Book on Murdoch Making its own Controversy | Newsweek Scope

Broadcast News
Johnnie L. Roberts 9/2/2009 12:00:00 AM
For Connie Chung, Diane Sawyer's appointment as the second woman to solo-anchor a network evening newscast is just as historic as when current CBS News anchor Katie Couric broke the gender barrier three years ago and plopped herself into the chair once occupied by Walter Cronkite. As the second woman to co-anchor an evening news telecast (with Dan Rather on The CBS Evening News, 1993-1995), Chung has a strong sense of how the anchor desk sits at the crossroads of history. "Katie broke ground, but what has happened today with Diane means Katie's appointment wasn't just an aberration or a token gesture, not that anyone thought it was," Chung told NEWSWEEK shortly after news broke that Sawyer would succeed Charles Gibson on ABC's World News Tonight. "But what breaks the ceiling is not just having one male cheerleader on the squad. We have never seen two women solo anchors on the networks' flagship program[s]."
Live From the Economy’s Frontline
Daniel Gross 8/5/2009 12:00:00 AM
"Tyler Durden" at ZeroHedge has posted data showing that CNBC's audience fell 28 percent between July 2008 and July 2009. What gives? Is the decline a consequence of the network's rightward, anti-Obama tilt? Has the public, angered by the failure of the gurus and stock pickers featured on CNBC's airwaves to foresee the traumatic events of last fall, turned the dial? Or is CNBC a casualty of the return to something like normalcy in the economy and the markets?
Michael Jackson's Online Wake
7/7/2009 12:00:00 AM
Michael Jackson's funeral service starts at 1 pm Eastern today and you will have to try very hard not to see it: In addition to wall-to-wall coverage on the news channels, any Web site capable of live-streaming the event will be doing so (list at bottom of this post). Is the Internet ready for the coming traffic jam?
Channeling Fox
Jennifer Ordoñez 10/14/2007 12:00:00 AM
The blond, professional-looking woman featured in a promotional spot for Fox Business Network--the cable cousin of Fox News Channel that launches on Monday, Oct. 15--is in her 30s, has just bought a two-bedroom condo and happens to be a vice president at a New York financial firm. Still, when it comes to her own money, Christy Schaffner is feeling a bit unmoored.
Forward Into Battle
Johnnie L. Roberts
America Goes Tabloid
Jonathan Alter
From at least the time of the ancient Greeks, sex, disfigurement and murder have sold. ("Oprah, my name is Oedipus Anderson and I'm in a support group for men who have slept with their mothers and blinded themselves.") The 1890s are better remembered for Lizzie Borden whacking her parents than for, say, the Free Silver Movement. In a fine 1994 biography of Walter Winehell, the original gossip columnist, Neal Gabler explains that even the glory days of midcentury tabloids saw plenty of hand-wringing. The poet E. E. Cummings, for instance, fretted over how the tabloids encouraged "an infantilism in American life." Sound familiar?