In her opening remarks on the second day of The DailyBeast/Newsweek Women in the World Summit, former Secretary of State and New York Senator Hillary Clinton called women’s rights the 21st century’s “unfinished business.”

“The world is changing beneath our feet, and it is past time to embrace a 21st-century approach to advancing the rights and opportunities of women and girls,” Clinton said. “Technology, from satellite television to cell phones, from Twitter to Tumbler, is helping to bring abuses out of the shadows and into the center of global consciousness.”

Clinton’s remarks framed the morning session of panel discussions at the Summit. Clinton’s daughter Chelsea, a board member at The Clinton Foundation and a special correspondent for NBC News, was the morning’s first moderator, steering a panel about women’s roles in science, math and computer programming. The morning’s other moderators included ABC News anchor Cynthia McFadden, former CNN anchor Campbell Brown and CBS News anchor Norah O’Donnell.

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Our friends over at WebNewser report that Kathy O’Hearn is ditching TV news for the VP role at the newly formed Newsweek Daily Beast company.  O’Hearn most recently worked at CNN where, among other roles, she was executive producer of both Campbell Brown’s and Christiane Amanpour’s shows.

O’Hearn also served as executive producer of This Week before leaving in 2008 to manage ABC’s special event politics coverage.

Our colleagues at FishbowlLA have some exclusive news today: CNN is auditioning talent in the hopes of casting one conservative and one liberal host for a new “Crossfire” type of show.

FBLA has some ideas about who the news network might be looking at:

A few on the liberal side were Steve A. Smith of ESPN, Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks, Roland Martin who’s already on Campbell Brown‘s show frequently and Errol Louis a CNN contributor.

On the conservative side were radio personalities Roe Conn from Chicago, Joe Watkins from Philadelphia and Steve Malzberg from New Jersey. Plus frequent Glenn Beck fill-in Joe Pagliarulo from Texas.

Who do you think would be good for the show? Leave suggestions for co-hosts — and show names — in the comments.

FishbowlLA: FBLA Exclusive: CNN is Auditioning Talent For New Show

So! Not surprisingly, now that the election is over, all the behind-the-scenes dirty laundry is being aired. And by dirty laundry we really mean, how Sarah Palin is solely responsible for ruining John McCain‘s bid for the presidency (watch Campbell Brown‘s excellent take/rant on this after the jump). The other day we directed your attention to Newsweek‘s much talked-about post-election story about Palin’s heretofore unreported behavior, and just yesterday Carl Cameron went on Fox News and said “I wish I could have told you back at the time, but all of it was put off-the-record.” Fair enough. But does observing the off-the-record rule excuse the entirely uncritical nature of the reports that came out about Palin for the better part of the two months she was on the ticket? Andrew Sullivan emphatically disagrees:

But actual reporters were soon finding [Palin's failings] out for themselves – and not even conveying the gist of that to their viewers and readers…They kept taking Palin seriously as a veep candidate when she didn’t come close to even minimal standards for passing a citizenship test. I’m sorry but I think this is a terrible failing, and it is a reason the mainstream media are imploding. They let the rules of the game over-rule their duty to tell the American people the truth as they began to discover it.

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Speaking of Campbell Brown she was on Jon Stewart last night talking about how on her CNN show No Bias, No Bull (she joked it was initially named No Bias, No Bullshit) and her attempts to firmly establish herself as representative of the middle-ground between MSNBC and Fox. Also, she’s pregnant again!

It’s not your imagination. John McCain and Sarah Palin are getting more negative press coverage than their Dem counterparts. A recent study for the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that six out of 10 McCain stories were negative, furthermore Obama had more than twice as many positive stories (36 percent) as McCain — and just half the percentage of negative (29 percent). What’s more Politico has even copped to being part of the problem! The liberal media elite strikes again! But wait, perhaps it’s not actually that simple. Says Politico‘s John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei:

As it happens, McCain’s campaign is going quite poorly and Obama’s is going well. Imposing artificial balance on this reality would be a bias of its own…Our sincere answer is that of the factors driving coverage of this election — and making it less enjoyable for McCain to read his daily clip file than for Obama — ideological favoritism ranks virtually nil.

A number of media types have been making the similar points of late. Campbell Brown has defended her controversial questioning of McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds saying “When you have Candidate A saying the sky is blue, and Candidate B saying it’s a cloudy day, I look outside and I see, well, it’s a cloudy day, I should be able to tell my viewers, ‘Candidate A is wrong, Candidate B is right.’ And at a Smith Foundation panel last night Steven Rendall of the media watchdog Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting suggested that the bad press may just be a result of bad behavior on McCain’s part. Of course Obama is not all sunshine and unicorns when it comes to dealing with the press.

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FBNY is uptown at the Time Warner Center attending day one of the two day Time Warner Political Summit. Currently we’re watching Campbell Brown moderate a panel that includes Time‘s Rick Stengel, CNN’s Jon Klein, Vanity Fair‘s Graydon Carter, and Politico‘s Jim VandeHei. Catch the play by play on FBNY’s twitter.

Brown forces Zahn’s hand @ CNN

Roughly 55 hours after Campbell Brown announced she was leaving NBC, and a mere 24 hours after CNN announced Brown’s arrival, Paula Zahn has resigned from CNN. Here’s the internal memo:

July 24, 2007
To: CNN U.S. Staff
From: Jon Klein

Paula Zahn has announced today that she will be leaving CNN. We are grateful for her dedication, professionalism and class over the last six years, as she has presided over our coverage of such significant news stories as 9/11, the launch of the war in Iraq, national elections and natural disasters, among many others.

In addition, she has used her on-air platform to tap into issues that were underrepresented in the national dialogue through her recent Out in the Open series, and the entire Paula Zahn Now team should be extremely proud of their work.

Paula’s last day on the air will be next Thursday, August 2. Throughout the coming weeks, we will be utilizing substitute hosts at 8pm leading up to the November launch of a new program anchored by Campbell Brown. Additional details will be forthcoming.

Earlier this afternoon, Paula shared the news with her staff and she has asked me to pass along the following message from her:

To All,

It is with mixed emotions that I announce my departure from CNN, effective Thursday, August 2nd. I’d like to take this opportunity to express my tremendous respect for my good friends and colleagues, their talent and high standards.

It’s been an extraordinary journey since my first day on the job, September 11th, 2001. During my 6 years with CNN, we’ve covered the war in Iraq, the devastation of Hurrican Katrina, the death of a Pope and the massacre at Virginia Tech. I am enormously proud of the work we’ve done covering these stories as a team.

Now is the right time for CNN and me to move ahead on different paths. I wish good luck and success to everyone I was fortunate to work with. And for the first time in 30 years, I plan to take a break between jobs and catch my breath before I take on my next role.

— Paula

King and his wife flank the Trumps

The short hallway between the “Pool Room” and bar acted as a sort of cosmic, generational media portal last night at the Four Seasons, where a pair of cocktail parties — one celebrating Larry King‘s 50 years in broadcasting (a.k.a the “old people room”), the other celebrating the New York Observer‘s redesigned paper and Web site (a.k.a the “kids room”) — were in full, boozy, media-centric swing.

In the “Old People Room”: King and his television and famous New York pals, like Joan Rivers, Donald and Melania Trump, the View‘s Barbara Walters (at one point Trump and Walters were just feet from each other, but didn’t appear to acknowledge each other) and Joy Behar, Campbell Brown, Mario Cuomo, Lou Dobbs, Phil Donahue and Marlo Thomas, Tina Brown, Jeff Greenfield, Ron Howard, Time Inc. managing editor Jim Kelly, Keith Kelly, Ray Kelly, Oprah B.F.F. Gayle King, Calvin Klein, Time Warner chief Dick Parsons, Sandra Bernhard, Jerry Stiller, Arliss actor Robert Wuhl, Mort Zuckerman, American Morning‘s newly-installed Kiran Chetry, Glenn Beck, Montel Williams, James Carville, Tom Wolfe, Andy Rooney and artist Peter Max, whose colorful rendering of King served as the room’s centerpiece.

In the “Kids Room”: 23-year-old Observer owner Jared Kushner held court with twentysomething bloggers and their youthful bosses, like Gawker’s Choire Sicha, Radar‘s Jeff Bercovici and Maer Roshan, Page Six‘s Corynne Steindler, Slate‘s Jacob Weisberg, Domino‘s Deborah Needleman, WWD‘s Irin Carmon, and HuffPo’s Julia Allison, Katharine Thomson and Rachel Sklar. Fittingly, Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, chose the Observer party over King’s.

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