OLBERMANN SUES CURRENT, CITING NUMEROUS “DISASTERS”

It didn’t take Keith Olbermann long to file his threatened lawsuit again Current TV and its owners who fired him. Exactly one week after the channel severed its ties to Olbermann, with whom it had a 5-year, $50-million deal, Olbermann filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court charging that he had been forced to […]

LIBYA COVERAGE: AL-JAZEERA FIRST WITH CRITICS; FOX NEWS, WITH VIEWERS

Al-Jazeera English attracted most of the critical praise for its coverage of the assault on Tripoli by Libyan rebels this week, but with only a handful of cable outlets carrying it in the U.S., that’s about all it got. Among the major cable news outfits, Fox News Channel drew the most viewers, averaging 950,000. CNN […]

WEINER CAPTURES 33 PERCENT OF CABLE NEWS’S TIME

Cable news networks devoted 33 percent of their time last week to the sexting scandal involving Congressman Anthony Weiner. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the broadcast network television newscasts devoted 14 percent of their time to the scandal, slightly above online news websites, which nevertheless amounted to 14 percent of their news […]

IS WHITE HOUSE SNUBBING FOX NEWS AGAIN?

Reviving the conflict between the White House and Fox News, Fox News Sunday‘s host Chris Wallace on Sunday complained that while the White House had made Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates available to NBC, ABC, and CBS for their Sunday-morning public-affairs programs, it did not make them available for […]

AL-JAZEERA WINS PLAUDITS FOR EGYPT COVERAGE

Al-Jazeera continued non-stop broadcasting out of Egypt on Monday even as Egyptian authorities made what appeared to be clumsy moves to shut it down. The government has blocked entrance to the Arab news network’s offices in Cairo, arrested at least two of its news crews then released them after confiscating their equipment. And while all […]

GAY MAG “THE ADVOCATE” TO LAUNCH NIGHTLY CABLE NEWSCAST

The pioneering but relatively moderate gay-oriented magazine The Advocate, which in recent years has found itself on the outs (no pun intended) with more militant gay activists, plans to launch a cable and Internet news program focusing on gay events and issues, Mediaite.com reported on Monday. The program will also use content from NBC News […]

CNN’S RATINGS FALL DESPITE INTENSE CRISIS COVERAGE

At a time when President Obama’s health care proposals dominated the news — and divided the nation — Fox News Channel, whose commentators led the attack on them, experienced its best quarter ever in ratings, the New York Times reported today (Tuesday). At the same time, CNN saw its rating plummet, with its primetime programming […]