Zachary Roth

It's true that, as Howard Kurtz notes today in The Washington Post, Barack Obama is getting some pretty adulatory press coverage lately. Still, Sen. Obama did win the first nominating contest, against what looked at one time to be pretty long odds, so a certain amount of the praise is
only to be expected.

John McCain, on the other hand, finished fourth in Iowa (though he looks likely to win in New Hampshire tonight). And yet, in recent weeks, I'd argue, he's received equally glowing coverage, just as he did in 2000.

Here's one explanation for why -- and not one which reflects well on campaign reporters.

Observer Media Mensch of the Year Nikki Finke is reporting that, thanks to the writers strike, NBC will not broadcast a traditional Golden Globe awards ceremony this year.

Instead, she writes, "a stripped down announcements telecast will be aired by NBC News. It will consist of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association handing out Golden Globes to the winners, who will then pick up the awards and pass through a press room for photos and interviews."

The Oscars, by the way, are in 48 days.

A story in today's Wall Street Journal has kicked off the latest round of fevered Lou-Dobbs-for-President speculation. Perhaps with one eye on his ratings, CNN's Mr. Dobbs is still playing coy about a possible independent bid, telling the paper: ""I haven't got the personality or nature to be a politician," but adding, "I cannot say never."

Say what you will about Mr. Dobbs' populism and his obsession with illegal immigration, but at least there's evidence of significant public support for his platform -- which is more than you can say about that other independent who's flirting with a presidential run.

Real-estate-publicist-turned-sex-columnist Kelly Kreth has been fired from her job at the New York Press after only four months, The Observer's Real Estate blog reports.

One of the strange subplots to the Democratic primary race has been the ongoing feud between the Obama campaign and liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Mr. Krugman has argued that Sen. Obama's healthcare plan is too incremental, and more generally, that the senator's intention of working with Republicans and their allies, rather than taking them on, is naive and doomed to failure.

But could there be a thaw in the relationship? A few days ago, Sen. Obama told Tim Russert that his healthcare plan might involve a penalty for those who didn't get insurance, in order to deter the problem of free-riders and get closer to universality -- something Mr. Krugman had been calling for. In response, the Times-man sounded optimistic.  read more »

One day after being announced as a "media reporter" for Gawker, Richard Morgan has quit—and dished to New York magazine's Daily Intel about the experience. Choice quote: "Jesus spent three days in Hell. I could only handle one."

And of course, Nick Denton has responded, in similarly unconciliatory terms.

Gawker catches Salon in an embarrassing (and pretty funny) gaffe: The online mag recently got in touch with "some of their favorite experts and opinion-makers" and asked for their thoughts on the presidential race. But in trying to contact Savage Love writer and all-around alt-weekly bigshot Dan Savage, they accidentally contacted this Dan Savage.

Salon didn't realize its mistake even when they got back a barely readable response (Gawker has the screengrab) which included the observation that Hilary Clinton "has no penis ... as far as we know" -- which they briefly posted.

This is a bit off the beaten track, but we couldn't help noticing that an ongoing inter-blog discussion about the socio-political implications of the official "Greatest TV Show Ever", The Wire (whose upcoming season, by the way, takes viewers inside the newsroom of The Baltimore Sun), has been joined by none other than Wire-creator (and former Sun reporter) David Simon himself.

The conversation was sparked by this rare Wire critique by Mark Bowden in The Atlantic.

And, of course, The Observer also weighed in on the show this week.

TV Newser confirms that CBS News' PublicEye blog, once described as the "de facto ombudsman of CBS News," has been shuttered.

The former editor of the site, Matthew Felling, had been laid off last month as part of a round of job cuts at CBS Interactive -- though CBS had at the time insisted that the site would continue.

The Houston Chronicle reports that, in an interview, Phil Griffin, who oversees MSNBC's primetime lineup, "reject[ed] the notion that MSNBC has used [Keith Olbermann's] show and others as part of a deliberately more contrarian tone toward the Bush administration as an alternative to Fox News Channel."

Mr. Griffin told the paper: "Keith was doing this show before it was popular to beat up on this president or to beat up on this war ... Because of his point of view and the 'Special Comments,' people think this is our strategy. This isn't a strategy. This is Keith."

But two months ago, The Times reported:  read more »

A long letter written by Michael Moore to friends and supporters has been posted on the Drudge Report (and now on Gawker, whose link will likely last longer). Mr. Moore writes that he's not endorsing any of the Democratic candidates for president "at this point." But the most interesting tidbit comes a bit further down.

Mr. Moore reveals that he was asked by Rolling Stone to do a cover story in the form of separate Q&As with the three top Democrats, under the understanding that if any of the candidates didn't participate, the story wouldn't run.

He writes: "Obama and Edwards agreed. Mrs. Clinton said no, and the cover story was thus killed."

Of course, this isn't the first time during this campaign that the Hillary camp has successfully nixed a major magazine story about her.

Looks like those rumors you might have heard about Tucker Carlson being on the outs at MSNBC might have been off the mark after all. TV Newser says it's hearing from insiders that the network has no plans to cancel the conservative pundit's show.

Maybe he should thank these guys.

In the wake of OK! magazine's exclusive on Jamie Lynn Spears' pregnancy, The New York Times writes about the growth of checkbook journalism--that is, paying sources for the rights to stories. 

It's hard to believe that, with competitive pressures increasing across the industry, the trend won't soon migrate from celebrity journalism to more "respectable" outlets, as it has already begun to do in Britain.  Right now the taboo against paying for a story is strong enough to keep most non-celebrity US publications from doing it, but for how long?  

And would such a development necessarily be a bad thing?

Speaking of Ron Paul ... blogger Ben Fritz catches NBC's Tim Russert making an embarrassing error during his interview with the Republican presidential candidate on last Sunday's Meet The Press.

At one point, Mr. Russert asked his guest: "You say you're a strict constructionist of the Constitution, and yet you want to amend the Constitution to say that children born here should not automatically be U.S. citizens."  read more »

This is from over the wekend, but deserves some attention nonetheless, since it's a spat that's clearly not over.

Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul said Saturday that Fox News, which has excluded him from an upcoming presidential debate, is "scared" of him.

According to The Boston Globe, Mr. Paul told a crowd at a New Hampshire diner: "They are scared of me and don't want my message to get out, but it will. They are propagandists for this war and I challenge them on the notion that they are conservative."  read more »

While we're linking to end-of-year lists ... here's Inside Cable News' awkwardly introduced "list of the hottest and not hottest cable news related stories for 2007."

Almost every prominent cable-news personality, from Campbell Brown to Maria Bartiromo to Shepard Smith, makes it onto the list one way or another -- with one obvious exception: Bill O'Reilly. Guess this year the FNC anchor was neither hot nor not hot, but just sort of ... luke warm.

At last, the suspense is over. The Huffington Post has revealed its "Media Winners of 2007".

The list includes a few entries you'd expect -- Rupert Murdoch, Brian Williams, Stephen Colbert, Oprah -- and a few you might not: Jezebel, Portfolio, and the Upright Citizens Brigade.

Here's something else we'd like to see from the HuffPo crew: Predictions, a year out, for the 2008 list.

Did Charlie Gibson just take a veiled shot at Tim Russert?

The ABC News anchor—whose show was the only network evening newscast to gain viewers in 2007—gave The Washington Post a sneak preview of his plan for moderating the Democratic and Republican debates Saturday night from New Hampshire: "I'm going to put a question on the table, and to the extent that I can, I'm going to disappear," he said. "It's not about me. It's not about showing I can ask a clever question. It's about them."  read more »

CNN likes to say that it's the network people turn to when major world news events occur.  And one reason why there may be some truth to that boast was revealed in the wake of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto last week.

CNN was the only American network that had a full-time producer, Mohsin Naqvi, at the site of the rally where Ms. Bhutto was killed Thursday, reports The New York Times.  Mr. Naqvi had spoken to Ms. Bhutto earlier that day, and reported for CNN by phone throughout the day. By contrast, Fox and MSNBC were forced to rely on phone reports from freelance journalists in the country.   read more »

More bad news for Katie Couric and CBS: Evening News lost 1.1 million viewers over the last 12 months, according to ratings numbers for the third week of December reported by the New York Post.

By contrast, Brian Williams of NBC lost just 164,000 viewers, and ABC's Charlie Gibson gained 38,000 over the same period.

Somewhere, Dan Rather is smiling.

Since returning to the air December 3, Don Imus has seen many of his regular guests come back to the show.

But one probably won't be returning. During an on-air conversation with the columnist James Brady Wednesday, the Post's Page Six reports, Mr. Imus had these words for the former NBC anchor: "He [Brokaw] is not the most courageous person I've ever met in my life," Imus told his listeners on Wednesday. "He's not the guy I'd want to be in a foxhole with."

That came after Mr. Brokaw said in an interview last week that Mr. Imus "should have been fired" for his comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team last April.

The Times today published a correction to yesterday's disputed sub-hed:

The subheading with a front-page headline on Wednesday for an article about discussions between four top White House lawyers and the Central Intelligence Agency over whether to destroy videotapes showing secret interrogations of members of Al Qaeda referred imprecisely to the White House’s position thus far on the matter. While Bush administration officials have acknowledged some discussions leading up to the destruction of the tapes in November 2005, as the article noted, the White House itself has not officially said anything on the subject, so its role was not "wider than it said."  read more »

It's been a while since we've had a good Bush-administration-vs.-New-York-Times flare-up. But today the White House took the unusual step of issuing a public statement demanding that The Times retract the subhed to a front-page story in today's paper.

The Times reported today that four White House lawyers were more involved than had previously been acknowledged in the CIA's destruction of interrogation tapes. The story's subhed read: "White House Role Was Wider Than It Said."  read more »

Russian president Vladimir Putin has been named Time's 2007 Person of the Year.

Let's just get this out of the way now: Naming someone Person of the Year doesn't imply a positive judgment on the person by Time's editors. It just means they think he was influential.  read more »

Tina Brown, having run magazines and briefly written a newspaper column, has a new venture. According to the Post's Liz Smith, Ms. Brown, the former editor of both Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, has signed a deal to bring projects and story ideas to HBO.

Post-Sopranos, the cable network may need all the help it can get generating buzz and new ideas. And few are better at that than Ms. Brown.

This isn't Ms. Brown's first foray into television, of course. From 2004 to 2005, she hosted a weekly interview show on CNBC, which drew high-profile guests but struggled in the ratings.

Back in September, The Observer wrote about how Hillary Clinton's campaign had forged a surprisingly friendly relationship with the Democratic netroots by carefully feeding them scoops and nuggets of information. That strategy, we reported, was masterminded largely by Peter Daou, who runs the campaign's internet outreach.

Today comes perhaps the apotheosis of that phenomenon, as Mr. Daou takes to The Huffington Post to promote a new Web video and Web site on behalf of the Clinton campaign...

A propos of the friendly argument I had last week with Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici over whether it's in Democrats' interests to appear on Fox News, I should note that Hillary Clinton was on Fox and Friends -- along with all the other major morning shows -- this morning.

So in this case at least, her campaign appears to agree with Jeff.

Oops! NBC reported this morning that Rep. Steve King, a key Iowa G.O.P. congressman, had endorsed Mitt Romney. Then a little while later, the network took it back, saying on its Web site that in fact Rep. King is backing Fred Thompson.

To NBC's credit, it didn't try to hide its error. Its site explains: "Team Romney is in the back of the room looking bewildered. They were all here, leading all the press to conclude that it was an endorsement for Romney."

You can see the progression of updates here.

Advertising Age picks out ten 2007 magazine covers it loved. For our money, the list's most weirdly eye-catching entry is Garden and Gun's black-and-white image of a sophisticated-looking man and woman with a Berretta.

There are also a few more familiar entries...

Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media, will take over as managing editor of the company's flagship site, Gawker.com, The New York Times reports, citing three employees.

Mr. Denton had been looking for a replacement since Choire Sicha resigned as managing editor at the end of last month, and indicated in a job listing for the position that he wants the site to break and develop more stories.

Almost three weeks after Perry Bacon's story on false rumors that Barack Obama is a Muslim appeared on the front page of The Washington Post, The New York Times has weighed in on the flap over the piece.

When the story first appeared, it was criticized almost immediately by Columbia Journalism Review and a host of liberral bloggers, who argued that it didn't do enough to clearly tell readers that the rumors were false. Soon after, Chris Daly, a Boston University journalism professor wrote a post that made an issue of Mr. Bacon's age -- 27.  read more »

There may be no end in sight to the writers strike, but the late-night shows could soon be back on the air anyway.

The Writers Guild said over the weekend that it would be willing to sign individual agreements with media companies, and the independent company that owns The Late Show with David Letterman said it plans to take advantage of that move to work towards a deal, according to several reports.  read more »

Over the last few weeks, we've learned from several reports that NBC is planning a series of layoffs at NBC News and MSNBC. Today, TV Newser provides some names.

According to the site, Davidson Goldin, MSNBC's editorial director; Amy Rosenblum, the senior producer of the 10am hour of The Today Show; Joe Alicastro, a veteran NBC News producer; and Jean Harper, a senior prodcuer at Nightly News who has worked with Brian Williams for many years are all on the way out.

Mr. Goldin's likely departure was first reported last week by The New York Post.

In addition to speaking to the Wall Street Journal newsroom, Rupert Murdoch also found time to sit down with Fox's Neal Cavuto yesterday, after the News Corp. chief's bid to take over Dow Jones was offically approved by shareholders.

The Huffington Post has picked out some choice excerpts from the conversation, a few of which follow after the jump...  read more »

So it looks like, just in time for the holidays, MTV Networks has done an about-face and decided that it's not going to cut benefits for its many freelancers after all. Cue much rejoicing.

Gawker has the memo...

I have to politely take issue with Portfolio.com's Jeff Bercovici, who agrees with Chris Wallace that Democrats are wrong not to go on Fox News. Jeff writes:

Democrats don't avoid Fox as some kind of sop to the MoveOn.org crowd. They do it for the same reason they limit their press availability in general: because they're afraid of getting tripped up, caught in a flip-flop or a contradiction.

But this isn't quite right, in my view. It's true that, as Jeff says, Democrats are more likely to get tripped up during an interview on Fox News than on other networks. But they didn't start consistently snubbing Fox until liberal activists, led by watchdog groups like Media Matters, made it into an issue...  read more »

Fox News' Chris Wallace unloads to The Politico about the Democratic presidential candidates' refusal to appear on debates moderated by his network:

"Just imagine if the Republicans, under pressure from right-to-life groups, refused to appear on CNN or MSNBC. I think there would be holy unshirted hell. I think there would be such talk about these people being captives of the extreme right wing and why are they afraid to answer questions. And I think the absence of that is very telling.

"At this point, it has become kind of a loyalty test inside the Democratic Party, ... pandering to the far-left-wing. And we live with it."  read more »

David Letterman is winning the battle of the re-runs, the New York Post reports.

Since the writers strike began over a month ago, forcing both Mr. Letterman of CBS and his late-night rival, Jay Leno of NBC, into re-runs, Mr. Letterman's numbers are down only around 21 percent, whle Mr. Leno's are off by 40 percent. Mr. Leno still leads, but, says the Post, "Letterman hasn't been this close to Leno in years."  read more »

The judge in the trial of Canadian media mogul Conrad Black has announced she will consider a range of between 78 and 97 months (or six and a half to eight years) in sentencing, reports the Chicago Sun-Times. That's seen as good news for Mr. Black, who could have faced 20 years after being convicted in July of fraud and obstruction of justice.

Mr. Black is expected to deliver a lengthy court-room speech before his sentencing later today. We'll keep you posted.  read more »

MSNBC's much-noted shift left continues apace. First, on Friday, Dan Abrams used his blog to announce a new series, Bush League Justice, which looks at the politicization of the Justice Department under President Bush.

Writes Mr. Abrams: "This series is long overdue. The scandal with the firings of the U.S. Attorneys under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales exposed the underbelly of this administration’s penchant for putting politics over objectivity and qualifications. We now hope to dissect the subject more fully and help spur change."

Then yesterday, TV Newser revealed that ...  read more »

"There is a chance that historians will examine this period in American history and wonder if journalism left the field."

That's David Carr in today's New York Times, who considers the future of investigative reporting in the wake of last week's layoffs at the Chicago Reader and the Washington City Paper.

But, in looking for a silver lining, Mr. Carr offers this sort-of-unconvincing argument...  read more »

That was quick!  On Friday, we noted that NBC had rejected an ad from the conservative group Freedom's Watch that asked viewers to think of U.S. soldiers in Iraq over the holidays.  The network had said its decision was based on the fact that the ad contained a link to the group's Web site, which has explicitly political content, and therefore violaterd the network's prohibition on controversial issue ads.

But over the weekend -- after Newt Gingrich had taken to Fox News to urge conservatives to boycott NBC -- came word that the network had changed its mind.   In a statement released Saturday evening and reported by the Associated Press, NBC declared: ""We have reviewed and changed our ad standards guidelines and made the decision that our policy will apply to content only and not to a referenced Web site."  read more »

The News Corp. shakeup continues.

New York Times new boy Tim Arango reports that James Murdoch, Rupert's younger son, will step down as the head of British Sky Broadcasting in order to take on a newly created position which makes him the number 3 executive in News Corp., behind his father and New Corp. president Peter Chernin.

The Times confirms that the timing of the move is related to News Corp.'s acquisition of Dow Jones, which goes into effect next week.

In a memo sent this morning to Time staffers and posted on Romenesko, managing editor Rick Stengel announced that the magazine has hired Salon political reporter Michael Scherer. Mr. Scherer, who has also worked at Mother Jones, will report and produce videos for Time.com, as well as writing for the magazine, and will be based in the Washington DC bureau.

Mr. Stengel writes: "Michael represents the new TIME correspondent: adept on-line, on-air and in print."

Keith Olbermann has raised his profile and his numbers at MSNBC in part by taking on other cable hosts. And last night, notes TV Newser, he opened another campaign, naming CNN's Lou Dobbs as the"Worst Person in the World" (there's a new one every night, so don't take it literally).

Mr. Dobbs provoked Mr. Olbermann's ire with a tirade of his own, attacking LA Times columnist Tim Rutten on his Monday show, after Mr. Rutten wrote a column that argued that CNN devoted too much of its recent Republican debate to immigration, as a way to help Mr. Dobbs' show, which focuses on the issue.

   read more »

Karl Rove's memoir, whose rights will be auctioned beginning today, should fetch around $3 million, according to an unnamed publisher who plans to bid on it and spoke to The New York Post's Keith Kelly.

That would be significantly less than memoirs by Tony Blair, Teddy Kennedy, and both Bill and Hillary Clinton, all of whom were represented, like Mr. Rove, by Washington uber-lawyer/agent Bob Barnett.

The publisher says Mr. Rove is "moving beyond the cliches," though there was little evidence of that in Mr. Rove's first column for Newsweek.

Political junkies know Mark Fabiani and Chris Lehane as ruthless Democratic spin doctors who'll stop at nothing to take down a challenger. Now, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers has signed up the duo to help it reverse its woeful public image as it does battle with the striking writers, The Los Angeles Times reports.

The AMPTP is also bringing in a third political pro, Steve Schmidt, who worked on President Bush's 2004 re-election and is now a close adviser to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Whether an image makeover will help the producers remains to be seen.

NBC is planning to get rid of an entire level of MSNBC's management team, as well as making major cuts at NBC News, according to The New York Post. Two senior MSNBC staffers -- head of primetime programming Bill Wolf, and editorial director Davidson Goldin -- are set to see their jobs eliminated. But the cable network's top shows -- those hosted by Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, and Dan Abrams -- are said to be sacrosanct, and will escape the cuts unscathed.

As for CNBC, it too will be unaffected, says The Post, because NBC chief Jeff Zucker wants it at full strength to compete with Fox Business.  read more »

How did this go unnoticed for so long?

In Kurt Andersen's New York magazine column, published Monday, he casually spills the beans on Roger Ailes' preferred method of press control. Mr. Andersen writes that the Fox News chief "once threatened to send a camera crew to stalk my 3- and 5-year-old children in preemptive retaliation for a magazine story I was writing about his man Rush Limbaugh."

Thanks to Gawker for reading to the end.

Curious about how Fox News has covered this week's blockbuster news that, according to a National Intelligence Estimate prepared by the CIA, Iran shut down its nuclear-weapons program in 2003? This blogger has the run-down.

Short unsurprising story: They've hardly covered it at all, and when they have, it's been to question the report's accuracy.