Generalities

Have you ever wondered exactly how much the Mitt Romney or Barack Obama campaigns are paying for their television advertising?  If the companies that own most of those TV outlets get their wish, you won’t.

Executives from News Corporation, NBCUniversal, the Walt Disney Company and the National Association of Broadcasters met with officials at the FCC on Monday to express their displeasure at proposed public interest rules, according to FCC filings obtained by TVNewser.

The rules in question would force TV networks to share details online about political advertising, including the rates that political campaigns pay for ad time. The executives argued that by posting the rate information in their “public files” and posting those files online:

“[C]ompetitors in the market and commercial advertisers may anonymously glean highly sensitive pricing data, which, by law, will represent the lowest rates charged by the station to its most favored commercial advertisers,” adding that they were “[O]pen to discussing other options for keeping sensitive rate information out of the online public file.”

Read more

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.

Fox News host and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is getting a three-hour afternoon radio show from Cumulus Media Networks, Brian Stelter at the New York Times reports.

Stelter writes that the new show is something of an attack on talk-radio stalwart Rush Limbaugh, whose program airs at the same time in many markets. Huckabee, who hosts his eponymous Fox News show on the weekend, will add his radio show from noon-3PM Monday-Friday.  His deal with FNC is not expected to change… for now.

Mr. Huckabee will normally host the radio show from Florida, where he lives, but it will travel with him as he gives speeches and tapes his weekend Fox show. He said he would remain affiliated with Fox News for “as long as they keep renewing my contract,” which is up for renewal this year.

The wait is over. China’s CCTV is ready to launch its English-language network, CCTV America. Launching with four hours of programming, the service will focus on North and South American issues, as well as Asian news and views. Among the programs on tap are a newsmagazine, a business program and a”panel” show.

CCTV will have to compete with a number of other international news channels for channel space, including Al Jazeera English, BBC World News, CNN International and RT. The AP has more:

The expansion aims to counter negative images of China, especially over issues such as human rights, one-party communist rule, and Beijing’s policies in the restive western regions of Xinjiang and Tibet.

While it enjoys top-level access to Chinese officialdom, state control tightly restricts CCTV’s reporting about China, leading critics to question what special advantages it can offer over other global networks.

Read more

Say hello to “Atlantis Cable News,” or “ACN” for short.

ACN is the fictional cable news channel at the heart of Aaron Sorkin‘s upcoming HBO drama “The Newsroom,” slated to debut this Summer.

A source close to the show tells TVNewser that HBO is leaning towards launching the series on Sunday, June 24th, most likely after the season premiere of vampire drama “True Blood.”

Atlantis Cable News exists in Sorkin’s universe as part of a media conglomerate, Atlantis World Media, led by CEO Leona Lansing, played by Jane Fonda.

The program may exist in Sorkin’s universe, but that universe shares many similarities with our own. When “The Newsroom” debuts, episodes will focus around actual recent news events. The original pilot script for the program (you can read the first page here) was about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and one episode currently in development is about the death of Osama bin Laden, our source says.

Sorkin’s original script had the main character Will McCallister (Jeff Daniels) host his program “News Night” at a network called “UBS,” an overt reference to the classic film “Network” which was set at a channel with the same name. Sorkin and HBO have decided to move away from that homage for when the program finally launches.

We are told that one of the reasons for the change from UBS to ACN is the ability to “own,” the name, and create accompanying materials like merchandise and websites.

ACN may be fictional, but it will have a very real presence on the Web, according to someone close to the production. HBO has already secured atlantiscablenews.com and www.atantisworldmedia.com, and is expected to build out pages on both websites. Right now a visit to www.atlantiscablenews.com reveals a blank page, except for the words “I don’t think you should be looking at this page,” but that will change later this year.

Read more

Featuring the Florida and Nevada primaries, the week of January 30, 2012 should have been an eventful one for the cable news channels. In the end, everything remained more or less the same. Fox News Channel was the top cable news outlet for the week, placing third in primetime among all ad-supported cable nets with 1.993M total viewers. FNC placed fourth in total day with 1.123M.

MSNBC placed 25th in primetime and 28th in total day with 815,000 and 454,000 viewers, respectively. CNN placed 31st in primetime and total day, drawing 637,000 and 402,000 viewers.

Among the business networks: CNBC placed 51st in primetime with 232,000 viewers, and 50th in total day with 180,000. Fox Business Network continues to tread water, placing 89th in primetime and 86th in total day with 51,000 and 56,000 viewers, respectively.

Current TV fared even worse, placing 90th in primetime and 95th in total day, with 50,000 and 22,000 viewers.

Read more

In his Sunday New York Times column Ross Douthat took the media to task for their reporting opinion of the Komen foundation’s decision to pull some funding meant for Planned Parenthood — a decision that was reversed after that media coverage, of the social and traditional varieties. “In story after story, journalists explicitly passed judgment on Komen for creating a controversy where none need ever have existed,” Douthat writes.

Three truths, in particular, should be obvious to everyone reporting on the Komen-Planned Parenthood controversy. First, that the fight against breast cancer is unifying and completely uncontroversial, while the provision of abortion may be the most polarizing issue in the United States today. Second, that it’s no more “political” to disassociate oneself from the nation’s largest abortion provider than it is to associate with it in the first place. Third, that for every American who greeted Komen’s shift with “anger and outrage” (as Andrea Mitchell put it), there was probably an American who was relieved and gratified.

A day after grilling the founder and CEO of the nation’s largest breast cancer advocacy group over its decision to pull some funding of Planned Parenthood, Andrea Mitchell, a breast cancer survivor, led her show with the group’s reversal today.

The decision, and its reversal coming around 11:15am this morning, have been a big story on the morning shows and cable news channels today. The news was the lead on both “NBC Nightly News” and “ABC World News” last night.

On her show Thursday, Mitchell said to Nancy Brinker, the founder and CEO of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure: “We’ve known each other a long time… But I come to you today, you know, expressing the anger of a lot of people … channeling through them, you see it on Twitter, you see it everywhere.”

On her Fox News show today, Megyn Kelly reported that Komen says, “politics played no part in its original decision to cut Planned Parenthood’s grant and that outside pressure did not play a part in today’s decision to reverse course.”

Last month, we reported that ABC’s “Good Morning America,” in an increasingly close battle with NBC’s “Today,”  re-named a week of programming on a holiday week to eliminate the ratings from the national averages. In today’s New York Times, Bill Carter writes a front-page article examining tactics of trickery broadcast networks use when it comes to ratings:

NBC took the opposite path of ABC with the use of the term “special” in its presentation of the Republican primary debate on Jan. 23. Careful viewers noticed that the debate was labeled a regular edition of the network’s ratings-challenged newsmagazine program, “Rock Center with Brian Williams” — one that, as it turned out, just happened to double the show’s usual audience to just over 7.1 million viewers.

Networks closely track the gimmicks their competitors use to lift ratings, and it is a hotly debated subject within the industry, but most executives avoid speaking publicly about it so as not to be critical of tactics that they sometimes use themselves.

HBO has released the full-length trailer for its upcoming movie “Game Change,” and television news seems to be a major plot point. There is a lot of talk about “creating a dynamic moment,” YouTube and the 24-hour news cycle, while an interview Sarah Palin gave to ABC’s Charles Gibson is featured as a turning point. There is also a Gibson body-double, pretty spot-on, albeit brief.

WATCH:

Fox News had the top 13 programs in cable news in January, with a repeat of “The O’Reilly Factor” not only topping every program on MSNBC and CNN, but “Studio B” and “Fox & Friends” as well.

As usual, the top program in cable news was “The O’Reilly Factor,” averaging 2.909M total viewers and 607,000 adults 25-54.

The top program on MSNBC was “The Rachel Maddow Show,” which placed 14th overall with 976,000 total and 234,000 demo viewers. MSNBC shows rounded out numbers 15-18 as well. The top CNN program was the 10 PM airing of “AC360,” which drew 765,000 total and 281,000 demo viewers. “AC360″ placed higher than any MSNBC program in the demo.

The full cable program rankers are below.

Read more