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Cumulus Planning to Drop Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity (Politico / Dylan Byers on Media)
In a major shakeup for the radio industry, Cumulus Media, the second-biggest broadcaster in the country, is planning to drop both Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity from its stations at the end of the year, an industry source told Politico on Sunday. Cumulus has decided that it will not renew its contracts with either host, the source said, a move that would remove the two most highly rated conservative talk personalities from more than 40 Cumulus channels in major markets. New York Daily News New York radio observers have been expecting for the past year that Limbaugh and probably Hannity would leave WABC, which is owned by Cumulus, for rival WOR. Speculation about possible replacements at WABC for Limbaugh’s noon-3 p.m. show and Hannity’s 3-6 p.m. show has focused on Mike Huckabee and WABC evening hosts Mark Levin and Michael Savage, who signed with Cumulus last year. Deadline Hollywood In May, Limbaugh reportedly mulled leaving Cumulus after receiving blame for advertiser decline in the wake of his controversial Sandra Fluke comments. Cumulus CEO Lew Dickey told Bloomberg TV at the time that “we have the premier talk distribution platform in the business and if you want to be on a big stage in this game, you need to be on our stations in the largest markets. They’re the biggest signals, the heritage brands and everybody knows that.”

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Tamron Hall to Host New Crime Show (Chicago Sun-Times / Voices)
Tamron Hall, the MSNBC host and NBC News correspondent — and former morning show co-anchor of Fox 32 News in Chicago — will host Deadline: Crime with Tamron Hall, a new weekly crime investigation series for Discovery’s ID (Investigation Discovery) network. The announcement was made by the peacock network at the semi-annual Television Correspondents Association meetings in Los Angeles. Hall has a direct, personal connection to violent crime. Her older sister was a murder victim in a case that is still officially unsolved. Deadline Hollywood In each one-hour episode, Hall will be joined by other correspondents to explore crimes. Among them: journalists Michelle Sigona and Angeline Hartmann and veteran America’s Most Wanted correspondent Tom Morris Jr. The new series also will feature appearances from ID regulars Aphrodite Jones (host of True Crime with Aphrodite Jones) and Keith Beauchamp (host of The Injustice Files). HuffPost Hall will host the program while continuing to anchor NewsNation on MSNBC. The first episode will look at the murder of a mentally ill wife and mother of two, and Robert Chambers, otherwise known as the “Preppie Killer.”

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Time Warner Cable Threatens to Drop CBS From Channel 2 Spot (AdAge / Media News)
Time Warner Cable Inc. is threatening to drop CBS from its position as the first broadcast station on its TV menu as a deadline to conclude negotiations nears. The second-largest U.S. cable provider is talking to several competitors about taking CBS’ place if the deadline passes and CBS goes dark in New York, Los Angeles and Dallas, said Maureen Huff, a Time Warner Cable spokeswoman. Deadline Hollywood The parties again have set a new deadline to settle their retransmission consent battle: This time it’s 5 p.m. ET on Monday. In a memo to staffers this week, CBS chief Leslie Moonves wrote that there’s “a very real threat” that the blackout will happen and “possibly” also affect Showtime. NYT CBS has been demanding an increase in the fees that the cable company pays to retransmit the signals of network stations to its customers. Time Warner Cable has labeled the CBS demands exorbitant. The two sides have both taken out ads denouncing the other as unreasonable, trying to lay the groundwork to blame the other party if the stations were made unavailable to the cable customers. LA Times / Company Town Media analyst David Banks of RBC Capital Markets said in a recent report that CBS is looking to increase the fee Time Warner Cable currently pays from less than $1 per subscriber per month to a figure approaching $2 in the first year and with subsequent increases in later years. Adweek While most observers believe it’s a foregone conclusion that CBS will prevail, at least one analyst said the network may have bitten off more than it can chew. In a note to investors issued last week, BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield said the availability of Aereo in New York and Los Angeles and the relatively sleepy summer broadcast season neutralizes some of CBS’ considerable leverage.

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Brian Stelter to Guest Host Reliable Sources (The Washington Post / Erik Wemple)
Brian Stelter, a New York Times reporter covering television and digital media, will guest-host an edition of CNN’s Sunday program Reliable Sources, the media-watchdog show that longtime host Howard Kurtz recently left for a job with Fox News. In doing so, Stelter will join the likes of NPR’s David Folkenflik, CNN contributor John Avlon and others in CNN’s Reliable Sources bake-off. TVNewser Stelter will host Aug. 11. In the meantime, he will avoid covering CNN, as well as Fox News and MSNBC. Mediaite Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren is not taking the news well that Stelter will be guest-hosting Reliable Sources in August. In a blog post Tuesday, Van Susteren called Stelter’s move a “conflict of interest” and labeled him a “hypocrite” for his paper’s criticism of her husband’s ties to GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain. Gretawire Van Susteren: “Stelter writes about CNN (and MSNBC and Fox News) and is now either hustling CNN or the other way around… there is no clearer conflict of interest. Stelter now knows where his bread is buttered (and where is the New York Times public editor?)”

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Nate Silver Went Against The Grain for Some at The Times (NYT / Public Editor’s Journal)
I don’t think Nate Silver ever really fit into the Times culture and I think he was aware of that. He was, in a word, disruptive. Much like the Brad Pitt character in the movie Moneyball disrupted the old model of how to scout baseball players, Nate disrupted the traditional model of how to cover politics. A number of traditional and well-respected Times journalists disliked his work. The first time I wrote about him I suggested that print readers should have the same access to his writing that online readers were getting. I was surprised to quickly hear by email from three high-profile Times political journalists, criticizing him and his work. They were also tough on me for seeming to endorse what he wrote, since I was suggesting that it get more visibility. FishbowlNY This is all understandable. Old people don’t like change, and writers have egos. And maybe Silver acted a bit too above everyone else and that earned him some pages in the Times’ burn book. HuffPost / The Backstory On Monday afternoon, this reporter asked Silver about the Times public editor’s column, whether he felt constrained by the Times newsroom culture, and if he had enough support from colleagues. “I had plenty of support, I felt, from [executive editor Jill Abramson] and from other key people at the Times,” Silver said. “I don’t really want to dwell too much to my relationships there. It was not — I would say, I love the people at ESPN.” Silver added that any cultural issue was “not a big factor” in his decision. NY Mag / Daily Intelligencer “I’m interested in running a website, building out a business here, and having my opportunity to weigh in on different topics,” Silver said, responding to Times public editor Margaret Sullivan’s comments. “I’m not interested in who I’m getting a beer with. I have plenty of people in my social circles for that.” TheWrap / MediaAlley In a conference call with the press, ESPN president John Skipper said FiveThirtyEight will be similar to Bill Simmons’ Grantland, which is also owned by ESPN. The FiveThirtyEight name and URL were purchased for an undisclosed amount. Previously, Silver owned those rights and licensed them to The New York Times for a three-year contract. Its deal with Silver is a “long-term, multi-year deal.” TVNewser Put another way: If Silver leaves ESPN in a few years, FiveThirtyEight will not be going with him, but rather staying with ESPN and ABC. paidContent Silver stressed that “we’re not pulling back from politics. We’ll probably hire at least one more person to cover politics fulltime” and said that the new site’s only guaranteed coverage areas will be sports, politics and some economics. As for other topics, “if we find the right person, we might hire in that vertical… We’re looking for people who can think, do math and write. Those skills don’t always overlap, so it’s going to be an intense search process for us.” TVNewser Silver’s migration from the Times to ESPN represents more than a new URL — it augurs a sea change in the news business itself, experts say.

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Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight Blog to Join ESPN Staff (NYT)
Nate Silver, the statistician who attained national fame for his accurate projections about the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, is parting ways with The New York Times and moving his FiveThirtyEight franchise to ESPN, the sports empire controlled by the Walt Disney Company, according to ESPN employees with direct knowledge of his plans. At ESPN, Silver is expected to have a wide-ranging portfolio. Along with his writing and number-crunching, he will most likely be a regular contributor to Olbermann, the late-night ESPN2 talk show hosted by Keith Olbermann that will have its debut at the end of August. In political years, he will also have a role at ABC News, which is owned by Disney. Politico / Playbook Early this year, the Times laid out a plan that would give Silver a staff of six to 12 bloggers to focus on a variety of topics, modeled on Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog at The Washington Post. The plan was so specific that it named Megan Liberman, an up-and-coming deputy news editor at The Times, as Silver’s editor. As recently as last month, some executives at the Times were confident Silver would stay, mainly because they had given him everything he had asked for. New Republic ESPN has been trying to land Silver for at least five years. Gary Belsky, a one-time editor-in-chief of ESPN The Magazine and now a content consultant and contributor to Time, told me Saturday the original effort had been spearheaded by Gary Hoenig, then the general manager of ESPN Publishing, and that the original plan had been for Silver to write for the magazine and ESPN Insider, a collection of paywall-protected premium content on the Web. Daily Beast One thing that is clear, however, is that Silver’s move marks a potentially big loss for the Times. “He was doing something that is fairly rare in journalism — he was doing the math. I say that not entirely jokingly. Journalists are notoriously bad at this,” says Dan Gillmor, a journalism professor at Arizona State University. “For people who care about this sort of thing, it was pretty delicious to watch someone doing the math and to see pundit after pundit make fools of themselves with their ‘intuition.’”

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Boston Magazine Counters Rolling Stone‘s Boston Bomber Cover: ‘This Is The Real Face of Terror’ (TheWrap / MediaAlley)
Boston Magazine published never-before-seen photos of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Thursday in response to Rolling Stone‘s controversial cover that critics felt depicted the accused murderer as a rock star. The photos, supplied by Mass. state police sergeant Sean Murphy, were intended to show the “real face of terror.” In one, a bloodied Tsarnaev emerges from his boat hideout while a sniper rifle trains its laser sight on his head. Boston Magazine Sean Murphy: “As a professional law-enforcement officer of 25 years, I believe that the image that was portrayed by Rolling Stone magazine was an insult to any person who has ever worn a uniform of any color or any police organization or military branch, and the family members who have ever lost a loved one serving in the line of duty. The truth is that glamorizing the face of terror is not just insulting to the family members of those killed in the line of duty, it also could be an incentive to those who may be unstable to do something to get their face on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. The Atlantic Wire While Murphy’s photographs certainly put some distance between Tsarnaev and the audience, both physically and emotionally, they will, like nearly any photograph, depend on the interpretation of the viewer to complete their message. Rolling Stone‘s image’s normalcy is uncomfortable, but its eeriness speaks volumes. The new images depict a man, at a distance, defeated. But in them, he is also seen at his most vulnerable. CNN John Wolfson, Boston Magazine‘s editor-in-chief, said the magazine has hundreds of similar photos and will publish more in its September issue. Boston Globe / MetroDesk A state police spokesman said Thursday night that Murphy had been relieved of duty for one day and will be subject to an internal investigation. “His duty status will be determined at a hearing in the near future,” said spokesman David Procopio. “[Thursday’s] dissemination to Boston Magazine of photographs of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and police activity related to his capture was not authorized by the Massachusetts State Police,” Procopio said in a statement. Boston Magazine Just one day after the curtain was raised on the Rolling Stone cover featuring Tsarnaev, one day before it hit newsstands, there were several copies of the magazine selling on eBay for around $20.

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Rolling Stone‘s ‘The Bomber’ Issue Banned by CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid And Kmart (HuffPost)
Multiple retailers and drug stores say they won’t be selling this week’s Rolling Stone, which features Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the cover. “As a company with deep roots in New England and a strong presence in Boston, we believe this is the right decision out of respect for the victims of the attack and their loved ones,” CVS wrote in a statement. Boston Herald Boston mayor Thomas M. Menino wrote to the publisher of Rolling Stone, telling him the decision to put accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the cover “rewards a terrorist with celebrity treatment” — treatment the magazine should have given to the survivors. “The survivors of the Boston attacks deserve Rolling Stone cover stories,” Menino wrote in a letter to Jann Wenner, “though I no longer feel that Rolling Stone deserves them.” Rolling Stone Our hearts go out to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, and our thoughts are always with them and their families. The cover story we are publishing this week falls within the traditions of journalism and Rolling Stone’s long-standing commitment to serious and thoughtful coverage of the most important political and cultural issues of our day. The fact that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is young, and in the same age group as many of our readers, makes it all the more important for us to examine the complexities of this issue and gain a more complete understanding of how a tragedy like this happens. PRNewser A calm, eloquent response that respectfully explains the publication’s intentions, and defends the cover and article without actually sounding defensive. While this will likely do little to assuage those who are offended — it is not, by any means, an apology — it may at least open the floor for candid and civilized conversation. New Yorker / NewsDesk Just because something sparks outrage doesn’t mean that it is outrageous. The vitriol and closed-mindedness of the Web response to the Rolling Stone cover, before anyone had the chance to read the article itself, is an example of two of the ugly public outcomes of terrorism: hostility toward free expression, and to the collection and examination of factual evidence; and a kind of culture-wide self-censorship encouraged by tragedy, in which certain responses are deemed correct and anything else is dismissed as tasteless or out of bounds. Slate / BrowBeat By depicting a terrorist as sweet and handsome rather than ugly and terrifying, Rolling Stone has subverted our expectations and hinted at a larger truth. The cover presents a stark contrast with our usual image of terrorists. It asks, “What did we expect to see in Tsarnaev? What did we hope to see?” The answer, most likely, is a monster, a brutish dolt with outward manifestations of evil. What we get instead, however, is the most alarming sight of all: A boy who looks like someone we might know. Ad Age / Media News Rolling Stone may take a hit at the newsstands over its cover story, but provocative covers often encourage single-copy sales at the same time as they spark anger.

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Keith Olbermann Will Return to ESPN (NYT)
ESPN is expected to announce on Wednesday that the former network mainstay Keith Olbermann, who contentiously departed in 1997, will return to host a one-hour, nightly show for ESPN2 later this year, according to three executives with knowledge of the deal but not authorized to speak about it publicly. Olbermann, 54, became renowned for co-anchoring ESPN’s SportsCenter with Dan Patrick — arguably the most auspicious pairing in the history of the show or the network. THR The show will originate from the ABC News Nightline studio overlooking Times Square. The two-year contract returns the erstwhile SportsCenter anchor to the network where he rose to stardom as an erudite and skilled sports commentator. His pairing with Dan Patrick on SportsCenter was among the most popular and memorable in the long history of the franchise. Politico / Dylan Byers on Media Olbermann had expressed interest in returning to ESPN as early as March, though network president John Skipper said at the time he was not “prepared” to bring the commentator back. HuffPost Olbermann recently signed a deal to host TBS’ studio coverage of Major League Baseball alongside Hall of Fame pitcher and analyst Dennis Eckersley in Atlanta; it’s unclear if that gig will be affected by his new one. Variety Olbermann has been out of work for 15 months since parting with Current (receiving a substantial severance package), an exit that fueled the perception of him as someone with a penchant for leaving jobs rather abruptly, and often under acrimonious circumstances. Still, he has maintained ties to his admirers via outlets such as social media, where he still commands close to 450,000 followers on Twitter.

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Jenny McCarthy Named Co-Host of The View (TVNewser)
Following the news that Elisabeth Hasselbeck would be leaving The View to join Fox News, Barbara Walters insisted, “We will not be filling [the position] very soon.” Well, apparently a week was long enough, as Walters announced Monday that actress Jenny McCarthy will be joining the program in September. NYT In a statement, Walters said, “Jenny brings us intelligence as well as warmth and humor.” McCarthy, 40, has had roles in a few short-lived situation comedies but is probably best known on television for the game show Singled Out on MTV, where she was a host in the 1990s. Time / Tuned In She’s also the single most visible celebrity spokesperson for the discredited, literally dangerous belief that childhood vaccines can cause autism. The View’s Sherri Shepherd may once have wondered if the world might be flat, but at least no one fell into orbit as a result. Vaccines are actually a matter of life and death. Slate / Bad Astronomy Giving McCarthy a large public forum to share her views is a terrible idea. I’ll note The View has more than 3 million viewers, and given the time slot, I suspect a lot of those folks watching are parents of young kids — precisely the demographic most prone to listen to anti-vaccine views. And even if she doesn’t talk about any of her nonsensical health ideas on the show, the very fact that she now has this co-host position gives her a tacit credibility to the viewer. HuffPost Bill Nye is among those who take a dim view of McCarthy’s new gig — and the possibility that she will use it as a forum to spread her pseudoscientific views on vaccine safety. “I am concerned that Ms. McCarthy will encourage parents to prevent their kids from getting vaccinated,” Nye told The Huffington Post in an email. Business Insider Even non-scientists are upset. Comedian Julie Klausner tweeted “Wow! Congratulations to Jenny McCarthy and Measles/Mumps/Rubella for spreading its reach!” and movie critic Scott Weinberg tweeted “Jenny McCarthy’s views on vaccination are only slightly less barbaric and repulsive than a movie she made called Dirty Love.”

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