Love and Romance

Conservatives down on their luck in the love department, fear no more. CPAC has just the event for you. The schedule for the largest annual gathering of conservatives includes a special forum this year for right-wing singles.

Guiding them through daring dating waters will be dating coach Wayne Elise, pictured at right, shirtless and holding a pair of tiny scissors. He has been hailed a pick-up artist and an escape artist (this doesn’t scare us at all). “Learn everything from how to avoid scaring away your own personal Dagny Taggart in the first five minutes of the conversation, to whether Tea Partiers and Occupiers can share something more than a dislike for bailouts,” the description for the event says. For the uniformed, Taggart is the protagonist in Ayn Rand‘s Atlas Shrugged.

The event will be held Thursday, Feb. 9 in the McKinley room at the Marriott.

 

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

The NYP’s Page Six is reporting news of a budding romance. It may not be so “budding” at this point. Rumors have been swirling for months over these two — it’s MSNBC’s Tamron Hall, 41, and Lawrence O’Donnell, 60. Even network insiders have been hearing heavy chatter about it.

NYP posted the news late last night. They say the pair have been “canoodling at downtown haunts.”

MSNBC declined to weigh in on the matter.

See here.

Politico has been working diligently to defrost its icy relationship with Fox News as of late. And it appears to be paying off, or at least moving in a cozier direction.

FishbowlDC has learned that FNC’s media relations department has been forced to “soften up” on Politico. “From the top it has come down that media relations have to be softer than they are,” a source who requested strict anonymity told FBDC. While Politico reporters may not start popping up on FNC programs by, say, next Tuesday, it is headed that way. “There are certain shows that would like to have them on and I think that will happen,” our source said.

But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. The two media entities are still in mid-thaw. Fox News and Politico have notoriously not gotten along, with a string of media writers placed on the infamous Black List (which exists no matter what they claim and, in fact, is discussed monthly). Just three months ago FNC PR snubbed Politico reporters, saying they “tend not to rate well” on the network. Politico responded with a sticky-sweet profile on “Special Report” anchor Bret Baier. Fast forward two months to today and Politico has a three-page story on “how Fox News has stayed on top” of cable ratings for a decade. Both stories are by Mike Allen.

We wrote Allen as well as Politico‘s editor-in-chief John Harris to ask if they’ve seen any uptick in FNC booking their writers. To Harris: “Are there any talks between Fox News and Politico to get more airtime for your reporters in the way MSNBC has?” To Allen: “In the past Fox hasn’t booked too many Politico reporters. Has that changed of late? Have you been booked on Fox before?” We also reached out to some of the talent at FNC to get their take on the matter. So far, no word.

Allen’s buttery piece quotes FNC execs as well as talent…

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Say “Politico” three times in the bathroom mirror and Mike Allen shows up with an eBook. Say it four times and you have John Cassidy‘s gushing piece in the New Yorker.

In a lengthy defense of modern political reporting, Cassidy named several publications that offer up solid journalism in the field. Among them, the NYT, WSJ, WaPo, The Atlantic and HuffPost. But none were showered with kisses like Politico.

WSJ was mentioned twice. NYT also twice (with a separate mention for NYTimes.com). HuffPost, once. The Atlantic, once.

Politico was referenced four times. Love at first scooplet?

It’s worth noting that the D.C. publication’s original competitors, The Hill and Roll Call, weren’t mentioned at all. Looks like there’s a growing perception that Politico is now out of their league.

NBC Congressional Correspondent Luke Russert is playing matchmaker for his reporter pal Politico‘s Jake Sherman this week. Yesterday he put feelers out about Politico‘s Sherman to the popular daughters of GOP Presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman.

“Don’t worry ladies, @JakeSherman is single!” Russert wrote on Twitter.  Unfortunately one of the pictures now associated to this tweet is a frog in a block of ice.

The ladies replied saying, “Oh good! Mary Anne was wonderin.”

Sherman doesn’t appear to be protesting. After the Huntsman’s daughters wrote, “Hook a sista up,” Sherman wrote, “Luke, you have your charge.”

Washington D.C. journos may be sad to hear that Katie Couric and her beau of five years Brooks Perlin are splitting up. NYP’s Page Six broke the news just after midnight Tuesday. Pictured below is the couple in happier times. They attended a number of events together, including the White House Correspondents’ Assoc. Dinner and the Kennedy Center Honors in 2009. Perlin, 17 years Couric’s junior, is CFO of Eco Supply Centre, a green materials distributor.

 

There may be no love lost between Fox News PR and Politico after they declared Politico scribes unfit for their airwaves in a recent quote to The Daily Caller. But there is a heated romance going on between the publication and FNC anchor Bret Baier.

In today’s edition of Politico, not only did author Mike Allen devote the first three graphs of “Playbook” to his story on Baier, but the piece itself is two pages of graph after graph after graph of gushing evidence about just how terrific Baier is. It’s the sort of piece you hang on the refrigerator — for years.

Baier says the biggest thing he does in his work is …. he listens. This is deep listening, not your garden variety ignore your subject and move on. Is this supposed to be unusual for a reporter? Allen even had a GOP consultant study Baier’s TV tapes. He compares Bret to a Boy Scout with a “very sharp” knife. As analogies go, how great is that?

The bulk of the story reads like a publicist’s dream with quotes that sound like soundbites such as this one from Baier in which he remembers to include the obligatory mention of former Bureau Chief Brit Hume: “I always wanted to cover politics when the American people were interested in politics, and, as you know, that’s now,” Baier said. “And I always aspired to follow in my mentor, Brit Hume’s, footsteps, and I’ve done it, so I’m living what I wanted to do.”

We did learn one thing we didn’t know about Fox News. In page two of the bland, smoochified profile, it’s revealed that the network has a “Brain Room” — a room packed with briefing books — that Bret flees to before moderating debates.

Even if FNC PR hated Politico last week, surely they’re warming to them now.

A good rule of thumb to live by: Never let a jealous fiancé anywhere near a computer. Social media is an obvious no-no. Case in point: WRTI news anchor Windsor Johnston, who apparently seethed with jealousy when adoring female fans of her future husband, Sirius XM Radio host and former NPR Host of “Morning Edition”  Bob Edwards, began complimenting him. Windsor, who didn’t turn into a green-eyed monster, claims it was a friend who shot off nasty emails to a woman in Ohio. Phili.com’s Dan Gross had the scoop Wednesday.

One of the missives that Windsor didn’t write: “Are you unaware that Bob Edwards is engaged to be married? If you EVER post on his page again – well, you’d be smarter than you look.” She also didn’t accuse the woman of being in menopause even though the woman is just a few years older than Windsor, who is 34.

Edwards, 64 and obviously sexy, was NPR’s first host of “Morning Edition.” He held the job from 1979 to 2004. Despite high ratings, in 2004 NPR removed Edwards and brought in Steve Inskeep and Renée Montaigne to replace him. Colleagues like Cokie Roberts were none too pleased.

 

When The Daily Caller broke its widely-known “exclusive” that President Obama borrowed the title of his book “Audacity of Hope” from a sermon given by Reverend Jeremiah Wright in 1990, HuffPost media critic Jason Linkins was among the first to knock them for it.

He also cited Slate‘s Dave Weigel who earlier pointed out a post on BigGovernment.com that rehashed the story of Bill Ayers hosting a dinner for Obama in the ’90s: “Hey, Dave Weigel, what else is going on this morning?” Linkins wrote in his story. A little odd. But maybe not considering the relentless man crush he seems to have on Weigel.

Over the years, we’ve noticed a lot of cross referencing in stories and blog posts by Linkins and Weigel. We mean, a lot. Though Weigel tells us he doesn’t recall he and Linkins hanging out “one on one, ” they met through DCist and ever since, they come off like a team in their work. Like Sonny and Cher. Captain and Tennille. Laverne and Shirley. The Odd Couple.

Since 2009, Linkins has referenced Weigel by name in his media news stories no less than nine times. And that’s just on HuffPost. On his personal blog, we found two references, in one he gushed about Weigel, calling him “a really great person.” In an interview with Washingtonian, he named Weigel as one of D.C’s “especially” great reporters.

He must be. Maybe even perfect. Not one of the references to Weigel in Linkins’ reporting was negative. Media critic? “Maybe he’s just reading me on even days,” Weigel joked to FishbowlDC.

We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the fierce, almost boyfriend-like defense Linkins offered up for Weigel over the JournoList scandal that resulted in Weigel’s resignation from WaPo. (He said FBDC should die in a fire for breaking the story.)

Weigel has returned the back rub, though to a much lesser extent. He has dropped Linkins’ name on Slate at least five times in the last two years.

The turkey coma has finally worn off enough to offer belated our congratulations to CQ Roll Call’s Peter King.  Peter and his wife, BNA’s Heather Rothman, celebrated the holiday by welcoming to the world Eli Wilson King at 10.29 pm on Thanksgiving Day.  The little pilgrim weighed in at nine pounds, seven ounces and measured nearly 22 inches.  Fun fact: Eli’s big sister Abigail was born the day after Christmas two years ago.  Congrats to Peter, Heather and Abigail.  And welcome to the Fishbowl, Eli!

Note to readers: The bizarre pilgrim baby photo is not actually Eli but it is representative of the way we imagine him.