Permanent link to MTA daily media news

Networks Learn Harsh Lessons From Katrina
When Hurricane Dean formed earlier this month as the first major hurricane in the Atlantic basin since the 2005 season ended, the networks leapt into action using plans that have been finely tuned since Katrina made landfall August 29, 2005… Soon after the disaster, the networks broke down their responses to it — what went right and what went wrong — and found that the plans they had made in advance for a natural disaster didn’t scale when faced with a story of Katrina proportions.

Study: Democrats get more A.M. airtime
A conservative media watchdog organization charged Wednesday that the network morning news shows have spent considerably more time this year on Democrats running for president than on Republicans. Network news executives rejected any suggestion of bias, and said they have a considerably harder time getting Republican candidates to appear on their shows.
I’ve sent this to Media Matters to get their reaction.

Why I hate The New Republic (By Kathy G. at Ezra Klein)
TNR plays a unique role in the development of policy and politics. Its circulation has always been low (and in recent years has declined drastically), but many of the people who read it are very powerful: media elites, D.C. lobbyists and activists, and policymakers in the White House and the Senate, and on Capitol Hill. If TNR supports a particular policy or idea, that carries serious weight, especially when what it supports is conservative. It enables the right to say, “Even the liberal New Republic endorses X,” and that has tremendous credibility and resonance. It doesn’t matter if 19 out of 20 articles in a given issue are liberal; the one wingnutty one out of the 20 will, by virtue of its setting, be all the more influential.

STODDARD KNOWS SCRIPT! A. B. Stoddard recited a script—a script with a long, ugly history
According to Stoddard, there’s an idea about in the land—an idea that the Clintons “cannot stop taking money from illegal sources.” That’s the script—and she’s sticking to it! Has Clinton done anything wrong in this case? Stoddard doesn’t know—but she does know the rules. You don’t clarify, caution, apply brakes or explain. You don’t correct your host’s misstatements. You don’t warn your viewers about the shortcomings of a highly speculative report. You don’t offer context from recent history.

Tucker: I assaulted a man who ‘bothered’ me in a bathroom.
Yesterday on MSNBC, Tucker Carlson said “it’s really common” that men accost one another in mens’ rooms… “I’ve been bothered in Georgetown Park,” in Washington, D.C., “when I was in high school.” When asked how he responded to being “bothered,” Carlson asserted, “I went back with someone I knew and grabbed the guy by the — you know, and grabbed him, and … hit him against the stall with his head, actually.”
Click through to watch the video.

CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin – Did Senator Craig Commit Perjury In Minnesota?
During Tuesday night’s “AC 360″ CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin laid out a fantastic breakdown of Senator Larry Craig’s bizarre claims surrounding his bathroom sex scandal. If, as Craig claims, he wasn’t guilty of the charges against him and only pleaded guilty to make the scandal go away, then as Toobin puts it, he committed perjury by pleading guilty to the judge in Minnesota.
Click through to watch the video.

Man recounts Union Station sexual encounter with Craig
The Idaho Statesman, which [Sen. Larry] Craig blamed for his woes in his news conference yesterday (ha!), has a transcript up from its interview with the man who says he had oral sex with the senator in a Union Station restroom.

Idaho Statesman editor defends paper’s Craig coverage
Managing editor Bill Manny says: “As our story [about Sen. Larry Craig] demonstrated, we followed leads and asked questions. We worked hard and behaved responsibly, not publishing a story until it was ready. We didn’t print anything until the senator pleaded guilty.”

Beck’s solution for New Orleans: More guns.
As the pace of reconstruction in New Orleans slows, the crime rate in New Orleans has increased. Rather than focus on addressing the horrible conditions facing the region’s residents, right-wing pundit Glenn Beck offers an alternative solution: give them guns. “There’s not enough guns in New Orleans,” Beck claims.

FOXNews Isn’t Sure What Party Senator Larry Craig Belongs To
We all know that FOXNews is famous for switching R’s to D’s when Republicans get into trouble or they don’t like what they hear from one, but they changed up their tactics in the case of Senator Lavvy Craig’s potty scandal. Instead of assigning him to the bad, naughty, nasty Democratic party, in [a recent] article from their website FOX chose to completely leave out his political affiliation altogether.

Armstrong Tames Matthews’ “Hardball” Style
It took the likes of international cycling star Lance Armstrong to tame the aggressiveness of MSNBC’s “Hardball” host Chris Matthews during the second day of Armstrong’s presidential forum on cancer. “Just be a little nicer,” Armstrong advised Matthews during a break between the questioning of the two Republican presidential candidates who participated, Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas and former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas.

Richard Jewell found dead; natural causes cited
Richard Jewell lived for more than a decade with the shame caused by being wrongly linked to the 1996 Olympic bombing. The former security guard died Wednesday without closure with the newspaper he accused of starting the frenzy… After he was exonerated, Jewell sued the Journal-Constitution and other media outlets for libel. Several news organizations settled with him but the Journal-Constitution did not… Jewell’s attorney, Lin Wood, told the Associated Press he expects to pursue the case for Jewell’s estate.

Four Charged In Politkovskaya Murder
Prosecutors have charged four of the ten suspects arrested in the murder of Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a lawyer for one of the suspects said Tuesday.

Newspapers look to real estate to shore up their finances
Financial pressures have forced the Philadelphia Inquirer (building at left) and Boston Herald to sell their property, and now some wonder what Sam Zell will do with Tribune’s real estate. Will he sell Tribune Tower on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue and the Los Angeles Times building? “This is a guy who’s made his mark maximizing real-estate values,” notes Jim Vesey of the real estate advisory firm Cushman & Wakefield.

NBC Universal Buys International Cable Networks
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — NBC Universal’s cable portfolio just got fatter. With this latest batch of cable properties under its belt, NBC Universal has an ever-more-robust suite of cable properties that stacks up against the likes of Time Warner, Discovery, News Corp. and Viacom in terms of households and international presence.

CondeNet and MSNBC Enter Content-Sharing Deal
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — CondeNet and MSNBC.com announced a unique content partnership today in which the website division of Conde Nast will share its content with the news portal. The two parties have partnered before, but this marks the first time CondeNet has signed up for an overarching partnership with a third-party site.

News Corp and NBC Universal name video site Hulu
NEW YORK (Reuters) – News Corp. and NBC Universal said on Wednesday they have named their new online video joint venture Hulu, taking a page from the Internet company tradition of creating meaningless corporate monikers. The two media companies said the site will be available for testing by a “limited” number of users by October — a month later than originally planned.

Media Showers
Big media and big politics are all flying through an electronic meteor shower just now, and not all will survive. But, like “Star Wars,” it’ll be fun to watch the carnage.

The Role of Trusted Human Editors In Filtering The Web (Publish2 Blog)
“By using journalists and serious bloggers as a proxy for trust, We aim to solve the scalability problem. We’re going to seed Publish2 with trusted, skilled human editors and then let them decide who else to trust.”
But will they pay?  THAT is the question.

The Cost Of America’s Slow Internet Connection
One might question the importance of broadband speed in America; after all, it’s not as if a webpage takes hours to load. The answer is the possibility for greater economic activity. One study by Dataquest Inc titled “Dataquest: Implementation of ‘true’ broadband could bolster U.S. GDP by $500 billion a year,” claimed the U.S. could add that much because of new jobs, technologies, equipment and software design.

Japan Plans Research For Network To Replace Internet
Japan will start research on new network technology to replace the Internet to tackle growing quality and security problems, a government official said Tuesday.

Nokia Takes on iTunes
Nokia is announcing its music store today, which will target Apple’s iTunes in the downloads space. It’s a transition you could call “Nokia 2.0″ – along with 4 new mobile phones (some of which are iPhone-like), it’s launching the “Ovi” brand to tie together Nokia’s web efforts. Ovi will include the Nokia Music Store, Nokia Maps and N-Gage games. It’s just a holding page for now, however.

The Promise of Low Power FM
The chances that Congress will allow the expansion of low power FM broadcast radio stations to exist in big radio markets offers a huge opportunity for citizens to communicate outside of the corporate airwaves.

Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings
“New eyetracking studies confirmed for the umpteenth time that banner blindness is real. Users almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement, whether or not it’s actually an ad.” Text-based ads, and ads in feeds, are looking better and better.

Mending a Bruised Image
Worried by the growing image of athletes gone wild, the N.F.L. is embarking on an advertising effort that highlights the positive aspects of the lives of its players.