During President Obama’s speech to the National Defense University, he was interrupted a handful of times by a protester who called for him to shut down the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (video after the jump).

As so often happens when there is a heckler, news coverage of the speech spent some time talking about the heckler rather than the meat of the speech itself. No cable news channel dwelled on the protester, but both CNN and MSNBC spent time talking about her right after it concluded that would otherwise have been spent talking about what the President actually said. Fox News didn’t mention the protester at all right after the speech, even during a segment about the President’s comments on Guantanamo.

Here’s what was said on cable news right after the speech concluded:
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Former GOP VP candidate and Fox News contributor Sarah Palin has some kind words for CNN anchor Jake Tapper. Palin tweeted:

There’s something different, certainly refreshing, about Jake Tapper. I call it integrity and professionalism…. fb.me/Kjg5B3MR

— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) May 21, 2013

Palin linked to an interview with Tapper from Zap2It. Tapper talks about the Boston bombing coverage, as well as coverage of the Gosnell trial:
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President Obama is scheduled to comment on the disaster in Oklahoma at 10 AM and it is likely that all of the broadcast networks will break into regular programming to cover it.  ”CBS This Morning” went into the 9 AM hour to cover the fallout. We hear that “CTM” will stay live until 12 PM on the east coast covering the damage, and 10 AM pacific.

Update: “Our prayers are with the people of Oklahoma today,” Obama said. “Oklahoma needs to get everything that it needs right away.”

“If there is hope to hold onto, not just in Oklahoma but around the country, it is the knowledge that the good people there in Oklahoma are more prepared than most, and what they can be certain about is that Americans around the country will be right there with them,” he added.

Meanwhile, the news channels are sending their A-teams to Oklahoma to cover the fallout from the tornado.

As we noted yesterday, NBC has Brian Williams,  Lester Holt, Ann Curry, Harry Smith, Kate Snow, Anne Thompson and Dr. Nancy Snyderman in Oklahoma, as well as the Weather Channel team of Jim Cantore, Mike Bettes, and Mike Seidel.

ABC News has Sam Champion, Ginger Zee, David Muir and Alex Perez in Oklahoma. Byron Pitts, Mike Boettcher, and Cecilia Vega are also either in Moore or en route.

CBS has Norah O’Donnell anchoring from Moore, and Anna Werner on the ground, and Scott Pelley will anchor the “CBS Evening News” there this evening.
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ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl finds himself in an unusual and never comfortable position: he has become the news.

Karl has released a statement expressing “regret” after it was revealed that he inaccurately identified reviewing handwritten notes based on emails as having reviewed the actual emails in his bombshell “exclusive” on Benghazi. While Karl did say that his story was based on “summaries” on the web story, in the stories that aired on the ABC news broadcasts it was reported that ABC had “obtained” the emails.

The full emails, (the first of which was obtained by Jake Tapper) which were released later that week, revealed content and quotations that did not entirely match up with the notes that Karl was given, although they did support some of the issues Karl raised. That said, Karl and ABC News maintain that the crux of the reporting–the changing talking points–remains accurate.

“I regret that one email was quoted incorrectly and I regret that it’s become a distraction from the story, which still entirely stands,” said Karl in a statement. “I should have been clearer about the attribution. We updated our story immediately when new information became available.”

Karl became the story on cable news last week, and was even mentioned on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” where he was effectively accused of being used by Republicans by White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer. Karl was also one of the stories covered on “Reliable Sources.”
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Benghazi, the AP phone taps and the IRS scandal. It’s been quite a few days for the Obama administration and the journalists who cover it.

• On Benghazi: while the president believes “there’s no there, there,” CNN’s Jake Tapper got his hands on an email yesterday from then-Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes (brother of CBS News president David Rhodes) written three days after the attack. It was a version of an email that Tapper’s former ABC News colleague Jonathan Karl reported on last Friday.

• The Associated Press is not satisfied with Attorney General Eric Holder‘s statement on the breadth of phone tapping the news agency’s reporters were subjected to. Neither, for one, is the New York Times editorial board as well as dozens of other publishers, broadcasters and trade groups.

• But the biggest scandal appears to be the IRS’s selective targeting of conservative organizations. It was the lead on the evening newscasts last night and two of the three morning shows today (“Good Morning America” and “CBS This Morning”) and continues to be a hot topic on the cable news networks.

In a Behind the Curtain column, Politico’s Mike Allen and Jim VandHei write, “(T)he press, after years of being accused of being soft on Obama while being berated by West Wing aides on matters big and small, now has every incentive to be as ruthless as can be.”

Will they?

This morning starting at 11:30, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will hold a hearing on what exactly happened during the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya that resulted in the deaths of four people, including the U.S. Ambassador to Libya.

Fox News and CNN are planning live coverage of the hearings, with CNN bringing in Jake Tapper, Dana Bash, Wolf Blitzer and Arwa Damon to join the coverage. Fox News will have Bret Baier, Congressional correspondent Mike Emanuel, chief Washington correspondent James Rosen and Fox News contributor and Amb. John Bolton contributing.

Interestingly enough, it is quite likely that the Sunday public affairs shows will be part of the story. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice appeared on the network Sunday shows and argued that the attack was spontaneous and not premeditated. That now appears not to be the case, and some State Department officials say they knew that all along.

Elsewhere, The Washington Post profiles CBS News correspondent Sharyl Atkisson as “a persistent voice of media skepticism on Benghazi.”
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In the aftermath of the coverage of the Boston bombing, CNN continues to tweak its lineup.

A few astute viewers may have noticed that Wolf Blitzer has been filling in on “CNN Newsroom” for the last week or so at 1 PM, a few hours ahead of “The Situation Room” at 5 PM. Jake Tapper and Brooke Baldwin have also filled in on the early afternoon hours.

The move is not believed to be permanent, just an experiment tied to some major breaking news events, like the Bush Library dedication, president Obama’s news conference and developments in the bombing case. As with the “AC360″ format tweak though, if it works, it could very will stick around.

CNN claimed the second-place spot among the cable news networks in the busy news month of April, topping MSNBC in both Total Day and primetime for the first time in more than two years. The network also showed the most growth among its competition, up double digits among Total Viewers and triple digits in the A25-54 demographic compared to the same month last year.

The ratings for April 2013 (Nielsen Live + Same Day data):

• Primetime (Mon-Sun): 920,000 Total Viewers / 340,000 A25-54
• Total Day (Mon-Sun): 638,000 Total Viewers / 228,000 A25-54

The month of April was a busy one for all the cable news networks, with extended coverage of the Boston marathon bombing and subsequent manhunt as well as the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas. Every hour of CNN programming was up double or triple digits compared to April 2012, which was an especially slow month for the network. In Total Day, CNN was up +79% in Total Viewers and +109% in the A25-54 demographic. In primetime, the network was up +80% and +128%, respectively.

The 6pmET hour of “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer” showed the most growth of any cable news program in April, up +124% in Total Viewers and +224% in A25-54 viewers. “OutFront with Erin Burnett” posted its best month since launching in 2011, growing +145% in Total Viewers and +221% in the demo year-over-year. Piers Morgan‘s 9pmET program was also up significantly, growing +71% and +119%, respectively.

Two newcomers for CNN — Jake Tapper and Anthony Bourdain — also boosted their respective timeslots. Tapper’s 4pmET program is up +54% in Total Viewers and +108% in the A25-54 demographic compared to the same month last year, when the hour was home to “The Situation Room.” Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown” boosted the Sunday 9pmET hour by +122% and +440%, respectively.

“Anderson Cooper 360″ averaged 1.16 million Total Viewers and 431,000 A25-54 viewers for the month, making it the top rated show on CNN in both ratings measurements.

CNN’s release is after the jump. Read more

After a slow start, Jake Tapper‘s new CNN show “The Lead” is giving a lift to CNN’s 4pm hour. After a month on the air — including an extraordinarily busy news week last week which gave CNN some of its best numbers in a decade — the show is averaging 689,000 total viewers and 209,000 in the demo, through Monday’s show.

“The Lead” is up +28% in total viewers and up +62% in the demo compared to the same period last year on CNN. The show is in second place among cable networks ahead of MSNBC but trailing Fox News’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto” which has led the timeslot for 11 years.

Friday night capped off a long week for local, state and federal investigators, the people of Watertown, Cambridge and Boston and the media covering the manhunt for 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and this longer than most week in Boston. A few of the correspondents still on the scene last night had put in some of the longest days in a long time. “I guess I started working thursday at 5:00 a.m. and have been working straight through,” said NBC’s Kerry Sanders, a Boston area native, not long after Tsarnaev was taken into custody last night. “It’s hard to keep clear everything that’s been going on.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper began reporting Thursday morning too, through the chaotic overnight events of Friday morning, into late Friday afternoon. FNC’s Bill Hemmer reported for about 32 hours straight Thursday into Friday. And NBC’s Lester Holt, stationed in Watertown, a city which had been under siege all day, finally jubilant as local, state and federal officials made their way out of town. “They were preparing for the worst. Now they are basking in the applause of the crowd. I may be punchy because I have gone 40-some hours without sleep,” said Holt, adding, “I have a big grin on my face. This does take me back to one of the very few good memories of the time related around 9/11. That was when we recognized the hard job our first responders do. They got their credit. That’s what we are seeing here in Watertown tonight.”

Holt, Sanders and dozens of other correspondents and anchors — network and local — who’ve worked long hours all week, are back on the air this morning as the full investigation into the bombings gets underway.