TV’S MAD SCRAMBLE AT MURRAY TRIAL

Delivery of the involuntary-manslaughter verdict in the Conrad Murray trial was broadcast by virtually every television network, cable news channel, and Los Angeles station on Monday, most devoting at least an hour to discussions about it and others treating it as if they were calling the play-by-play after a winning play at the World Series. [...]

A BEVY OF COMEDY WRITERS ASSEMBLED FOR OSCARCAST

Call it the Academy Awards Comedy Show, because that is what it will apparently amount to, judging from a Los Angeles Times report today (Monday) that describes how co-producer Brett Ratner has brought on board a host of comedy writers for the February telecast — from those working on such TV shows as Saturday Night [...]

CNN WRESTLES WITH SHOWING JACKSON AUTOPSY PHOTO

A graphic autopsy photograph of the nude body of Michael Jackson that was introduced as evidence at the Conrad Murray trial on Tuesday was not initially displayed on CNN. The cable news network’s decision not to show the photo was praised by celebrity criminal attorney Mark Geragos, who had acted as Jackson’s attorney at the [...]

CONRAD MURRAY TRIAL APP RACKS UP BIG SALES

Ordinarily trial coverage by local television stations does not usually generate much ad revenue — if any at all. Advertisers generally don’t regard such coverage as a fitting environment for sales pitches. And then there’s the problem of where and when to run such ads. But KTTV, the Fox-owned station in Los Angeles that is [...]

PEPSI TO SPEND $60 MILLION ON X FACTOR

It’s not on the air yet and therefore there are no ratings to indicate how many viewers will watch, but Pepsi-Cola is so confident that Simon Cowell’s The X Factor will become a hit that it has agreed to spend $60 million on it in its first season, the Los Angeles Times reported today (Thursday). [...]

GRAMMYS DRAW BIGGEST CROWD SINCE 2001

Sunday night’s CBS telecast of the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards drew an average of 27.56 million viewers, peaking in the 9:00 p.m. half hour with 29.30 million — the biggest audience to watch the music awards show in at least a decade and up 7 percent from a year ago, when 25.87 million tuned in. [...]

TV SHOW ABOUT MICHAEL JACKSON’S AUTOPSY POSTPONED

Plans by Britain’s incarnation of the Discovery Channel to air a reenactment of the Michael Jackson autopsy have angered Jackson’s fans and family, who have launched a petition campaign urging the cable channel to cancel it. In a letter sent to Discovery chief David Zaslav on Wednesday, John Branca and John McClain, co-executors of the [...]

MUSIC VIDEO COUNTS 2 MILLION VIEWERS AND 200,000 MORE PER DAY

A masterfully edited montage of dance scenes from some 40 movies set to Kenny Loggins’s recording of “Footloose,” has quickly gone viral on YouTube, moving past the 2-million mark on Wednesday as it currently collects more than 200,000 additional viewers per day. The unidentified uploader apparently adjusted the speed of each clip so that the [...]

FORMER “JACKSON ASSOCIATE” PLANNING ANOTHER JACKSON DOCUMENTARY

Ron Newt, a self-described “gangsta pimp,” who sometimes calls himself Prince Diamond, claims that he has put together a 64-minute documentary using footage from the Jackson 5′s Triumph Tour. The tour covered 36 U.S. cities over 10 weeks in the summer of 1981. The celebrity website TMZ.com, which describes Newt as “a former Jackson associate,” [...]