McEnroe: "I Always Knew It Would Take Time"

John McEnroe says he "always knew" his CNBC talk show "would take time." In a NYT Q&A, Johnny Mac suggests the show hasn't been promoted well enough. And on the subject of his contract: It's "for one year, with a second year at their option. After nine months, they can choose to keep me. In my mind it's six to nine months, but I hope they'll stick with me, like Dennis Miller, who was renewed after hitting eight or nine months." His show debuted almost four months ago...

Cronkite: Election Woes Will Linger Until Spring

Walter Cronkite offered a surprising prediction on Larry King Live Friday night: "I believe that we're undoubtedly not going to know the results of this election. I don't want to knock you off the air on Monday night or anything, or Tuesday night. But I suspect that we're not going to know who the next president is, whether it is Bush or the new man, until very probably sometime in the early spring. There's so much controversy that they're planting, deliberately planting at the polls, that there's almost certainly to be a suit going back to the Supreme Court eventually, going through the other courts slowly first."

CNNfn Was "Directionless" & Boring, B&C Says

Broadcasting & Cable examines "Why CNNfn failed" in its Nov. 1 issue. "The network is so directionless, so unlikely to attract more viewers it's not worth keeping alive," the mag says. "CNNfn's problems lie as much in management as on the NASDAQ. Its executives simply made the network less interesting."
> "Fox News is openly talking about launching its own business-news network," John Higgins notes. "There will be red faces at CNN if it's a hit."

Brit Hume & John Kerry: Playground Pals

...They "shared a passion for cartoons instead of politics," Verne Gay writes in Newsday this weekend. "They met in kindergarten and hung together through fifth grade." // "We're all biased," Brit says, "but the questions is: How do you address that bias? If you're not careful, you're going to make a journalistic judgment that may be political, and I've got to be careful about that."