protestations about how “unique” these circumstances were, I was struck by something odd that happened in the midst of one of my interviews with Laurie. She suddenly interrupted the conversation. “Is there a connection that you have with Ian Schrager?” she asked. I told her I’d spoken to the hotelier once for a story. Oh, and I’ve stayed in his hotels on occasion. “So you have spoken to him, and he’s someone you’ve connected with,” she nodded, latching onto an inflated notion of our relationship. “I think you’re a link to help me get to him. I’ve been trying to get in touch with Ian because if Moonview expands, I felt like we could do something as a partnership.”

A few weeks later, I brought this exchange up with Laurie. She told me that Ian Schrager’s brother was a friend of hers in high school and that Schrager’s dead mother has “come to” her over the years. “Blanche came while you and I were talking,” Laurie explained to me. “I felt my energy pulled, and I knew I was having a simultaneous conversation with the other side. So I felt compelled to ask you about Ian. I felt I was meant to bring it up."

Laurie is also writing a book, and attempting to file a patent, regarding “the way a corporation or an endeavor can be founded using ‘the other side’ as your partners. You’re bringing in souls past and present.” As Jerry describes it, “Organizations can consult the guidance of an unseen realm. The metaphor is that it gives off into the ether, and it’s always there, like a television signal. Everything that’s ever been broadcast is somewhere out there.” Laurie says that during the planning stages for Moonview, she personally consulted Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin. She says Moonview as a whole consulted “Christ, Buddha, and doctors who’ve made breakthroughs.”

OK, The Cable Game will just leave it at that, because I need to get back to solid ground. You, fellow Cable Gamer, can decide what to make of Laurie, her technique, her book, her hoped-for patent--and her husband, the man who helped make CNN what it is today.

And if you have $175,000 you don't need, and you get to Moonview, please drop me a line and tell what it's like--I won't get to know what it's like there otherwise!

Howard Kurtz -- Stenographer to the Beltway

Is The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz too close to the Inside-the-Beltway mentality? Has Kurtz come to embrace the value system of Powertown--such that he no longer speaks truth to power, as journalists should?

As The Cable Game observed recently--on July 5, to be exact--Kurtz is a good reporter who has a leetle beetof a bad habit of sucking up to his sources. That is, if, say, Joe Scarborough of "MSDNC" gives Kurtz good access, then Kurtz will give Scarborough good ink. It's a fair trade, in Beltway terms, but any transaction that takes care of the K Street Crowd and the Georgetown Set is likely to leave the rest of us out of the loop--and out of luck.

But here, let Ken Silverstein, who pens the "Washington Babylon" blog for Harper's, tell the story himself:

Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post has faithfully parroted the talking points of the two lobbying firms I embarrassed in this month’s Harper’s, but APCO and Cassidy & Associates have had less luck with other journalists. The story exposed how the firms offered to polish the image of Stalinist Turkmenistan when I approached them, claiming to represent a shady energy firm that allegedly had a stake in that country’s natural gas sector.

The lobby shops attacked my ethics and Kurtz dutifully supported them in the Post and in a commentary last Sunday on CNN’s Reliable Sources, saying during the latter, “When you use lying and cheating to get a story, even a really juicy story, it raises as many questions about the journalist as his target.” Encouraged by Kurtz’s parroting of the lobbyist line, APCO has been sending out a press statement denouncing me to other journalism experts.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Kurtz can not only blast his enemies in his Post column, he can only clobber them on his CNN show, "Reliable Sources," which critiques the media--except, of course, when it's too busy massaging the interests of lobbyists.

So there you have it. A journalist goes undercover to smoke out creepy sleazy behavior among lobbyists--and "media watchdog" Kurtz sides with the lobbyists!

To repeat: the Post/CNN man takes up the cause of the poor picked-on lobbyists, the Gucci Gulch crowd. So much for the public interest, so much for a vigorous free press. Say hello, instead, to the Beltway-ocracy, may it be in power forever, untroubled by snarky investigators, getting in the way of cozy deals with corrupt and even evil foreign governments. You can be darn sure that Kurtz's attack on Silverstein will scare away some would-be muckrackers, although evidently not Silverstein himself. Go Ken!

Kurtz criticizes the undercover technique. That's a hoot. Remember when "60 Minutes" did this all the time? I don't remember Howard Kurtz complaining when it was the Eye Network taking on some corporate sleazoid--or maybe an alleged corporate sleazoid who was innocent, there were plenty of those, too. And just this past week, NBC's ultra-cool, ultra-brave Middle East reporter, Richard Engel, went undercover in Syria to get footage (tastefully handled, I might add) of under-age hookers in Damascus.

But when lobbyists are caught red-handed, looking like, well, lobbyists, Kurtz rushes to their defense.

As the pundit Michael Kinsley has observed, In DC, the real scandal isn't what's illegal--it's what's legal. And yet you'd never know that from ol' Howie,that good buddy to the Beltway, continuing, as he always does, his remarkable streak of journalistic "good gets."

Of course Kurtz gets the big ones. Because those big enchiladas know that Kurtz will faithfully record their words, all the while covering up blemishes, like a loyal and discreet secretary.

Howard Kurtz, meet Rosemarie Woods.

Rudi Bakhtiar out at FNC

OK, so Inside Cable beat me to the story of Rudi Bakhtiar's departure from FNC. Oh well.

The Cable Gamer was never a big fan of hers, either when she was at CNN or when she was at FNC, but she sure had a lot of fans out there, that's for sure. Not that this girl is jealous or anything!

What kind of fans? It seemed to lean heavily toward horny males, who weren't much interested in her journalism. Instead, they were interested in, well, her... her Bakhtiars. These were the sort of horndogs who who posted items, like this, from Free Republic back in 2003, with headlines such as: "Rudi Bakhtiar's See-Through Blouse on Headline News NOW!"

Other fans have told me--not that I would ever notice!--that of all the female anchors out there, she always seemed to be one of the most suggestive. Schwing!

It's a subtle business, of course, and there's nothing wrong with being sexy, and even using It on the air, but it has been interesting to see Bakhtiar building a cult following that way, over the past few years, such as this "shrine" site, here. (If you scroll down a ways, you'll see some excellently lascivious lip curling moves of hers--pretty hot stuff for TV!)

Sorry guys. Rudi may be gone from FNC, but she will surely turn up somewhere else in the cable world. Maybe back to CNN? Nah, their "gimmick" is, uh, hard news these days. MSNBC? Nah, their gimmick is Bush-bashing. Or maybe straight to the Playboy Channel?

New Show at Fox

TCG hears that Fox has a new show tomorrow, "Fox Online," featuring the adorable Jamie Colby, preeming at 2 pm et.

Newsbusters Busts CNN--Again!

Newsbuster Tim Graham totally nails(sorry for the mixed metaphor):

It doesn’t seem to matter how small it is, a left-wing protest can always draw a national network TV camera. On CNN’s Newsroom program on Wednesday morning, the network founded by Ted "Call No One Foreign" Turner presented a northern Virginia controversy over illegal immigrants through a familiar lens -- highlighting a few hundred protesters charging racism in the supposedly outrageous demand that government officials have the right to inquire into the immigration status of potential illegal aliens in police custody.

Liberals vs. Free Speech

In a free society, of course, everyone has the right to watch--or not watch--what they wish. But there's a distinction between one choosing not to watch and seeking to keep others from watching what they want to watch.

And so that's why the organized boycotts being assembled by Fox Attacks.com--a consortium of Moveon.org and The Sierra Club and who knows who else--is worth scrutinizing. Because sometimes there's a fine line between legal political agitation and illegal intimidation.

So The Cable Gamer sure hopes that e pro-First Amendment watchdog group will keep a close eye on FoxAttacks, just to make sure that the lefty pressure group doesn't descend into threats and bullying.

Such threats and bullying, if they were to prove to be an interstate conspiracy, would be a felonious violation, as well as a civil violation. A violation of the famous RICO statute, scourge of organized crime, in fact.

Fox Business Channel

It'a all official from top execs Kevin Magee and Neal Cavuto: Start Date: Monday October 15.

That'll be almost 11 years to the day that the Fox News Channel began--back on Monday, October 7, 2007.

"CNN vs. Sicko," with Kyra Phillips Being a Bitch

The Cable Game doesn't do health care. Sorry, it's one of my many flaws.

But TCG does do feuds! And the ongoing food fight, CNN vs. Michael Moore is proving to be a doozy. Here's Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting's take on the controversy that led Huffington Post hottie Rachel Sklar to call Sanjay Gupta "a dick."

FAIR notes this nasty quote from CNN's Kyra Phillips: "You can tune in to the Situation Room at 4:00 Eastern for a little more unedited Moore interview, if you can stomach it."

To which FAIR aptly adds: "The implication couldn't be clearer: If we make false claims about your work, it's downright rude of you to say something about it."

What does the "D" in Sanjay Gupta's MD stand for? Dick?

Does it compromise my journalistic objectivity to say that Dr. Sanjay Gupta is a dick? Probably, but it was my strong and continuous impression during last night's "discussion" with Michael Moore on Larry King Live regarding Gupta's allegations that Moore "fudged the facts" in his documentary, Sicko.

Rachel Sklar gets right down to it, in the first graf of her piece on Sanjay Gupta vs. Michael Moore, found on The Huffington Post website. Sklar's piece is long and detailed, full of links, but she makes a pretty good case that Gupta was determined to defeat Moore in an argument, and that Larry King was helping his CNN colleague. Loyalty to the team is nice, but loyalty to the viewer is better.

CNN should've played the story straight, letting the viewers decide, without being guided by Dr. Sanjay Paternalist.

"Cable news ratings race heats up/CNN, MSNBC set sights on second-place"

That's the headline atop Michael Learmonth's piece in Variety.

As always with Variety headers, it's just about impossible to beat the trade mag for clarity and conciseness. Here're the key numbers, showing that Fox News is still way out front, not only in total viewers but also in the key younger demographic:

MSNBC averaged 201,000 in the 25-54 demo over the week, just ahead of CNN's 193,000 average viewers. Fox News Channel led all cable news with 307,000 demo viewers.

Joe Scarborough Update & Exculpation?

Reader Allison A. writes The Cable Game with this response to my post of July 5:

"You are wrong to imply that Joe Scarborough killed his employee. It's slanderous and morally wrong. He was working in Washington DC when she died in Florida. He never moved to NYC. He broadcasted Scarborough Country from a studio in Florida."

TCG is happy to stand corrected. I don't want to defame anyone; or at least I don't want to defame anyone who does doesn't deserve defaming.

Allison points to to an October 23, 2005 item in Newsmax.com, an online publication that TCG has great respect for, under the headline, "Joe Scarborough: I Didn't Kill My Intern."

Here's the text:

MSNBC pundit Joe Scarborough is piping mad at Vanity Fair magazine after it implied he killed a female employee while he was a member of Congress.

The VF article in question, written by James Wolcott, appeared in October 2003.

In a letter to the magazine that has been published in the November 2005 edition, Scarborough writes that Wolcott's "libelous charge, pulled from a hate site on the Internet, led readers to believe that a good woman named Lori Klausutis carried on an adulterous sexual affair with a congressman before being killed in a sleazy sex-scandal cover-up.

"The article suggests that this imaginary sex scandal forced me to leave office. I was painted as the Republican Party's answer to Gary Condit, saved from prosecution by a right-wing media machine."

Scarborough said that in fact, Lori worked at an annex office and he met her no more than three times; he was never alone with her; he announced his retirement from Congress several months BEFORE she died.

Scarborough said he was willing to let the "lie" fade away without taking legal action.

But he's decided to "set the record straight" after a March 2005 Vanity Fair profile of Michael Moore included a Web site domain name that Moore purchased, JoeScarboroughKilledHisIntern.com, which he feared would promote the magazine's "original reckless charge."

In a response to Scarborough's letter in the November issue, Wolcott wrote that he regretted "any emotional distress caused to Mr. Scarborough, his family, and the family and friends of the late Lori Klausutis."

As for Michael Moore, we expect no apologies.

However, this item, even if it exculpates Scarborough in Lori Klausutis' actual death, does not answer all questions about any possible relationship between Scarborogh and Klausutis, and the connection between her untimely demise and the demise of Scarborough's Congressional career.

Scarborough is free, of course, to make a full exposition of the case, and what happened, laying out all the facts. After all, he has his own show on MSNBC--plenty of time to devote to the full and complete vindication of his, uh, good name.

If he does, The Cable Gamer will certainly be watching.

Fox News beats CNN

OK, that's not really news; FNC has been beating CNN for more than five years now. But it's still fun to pause over the numbers.

And here's something I just noticed: CNN can’t get up to FNC’s household ratings until dinnertime. Typically, ratings rise during the day, peaking, of course, during prime time. But the audiences at CNN--such as they are--seem to be late risers.

Take Monday’s ratings, for example.

During FNC’s pre-morning show, "FOX & Friends First," at six a.m., FNC got a .6 It took CNN a full 11 hours, at 5 p.m., to match that--with "The Situation Room."

To put it more simply, Fox beats CNN all day. There's the headline, all ciphering about "dayparts" aside.

So is there any good news for CNN? Only this: MSNBC does even worse, rising above .6 only once during the entire day--one little spike to .8. Otherwise, MSNBC was always at .5 or below. It's amazing how much buzz "MSDNC" gets relative to its weak ratings.

So what's the explanation? I suspect that MSNBC is sort of a vanity operation for NBC and parent GE. OK, it doesn't get ratings, but it is a TV network, and it's fun to have those around, as long as you can use other people's money.

What is amazing, however, is that GE shareholders would be so tolerant of an under-performing division. First they humored Bob Wright, now they humor Jeff Zucker and Jeff Immelt. Will it go on forever? Apparently, unless, say, Nelson Peltz gets into The Cable Game.

Things I Learned About Katie Couric, Thanks to Joe Hagan in New York magazine

America's Sweetheart. Katie Couric? No, try Joe Hagan.

The Cable Gamer will admit that she's had a crush on Joe Hagan--on his mind, of course!--ever since he started covering the media for The New York Observer. My heart followed him to The Wall Street Journal for a spell, and now to New Yorkmagazine.

But enough my Joe. Let's talk about why he hot, yet again, for his
sizzling profile of Katie Couric. So let me count the ways:

First, she disses her fans pretty good, all on the record. OK, her ratings are down, to as few as 5.5 million on some nights, but her trashing her audience is not the way to make her ratings go up. She bluntly refers to her fans this way: "People are very unforgiving and resistant to change."

Second, she's a drama queen. Speaking of her "vulnerabilities," she describes herself in the third person singular, as seen by her "Day of the Locust"-like fans: "This person who's been so successful isn't so great, and finally she's been put in her place--that kind of mentality. I think it's fairly primal." In other words, the lizard-brained brute fans out there want to see their pale White Princess ritually sacrificed. That's not how you see yourself, dear TV viewer? As a primal slaughterer of your betters? Well, too bad! Cuz that's how Katie sees you.

Third, she expresses open disappointment in CBS prexy Les Moonves--that's generally a no-no. As she says, "We're in the midst of such a major shift in how we consume information that even a brilliant guy like Les Moonves doesn't have all the answers." That's kinda damning with faint praise. Moonves could have softened the impact of Couric's words by accepting some of the blame, in the sense of "we're all learning here," but Couric's boss isn't so forgiving. He told Hagan that he accepts no blame, zero. Leaving Katie's words, gently trashing him, to simply sit out there, for public inspection, forever.

Fourth, she reveals a dark side, underneath that perky streak. She goes way beyond saying that she has had second thoughts, all the way to saying, "I think it bugs people even more that I'm not a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown, It's probably disappointing to some poeple." Ooh. And yet, keenly aware of her own centrality in her own self-generated script, Couric adds, "Because in the arc of the story, that's what they want to see." In case people don't get the full flavor, she refers to her own "casual evisceration" in the press. Ouch!

Fifth, and speaking of the press, she blames Bob Schieffer for leaking a nasty story about Couric's alleged impending demise to Gail Shister of The Philadelphia Inquirer. And maybe she blames Leslie Stahl, too.

Sixth, she might be getting paid as much as $22 million a year, not just the chump-change-y $15 million that's been earlier reported.

Seventh, she swears, as in obscenities.

Eight, the ring tone on her cell phone is "Don't Cha (Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me)."

Dish and gossip aside--not that there's anything wrong with either!--Katie Couric and the story of "CBS Evening News" is interesting to Cable Gamers, of course, for the same reason that radio is interesting to CGers. And for the same reason that iPods and iPhones and Google are interesting to us here at TCG--because it's all Converging.

Yet broadcast TV seems to be the last to understand that the real heart of the Cable Game is not cable, its choice! The reason we like cable news is that it's on all the time, that it's got lots of variety, that it's backed up by ever-improving websites, and that it's continuing to evolve to meet new needs, such as content specially designated for cell phones. CBS, the most dinosaur-like of the former "Big Three" networks, is belatedly moving in that new-media direction; it's now possible, for example, to watch the entire "CBS Evening News" online.

And yet even thought Moonves publicly promised to "blow up" the evening-news format when Couric came over last fall, he didn't do it--couldn't do it. As Joe explains, 22 minutes is just too short for the news these days; even a three-minute interview, a format at which Couric traditionally excels, stretches out too long to fit into such a time-straitjacket. Seems to me that Couric and Moonves should have thought of that constraint issue before they made bold claims they couldn't keep. Oh well.

All in all, a really informative interview.

PS: Joe, you know where to find me!

Howard Kurtz Nails NBC's Over-Coverage of "Live Earth"

The Cable Gamer doesn't always agree with Howard Kurtz's coverage, and his editorial judgement, viz. my recent zing of him on his kids-glove treatment of MSNBC's Joe Scarborough.

But Kurtz is hard working, always interesting, and even a bit unpredictable, as when he nails NBC for its fellatial treatment of Al Gore and the global warming issue as seen during the "Live Earth" treatment, which NBC and its organs, including MSNBC, heavily promoted:

Doesn't this strike a discordant note? Wasn't NBC, whose news division covers the debate over climate change, providing a huge platform for advocates on one side of a contentious issue? And isn't the network helping a prominent Democrat -- who granted "Today" an interview last week in which he was asked again about his presidential ambitions -- raise money?

Dan Harrison, an NBC senior vice president, does not back away from the message. He calls the Gore effort "an initiative we believe in," including parent company General Electric. "I really don't think climate change is a political issue," Harrison says.

Whereupon Kurtz speaks for all of us when he asks:

Really?

But Harrison, the NBC exec, is unabashed as he charges ahead with his bias--thus confirming the conservative view that MSM bias is so thick that MSMers don't even see it as bias:

"Everyone agrees it's happening. If it's a political issue, it's whether the political will exists to address that change. We know we need to do something, and this is a way to heighten awareness."

Now the question: When will Howie go after his own employer, CNN, which is the most p.c. of all the cable channels?

Kiran Chetry Channels Peter Jennings

CNN's Kiran Chetry tells Nepal Monitor that her hero in journalism is the late Peter Jennings of ABC. As she put it, "He is somebody I grew up watching, and I really admire his style of delivering the news. You felt like that he was having a conversation with you, never talking down to you."

And she goes on and on, singing Jennings' praises, including saying that he was "very kind." (Note to Kiran, as if you didn't know, he was married four times, always to younger women--so of course he was kind to you!)

Now of course, Jennings, who anchored or co-anchored "ABC World News Tonight for the better part of three decades, counts as a giant of journalism. When he died in 2005, his passing spelled the end of the "Big Three" era of broadcast journalism, as Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw departed from their gigs at about the same time. So in that sense, Jennings was a safe enough role-model for Chetry to cite.

But it must also be remembered that Jennings was a liberal, and that he let his biases show through on the air. And he was particularly biased in his coverage of the Middle East.

So sure, Kiran, be like Jennings. By advertising, in advance, your liberal elitist politics, you will likely be embraced by CNN and the rest of the liberal Establishment--no doubt that was your plan.

But beware, Kiran: While you and your trendy views will surely go far inside the MSM, maybe you won't get so far with viewers, who have caught on to the liberal-racket game by now, and who, of course, have choices that they didn't have through most of Jennings' career.

Thanks to reader KP for this tip.

Mark Phillips Rocks the News Biz

Mark Phillips, of CBS News' London bureau, is not normally part of The Cable Game. But the media are all Converged anyway, and besides his lively, even brave, coverage, on Friday night's Katie Couric broadcast, of the "Live Earth" show was a welcome tonic to all the p.c. piety that has surrounded the event, especially on NBC. And isn't it strange that NBC, which laid it on so thick--with guest-anchorLester Holt doing a lot of the ladling, on "Nightly News"--was also the network covering the event? Imagine that. No wonder Phillips of CBS got the leeway to make fun of the event.

The above picture, by the way, comes from MSNBC's website--it's right up there, "above the fold," as it were. Evidently NBC and its flunky-sidiaries figured--or were told to figure--that "Live Earth" was the biggest news of the weekend.

This piece of Mark's here--which notes that the performers used lots of energy, and that the attendees left lots of trash--only scratched the surface of the snarky tone of Mark's Friday piece, which mocked the whole idea of a global rock concert to fight global warming.

Unfortunately, Mark's Friday night video segment has been buried on the "CBS Evening News" website. Yup, for all the bragging that CBS has done, about joining the New Media revolution, TCG could not find a direct link to the Phillips piece. (Happily, I TiVo'ed it).

But in the meantime, TCG can only assume that the in-house liberals didn't want to give it too much exposure--because while it's great to dish the competition, it's even greater to boost the cause of liberalism.

Isn't that right, MSM? That's the logic that created Fox, of course, because the Old Media's unwillingness to cover legit stories--and to cover them fairly--opened the space for FNC. And yet even now, 11 years after Roger Ailes and Fox brought "fair and balanced" to the media table, there are still those who think that Liberalism Knows Best, and that enlightened liberals should administer the news to the proles and rubes out there.

Investor's Business Daily Smokes "MSDNC"

IBD is perhaps not commonly thought of as a major player in The Cable Game, but this editorial is a humdinger.

Yup, that's not a typo: Investor's Business Daily bluntly labels MSNBC, the cable network, as MSDNC--a stooge organ for the Democrats. As in? For example?

*You know, Keith Olbermann doing Howard Dean's dirty work by referring to the Iraq war and Scooter Libby commutation as "the greatest crime of this young century." Worse than 9-11? C'mon Keith, get back on your favorite pills.

*You know, Chris Matthews, ex-aide to Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill, throwing softballs at Democrats, hardballs at Republicans, and spitballs at Ann Coulter.

*You know, Joe Scarborough, capitalizing on his status as a Republican, bashing the GOP--as noted here at TCG.

*You know, the twitchy, itchy Dan Abrams, who has been taking over from Scarborough in the evenings, who never pretended to be a Republican, and who, in fact, has been quite open up his expressed desire to move MSDNC--oops, MSNBC--to the left. Mission accomplished, Dan!

One other good point from the IBD edit, about the Democrats posture:

Democratic presidential candidates get away with refusing to let Fox News sponsor a debate, while their Republican counterparts let MSNBC lead them like lambs to the slaughter courtesy of Matthews' loaded questions and sound bites and Olbermann's crazed tirades. A "Fairness Doctrine" manufacturing Olbermann and Matthews clones is the last thing America needs.

Howard Dean & Co. must be delighted to see that they have so successfully colonized a TV network--methinks maybe MSNBC could also be called "MSCBS"--but there's still the nagging issue of getting elected in a country full of red-states. That is, it's one thing for Olbermann to persuade NPR listeners to shift over from radio to TV, long enough to catch him calling for, say, Dick Cheney to be drawn-and-quartered. But the DNC--the real DNC--already had those voters. Where the Democrats need help is with the country as a whole. And that sort of help, MSDNC can't provide.

The Cable Gamer doesn't have much of a head for business, but she is going to subscribe to IBD now--it's not just for investors anymore!

Brian Kilmeade + Brian Kilmeade

Verne Gay, the always-interesting TV columnist for Newsday, takes us behind the scenes in the "double life" of FNC's Brian Kilmeade.

On the one hand, Brian is 1/3 of the "Fox & Friends" gang. At their best, he and Steve Doocy are up there with Martin & Lewis in terms of quick comic timing. Although, of course, "F&F" always does serious news, depending on the news.

But at all times, Brian is a loyal son of his hometown, the distinctly middle American Long Island 'burb of Massapequa. And in particular, he is a good dad to his three kids. So sure, he could move to Manhattan, but he wants to stay in Massapequa, even if that means getting in a car to get to FNC HQ every weekday morning at 2:30 am.

And oh yes, Brian has just written his second sports-related book, It's How You Play the Game: The Powerful Sports Moments That Taught Lasting Values to America's Finest , which is surely destined to be another best-seller.

All of which proves that you can retain your middle American family values and still rise to the top.

C'mon Jeff Zucker, Clean Up Your Networks! And if Jeff Z. won't do it, how how 'bout Jeff I.?

Jossip makes a good point: The Dangerous Liaison betweeen Telemundo's Mirthala Salinas and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is a lot like the Dangerous Liaison between CNBC's Maria Bartiromo and former then-Citigroup big cheese Todd Thomson.

Thomson, of course, was pushed out of his job. And who knows what the LA voters will do with Villaraigosa. But we know that Salinas and Bartiromo are both still on the payroll of their respective companies, both of which are subsidiaries of NBC-Universal, helped by Jeff Zucker. And Zucker, of course, doesn't seem very interested in putting an end to such un-professional hanky-pankying--indeed, company flacks defend their wayward girls. (And of course, MSNBC is also under Zucker's domain, and yet Jeff doesn't seem very interested in policing a wayward boy, Joe Scarborough's behavior.)

But wait a second! NBC-U is, in turn, wholly owned by General Electric. It's hard to imagine that this such looking-the-other-way is good strategy for GE, a publicity-conscious international conglomerate, with lots of activist shareholders and at-the-ready critics and gadflies watching its every move. I mean, GE has a lot or exposure, and is a Deep Pocket worthy of the most enterprising trial lawyer.

And yet the other Jeff, GE CEO Jeff Immelt seems uninterested, too, in this budding scandal-cluster within his company.

What Howard Kurtz Does, and Does Not, Tell You About Joe Scarborough/How "GOP Joe" became "MSM Lackey Joe"/Radar to the Rescue!?

Howard Kurtz seems like a fair-minded fellow, as evidenced by his columns in The Washington Post and his show on CNN, but like most reporters, he is a slave to his sources. That is, if the source gives the reporter good access, then the source gets good coverage from the reporter.

A case in point is Kurt'z profile of MSNBC's new morning host, Joe Scarborough, the former Republican Congressman from Floridwho will be replacing Don Imus. Kurtz goes through the usual rigamarole of profiling Scarborough, and it's mostly friendly stuff, of course. But happily, Kurtz is a good enough reporter that he includes a few facts that Scarborough won't like, such as the blunt reality that Joltin' Joe's ratings are down 42 percent from Imus's. That's a pretty big tumble, even by MSNBC's cellar-dwelling standards.

So how did Scarborough get the gig? For Cable Gamers, it's possible to read between the lines and see just how Scarborough got his job: So let's do it! Kurtz details that "caught [MSNBC exec Phil]Griffin's eye after a series of appearances on 'Hardball,' including one in which he predicted that Trent Lott was toast as Senate Republican leader after having praised Strom Thurmond's segregationist 1948 candidacy for president." In other words, a Republican goes on TV and predicts the doom of another Republican, thereby making such doom all the more likely to happen. Of course the MSM will love that! Such backstabbling might not be rewarded by high ratings from viewers, but it sure will be rewarded by MSMers, who are always eager to see Republicans carving each other up, for the ideological and political benefit of liberal Democrats--like most MSMers.

In other words, Scarborough was content to be a "useful idiot" for the MSM. And that's what he's doing now, as Kurtz further details, Scarborough's "growth," now that he is free of the Republican Party. Specfically, Scarborough now blasts George W. Bush and the Iraq war:

He has turned against both, and MSNBC now runs commercials touting him as an independent voice.

"The Republican Party has been corrupted by power," Scarborough says. "George Bush and the Republican Party have done more to hurt the conservative cause in the last seven years than Ted Kennedy ever could."

OK, Kurt always gives Cable Gamers plenty to chew on. But maybe the Postie doesn't give us all the meat that he could. Let's next consider this passage from Kurtz's piece:

In spring 2001, Scarborough faced a personal crisis. He had gotten divorced two years earlier, and the older of his two teenage sons was having problems. Scarborough says a counselor told him that "Joey needs you in his life as much as possible." The congressman resigned, moved back to Pensacola and had Joey move in with him.

OK, we should, of course, praise anyone who makes a career sacrifice for the sake of family--although, of course, it wasn't long before Scarborough moved north again, this time to New York. Let's hope that son Joey got his life straightened out during the relatively brief period that Scarborough was practicing family values.

But there're other factors, too, that might have weighed Scarborough down--and that Kurtz might've mentioned. Why is it, for example, that the less-chummy-with-sources Radar magazine gets the good stuff on Scarborough's misogynistic and inapproprate comments on the air, all of which seems to have eluded the chummy-minded Kurtz?

And speaking of misogynistic, is there anything worse that can be do a woman than killing her? Ever since I first read about the death of Lori Klausutis in Vanity Fair years ago, I have wondered about that case. Here's a good online summary of what happened, and the state of the investigation. Maybe the authorities' curiosity about the death of this poor woman will be piqued if they see Scarborough on TV every morning.

Oops, I almost forgot: Scaraborough is on MSNBC, so he's probably safe from being observed on the air. But still I wonder: When the Mysterious Death of Lori Klausutis be seriously investigated, let alone solved?

All About Kiran: No Regrets? Or No Shame?

An in-the-know TCG reader adds this pungent point to my post on Kiran Chetry:

I think Chetry will make a big name for herself at CNN, and will use American Morning as a staging ground for her move to one of the three big network morning programs. But then again, Kiran wants to do news and not fluff now, so I don't know how all that would work out. I was a bit puzzled by a comment that I just read today in East West Magazine. Kiran is on the cover, and there is one line in the interview that doesn't make sense. Now, we all know of her ruthless backstabbing towards Gretchen, but in the interview, Kiran says of her time at Fox "I wouldn't change anything". Now, how does that jive with the fact that she did want to change everything? I don't really get it.

But I report, you decide! Read for yourself...

Kiran Chetry Raids CNN's Ratings Tomb--Fights Her Way In

Reader KP reminds TCG about Kiran Chetry. KP recalls Chetry's "very smart and gutsy move"--when she left Fox News and took over as co-host of CNN's "American Morning," pushing aside Soledad O'Brien.

Thanks for the reminder, KP, let's go to the tape--and then look at the ratings!

Back in February and March, TCG was pretty rough on Kiran Chetry, who jumped ship from FNC to CNN. It's a free country, of course, but Chetry did the jumping in an un-ladylike way. At the time, Chetry was working "Fox & Friends" weekend duty. Then her agent, John Ferret--oops, I mean Ferriter--reportedly went to Fox and demanded that Fox push Gretchen Carlson aside from the more prime-time-y "Fox & Friends" weekday gig, to make room for Chetry.

There's nothing wrong with Gretchen of course, but Chetry--or at least Ferriter, speaking for Chetry--wanted the weekday gig. So it was a standoff.

For about two seconds, until FNC chief Roger Ailes told Chetry/Ferriter to take a hike. That's the way Ailes is: He's a tough boss, but a loyal boss, and he expects FNC talent to be loyal, not only to him, but to each other.

But OK, OK, enough background, you might be saying. But doesn't TCG reader KP have a point in observing, "She's the star of her own show now, plus she won't have to muzzle that liberal ideology of her's like she's had to do for the past 6 years at Fox"?

Chetry does have her own show, but the question is, is anybody watching? And so let's look at the ratings. Those cold numbers have a way of chilling all of us, even when we way skimpy Lara Croft-type outfits (and don't ask me why Kiran was dressed up like this, I assume that it was a Halloween Party, but I could be wrong!).

But anyway, here're the cold hard facts: "Fox & Friends" has a 124 percent advantage over "American Morning," in the ratings. For the month of June, for example, according to Nielsen Media Research, "AM" averaged 382,000 total viewers, compared with a total for "F & F" of 855,000.

Ah, but what about the "demo"? You know, the younger viewers, in the 25-54 demographic category so prized by advertisers? On that score, FNC's advantage is even greater: "AM" averaged 139,000 compared with "F & F" getting 340,000. That's a 145 percent advantage.

So what did Chetry get? And what did Ferriter get for his clien? Maybe a little more short-term glory, but I have learned that The Cable Game is like life itself: What goes 'round comes 'round.

And so Chetry should be worried about her reputation. As reader KP observes, Chetry does "appear to be ruthless," adding, "I've heard she has quite a reputation for that anyway, so why not put it to good use?" Well, if one puts morality aside--Chetry/Ferriter did, as we have seen, try to stab Gretchen Carlson in the back--then the only justification for ruthlessness is effectiveness. And on that score, in view of the ratings, TCG wishes to answer to KP that Chetry and her ratlike agent have been remarkable INEFFECTIVE.

So Chetry has little to look forward to in the TV biz, let alone The Cable Game. If she is not to be trusted as a colleague, then she will have a risky time of it at CNN, which is notorious as a snake pit--a pit made worse by ratings that are in the pits.

It'll take Lara Croft, not Kiran Chetry, to escape from that Nielsen black hole.

Jon Friedman on Jon Klein

Marketwatch's Jon Friedman is always interesting, providing insider commentary on the media and the media market.

And sometimes Friedman gets really interesting--and maybe a little bitchy, never a bad thing in The Cable Gamer's book-- as when he jibes, in the wake of Larry King's dull non-interview interview of the vacant-eyed Paris Hilton, "CNN: The most trusted name in fluff." With that play on CNN's threadbare slogan ("The most trusted name in news") Friedman is going right at CNN prexy Jon Klein, who has presided over the decay of CNN as a legit news outlet.

Here's the good stuff from Friedman:

This has to be the quote of the week, if not the millennium, courtesy of Paris Hilton:

"I am thrilled that Larry King has asked me to appear on his program to discuss my experience in jail, what I have learned, how I have grown and anything else he wants to talk about," the hotel heiress said in a torturously constructed statement. "Larry King is not only a world-renown journalist, but a true American icon. It will be an honor to do his show." …

For all of Hilton's adoration, King was hardly her first choice. The starlet's beleaguered but wily publicist, who probably crafted that bit of fluff, could have inserted King's name where he had crossed out the likes of Meredith Vieira of NBC's "Today" and Barbara Walters of ABC.

After competing for the cheap "get," many journalists pulled back when word leaked out that the Hilton camp was going to rake in big bucks from someone. Hilton's handlers began to resemble rug merchants in an Istanbul market, desperate to unload their wares.

Enter CNN, and Larry King.

Has anyone noticed that "the world's most trusted name in news" isn't exactly covering itself in glory these days? Don't forget Wolf Blitzer's meltdown during the Anna Nicole Smith saga. The news network's decision to replace morning anchor Soledad O'Brien with "Fox and Friends" fixture Kiran Chetry was questionable.

Maybe we all should accept that news and entertainment have become so intertwined that there's no distinguishing between them.

At this rate, I half-expect CBS to get it over with and finally shove Paris, Britney, Lindsay and God knows who else into a house for a breathless installment of "Big Brother: The Hollywood Apocalypse."

Of course, it would be written into the contract that, as each person is booted out, Larry King gets first dibs on the interviews.