Salon.com > Cable News

Howard Kurtz faces the rarest threat of all: Pundit accountability

Mon, 06 May 2013 12:45:00 +0000

The video of CNN "Reliable Sources" host Howard Kurtz receiving an adversarial questioning by two media reporters on his own show, which happened Sunday, is remarkable, mostly because that doesn't ever really happen to TV pundits. (Piers Morgan is questioned by U.K. parliamentary committees, not by Jake Tapper.) The host was being treated like a scandal-plagued politician, not like the most prominent media critic in the country.

Kurtz just got the ax from the Daily Beast, following a column in which he attacked Jason Collins, an NBA player who recently came out as gay, for not disclosing that he'd once been engaged to a woman. Collins had in fact disclosed that. But the Beast also seemed to want an excuse to rid itself of Kurtz, its "Washington Bureau Chief," who had recently (for like the last year or so) seemed hugely distracted by other ventures that he also seemed more interested in promoting.

CNN’s “Crossfire” talk shows CNN still doesn’t get what’s wrong with CNN

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 12:15:00 +0000

CNN would like you to know that under Jeff Zucker's leadership, it will continue being as CNN-y as possible. That's the message I'm getting from the report that the struggling cable news channel is planning to relaunch political shouting program "Crossfire" and is "in talks" with Newt Gingrich and Stephanie Cutter. Gingrich! Finally, Lincoln-Douglas-style "Crossfire."

This is at this point pretty thin. "Talks" doesn't mean much. Gingrich and Cutter might be part of a whole bench of hosts. But it does suggest that CNN is going about a "Crossfire" launch in just about the worst way possible. Those hoping for a smarter version of the old show will definitely be disappointed.

Stephanie Cutter has spent her entire career as a campaign flack. Her job has been, for years, to spin reporters. (This job leads to becoming a political news media professional strangely often.) Regardless of her intelligence and her ability to speak extemporaneously on camera, she has never demonstrated an ability to be an interesting, independent thinker, and it is fair to predict that as a TV pundit she'd be representing "The Democratic Party" and not "liberalism."

The sprinting, sloppy TV news coverage of the Boston manhunt

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 20:35:00 +0000

If you woke up after 7:30 EDT this morning, there have been no new developments in the manhunt for Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, the white-hat-wearing 19-year-old suspect in the Boston bombing, since you got out of bed. If you have been following the story closely on television — or Twitter — it most certainly feels like this could not be the case. Over the past nine hours, news coverage has been in a flat-out sprint, continuous and unending, huffing and puffing to supply us with the latest news when there is no new latest news. The news networks are treading water but trying to make it look like they are free-styling by hysterically flailing their arms in a forward motion. At one of the rare moments when there is a huge, breaking news story, TV news is having just as rocky, sloppy and manipulative a time filling its schedule as when it is struggling to find stories to cover. How can this be?

Newsrooming it: How Aaron Sorkin reframed bad media behavior

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:06:00 +0000

Last July, the most widely ridiculed episode of Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom” aired. Titled “I’ll Try to Fix You,” it climaxed with the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords. The staff of “News Night,” assembled at the office on a Saturday, quickly went into action, as the sound of Coldplay’s “Fix You” began to play on the soundtrack. Other news agencies— NPR, and then Fox, MSNBC and CNN— began to report that Giffords was dead. The crass head of ratings stormed into the newsroom and demanded that the “News Night” team “call” Giffords’ death: “Every second you’re not current a thousand people are changing the channel! That’s the business you’re in,” he shouted, looking to his typical ally, the cynical producer Don, for support. Don didn’t provide any: “She’s a person. A doctor pronounces her dead, not the news,” he said. Jeff Daniels’ Will McAvoy then made the righteous choice, deciding not to announce Giffords’ death on air, but to stick to the facts. Seconds later, word came that Giffords was alive and headed for surgery. The “News Night” team, virtuous resistor of peer-pressure, had made the right call. The Coldplay swelled.

Poll: Fox News is both most and least trusted cable network

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 16:34:00 +0000

A new Public Policy Poll finds that overall Fox News' credibility is on the decline, but "When it comes to asking Americans which single outlet they trust the most and least out of the ones we polled on, Fox News once again wins both honors."

According to PPP, Fox News has hit a record low in credibility, with 41 percent of voters saying they trust the network, and 46 percent saying they do not. In 2010, when PPP first started doing the poll, the results were 49 percent-37 percent.

But people also had strong feelings both ways about Fox News' trustworthiness:

How not to defend yourself against the “chauvinism” charge, starring Morning Joe

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 18:24:00 +0000

As best as I can tell, here is what happened on "Morning Joe" this morning. Wacky jokester morning show host and respected American political figure Joe Scarborough mocked and belittled his co-host, Mika Brzezinski, until she became genuinely upset with him, then he angrily yelled at her for being upset with him until, finally, he got her to apologize to him for calling him on his bullshit.

Brzezinski was defending Obama from complaints that his Cabinet is too male. Scarborough was responding to her comments with snide jokes, including one about the Lily Ledbetter Act. Brzezinski told Scarborough that he was "being chauvinistic right now," and Scarborough responded with outrage. Soon he was -- for real -- snapping his fingers to get her to shut up and listen to him berate her.

Time Warner drops Current after Al Jazeera deal

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 15:57:00 +0000

Al Jazeera this week purchased Al Gore's cable network Current TV in what the New York Times' Brian Stelter called "a coming of age moment" for the Qatar-funded network in the United States. By buying Current, Al Jazeera seemed set to establish itself in the U.S. after struggling for years to gain purchase in unreceptive markets outside of New York and Washington.

However, hours after the estimated $500 million deal was made, Time Warner Cable announced that it would no longer carry the Current channel, and thus Al Jazeera's new channel Al Jazeera America would not be distributed by the cable provider. Although the Current deal will still bring Al Jazeera into around 40 million American homes, the Time Warner move constituted a considerable blow for the globally respected network -- Time Warner Cable reaches 12 million homes.

As HuffPo's Michael Calderone reported:

Hack List No. 8: MSNBC

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 19:48:00 +0000

This year, my annual list of the worst of political media highlights not just individuals, but the institutions that enable those individuals. The 2012 Hack List will be counting down the 10 media outlets that are hurting America over the next two days -- stay tuned! (Previous Hack List entries here, here and here.)

MSNBC, we're told all the time, is the liberal Fox News. That's reductive and stupid. It isn't. MSNBC isn't the liberal Fox News for two very important reasons: It usually demonstrates a greater respect for the truth than Fox News, and it's not as good as Fox News. It's not as good at being liberal as Fox is at being conservative. Fox is rigidly ideologically consistent, with its "straight news" programs echoing the same talking points and pushing the same slanted stories as its opinion shows. While there's no doubt that MSNBC is more unapologetically liberal than it used to be, it's still all over the place, with a conservative anchoring its flagship morning show, objective Beltway "straight news" proponents like Chuck Todd and Andrea Mitchell dominating in the daytime, and weekends full of ... prison shows. But more important, it's not as good as Fox at being compelling TV, which is why millions more people watch Fox every day. (There are demographic reasons for Fox's advantage, too, but it's still a huge number.)

CNN hires failed gimmick king

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 21:27:00 +0000

Who better for the job of turning around CNN than the man who took NBC from first to last? Jeff Zucker, the brain behind TV's "Joey," is going to be the new president of CNN Worldwide. The decision basically confirms that CNN, and Time Warner, have no clue what's "wrong" with their struggling channel, nor the first idea as to how to fix it.

It's been pointed out before that CNN doesn't actually need rescuing. The ratings at the flagship channel are atrocious, but the organization is profitable and its international arm is respected and successful. Departing CNN Worldwide executive Jim Walton was quite successful at making Time Warner money. Its primary problem is one of "embarrassment": the embarrassment that the clowns of Fox News and MSNBC are beating them in prime-time ratings, primarily, but also the embarrassment the very serious and good journalists of CNN feel regarding the shoddy product the bosses have been producing over the last few years. Zucker is theoretically capable of reversing the ratings trend, though I wouldn't hold my breath. But he's definitely never shown any ability or interest in producing less embarrassing programming. The man to rescue CNN from a loathsome charlatan like Piers Morgan is not the man who made Donald Trump a nationally recognized prime-time television clown.

Fox News licks its wounds

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 04:41:00 +0000

To the victors goes the Schadenfreude. The day after Barack Obama's and the Democrats’ fairly decisive electoral victories, Fox News is still licking its wounds, in simultaneously hilarious and terrifying fashion. On the riotous end, they’ve repeatedly shown a scruffy 20-something in Colorado screeching, “I’m going to get high tonight!” while petulantly complaining about Obama’s lack of bipartisanship. On the hair-raisingly efficient end, the talking point engine is already humming along, keen to make the “fiscal cliff” situation as much of a traumatic, partisan experience as the debt ceiling crisis. So 14 hours after Obama's victory, Fox News is basically back to normal, having traded in yesterday’s super-sad faces and Karl Rove’s deranged attempt to flip Ohio and the election for Romney, for its more standard anxiety-mongering. Fox may have lost the election, but it still has a job to do: Even when one’s worst fears have been realized, there is always another fear (even if it has the lame name "fiscal cliff," which sounds like it could be Jimmy Buffet’s backup drummer).

Jack Welch still thinks the government did some fuzzy math

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 22:27:00 +0000

Prodigious firer of employees and former captain of industry Jack Welch ended his day with some conspiracy-mongering on "Hardball."

Poll: Americans really don’t trust the media

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 15:25:00 +0000

Americans have a record lack of "trust and confidence" in the media, according to a new poll from Gallup.

The poll finds that 60 percent of those surveyed have "not very much" trust in the media, compared with 40 percent who said they had a great deal or a fair amount. The numbers have been steadily on the decline over the last 20 years, dragged down by Republicans and independents. The same poll shows that Democrats have more trust in the media than they did last year.

On the whole, the survey shows that 39 percent of people are paying "very close" attention to political news, up from 35 percent last year, but down from 43 percent during the last presidential race in 2008.