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We've got your morning mix of media Muesli after the jump...
It's Jason Linkins' birthday. Most of you have cooked an original meal within the past week. Today's "Angry Journalist" rant of the day: "After 15 years, I'm angry that I can no longer see a future in an industry that I love." Check out today's White House Photo of the Day from Time.
Variety reports, "Angela Shapiro-Mathes is out at TLC, just over a year after she joined the Discovery-owned lifestyle cabler. Shapiro-Mathes has been replaced as g.m. by 17-year Discovery vet Eileen O'Neill, who most recently launched Discovery's Planet Green channel. She previously oversaw TLC during an interim period in 2007 before Shapiro-Mathes took over that July."
The New York Observer reports, "Wall Street Journal: 'The goal is fewer editors, more reporters'"
The AP reports, "Regional and national newspaper publishers, already staggering with a drop in ad revenue more severe than the industry has seen since the Great Depression, say the second half of 2008 may be even worse."
USA Today reports, "As the economy sputters and media companies slash jobs, diversity in U.S. newsrooms is likely to suffer, minority journalism leaders here said Thursday."
Washington Post's Deborah Howellwrites, "The Chandra Levy series, on Page 1 for 13 days, has provoked these kinds of comments: Lurid! Appalling! A waste of time! And these: Fascinating! Totally hooked! Riveting! No investigation in my 2 1/2 years here has provoked such sharply opposing reader comment as the series on the seven-year-old unsolved murder of the Washington intern, who was having an affair with a congressman."
Slate reports, "In a move that has apparently stirred up some internal discontent, the Los Angeles Times has banned its bloggers, including political bloggers, from mentioning the Edwards/Rielle Hunter story. Even bloggers who want to mention the story in order to make a skeptical we-don't-trust-the-Enquirer point are forbidden from doing so. Kausfiles has obtained a copy of the email Times bloggers received from editor Tony Pierce."
Huffington Post reports, "McCain Blows Off WSJ Reporter"
The Maynard Institute reports, "CBS Lags in Diversity Survey of Station Management"
Los Angeles Times' Top Of The Ticket reports, "The president of the College Republicans at the University of Southern California is charging that CNN used a 'fake College Republican' in its broadcast report today, claiming there was a lack of enthusiasm for the GOP candidate, Sen. John McCain."
TVNewser's Chris Ariensreports, "Wait. This may be a first. Is the New York Times now picking up on stories first seen on a television news broadcast?"
Washington Post reports, "Fox News executives knew it would be a long, uphill battle to challenge CNBC when they launched a new business channel last October -- and new ratings confirm that they are right."
TVNewser's Steve Krakauerreports, "Admittedly, we don't speak French. But even through a translator, it was clear French president Nicolas Sarkozy was more than a little annoyed by CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour's question during a joint presser with Sen. Barack Obama yesterday."
TVNewser reports, "As chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell is charged with reporting on the diplomatic beat for all NBC News platforms. This week, that has meant covering Sen. Barack Obama's overseas trip and his meetings with heads of state. She has appeared on the Today show and Nightly News every day this week. She also reported for the weekend editions of those shows last Saturday and Sunday. And she continued to anchor her 1pmET hour on MSNBC, with Mika Brzezinski or Contessa Brewer back at MSNBC HQ reporting the other news of the day."
B&C reports, "Allbritton Communications' WJLA Washington, D.C., is replacing its Local Point TV multicast channel with programming from Retro Television Network, which supplies way-off-network programming to more than 70 stations."
AJR reports, "With their obsessive single-topic focus, are the three 24-hour cable news channels setting the agenda for the rest of the media when it comes to the presidential campaign -- even though most of the material they endlessly flog originates somewhere else?"
TVNewser reports, "While reporting on Robert Novak's hit-and-run charges last night on FNC's Special Report, Brit Hume was interrupted by one of the the All-Star panel members, Mort Kondracke. As he walks behind Hume, the anchor says, 'We're in the middle of a segment here, excuse me.'"
A release announced, "Young Bloggers and Online News Users are Better Informed On First Amendment Rights, Authors Find"
TVNewser's Steve Krakauer reports, "Redlasso, a web site allowing users to make their own clips of cable and broadcast programming, has shut down, 'for the immediate future.' NBC and FOX filed suit against the company this week."
Washington Post reports, "AOL Cuts More Products Developed in Dulles"
CJR reports, "An early ProPublica collaboration tests deadlines and gets results"
Washington Post's Dan Steinbergreports, "To recap: earlier this week, I attempted to post an innocuous Redskins fan video from training camp. I was told to take it down, due to team rules prohibiting any speck of Redskins Park video from running on a newspaper Web site. Undeterred, I then attempted to embed Redskins related videos from local television stations, which were posting great quantities of Redskins related videos in handy embeddable video players on their Web sites. This worked fine, until the Redskins complained to the stations and the stations complained to our lawyers and I was told to take them down. Finally, to keep from losing all self-worth, I relied on the bonds of bloggerdom to score an invitation to Chris Cooley's mom's house for lunch on Thursday, where under most commonly held interpretations of international law, NFL video restrictions do not apply." Check out the video here.
A release announced, "The National Association of Government Defined Contribution Administrators, Inc. (NAGDCA) is pleased to announce that the winner of 2008 Media Recognition Award is Ms. Mary Beth Franklin of Kiplinger Personal Finance Magazine for her continued dedication in reporting up-to-date issues affecting the retirement community." For more info, click here.
The New York Times reports, "Black Radio on Obama Is Left's Answer to Limbaugh"
AP reports, "A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by conservative radio talk show host Michael Savage against an Islamic civil rights group over its use of a portion of his show in which he called the Quran a 'book of hate.'"
The AP reports, "Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. (SIRI)'s $3.3 billion buyout of rival XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. (XMSR) will mean millions of subscribers will be able to receive programming from both services, while executives say it will create huge cost savings for the industry."
The Washington Post reports, "According to the latest audience ratings, the most popular radio station in the Washington area for the past three months was WHUR, the R&B-and-soul outlet owned by Howard University. WHUR's share of the audience, in fact, grew by almost 20 percent, according to the Arbitron quarterly survey released yesterday. All of which raises a question: Really? How could WHUR (96.3 FM) -- a station that played essentially the same type of music, had the same on-air personalities and didn't undertake any special audience-building promotions during the spring -- surge so far, so fast?"
Washington Post's Howard Kurtzreports, "After saying little in public during a weekend in Iraq and Afghanistan, Barack Obama met with traveling reporters near Jordan's Temple of Hercules, a gladiator standing his ground against the media hordes. But even as the likes of NBC's Andrea Mitchell and ABC's Jake Tapper rose to press the Democratic candidate on Tuesday, television viewers back home heard nothing but faint voices in the wind. The journalists weren't miked; only Obama's answers came through loud and clear. That may have been unintentional, but it underscored the degree to which Obama has controlled the message -- and, more important, the pictures -- during his exhaustively chronicled trek across the Middle East and Europe. Obama meeting the troops, meeting the generals, meeting prime ministers and kings, drawing a huge crowd in Berlin yesterday -- the images trump whatever journalists write and say."
A release announced, "US District Judge Cormac J. Carney ruled in favor of Washington Times national security reporter Bill Gertz on Thursday, supporting his right to protect confidential sources. As the Washington Times reports, the Judge said Gertz could not be forced to answer questions concerning one of his articles because his First Amendment rights outweighed the government's need to identify his sources. The issue at hand was Gertz's May 16, 2006 article on a Chinese espionage case in which he cites unnamed 'senior Justice Department officials' as the sources of information about criminal charges against Chi Mak, accused and convicted of leaking military information to the Chinese government. Judge Carney had presided over the case and ordered an investigation to see if federal employees had leaked information from a grand jury investigation, a federal crime."
A Capitol Weekly reader asks, "I was just sort of wondering, what ever happened to the Capitol Press corps?"
Center for Citizen Media reports, "What famous journalism organization has, until very recently*, done the best reporting (remember, that's the gathering process) about the United States government's Guantanamo Bay prison? That's the place where the United States holds the people the government has declared to be terrorists, a prison where prisoners have been in many cases tortured and, until recently, held without access to the legal system. The people who've done the best reporting on this scandal have not, for the most part, been working for major media outfits. They've been working for that famous journalism organization called the American Civil Liberties Union."
A release announced, "A digital clearinghouse for news diversity research was unveiled today at UNITY: Journalists of Color, Inc.'s national convention in Chicago. The UNITY/McCormick Foundation Electronic Clearinghouse for News Diversity Research contains more than 400 references to books, articles and reports that relate to diversity in journalism, provided in an easily searchable online database. ... The resulting database can be browsed, sorted, filtered and searched. The clearinghouse is available at http://cronkite.asu.edu/unity."
Huffington Post's Bob Cesca reports, "As we have observed throughout the last several years, the notion of fairness in journalism has been guided by a miscalculated rule that in order to report good news about a liberal or a liberal success, news reporting has to be counterbalanced either with unearned praise for conservatives or trumped up and parroted negative news about the aforementioned liberal or liberal success. Oh, and the reverse doesn't apply. That's the rule."
Mara Schiavocampo, Nightly News Digital Correspondent, asks, "Can black journalists cover Obama fairly?"
