The plunge in circulation afflicting U.S. newspapers is even worse than officially reported — because new auditing rules make it easier for papers to count a reader as a paying customer.

Average weekly circulation at 379 newspapers fell 10.6% from April to the end of September. That is the steepest drop ever recorded by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which verifies the number of people paying to read publications.

But under the new auditing standards implemented in April, if a newspaper sells a “bundled” subscription to both its print and electronic editions, the paper is allowed to count that subscriber twice.

If not for the new standards, circulation figures would be even worse, according to The Associated Press, which conducted a review of circulation figures.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal provides an example of how overall circulation figures can be misleading. The paper saw its average weekday circulation rise by nearly 11,000 subscribers, to 175,841, over the past year. But its circulation figure now includes 23,000 more electronic subscribers than last year — so its print edition actually fell by 12,000 copies.

A newspaper copy previously had to sell for at least 25% of the basic price to qualify as paid circulation. Under the new standards, a paper can count as a paying customer anyone who spends at least a penny for a copy.

The new rules have made the reported circulation number less credible, agrees Allison Howald, U.S. director of print investment at PHD Media, a big buyer of newspaper ads:

“You really have to do your homework now and ask newspapers about how much double counting is going on.”

==============================

>>Publisher Lays Out Plan to Save Newspapers (Paris International Herald, 091206)

When Axel Springer, the founder of the German newspaper publishing business bearing his name, laid the cornerstone in 1959 for a high-rise headquarters in Berlin only steps away from the tense line separating East from West, people called him crazy, arrogant or both.

While the Berlin Wall has come and gone, Springer executives are looking into another ideologically divided realm — cyberspace — with a similarly stubborn mien.

Springer, which publishes the biggest daily in Europe, the tabloid Bild, as well as other newspapers in Germany and Eastern Europe, says it wants publishers to get paid for their work on the Internet, at a time when many people assume that online news should be free.

“The meta-philosophy of free — we should get rid of this philosophy,” said Christoph Keese, Springer’s head of public affairs and an architect of its online strategy. “A highly industrialized world cannot survive on rumors. It needs quality journalism, and that costs money.”

Springer is not the only publisher looking for ways to earn money from digital sources, as readers turn away from printed newspapers and the promise of Internet advertising fades. In the English-speaking world, Rupert Murdoch, the chief executive of News Corp., has been telling anyone who will listen that he plans to erect so-called pay walls for his company’s newspaper Web sites. Other publishers, including The New York Times Co., which owns the International Herald Tribune, have also said they were considering charging for online access.

But while newspaper companies elsewhere have generally been vague about their intentions, Mr. Keese, during an interview at Axel Springer’s headquarters in Berlin, provided a detailed overview of the company’s digital ambitions.

Instead of separate pay walls around individual newspaper Web sites, Mr. Keese wants publishers and Internet companies to work together to create a “one-click marketplace solution” for their online content. In that system, Google or other Internet gateways would display links to newspaper articles, videos and other content from a variety of providers, as search engines do now. But some of the items would include something new: a price tag.

What kind of content would come at a cost? Any “noncommodity journalism,” Mr. Keese said, citing pictures of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy cavorting poolside with models at his villa in Sardinia — published this year by the Spanish daily El País — as an example.

“How much would people pay for that? Surely €5,” he said.

A single mouse click would allow the user to pay for and view the pictures. Readers could also buy flat-rate packages providing access to content from a variety of media companies, Mr. Keese said, just as they can subscribe to unlimited data access plans via mobile phone networks.

Axel Springer’s plans are contingent on cooperation with Google, a company that Mr. Murdoch has accused of “theft,” contending that it earns billions of dollars of advertising revenue on the back of newspapers’ journalistic endeavors. But Mr. Keese said Axel Springer was happy to work with Google, acknowledging that publishers could not match its expertise in monetizing digital content.

Josh Cohen, senior business product manager at Google, said an online marketplace like the one envisioned by Mr. Keese was an “obvious extension” of the company’s previously announced plans to create an Internet store for digital books. He declined to comment specifically on talks with German newspapers.

“It’s safe to say it’s a global discussion going on with a number of publishers,” he said. “Publishers are still in the exploratory stages of this.”

While German publishers are talking to Google about collaborating on a system for selling their content online, they are battling it in another area. They want the company to pay for the use of snippets of their articles by Google News, which compiles extracts from a variety of sources and links to the full stories.

Mr. Cohen ruled out any such payments, saying publishers benefited from the links by generating increased traffic to their Web sites, allowing them to sell more advertising.

“We have no intention to pay anyone for indexing their content,” he said. “If publishers don’t want us to show their headlines or snippets, they can already opt to take them out.”

Publishers say pulling their contents out of Google News, or the search engine, is not a fair choice because of the company’s powerful position on the Internet, leaving them with nowhere else to go; in Germany, Google accounts for roughly 80% of Internet searches.

To try to improve their leverage, German publishers have lobbied for a new kind of copyright preventing the secondary use of journalistic content online without express permission. The governing coalition headed by Chancellor Angela Merkel has pledged to enact such a law, though the timing remains unclear.

Mr. Cohen said the measure was unnecessary because Google abided by existing copyright laws, showing only portions of published works on Google News, unless it had agreements in place to display full articles.

Some analysts say, however, that the proposed copyright law could cover even the use of excerpts. That, they add, could have a chilling effect on aggregators, bloggers and others who now freely cite newspaper articles online.

“It’s a backward-looking way of dealing with the problem,” said Robin Meyer-Lucht, a digital media consultant in Berlin. “Publishers should be looking at aggregation and collaboration with their users, rather than wasting money on legalistic solutions that don’t work.”

Mr. Keese said, however, that the proposed law was an important prong in German publishers’ plans for digital business models.

With the copyright in place, businesses that used newspaper content online, including aggregators, might be required to buy licenses, much as restaurants, nightclubs or hair salons now need licenses to play recorded music. A new agency, modeled on the collecting societies that gather royalties for record labels, composers and artists, would administer the licenses.

Mr. Keese said he did not know how much revenue such licenses, or the other plans, could generate. But he noted that GEMA, the main collecting society for German music copyright owners, raises more than €850 million, or $1.3 billion, a year.

The proposed copyright has broad support among German publishers, and Mr. Keese said they also generally agreed on the need for an industrywide approach to the development of future digital business models. In the United States, some newspaper publishers have been wary about that kind of cooperation, citing antitrust rules.

While Axel Springer is often seen as one of the most pro-American of German newspaper owners, Mr. Keese had some sharp criticism for his U.S. counterparts. American publishers, he said, have been too timid in dealing with threats to their future — a problem that he attributed to a lesser cultural appreciation of the importance of the print media in the United States than in Germany.

“The Americans don’t give a damn if the newspapers go down,” he said. “This is very different in Germany. This is Gutenberg’s country. We invented this.”

==============================

**The scandalous Internet (townhall.com, 050330)

Tony Blankley

It’s not only the top of the market old media like CBS and the New York Times that are under assault. In the last few days there have been stories about the travails of the National Enquirer and the New York Daily News’ gossip columnist, Liz Smith, drowning in the digital storm.

It seems the Enquirer has lost a cool million readers per edition in circulation over the last eight years -- down to 1.5 million over its historic high of 4 million in the halcyon days of the 1970s.

Liz Smith, proud to be a gossip columnist a publicity agent could do business with, is down to 70 newspapers for her syndicated column. She cheerfully admits that she may be the last of the breed, and that it would be nuts to pay the million bucks a year she pulls down for a new hot print gossip columnist.

Unnamed Washington Post gossip staffers confess on background that they spend their days reading Wonkette on the Internet scooping their stories -- because she can be up as fast as she can type, while they have to wait for the next day’s Washington Post to be manufactured and shipped to its distribution points almost a day after the hot rumor has already been consumed by a ravenous public.

Is nothing sacred? Walter Winchell must be rotating in his grave, considering that the noble work of print gossip is being usurped by irresponsible digital gossips. In the old days, you could rely on printed gossip to be a genuine, certified rumor or double entendre sexual reference. (Have you noticed that there is invariably only one possible meaning to a double entendre?)

But today, the public is being fed unreliable digital gossip. What you read on an Internet gossip blog may not be a genuine rumor at all. The blogger may have made up the rumor out of whole cloth (or, to update the phrase, out of virgin electrons.)

Of course, its true that once the fabricated rumor (again, our language is lagging behind our technology. Something made of whole cloth is fabricated. But something made up of virgin electrons is “inputed” or “uploaded” -- once the uploaded rumor has been downloaded, it becomes a genuine rumor.

Still, there seems to be something more reliable, more substantial, about rumors printed on paper. Behind that rumor stands a large building filled with hundreds of employees paying federal state and local taxes. The words used to make up the rumor weren’t just typed, willy-nilly, on some $50 keyboard. When print media was really print media, each letter of each word of each sentence was cast in molten lead and assembled in large trays.

Even today, a printed rumor is then processed by large printing presses. The New York Times spent three quarters of a billion dollars a few years ago to buy some new printing presses. These are machines that require good relations with a major financial institution in order to acquire. Compare that impressive sum with the paltry few dollars a month it takes to bring a web server online.

The paper, measured by its tonnage, is delivered by train from Georgia. Oxen could drown in the ink vats. Platoons of highly trained, often unionized, press operators work around the clock to successfully bring the paper, ink and words together to form a proper setting for a genuine, certified rumor.

When those kinds of assets and those kinds of people are behind a paper-printed rumor, a reader has solid grounds for relying on it.

But today, inexperienced youthful readers are willing to consume cheaply produced rumors by unlicensed persons in their basements -- if they even have basements. Knowing the type, they probably only have lofts. Having a basement suggests a substantial building of multiple stories. But today’s decadent youth don’t care from where they get their rumors. Just like the steel and other heavy manufacturing industries, the paper-printed rumor business is being hollowed out. Digital rumor manufacturing is to the rumor industry what ten cents per month Chinese wage rates are to the steel industry.

The impending death of the paper-printed rumor business should be a warning to the news divisions of those papers. While the newspaper’s rumor department is at a competitive disadvantage with the digital rumor blogs, the news departments actually have some advantages -- if they choose to use them. Hundreds of trained reporters and editors, if they are committed to objective news gathering, can actually produce more usable, objective news each day than even the most hard-working blogger. But if they print rumor and prejudice masquerading as news, they will surely go the way of their official, certified rumor departments.

==============================

**More People Reading Political News on ‘Net (Foxnews, 050306)

NEW YORK — Reliance on the Internet for political news during last year’s presidential campaign grew sixfold from 1996, while the influence of newspapers dropped sharply, according to a study issued Sunday.

18% of American adults cited the Internet as one of their two main sources of news about the presidential races, compared with 3% in 1996. The reliance on television grew slightly to 78%, up from 72%.

Meanwhile, the influence of newspapers dropped to 39% last year, from 60% in 1996, according to the joint, telephone-based survey from the Pew Research Center for The People and the Press and the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Nonetheless, Americans who got campaign news over the Internet were more likely to visit sites of major news organizations like FOX News Channel and The New York Times (43%) rather than Internet-only resources such as candidate Web sites and Web journals, known as blogs (24%).

28% said they primarily used news pages of America Online Inc., Yahoo Inc. and other online services, which carry dispatches from traditional news sources like The Associated Press and Reuters.

“It’s a channel difference not a substantive difference,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet group and author of the study. “Newspaper executives probably now have to think of themselves less as newspaper people and more as content people.”

The study also found the political news audience more mainstream — more women, minorities, older Americans and lower-income users than before.

58% of political news users cited convenience as their main reason for using the Internet. This group was more likely to use the Internet sites of traditional news organizations or online services.

But one-third of political news consumers cited a belief that they did not get all the news and information they wanted from papers and television, and another 11% said the Web had information not available elsewhere. These individuals were more likely to visit blogs or campaign sites for information.

And blogs, Rainie said, likely had an indirect influence on what campaigns talked about and what news organizations covered.

Blogs, for instance, have been credited with forcing an apology from CBS News anchor Dan Rather for last fall’s “60 Minutes” report on President Bush’s National Guard service.

Blogs “are having a modest level of impact on the voter side and probably a more dramatic impact on the institutional side,” Rainie said. “Blogs are still a realm where very, very active and pretty elite, both technologically oriented people and politically oriented people go.”

The study also found that the reliance on the Internet for political news was most pronounced among those with high-speed connections at home — 38% among broadband users against 28% among all Internet users. Reliance on newspapers was roughly even between those groups — 36% for broadband and 38% for all users.

40% of Internet users found the Internet important in helping them decide for whom to vote, while 20% said the online information made a difference.

The random survey of 2,200 adults, including 1,324 Internet users, was conducted Nov. 4-22 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2%age points.

==============================

Presidential Election Campaign News Source (050100)

(Based on All Voters)

Question: How did you get most of your news about the presidential election campaign? From television from newspapers, from radio, from magazines, or from the Internet?

	November 2000			November 2004
	T.V.	Newspaper	Internet	T.V.	Newspaper	Internet	(N)
	%	%	%	%	%	%
Total	70	39	10	76	46	21	(1209)
Sex
Male	68	39	12	70	43	24	(530)
Female	71	39	9	80	48	18	(679)
Race
White	70	40	10	75	46	21	(1051)
Non-white	73	35	13	79	44	23	(139)
Black	75	32	11	84	42	19	(82)
Race and Sex
White Men	69	39	11	70	44	23	(459)
White Women	70	42	9	80	48	18	(592)
Age
Under 30	72	21	22	72	23	40	(104)
30-49	64	37	15	72	43	25	(396)
50-64	72	43	5	77	52	16	(383)
65+	78	51	2	85	59	6	(308)
Sex and Age
Men under 50	65	34	18	67	34	32	(226)
Women under 50	66	33	15	75	40	27	(274)
Men 50+	72	46	5	75	55	15	(299)
Women 50+	77	47	3	86	55	9	(392)
Education
College Grad.	58	46	12	67	48	31	(517)
Some College	66	35	15	72	39	28	(303)
High School Grad. or Less	79	37	7	85	48	9	(383)
Family Income
$75,000+	62	47	14	68	46	29	(328)
$50,000-$74,999	64	39	13	72	43	27	(203)
$30,000-$49,999	68	41	14	73	50	21	(265)
$20,000-$29,999	80	34	7	82	41	19	(122)
<$20,000	78	32	5	88	43	8	(144)
Region
East	65	41	10	76	51	16	(240)
Midwest	67	43	9	75	44	19	(305)
South	75	32	11	82	43	21	(394)
West	68	46	11	64	46	29	(270)
Religious Affiliation
Total White Protestant	72	40	9	77	46	18	(583)
- Evangelical	71	38	11	79	43	17	(293)
- Non-Evangelical	72	42	7	74	49	20	(290)
White Catholic	66	46	9	78	47	19	(230)
Secular	65	29	15	68	39	31	(119)
Community Size
Large City	66	40	16	--	--	--	--
Suburb	67	46	10	--	--	--	--
Small City/Town	73	41	7	--	--	--	--
Rural Area	69	27	14	--	--	--	--
Party ID
Republican	67	37	10	75	42	17	(443)
Democrat	74	43	7	75	50	22	(390)
Independent	65	39	14	76	46	26	(340)
Party and Ideology
Conservative Republican	66	39	10	73	36	18	(324)
Moderate/Liberal Rep.	69	33	12	77	54	16	(110)
Conservative/Mod. Dem.	76	41	6	83	50	17	(243)
Liberal Democrat	70	48	9	58	50	36	(133)
When Decided to Vote for...
Before 2000/2004	70	37	8	73	40	22	(466)
Debates/Conventions	68	43	8	70	48	24	(354)
Post Debates/Conventions	75	37	10	85	48	17	(207)
Within Last Week	63	34	19	84	55	20	(106)
Labor Union
Union Household	68	45	7	69	48	18	(173)
Non-Union Household	70	38	11	77	45	22	(1022)
Battleground States
Republican States	--	--	--	79	43	21	(380)
Democratic States	--	--	--	68	44	25	(354)
Battleground States	--	--	--	78	49	18	(475)

==============================

FNC’s Ratings Continue Rising While CNN’s Plummet in Prime Time (Media Research Center, 050307)

CNN’s prime time ratings plummeted 21% in February, as MSNBC’s fell by 14%, but FNC’s ratings actually rose 18%. That put FNC’s average prime time audience at 1.57 million, compared to less than half, 637,000 for CNN, and even fewer for MSNBC, the New York Post reported on Thursday.

An excerpt from “CNN Sinking in Fox Hole,” a March 3 article by Tim Arango:

CNN saw its prime-time ratings drop sharply in February, falling further behind Fox News.

CNN’s ratings dipped 16% overall and 21% in prime time during February, according to Nielsen Media Research, as some of the cable news channel’s biggest stars lost viewers.

Fox News was the only one among the four cable news networks to post ratings gains during the month....

Fox saw its ratings rise 18% to an average of 1.57 million viewers. This compares with an average of 637,000 viewers for CNN....

Among individual shows, CNN’s “Paula Zahn Now,” which airs from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m., saw a 17% drop in ratings, while its Fox competitor, “The O’Reilly Factor,” saw a 9% jump.

In the 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. time slot, CNN’s “Larry King Live” saw its ratings tumble 23%, while Fox’s “Hannity & Colmes” posted a 19% rise.

The only CNN show airing between 4 p.m. and 10 p.m. to post a ratings gain was “Anderson Cooper 360,” which airs from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. It gained only 2%.

The other two cable news networks, CNBC and MSNBC, also saw ratings declines in February.

CNBC’s overall ratings declined 23% and in prime time they dropped 42%. MSNBC’s ratings dropped 15% overall and 14% in prime time.

==============================

When 9-Year-Old Praises Bush’s SS Plan, Couric Corrects Him (Media Research Center, 050307)

Noah McCulluogh, a frequent guest on NBC’s Tonight Show where he shows off his knowledge of political and presidential trivia, appeared with his mother in the 7:30am half hour of Friday’s Today.

After explaining how he’s serving as a spokesman for Progress for America, NBC’s Katie Couric wondered: “So, why did you decide to become a Republican? What was it that was more appealing to you about the Republican Party?”

Noah McCullough, who sat on a sofa next to Couric, said he looked at both parties and found he agreed more with Republicans, but that his mother is a Democrat.

Couric to Donna McCullough, Noah’s mother: “So, that must make for some lively discussions over mac and cheese, right? How do you feel about, first of all, that your son is such an incredible brainiac, Donna, I mean, you must be proud of him. But also, politically, is it difficult for you all to see eye to eye on the issues? I can’t believe I’m asking you that.”

Donna McCullough, condensed: At first it was, but maybe that’s how a future President starts out.

Couric: “And I know you’ve been to President Bush’s, the first President Bush’s library in Houston how many times now?”

Noah McCullough: “Twenty-seven times.”

Couric: “Twenty-seven times.”

Noah McCullough: “Twenty-seven times.”

Couric: “Is your favorite President, though, Ronald Reagan, is that true, or who would you say is your favorite?”

Noah McCullough: “It’s a tie between Ronald Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush, and George W. Bush.”

Couric: “Okay. Well, very good. Very political, by the way. You’d like to run for President one day I understand, right?”

Noah confirmed his plan to run in 2032.

Couric soon arrived at Social Security: “Tell me why you agreed to stump for Social Security for President Bush.”

Noah McCullough: “Because I know that it’s a major problem that has to be fixed. And I don’t want to have to deal with it my first day in office.”

Couric countered: “On the other hand, President Bush has admitted that private accounts really won’t solve all the problems of Social Security, that there perhaps need to be other things that need to be implemented to keep the system solvent.”

Noah McCullough: I think it will be revived and we can go from there. Bush plan “kind of like the medication to get it back.”

Couric: “So down the road you think it will help the system become healthier?”

Noah McCullough: “Revive it...”

Couric moved on to how Noah has beaten Howard Dean, Tim Russert and Al Sharpton in trivia contests, and Noah claimed that Russert cheated by pushing his hand way from the bell.

Following a couple of trivia questions for Noah, which he answered correctly, Couric turned serious: “Quick question, Donna. Do you worry about your adorable and brilliant son being exploited for political reasons at all? I know he’s working for Progress for America, which, or has been to asked to help by this group, which spent, I guess $45 million re-electing President Bush and $20 million it plans to spend pushing Social Security reform. Do you feel completely comfortable with it?”

Donna McCullough replied that at first she thought it wasn’t any place for a child, but after he was asked to appear on the Leno show and got to meet Presidents, she decided it was healthy for him.

Couric wrapped up: “Noah, so nice to meet you. Good luck in 2032.”

Noah McCullough: “2032. I have your vote, right?”

Couric demurred: “We’ll see. If I’m around, you never know, right? That’s a long ways off, Noah. Thanks so much. And Donna, thanks so much to you as well.”

==============================

Times circulation climbs to buck trend (Washington Times, 050518)

The Washington Times celebrated its 23rd anniversary yesterday with cake and champagne served to its employees at a midafternoon assembly, as its executives announced a substantial gain in audited circulation in the face of a national trend of declining U.S. newspaper numbers.

For the six-month period ending March 31, the newspaper’s daily circulation from Monday through Friday climbed to 103,017 -- an increase of nearly 3% over the similar period last year, according to Fas-Fax, the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) report of publishers’ estimates.

“We’re scoring important exclusive after exclusive,” says Wesley Pruden, editor in chief of The Times. “I think Washington, official and otherwise, is realizing that The Times is the lively newspaper in town, packing a terrific punch as the indispensable source of news, and we’re enormously pleased that this is so. Newspapers, like humans, can suffer hardening of the arteries, and we’re determined not to let that happen to us as we approach the completion of our first quarter of a century as an important part of the life of the nation.”

Many U.S. newspapers, in fact, have struggled in recent years to hold readers. The Washington Post, for example, reported losing 20,682 subscribers, a 2.7% decline in its weekday circulation, from 772,553 to 751,871 compared to the first six months of 2004.

“I think we have enormous potential to grow,? says Richard Amberg Jr., vice president and general manager of The Times. “We’re looking at a strategic plan that will provide a more focused effort to expand our circulation and expand our advertising, which will lead to an even brighter and bolder future.”

About 77% of adults in the top 50 U.S. markets, which includes Washington, read a newspaper each week, compared to 78.6% in spring 2004, according to the Newspaper Association of America’s Newspaper Audience Measurement Index.

By the NAA account, only about a third of U.S. daily newspapers reported circulation gains. The New York Times daily weekday circulation inched upward to 1,680,582 in the first six months of this year, a gain of 0.2% from the like period last year. Daily circulation at USA Today, owned by Gannett Co. in McLean, stood at 2,281,830, holding steady from the previous year.

John Murray, the NAA’s director of circulation marketing, says there is more competition than ever for consumers’ time and people can get their news from other places, such as radio, television and Internet sources. Most of the widely read Internet sites are those of newspapers (including that of The Times at www.washingtontimes.com).

The decline in telemarketing has also played a role in the drop of circulation. Even before the national do-not-call list went into effect in October 2003, telephone marketing was becoming a less-effective way of getting new subscribers, Mr. Murray says.

Last year, about 31% of all new subscriptions came from telemarketing, compared to about 40% in 2003.

Art Farber, director of circulation at The Washington Times, says the government’s do-not-call list has measurably hurt efforts to get more subscribers. About 65% of the telephone numbers in the Washington market is on the list, and telemarketers cannot call those phone numbers.

“It’s difficult to grow circulation,” he said. “But [our circulation] has been going up slowly and most newspapers are going down quickly.”

==============================

Poisoning children, too? (Townhall.com, 060303)

by Brent Bozell

It was some six years ago, and my youngest boy, Reid, along with his best friend Mitchy, both 3, had browbeaten me into taking them to the matinee of the “Thomas and the Magic Railroad” movie. We had settled into our seats, they with their popcorn and soda, and I with the mission of an afternoon nap — a goal I was well on my way to achieving when I was jolted awake by the dialogue in the preview of the upcoming “Rugrats” movie. Scene after scene concluded with a comedic punchline revolving around soiled diapers, flatulence, mucus and God-knows what other bodily excretions, while my little boy and his friend giggled in delight. Thanks, Hollywood.

And here’s the worst news. While most of what is offered as children’s programming at the movies and on television is wholesome in its innocence, it is also true that even here, even in the programming produced for the youngest of the young, there are cultural landmines everywhere. The topic matter and language in the “Rugrats” preview wasn’t the exception. It is the rule for much of what young children are now receiving, particularly on television, as entertainment.

The Parents Television Council has released the results of a new study that examined what Hollywood is producing for children ages 5-10, before and after school and on Saturday mornings, on eight different networks. The numbers should be enough to trigger a double-take for any parent.

First there’s the violence. In 443.5 hours of programming, researchers documented a staggering 3,488 instances of violence. Now hold on, Bozell, I hear the apologists saying already, surely you’re not going to condemn silly cartoons, are you?

It’s a good point. Just how many times did Jerry dismember Tom? How many sticks of dynamite eviscerated Wile E. Coyote, and how many times did Elmer Fudd open fire on Bugs Bunny with that shotgun? This isn’t serious violence. It is fantastic and fanciful, meant to elicit laughter because it’s comedic and inconsequential. After the smoke clears, the character is back. So take all those “cartoony” instances out.

And you’re still left with 2,794 other examples of violence. This violence is very different. It is realistic, oftentimes dealing not with goofy farm animals but with humans, and children to boot. It is dark: There is evil. It is consequential: There is pain and suffering. There is death. On Fox’s “Shaman King,” a fight between two characters ends when one kicks the other in the head and knocks him unconscious. The victor picks up the loser by his hair and reaches into his chest. The loser screams. The victor takes out the loser’s soul and puts it into his own body. The loser appears dead. That’s the kind of violence being presented to little boys and girls, ages 5-10, on television today.

What about language? Researchers found no less than 250 incidents of offensive language. There is the ever-present “potty humor.” On the Cartoon Network’s “The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy,” Billy shows his guardian Grim (a cartoon Grim Reaper) what he thinks of his “stupid rules” by passing gas, but then announces he has to change his pants, implying he soiled himself. In another scene, Billy’s dad picks his nose so much he pulls his brains out, and thinking his brain is mucus, eats it.

Euphemisms for obscene language are also prevalent. In the cosmic order of things, most are mild to be sure — but not all. One episode of “SpongeBob SquarePants” deals with the discovery of dirty words, with the childlike characters SpongeBob and Patrick trading sound-effect-covered cuss words, and you can only imagine the obscenity of the sailor talk they’re exchanging. More common still was verbal aggression, like abusive yelling and mean-spirited insults. There were 858 examples of these. And another 622 examples of disruptive, disrespectful or otherwise problematic attitudes, of which 53 were aimed at teachers or parents.

And there’s sexual content, too, certainly something of great interest to one on the back end of teething. On Nickelodeon’s “Fairly Odd Parents” a character uses his magic copier to make the things in his “dad’s magazines” real. He pulls out the magazines; one is titled “Under the Bed Monthly.” On Disney’s “Sister, Sister” there are references to pornography, descriptions of foreplay, and discussions about a “Gay Policeman’s Ball.”

All of which begs — screams — the question: Why? There is no market demand for this. It is clearly out of bounds, offensive and dangerous. It shatters the innocence of childhood deliberately. And yet there are people out there writing these scripts. There are people — not companies, people — producing this garbage. And there are people distributing it with the goal to reach, and influence, as many millions of little boys and girls as possible.

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Nielsens: Another Tough Week for Couric (WorldNetDaily, 061030)

Despite her newsmaking interview with Michael J. Fox last week, Katie Couric’s goal of taking the “CBS Evening News” to the top is getting further out of reach.

Her average audience of 7.3 million viewers left the “CBS Evening News” 1.1 million behind ABC’s second-place “World News.” It was the biggest gap between the two broadcasts since the week of Feb. 6, according to Nielsen Media Research. NBC’s “Nightly News” led the way with 8.9 million viewers last week.

Couric scored the attention-getting interview with Fox on Thursday after he was criticized by Rush Limbaugh for supposedly playing up symptoms of Parkinson’s disease in a campaign ad. But it caused no appreciable jump: Thursday’s broadcast had 7.4 million viewers, Nielsen said.

CBS and Couric have tried some new things with the evening newscast, including longer interviews and a “Free Speech” segment where guests offer opinions. In the light of the ratings, they will likely face pressure to head to a more traditional format.

Couric’s average of 7.3 million was identical to the Bob Schieffer-anchored newscast during the same week a year ago, Nielsen said.

However, both ABC and NBC were down from a year ago. CBS has pointed to that movement, and its own broadcast’s improvement among younger demographics, as proof that progress is being made.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will the ‘CBS Evening News,’” Couric told USA Today this week. “It’s a process, and being in the middle of a process, while it’s sometimes challenging and can be frustrating, that’s really in many ways the fun part.”

The news was better for CBS in prime time, where it won again. All three versions of the “CSI” franchise finished among Nielsen’s top-10 shows last week, as did the strong sophomore series “Criminal Minds.”

None of the World Series games on Fox between St. Louis and Detroit _ the lowest-rated Series ever _ managed to crack the top 10 last week.

For the week, CBS averaged 12.3 million viewers (8.0 rating, 13 share), ABC averaged 11.4 million (7.3, 12), Fox had 10 million (6.5, 10), NBC had 9.7 million (6.3, 10), the CW had 3.6 million (2.3, 4) and the i network had 590,000 (0.4, 1)

Among the Spanish-language networks, Univision averaged 3.2 million viewers (1.8, 3), Telemundo had 780,000 (0.5, 1) and TeleFutura had 550,000 (0.3, 1).

A ratings point represents 1,114,000 households, or 1% of the nation’s estimated 111.4 million TV homes. The share is the percentage of in-use televisions tuned to a given show.

For the week of Oct. 23-29, the top 10 shows, their networks and viewerships: “Desperate Housewives,” ABC, 21.24 million; “NFL Post Game Show,” CBS, 20.83 million; “Dancing with the Stars,” ABC, 20.7 million; “Dancing with the Stars Results,” ABC, 20.02 million; “CSI: Miami,” CBS, 17.83 million; “CSI: NY,” CBS, 17.42 million; NFL Football: Dallas at Carolina, NBC, 17.33 million; “Lost,” ABC, 17.09 million; “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” CBS, 16.83 million; “Criminal Minds,” CBS, 16.77 million.

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The American press should count its blessings (Townhall.com, 061122)

By Michelle Malkin

In between breathless condemnations of the Bush administration for stifling its free speech, endless court filings demanding classified and sensitive information from the military and intelligence agencies, and self-pitying media industry confabs bemoaning their hemorrhaging circulations (with the exception of the New York Post), my colleagues in the American media don’t have much time to give thanks. Allow me:

Give thanks we don’t live in Bangladesh, where you can be put on trial for writing columns supporting Israel and condemning Muslim violence. Just ask Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, editor of Blitz, the largest tabloid English-language weekly in Bangladesh. He is currently facing a sedition trial for speaking out about the threats radical Islam poses in Bangladesh. He has been imprisoned, harassed, beaten and condemned. In court last week, his persecutors read these charges against him: “By praising the Jews and Christians, by attempting to travel to Israel and by predicting the so-called rise of Islamist militancy in the country and expressing such through writings inside the country and abroad, you have tried to damage the image and relations of Bangladesh with the outside world.” For expressing these dissident opinions, he faces the possibility of execution.

Give thanks we don’t live in Egypt, where bloggers have been detained by the government for criticizing Islam and exposing the apathy of Cairo police to sexual harassment of women. Just ask Abdel Karim Suliman Amer, 22, who was arrested earlier this month for “spreading information disruptive of public order,” “incitement to hate Muslims” and “defaming the President of the Republic.” Ask Rami Siyam, who blogs under the name of Ayyoub, and has been outspoken in his criticism of Egyptian brutality. He was detained this week along with three friends after leaving the house of a fellow blogger. His host, 24-year-old reformist Muslim Muhammad al-Sharqawi, had been detained by the Egyptian government this spring as he left a peaceful demonstration in Cairo where he had displayed a sign reading, “I want my rights.” Sharqawi was beaten in prison over several weeks.

Give thanks we don’t live in Sudan, where editors can lose their heads for not kowtowing to the government line. Ask the family of Mohammed Taha, editor in chief of the Sudanese private daily Al-Wifaq, who was found decapitated on a Khartoum street in September. He had been kidnapped by masked jihadi gunmen. What did Taha do that cost him his life? He insulted Islam, and dared to question Muslim history, the roots of Mohammed and other Muslims. Before his murder, his paper was shuttered for three months and he was hauled into court for “blasphemy.”

Give thanks we don’t live in China, the world’s leading jailer of journalists and Internet critics. Consider Yang Xiaoqing, jailed for five months because he reported corruption among local officials in the central Hunan province. Or Yang Tianshui, sentenced to 12 years in jail this spring for posting essays on the Internet supporting a movement by exiles to hold free elections. Or Li Yuanlong, a Guizhou reporter for the Bijie Daily jailed for two years on subversion charges because he dared to criticize the ruling Communist Party on foreign websites. Or any of the other 32 journalists and 50-plus bloggers behind bars.

Give thanks we don’t live in Lebanon, where outspoken writers pay with their lives. Journalist and Christian Orthodox activist Samir Kassir, who was critical of Syrian involvement in Lebanon, was assassinated in a Beirut car bombing in 2005. His colleague, An-Nahar newspaper manager Gibran Tueni, was killed in a car bombing last December. Lebanese TV anchorwoman and Christian journalist May Chidiak survived a separate car bombing last fall, but lost an arm, leg and use of one eye.

Give thanks we don’t live in Russia, where investigative journalists routinely wind up dead. Last month, unrelenting reporter and Putin critic Anna Politkovskaya was found shot dead in her apartment. In the days before her death, Politkovskaya had been working on a story about torture in Chechnya, according to her newspaper, Novaya Gazeta. She joins a death toll that includes Paul Klebnikov, the U.S.-born editor of the Russian edition of Forbes, who had been investigating the Russian business underworld and was gunned down outside his Moscow office in 2004; Valery Ivanov, editor of the newspaper Tolyatinskoye Oborzreniye, also shot dead after investigating organized crime and drug trafficking in 2002; and Larisa Yudina, editor of the opposition newspaper Sovetskaya Kalmykia in southern Russia, who was stabbed to death by former government aides.

Give thanks we don’t live in Denmark, where the cartoonists who dared to caricature Mohammed and challenge creeping sharia are still in hiding, in fear for their lives.

Give thanks we don’t live in Italy, where a spineless judge bowed to jihadists and put famed war journalist Oriana Fallaci on trial for her sharp-tongued critiques of Islam. She succumbed to cancer before they could exact a vengeful penalty against the lioness. But they made the price of “insulting” Islam known far and wide to the cowering Western media.

Give thanks we live in America, land of the free, home of the brave, where the media’s elite journalists can leak top-secret information with impunity, win Pulitzer Prizes, cash in on lucrative book deals, routinely insult their readership and viewership, broadcast enemy propaganda, turn a blind eye to the victims of jihad, and cast themselves as oppressed victims on six-figure salaries.

God bless the U.S.A.

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The Last March Of The Dinosaurs: The Death Of Network News (townhall.com, 071018)

Hugh Hewitt

Howard Kurtz is the Washington Post’s media critic and host of CNN’s Reliable Sources. Kurtz is also the author of the just published Reality Show: Inside The Last Great Television News War. This is a detailed and often riveting account of the unexpectedly rapid and often dramatic transition from the network anchor era of Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather to the new “big three” of Charlie Gibson, Brian Williams and Katie Couric. From the high point of the first big three to the week just finishing, the networks lost about 30 million viewers, and now welcome a combined audience of less than 25 million each night. Reality Show is a chronicle of decline, long on the details of what happened, not so long on the why. No matter, conservatives already know a lot of the “why,” and the elite Beltway-Manhattan media don’t care, so the account of the bleeding out of vitality and significance of the nightly news is entertaining without it.

Kurtz was my guest for a rare two-hour interview yesterday. Along the way we cover many of the most interesting aspects of his very candid book: Katie Couric’s lack of news judgment; the hyper-leftism of The Daily Show; the rapid aging of the network audience to a point where “25 million” vastly overstates the significance of the viewers; the “bubble” that network news lives in and cannot seem to break out of.

There are a lot of pleasant surprises in the book. The portraits that emerge of Brian Williams and Diane Sawyer are two of them. After reading Reality Show, I will start to take in Williams’ blog and —on the rare occasions I watch network news, will invite him back into my home. Williams is a smart, hard-working and —this is a compliment— thoroughly square guy who makes an effort to listen to the sounds originating from beyond Manhattan. His network is run by the most interesting exec in the book —Jeff Zucker— and small details, like Williams’ role as a director of the Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation and his decency towards Bob Woodward and his family, are the sort of insights that soften the image that the nets can’t seem to live without but which is killing them: The anchor on high, surveying his vast realm below.

Sawyer, of course, is the smartest of them all —a not surprising fact given her years of close association as a writer with Richard Nixon on his memoirs and her relentless energy and inquisitiveness. Close Reality Show and you know that the first network to put Sawyer in the anchor chair will dominate the next decade of ratings. Sawyer will not fall prey to either the cheap or the deserved shots that Katie Couric has been taking since she took over at CBS. Couric’s “perky” was fundamentally miscast. Sawyer’s hyper-smart attitude will return some of Jennings’ aloofness to whichever network she leads.

Not that it matters all that much. There are many themes in Reality Show, but only one conclusion: The nets can’t change their DNA, and that DNA isn’t meant for the world of new media. They are slow when the new media is fast. They are hyper-liberal in an era where the center-right can shop for news and the radical left won’t accept even the hyper-liberal as other than sell-outs.

Worst of all, they lost their collective news judgment years ago, and still haven’t figured out how to get it back. They keep hiring people from inside the junior varsity bubble of the Ivies and J-schools and wonder why they can’t break out of their Manhattan-Beltway bubble. They don’t seem very curious about life outside of the elite world which they inhabit, and when they travel it is with the comforts of a nawab of the Raj. They have retinues that make star athletes jealous, and salaries that would suggest audiences that rival Cronkite’s. In short, they are an aristocracy every bit as unaware of the revolution underway around them as that of France’s in 1788.

Did I say “worst of all?” Whoops. The death of news judgment is their greatest failing, but their greatest burden for which they are only partially responsible is their loss of trust. People trusted Walter, Chet and David. They simply do not trust the current gang. Too much memory, too many National Guard fake documents, too much ax grinding. Really, how can Brian Williams expect to escape the brand that is nightly damaged by the ravings of Olbermann and the frenzies of Matthews? Explain all day and all night how past experience doesn’t predict future bias, but you’ll still have Cuomo aide Tim Russert and Clinton aide George Stephanopoulus making major “news” decisions which red state America is supposed to believe are not in any way influenced by their politics.

Fox News’ Special Report is the newscast for serious center-right viewers now, and though it is only at 1.5 million viewers a night —a third of Couric’s audience— it is the right 1.5 million, and it will continue to grow. Wolf Blitzer has a daily three hour run which also attracts the serious news consumer (and would attract more if they dumped the peptic and predictable Cafferty.) Bennett, Laura, Rush, the two Denni, Medved, Hannity, and yours truly do the news for 15 hours a day, in the car, where you have the time to hear it.

Do you care about the news? I spent two hours talking about it with Howard Kurtz yesterday, super-serving the news junkie. Who knows what Katie Couric covered? Who cares?

Read the book. Read the interview. I suspect it is the last book of its kind as everyone will know that nobody cares in another ten years. In the meantime, watching the dinosaurs thrash about in the swamp can be interesting even if more than a little sad.

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Network TV News: Evil or Incompetent? (townhall.com, 080312)

By William Wilson

From the very beginning of our Republic, observers and statesmen have noted that success as a nation depended heavily on an informed and active public. Jefferson went so far as to contend that citizens who took arms against the United State government in Shay’s Rebellion should not be harshly treated but rather educated on the goals and purposes the government had sought to achieve.

In the complex and intense world of the 21st Century, an informed and aware public is more essential than ever. Citizens are asked to make judgments on issues and candidates where the decision could literally mean life or death for millions.

And yet, what is the public fed nightly by those over-paid “news” organizations at what is called the Networks? The public is force fed a steady diet of propaganda, distortions and outright pap.

One night last week as I sat watching NBC Nightly News, this point came home to me more starkly than ever before. Consider the elements of that broadcast.

It is the day before the Ohio and Texas primaries. A main issue in the debate between Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama revolves around which of the two would be stronger in dealing with foreign affairs. And yet, NBC treated the meat of the issue as if it was of no consequence.

In all of 31 seconds, NBC gave stories about the threat by Venezuela – a major oil exporter – to launch a war against a neighboring country, the Russian election where stark authoritarianism is raising its head once again, the bombing of another nation by the United States, and near open warfare in Gaza. That’s right: 31 seconds to deal with four stories, any one of which could have devastating consequences for American citizens.

So how did NBC fill the rest of the time? They spent 4 minutes and 20 seconds on two stories that will warm my mother’s heart. The first came down to “eat a good breakfast.” The second had one theme: “get 8 hours of sleep a night.”

The world is on the edge of explosion. Economies and governments are teetering and the best NBC can do is tell us to eat breakfast and get enough sleep? Why this story selection? What would lead supposedly serious, highly paid, “professional” journalists to make such silly and transparently deceptive decisions?

That’s the most troubling aspect of all. Looking at that one broadcast, there really is only one of two options that explain it. Either these highly paid, “professional” journalists are neither professional nor journalists – they are simply incompetent at their jobs. Or, they had a reason. They decided that it was not in their agenda to inform the American public of the true nature of the danger and problems our nation faces out in the larger world.

I will leave it to the conspiracy theorists to determine who they wanted to help or hurt. But as FDR said, if anything happens in politics you can bet it was planned. So, I’m pretty sure the story selection was a planned action by people looking to influence how Americans viewed the state of things. There is a word for that. It is called propaganda. And that is what these “news” organizations have become – pure propagandists for whatever cause or view they want to advance. Nothing they report or say can be taken at face value – they have an agenda in every word of it. Or else, of course, they could just be incompetent.

Is it any wonder that millions of people are turning to the Internet for news and information?

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U.S. paper ends print edition to live online (Paris, International Herald, 080428)

With print revenue down and online revenue growing, newspaper executives are anticipating the day when big city dailies and national papers will abandon their print versions.

That day has arrived in Madison, Wisconsin.

Last Saturday, The Capital Times, a fabled 90-year-old daily newspaper founded in response to the jingoist fervor of World War I, stopped printing to devote itself to publishing its daily report on the Web.

(The staff will also produce two print products: a free weekly entertainment guide inserted in the crosstown paper, The Wisconsin State Journal, and a news weekly that will be distributed with the paper.)

An avowedly progressive paper that carried the banner of its founder, William Evjue, The Capital Times is wrapped up with the history of two larger-than-life Wisconsin senators, the elder Robert La Follette (whom it favored) and Joseph McCarthy (whom it opposed). But in recent years, the paper’s circulation dropped to about 18,000 from a high in the 1960s of more than 40,000.

“We felt our audience was shrinking so that we were not relevant,” Clayton Frink, the publisher of The Capital Times, said in an interview two days before the final daily press run. “We are going a little farther, a little faster, but the general trend is happening everywhere.”

The transition in Madison, while long foretold - The Capital Times was doubly part of a dying breed in the United States, being the afternoon paper in a two-newspaper town - has hardly been neat, clean and cathartic.

More than 20 members of the newsroom staff lost their jobs, mainly through buyouts, but also through layoffs. Each departing journalist was profiled in the final paper, and lives on at the Web site Madison.com under the headline “A Fond Farewell to Talented Colleagues,” with a “class photo” taken next to the presses.

The new staff total will be in the 40s. This includes seven new hires in areas like Web producing and arts coverage. Copy editors, by contrast, are “exiting at a higher rate than reporters,” said Paul Fanlund, the editor who arrived from The State Journal in 2006.

The Web strategy, while seen as a long-term solution, is still a work in progress, Fanlund said. It revolves around a portal, Madison.com, which is owned under the same joint arrangement mandating that both Madison papers share revenues, though they are editorially independent.

The Capital Times will operate a nearly continuous Web newsroom and focus on repurposing online the cultural and entertainment material the staff will begin to produce in the supplement, 77 Square, to be inserted in The State Journal.

“If there is a window of opportunity for newspapers on the Web, it is locally,” said James Baughman, director of the University of Wisconsin journalism school in Madison. “The reason the online version of the Cap Times may have life is that opportunity.”

Once upon a time in the United States and elsewhere, the afternoon newspaper was the Internet of its day, Baughman said, giving afternoon baseball scores and stock market reports in a quick turnaround. It was the more lucrative slot as a result.

The liberal afternoon newspaper still has a sympathetic audience in Madison, but the changing pace of news is more important. “The political activism is there, you can’t deny it,” he said of Madison’s newspaper readers, “but they want the morning box scores.”

And while Fanlund takes pain to stress the need to continue the progressive editorials and watchdog role of the reinvented Capital Times, it is sports that serves as a perfect example of the changes he said have been long overdue.

As an afternoon paper that did not publish Sundays, his sportswriters would be covering a college football game and “it would be 48 hours until the articles would be read,” he said.

But the decision to migrate online, and in free weeklies, necessarily involves reinventing the core mission at the newspaper and the core audience.

In its account of The Capital Times’s last daily press run, The State Journal reported that it had “succeeded in garnering most of The Capital Times’s former subscribers and will see its average daily circulation rise from 89,000 to at least 104,000 starting Monday.”

The final editorial of the print daily pledged itself to its founder’s purpose as “an independent voice for peace and economic and social justice that speaks truth to power each and every day.”

The editorial evoked him to give his endorsement of the steps the newspaper is taking: “He would caution us not to worry about the form The Capital Times takes, but rather to be concerned with the content and character of our message.”

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Barbara Kay, A sad day for readers of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial section (National Post, 091214)

One only has so much newspaper-reading time in a day, so in order to maximize my intellectual edification in a predictable and efficient way, the only American newspaper content I single out for routine consumption is the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal. There I normally find the calibre of writing, the clarity of reasoning and the political and cultural perspectives I admire most.

So it was an unusually rude disappointment to come across an op ed piece in the Journal’s December 9 issue, “Major Hasan and the Quran,” by Salam Al-Marayati. In this op ed, Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) calls upon Major Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood massacrist, to repent of his wicked deed. Al-Marayati makes the case - or attempts to make the case - that Major Nidal Hasan was acting on un-Islamic beliefs. According to Al-Marayati, Hasan ignored the Quranic mandate “to stand for justice even if it is against your own interest” and “to avoid transgression in the pursuit of justice.” “Islam,” Al-Marayati reminds us, carries “a central message of mercy and compassion” and speaks of “Islam’s goal of peacemaking.”

The op ed goes on in this vein, arriving at a moral equivalence between “[Muslim] Extremists [who] believe they are compromising their Islamic values when living in the West” with “Muslim-haters [who] oblige them with the converse, when they argue that the West should not tolerate Muslims.” (Al-Marayati fails to note that the former often express their frustration at “compromising their Islamic values” through plotting to do violence or in violence itself, as in the case of Major Hasan, while the latter express their frustration by, as the author notes, “arguing” and blogging and running for office, quite a different thing.)

The real thrust of Al-Marayati’s op ed is to suggest that the best thing the American government could do about the jihadist is to “consider allowing Muslim-American religious leaders to meet with Nidal Hasan. And they could engage Maj. Hasan on his deeply flawed understanding of Islam....” This irrelevant suggestion - as if, with thirteen people dead because nobody would take responsibility in belling an obviously dangerous cat, anyone could care less whether Major Hasan finds spiritual redemption or not - is just one of many ways in which this op ed is insulting to the intelligence of normative Wall Street Journal readers.

Another is the peculiar idea that a lay person running a public relations organization is the appropriate person to invite as a guest columnist to hold forth on theological matters. If a Jew had shot up a military base, would it be appropriate for the executive director of B’nei B’rith to pontificate on the eschatology of Judaism or cite talmudic prescriptions convenient to his theme?

Surely that would be the job of a theologian, a cleric or a scholar. Of course the problem here is that reputable Islamic scholars would laugh to scorn Al-Marayati’s ridiculous cherry-picking of Quranic verses to support Hasan’s alleged misunderstanding regarding jihadism. For a sample of the multitude of Quranic verses that support Major Hasan’s famous slide show on Islam during “medical grand rounds” June 27, 2007 (in which slide 49 stated, “Fighting to establish an Islamic State to please Allah, even by force, is condoned by Islam”), see alpha Quran and Islamism scholar Andrew Bostom’s latest blog posts here and here on Major Hasan.

More problematic, though, is the Wall Street Journal’s decision to publish Al-Marayati or any spokesperson for the MPAC. The organization and the man both have a rather insalubrious history, and do not deserve the respectability thus conferred on them.

For starters, Salam Al-Marayati is a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. Shortly after 9/11 Al-Marayati said on radio in Los Angeles, “If we’re going to look at suspects, we should look to the groups that benefit the most from these kinds of incidents, and I think we should put the state of Israel on the suspect list.” Al-Marayati has advised Muslim-Americans not to cooperate as individuals with FBI investigations or to volunteer information about suspicious characters or behaviours in their communities: “Counter-terrorism and counter-violence should be defined by us...we reject any effort, notion, suggestion that Muslims should start spying on one another.” He says: “...[H]ave [the FBI] come in community forums, in open-dialogues, so they come through the front door and you prevent them having to come from the back door.” In other words, let the FBI investigate other people as individuals, but Muslims only in managed forums and through intermediaries. Not exactly a full-throated cry of patriotism here, for such an approach would and does hinder proper investigative law enforcement.

MPAC officials have defended Hezbollah and excoriated the U.S. government for actions taken to stop funding the officially designated terrorist group Hamas. They also vigorously defended Islamic Jihad operative Sami al-Arian, declaring that his prosecution was only a “political” persecution, when in fact overwhelming evidence confirmed his support for anti-American jihadism.

Do such a group and such an individual merit a coveted quarter page in the Wall Street Journal? They do not. Moreover, the column itself should not have passed muster by virtue of its internal weaknesses - weak argumentation, no definitions (what does Islam mean by “justice”?), no examples - and so it is a sad day for journalism when the best of the best demonstrates that substandard journalism, the very prototype of irrelevant political correctness, can demand and be offered a pulpit in the one journalistic home where it should above all not have been welcome.

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What’s Provocative About the Tebow Super Bowl Ad? (townhall.com, 100201)

by Star Parker

Why are pro-abortion groups so up in arms about the Tim Tebow ad that CBS will run during the Super Bowl?

According to the press release of Focus on the Family, the Christian organization sponsoring the ad, the former University of Florida Heisman Trophy winner Tebow and his mother, Pam, “will share a personal story centered on the theme of ‘Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life.”‘

The Tebows are devout Christians, and Pam gave birth to Tim despite advice from her doctor to abort because of illness during her pregnancy. Since the script is not publicly available, all we know is the family story and knowledge that the ad passed muster with CBS.

We spoke with Focus on the Family spokesman Gary Schneeberger and asked if the ad in any way speaks to the politics of abortion. The answer was an emphatic “no.”

According to Schneeberger, it’s “not selling, it is celebrating” and is about the “love between a mother and a son.”

Arguing with Idiots By Glenn Beck

So what’s provoking the letter writing campaign of feminist groups to CBS to pull the ad? Why would the National Organization of Women call this “offensive to women” or would the Women’s Media Center call it “divisive”?

Sure, there’s no question that Focus on the Family is pro-life and opposes legal and readily accessible abortion. But CBS wouldn’t be running this ad if its focus was political advocacy.

So what’s bothering these women?

Two things.

First, the enabler of human brutality is de-humanization. Pro-abortionists know that our existing legalized abortion regime can only continue as long as we keep the human face off abortion.

It’s why ultrasound has revolutionized this world. When young women who have doubts about taking their pregnancy to term see the live child within them, they overwhelming decide to give birth. You don’t have to preach. They see that this is life and they know what to do.

I have written in the past that if the personal ultrasound experience could be conveyed to public consciousness, the abortion holocaust would stop.

The Tebow story will put this human face on abortion for the 100 million or so who will watch the Super Bowl. Nothing could be scarier for the culture of death.

When Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she put a human face on slavery. When the American public understood that slaves were human beings, the capacity to tolerate slavery was punctured.

Abraham Lincoln supposedly said to Stowe when he met her in 1862, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”

Last week Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at Auschwitz, the former Nazi death camp in Poland. It marked the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the camp, where over one million, mostly Jews, were murdered.

The six million who were slaughtered in the holocaust in Europe challenges comprehension. But the meaning of this changed when Anne Frank’s diary was published in English in 1952. When the public at large read the thoughts and feelings of this young girl, recorded in hiding before she went to her death with her family, the human face of the holocaust emerged.

The second aspect of the Tebow ad that scares abortionists is that it shows that love arises from personal responsibility. This beautiful story of a mother and son shows that love is not about political claims but about individuals taking responsibility for their life and knowing that life is about more than self. It is caring for others and knowing that you are part of something bigger than just you.

At a time of great spiritual unrest in our country, I believe this courageous initiative taken by the Tebows and Focus on the Family will be well received.

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A Fraud Fights Fox News (townhall.com, 100317)

by Brent Bozell

Howell Raines lost his executive editor’s job at The New York Times for promoting the career of Jayson Blair, a black drug addict and fantasist who invented entire stories describing the hills of West Virginia from a saloon down the street in New York. But somehow, Raines still imagines himself a media Bigfoot who can pronounce on the State of Journalism, a one-man Pulitzer Prize panel. This is a little like a White House chef who poisoned an entire state-dinner crowd mounting a soapbox to lecture that the new chefs can’t be trusted.

Of course, that soapbox must be provided first. So who would give this naked man a fig leaf of respectability? The Washington Post would.

The Posties awarded Raines their marquee venue — the Sunday Outlook section — to denounce Fox News Channel and its owner, Rupert Murdoch. Announcing this was tugging at his “professional conscience” (thus suggesting he has one), Raines demanded to know “Why can’t American journalists steeped in the traditional values of their profession be loud and candid about the fact that Murdoch does not belong to our team?”

What has Murdoch done to break with the “team” of American media? Raines lamented his “blatant political alliances started our slide to quasi-news. His British papers famously promoted Margaret Thatcher’s political career.” No! But wait, this one’s even more rich; he also declared, “For the first time since the yellow journalism of a century ago, the United States has a major news organization devoted to the promotion of one political party.”

Raines expects people to believe you can say “news media” and “Barack Obama” and not think “blatant political alliance.” On Sunday, his New York Times published a half-page “photo illustration” of Obama’s head at the center of a cross, surrounded by a halo glow of white light.

But let’s continue. Raines then indicted Fox News president Roger Ailes. “Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II.”

After sentences like that, conservatives have to put the paper down. The laughter is beginning to deprive oxygen to the lungs.

Raines cannot be serious, and he isn’t. This article makes much more sense if you read it in Raines Code. What he’s saying is this: The “old-school news organizations” are the exclusive venue for liberals and liberal activism. Who let these fair-and-balanced pretenders in here to create the “news” differently? He charged that Ailes has torn up “the rulebook that served this country well as we covered the major stories of the past three generations, from the civil rights revolution to Watergate to the Wall Street scandals.”

Raines Code translation: Damn you, Ailes. You broke us.

Do the liberal media remember civil rights, Watergate and Vietnam as events they covered with objectivity? Do they deny (and deny warmly recalling) how their passionate advocacy defeated segregation, militarism and Richard Nixon?

Even when he’s so dishonestly trying to wrap himself in an objectivity blanket, Raines still can’t help but spew his leftist opinion. His liberal-media team “bore witness to a world of dynamic change, as opposed to the world of Foxian reality, whose actors are brought on camera to illustrate a preconceived universe as rigid as that of medieval morality.”

The media are, in his view, dynamic activists in the Hope and Change business. He is outraged that Fox News has stalled health “reform.” In his Orwellian Raines Code, liberal bias is objectivity, and the refusal to banish Fox News from the media is surrendering “the sword of verifiable reportage.”

It’s certainly not “verifiable reportage” to insist the media haven’t been partisan in 100 years, or that Fox News is currently conducting an anti-presidential “campaign without precedent in our modern political history.” Decrying president-bashing sounds a little tinny from a man who viciously charged after Hurricane Katrina that President Bush protected Big Oil “while the poor drown in their attics and their sons and daughters die in foreign deserts.”

The most important rebuttal to Raines is this: In a free country — which America still is, barely, despite the designs of liberals — media elitists do not get to decide who is allowed to report, and who is banished from the briefing room. They don’t get to select a unanimous liberal “team” and a rigidly liberal “rulebook.”

Fox News exists. It can’t be legislated away by Nancy Pelosi, and it can’t be wished away by Howell Raines. It’s popular with millions of Americans who’ve spent their entire lives being pelted by the mudslinging of the Fox-hating media “team.”

Poor Howell Raines. His New York Times is crumbling while the Fox News Channel was just named the most trusted news network in America by the public. Those ... peasants!

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Can CNN Be Saved? (Paris, International Herald, 100404)

Listening to Jon Stewart helped destroy CNN. Now imitating him might be the network’s only hope of salvation.

It was October of 2004, the heat of the presidential campaign, when Stewart showed up on “Crossfire,” long CNN’s flagship political program, and delivered a now-legendary tirade.

“Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America,” he told the hosts, Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson. He called them “political hacks.” He accused them of “helping the politicians and the corporations.” He compared their show to a professional wrestling match. “You’re doing theater,” he said, “when you should be doing debate.”

As it turned out, CNN was paying attention. Within two months, “Crossfire” was canceled, and the network’s president, Jon Klein, cited Stewart’s tirade as a tipping point. “I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart’s overall premise,” Klein said. Henceforward, he announced, CNN would move away from “head-butting debate shows.” Let FOX and MSNBC have their “live guests” and “spirited debate.” CNN was going to report, not editorialize.

Big mistake.

Six years later, CNN is still the network Americans turn to when an earthquake strikes Haiti or a crucial health care vote takes place. But most days are slow news days, opinionated journalism is more interesting than the elusive quest for perfect objectivity and CNN is getting absolutely murdered in the ratings.

It was bad before this year; now it’s terrible. CNN’s prime-time hosts have lost almost half their viewers in the last 12 months. In February, the once-proud network slipped behind not only Fox News and MSNBC, but HLN (its sister network) and CNBC as well. Anderson Cooper sometimes gets beaten by re-runs of Keith Olbermann’s “Countdown.”

People at CNN see themselves as victims of a polarized political culture — and to some extent, they are. But high-minded self-pity only gets you so far. At a media event in Washington recently, I watched a CNN producer try to persuade a gaggle of skeptical right-wing journalists that the network’s hosts really are objective. (“You’d be surprised how some of them vote!”) Even if they were, it wouldn’t matter. The disinterested anchorman pose worked when TV news ran for 30 minutes every night at 6 p.m. It doesn’t work across hours and hours of prime time, with Campbell Brown blurring into John King blurring into Wolf Blitzzzzzz... .

What might work, instead, is a cable news network devoted to actual debate. For all the red-faced shouting, debate isn’t really what you get on Fox and MSNBC. Hannity has ditched Colmes, and conservatives are only invited on Rachel Maddow’s show when they have something nasty to say about Republicans. There’s room, it would seem, for a network where representatives from the right and left can both feel comfortable, and compete on roughly equal terms. Sort of like they did on ... “Crossfire.”

But not the “Crossfire” of 2004. CNN overreacted to Jon Stewart’s jeremiad, but he wasn’t entirely wrong. The show was years removed from its Michael Kinsley/Pat Buchanan glory days, and its liberal hosts at the time, Begala and James Carville, really were Democratic Party hacks. (The conservatives, Carlson and Robert Novak, were much more independent-minded, but the constant need to rebut partisan talking points took its toll on them as well.)

What cable news needs, instead, is something more like what Stewart himself has been doing on “The Daily Show.” Instead of bringing in the strategists, consultants and professional outrage artists who predominate on other networks, he ushers conservative commentators into his studio for conversations that are lengthy, respectful and often riveting. Stewart’s series of debates on torture and interrogation policy, in particular — featuring John Yoo and Marc Thiessen, among others — have been more substantive than anything on Fox or MSNBC.

Even the thrust-and-parry sessions of “The Daily Show,” though, are limited by the left-right binary that divides and dulls our politics. They’re better than the competition, but they don’t give free rein to eccentricity and unpredictability, or generate arguments that finish somewhere wildly different than where you’d expect them to end up. This is what you find in the riveting television debates of the past: William F. Buckley versus Gore Vidal, Vidal versus Norman Mailer, anything involving Ross Perot. And it’s what you get from the mad, compulsively watchable Glenn Beck, who’s an extremist without being a knee-jerk partisan: You know he’s way out there on the right somewhere, but you don’t know what he’s going to say next.

Stewart, Buckley, Beck ... none of these are exactly the models that you’d expect “the most trusted name in news” to look to for inspiration. And some CNN suits have probably never even heard of Gore Vidal.

But television is a business. And when you’re losing to re-runs, you’ve got nothing to lose.

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CNN Fails to Stop Fall in Ratings (Paris, International Herald, 100329)

CNN continued what has become a precipitous decline in ratings for its prime-time programs in the first quarter of 2010, with its main hosts losing almost half their viewers in a year.

Anderson Cooper, seen reporting on the aftermath of the earthquake that hit Haiti, has had trouble holding onto viewers.

The trend in news ratings for the first three months of this year is all up for one network, the Fox News Channel, which enjoyed its best quarter ever in ratings, and down for both MSNBC and CNN.

CNN had a slightly worse quarter in the fourth quarter of 2009, but the last three months have included compelling news events, like the earthquake in Haiti and the battle over health care, and CNN, which emphasizes its hard news coverage, was apparently unable to benefit.

The losses at CNN continued a pattern in place for much of the last year, as the network trailed its competitors in every prime-time hour. (CNN still easily beats MSNBC in the daytime hours, but those are less lucrative in advertising money, and both networks are far behind Fox News at all hours.)

About the only break from the bad news for CNN was that March was not as bad as February, when the network had its worst single month in its recent history, finishing behind not only Fox News and MSNBC, but also its sister network HLN — and even CNBC, which had Olympics programming that month.

CNN executives have steadfastly said that they will not change their approach to prime-time programs, which are led by hosts not aligned with any partisan point of view.

But the numbers are stark: For the network’s longest-running host, Larry King, who has always been regarded at CNN as the centerpiece of prime time because he drew the biggest audiences at 9 p.m., the quarter was his worst ever.

Mr. King’s audience dropped 43% for the quarter and 52% in March. He dropped to 771,000 viewers for the quarter from 1.34 million in 2009. More alarming perhaps, Mr. King, whose show has been regularly eclipsed by Rachel Maddow’s on MSNBC (and is almost quadrupled by Sean Hannity’s show on Fox), is now threatened by a new host, Joy Behar on HLN (formerly Headline News.)

In her first full quarter competing with Mr. King at 9 p.m. Ms. Behar wound up beating him in the ratings 21 times.

CNN has given no indication that any changes in its lineup are imminent, but recently announced that it would try a series of specials in a talk-show format at 11 p.m. with its current 10 p.m. host, Anderson Cooper. The specials are interpreted by some at the network as a trial run for a new 9 p.m. show with Mr. Cooper.

Mr. Cooper has long been regarded as the strongest host at CNN, but his show has suffered badly as well. For the quarter, Mr. Cooper dropped 42% in viewers and 46% among the 25-to-54-year-old audience that the news channels use for their sales to advertisers.

In the past, CNN relied on big audiences for Mr. King’s show to deliver viewers to Mr. Cooper. Now Mr. Cooper sometimes finds himself losing to repeats of shows on MSNBC and HLN. (At the other end of prime time, Campbell Brown’s show on CNN at 8 had its worst quarter ever with the 25-to-54-year-old audience.)

Even in the morning, CNN is sliding. Its “American Morning” show dropped behind “Morning Joe” on MSNBC in total viewers for the first time; it still beat the MSNBC show among 25- to 54-year-olds, though it was down 29% from a year earlier.

At the same time, Fox News, which had its biggest year in 2009, continues to add viewers. Greta Van Susteren’s show was up 25% from a year earlier. Bill O’Reilly, whose show commands the biggest audience in prime time with 3.65 million viewers, was up 28%, and Glenn Beck was up 50% from a year earlier.

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Christian Video Site GodTube.com Revived by ‘Popular Demand’ (Christian Post, 100428)

GodTube.com, the Christian video-sharing site that reached 2.7 million users monthly before turning over to a new URL, reopened recently due to user demand.

The site had officially closed in 2009 after changing its name to Tangle.com and redirecting users to the new site. Tangle.com originally launched to expand GodTube.com’s user base from a faith-based community into the broader family-friendly market. Since its launch, however, Tangle.com has developed into a social networking site, allowing GodTube to be reborn as a site that focuses on video sharing.

Within a few weeks of reopening, GodTube.com has reportedly draw in 400,000 unique visitors.

“There is a great amount of brand loyalty to GodTube.com from the visitors to the site,” says Trey Bowles, CEO of Big Jump Media, parent company of both GodTube.com and Tangle.com.

Bowles says his company has learned to better serve the Christian community since GodTube’s launch in 2007, when the site was originally marketed as the evangelical Christian version of YouTube.

The internet strategist says the new site will give families an alternative to unfiltered video content on the web.

Presently, GodTube.com videos are filtered before appearing in one of seven categories on the site: Christian, comedy, cute, inspiration, music, news and sports. The site developers plan to create a flagging system for users to mark inappropriate videos as another precaution against harmful content.

According to the company, the site’s burst in growth reflects the excitement within the online Christian community.

“We will continue to focus on providing tools and distribution opportunities that will unite the body of Christ online,” concludes Bowles.

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CNN anchor: I’m quitting this ratings dumpster (WorldNetDaily, 100519)

‘The simple fact is that not enough people want to watch my program’

Campbell Brown, CNN’s news anchor at 8 p.m. Eastern Time, is quitting the cable network, and is making no secret as to the reason why: poor ratings.

In a statement filled with candor, Brown says, “I have also always marveled whenever a television anchor says that he or she pays no attention to ratings. I’m pretty sure the last time any anchor could honestly ignore ratings was well before I was born. Of course I pay attention to ratings. And simply put, the ratings for my program are not where I would like them to be. It is largely for this reason that I am stepping down as anchor of CNN’s ‘Campbell Brown.’”

She also noted:

To be clear: this is my decision, and one that I have been thinking about for some time. As for why, I could have said, that I am stepping down to spend more time with my children (which I truly want to do). Or that I am leaving to pursue other opportunities (which I also truly want to do). But I have never had much tolerance for others’ spin, so I can’t imagine trying to stomach my own. The simple fact is that not enough people want to watch my program, and I owe it to myself and to CNN to get out of the way so that CNN can try something else.

CNN will have to figure out what that is. The 8pm hour in cable news world is currently driven by the indomitable Bill O’Reilly, Nancy Grace and Keith Olbermann. Shedding my own journalistic skin to try to inhabit the kind of persona that might co-exist in that line up is simply impossible for me. It is not who I am or who I want to be; nor is it who CNN asked me to be at any point. This is the right decision for me and I hope it will be a great opportunity for CNN.

According to the Nielsen Company’s ratings, “Campbell Brown” brings in an average of 591,000 viewers per night so far this year. That falls far short of the time-slot leader, “The O’Reilly Factor” with Bill O’Reilly of Fox News, which averages 3.34 million. “Countdown With Keith Olbermann” on MSNBC is said to average 1.03 million, and Nancy Grace, who hosts a crime-oriented talk show on CNN’s sister network HLN, has an average of 724,000 viewers.

Campbell says she’ll stay as anchor through the transition, and the network’s U.S. president, Jonathan Klein, wouldn’t say what CNN had in the works to replace her.

“Today is about Campbell,” Klein said in a prepared statement. “We want to wish her well as she begins the next phase of her life. We respect her decision to leave. We will announce our programming plans in the coming weeks.”

The website Mediaite reported that Brown requested she be let out of her contract months ago, and the network finally agreed.

CNN lost its 7 p.m. anchor, Lou Dobbs, in November when the veteran broadcaster unexpectedly resigned. As WND noted, Dobbs’ refusal to drop “birther” stories about challenges to President Obama’s constitutional eligibility to hold office was reportedly a major source of contention with CNN management, leading the anchor to walk away from the network and more than $9 million.

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Fox News North a welcome addition to Canadian media jungle (National Post, 100611)

By Tasha Kheiriddin

Oooh, the fearmongering has started. Fox News North is coming! Batten down your remotes! If Liberal and NDP politicians are to be believed, Canadian airwaves are about to be flooded with right-wing propaganda, leaving hapless viewers at the mercy of pundits like Ezra Levant, who is rumoured to be courted to host a show on the new, as yet unnamed channel.

Funny, but when the decidedly left-wing Al Jazeera English (AJE) got regulatory approval last month for broadcast in Canada, nary a peep was heard from Parliament Hill, and its arrival was welcomed by media organizations such as Canadian Journalists for Free Expression. (Ironically, their news release contained no mention of the lack of freedom of expression in Qatar, where AJE’s openly anti-Semitic parent network Al Jazeera Arabic is based). But this reaction should not be too surprising. Fairness seems to be a relative concept in Canadian broadcasting – what’s left is fair, and what’s right is fair game for suspicion.

This bias is even entrenched in Canadian broadcasting law. Back in 2005, journalist and now lawyer Adam Daifallah and I wrote about the feasibility of a Fox News North in Canada, in our book Rescuing Canada’s Right. But unlike the United States, where a similar “fairness doctrine” was repealed in 1987, Canada’s Broadcasting Act still presents a serious impediment to the existence of such a channel.

Why? Section (i) (iv) of the Act mandates that broadcasters must,

“provide a reasonable opportunity for the public to be exposed to the expression of differing views on matters of public concern.”

Meanwhile, section 3(i)(d) requires the Canadian broadcasting system to,

“serve the needs and aspirations of Canadian men, women and children, including equal rights, the linguistic duality and multicultural and multiracial nature of Canadian society and the special place of aboriginal peoples within that society…”

In other words, networks must provide “balance” and cannot challenge many Trudeauvian sacred cows of Canadian identity, as defined by the Act.

This combination makes the creation of a one-point-of-view conservative network difficult, if not impossible. Indeed, when we wrote this, now-Senator Linda Frum had made inquiries about starting a conservative radio station, and was told not to bother, as she would not get approval from the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission. Charlotte Bell, senior vice-president of regulatory affairs at Canwest, then vice-president of regulatory affairs at Global Television, told us that conservatives shouldn’t bother with TV, but focus on the internet.

But apparently none of this has deterred Quebecor Media International President Pierre Karl Peladeau or its new VP of development Kory Teneycke from chasing the dream of a Fox News North. According to CBC’s Don Newman, Mr. Teneycke has been mulling the idea as far back as 2003. Exploratory work on the new channel got rolling last summer and journalists are now being hired to fill its Ottawa bureau.

Apart from surmounting regulatory hurdles, the biggest challenge for the network will be finding an audience. Are there enough conservative viewers in Canada hungry enough for another tv news channel? Considering the slagging existing broadcast media takes by readers of this blog, I would wager yes.

Opposition politicians and other detractors should thus stop fearmongering about television they haven’t even seen yet. Diversity of views and competition will only improve the quality of the news product on offer to Canadian viewers. Not to toot our own horn to excess, but consider the impact the National Post has had on the media landscape in Canada. Ten years ago, Conrad Black created the Post to provide a fresh perspective for Canadians. More right of centre, more “in your face”, it challenged the newspaper establishment and forced the competition to raise its game. As a result, readers of all Canadian papers benefit from stronger reporting, a greater choice of viewpoints, even better layout and design.

In introducing AJE in May 2010, managing director (and former editor in chief of CBC news) Tony Burman said:

“Our experience introducing this channel is, once it’s on air, once people see it, all these kind of negative stereotypes … are put aside…This is an opportunity for Canadians to make their own judgment.”

Shouldn’t that standard apply to a Fox News North as well?

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Newsweek, Still Devolving (townhall.com, 100804)

Brent Bozell

There’s something oddly funny about the cluelessness of liberal media companies when their ratings fall or their subscriptions collapse. They just refuse to admit, even consider that the business problem could be (at least in part) their own incessant liberal agitating. Instead, they seem to double down and make things even worse.

ABC’s Sunday show “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” could never beat NBC, so what did the ABC brain trust do? They promoted the Bill Clinton spin artist to an everyday anchor job on “Good Morning America.” Then they doubled down and replaced him with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, who is married to another Bill Clinton spin artist, Jamie Rubin. Can it get more insular?

Here’s another case in point: Newsweek’s subscriptions collapsed a couple of years back. How could it not be (at least in part) the umpteen Obama-worshipping cover stories that caused some subscribers to cancel? Then they really abandoned the “News” half of their title and wrote cover stories like “We’re All Socialists Now” and “Is Your Baby Racist?”

Newsweek was put on the market, and the market has spoken: a $1 sale.

Washington Post Company chieftain Donald Graham wasn’t going to let the unwashed “rabble” of journalism win this Cracker Jack prize. So he turned away the conservatives at Newsmax magazine, as well as the publishers of the National Enquirer and TV Guide. “In seeking a buyer for Newsweek, we wanted someone who feels as strongly as we do about the importance of quality journalism,” Graham said in a statement. That means nobody broke up into laughter in front of him over whether the notion of “quality journalism” is demonstrated by racist-baby exclusives.

Of course, the Washington Post wasn’t going to take that dollar (and unload its obligations) with some conniving Murdoch. They obviously wanted another liberal elitist to take the reins, and so they accepted the bid of Sidney Harman, the husband of Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif. This passed with flying colors for radicals like Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation, who hailed him on Twitter as a “decent & longtime liberal.”

Twitter also contained lots of mockery. Jim Geraghty of National Review joked: “Sidney Harman bought Newsweek, the institution, for $4.95 less than the cost of Newsweek, the print edition.” And: “Newsweek’s cover story next week is ‘MERCIFUL ATHENA: How Jane Harman balances toughness and tenderness in a dangerous world.’”

Mr. Harman has donated $85,000 to the Democratic National Committee (most recently $25,000 in 2004). He’s also contributed to liberal politicians from Ted Kennedy to Barbara Boxer to Geraldine Ferraro. There’s only one Republican on the list, Scott McInnis of Colorado in 2001. As for the potential that Harman would do his wife’s bidding, there are occasions where both Harmans contributed to Democrats at the same time, according to federal election records. Both donated to leftist Mark Green on July 9, 1997; to Ellen Tauscher on Feb. 6, 1998; to Max Cleland on June 29, 2001; to Paul Wellstone on Aug. 21, 2002; to Joe Lieberman on March 31, 2003; and to John Kerry on April 16, 2003.

Even without the major conflict of interest that the owner of Newsweek is married to the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Harman has liberal-elite credentials. He was president of Friends World College, a “worldwide experimental Quaker” peace college, in the early 1970s. He’s on the board of the Aspen Institute. He was also an undersecretary of commerce under Jimmy Carter and is a trustee emeritus of the Carter Center and a former board member of the Martin Luther King Center for Social Change.

But the media elite still sold this unconvincingly as one “centrist” selling to another. Mike Allen of Politico relayed Donald Graham “felt comfortable with Harman’s centrist politics, and was comforted by the idea of selling to a stalwart of the Washington establishment.”

This is the magazine that couldn’t send one greenhorn reporter to the scene of the earthquake in Haiti this year, choosing instead to rely for its “quality journalism” on a cover story written by (and about) President Obama. Two months later, they awarded their cover story to Michelle Obama to publicize her initiative on childhood obesity. With this kind of shilling for the White House, it won’t be at all shocking if Sidney Harman’s Newsweek seems run by a left-wing activist. That would mean the status quo is intact.

But that wouldn’t mean that Newsweek will stop losing money. This ship is still sinking, and the captains have no plans to plug the leaks.

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Girls Watching Reality TV Have Distorted View of Real Life? (Christian Post, 111021)

A recent study finds that girls who watch reality TV shows on a regular basis have a sharply different and often unrealistic view of human behavior more so than their peers who do not watch similar programs. The finding should alarm parents, said an expert on media and modern culture.

The recently released Girls Scouts Research Institute survey of more than 1,100 girls showed that the dramatic difference was between their expectations of peer relationships, overall self-image, and their understanding of how the world works.

All of the girls surveyed agreed that reality shows promote bad behavior, according to the institute. A large majority believe that reality TV shows “often pit girls against each other to make the shows more exciting (86%), make people think that fighting is a normal part of a romantic relationship (73%), and make people think it’s okay to treat others badly (70%).”

The study showed that regular reality TV watchers accept and expect a higher level of drama, aggression, and bullying in their own lives as well. These viewers are considerably more likely than non-viewers to agree that: “Gossiping is a normal part of a relationship between girls (78% vs. 54%); It’s in girls’ nature to be catty and competitive with one another (68% vs. 50%); and it’s hard for me to trust other girls (63% vs. 50%).”

Teresa Tomeo, author of Extreme Makeover: Women Transformed by Christ, Not Conformed to the Culture, said “maybe the genre should be called ‘Fantasy TV.’” Tomeo, who is a Catholic radio show host, often speaks at events about the impact of media on culture.

“What was most alarming were the percentage rates of just how many girls in the survey actually believe that these shows reflect real life,” Tomeo told The Christian Post. “Many in the Girl Scout study also said they see the bad behavior often exhibited in some of the reality shows as normal. This is, well, disturbing – especially if we’re talking about shows like ‘The Jersey Shore,’ which was actually mentioned in the report.”

The survey should serve as “yet another wake-up call for parents everywhere,” she said.

The study also found that girls who watch reality TV regularly are more focused on the value of physical appearance. Seventy-two percent say they spend a lot of time on their appearance verses 42% for non-viewers.

“So many young girls I meet during my speaking events around the country are struggling with self-esteem issues, depression, and eating disorders. While we can’t blame the media for everything, we can’t ignore the fact that the media are so pervasive in young people’s lives today, and they are taking many of their cues from what they watch and listen to,” Tomeo said.

In Extreme Makeover, Tomeo said that she challenges women “to shed the messages and toxic images like those in reality programs, and instead embrace the truth about their human dignity.”

When asked about what that shedding might look like, she said, “I encourage women to take what I like to call a media reality check. How much media are they consuming, and what type of media are they consuming?

“When women are constantly told through TV commercials and programs that they have to look, act, and dress a certain way to be accepted and loved, then this is going to impact their self-esteem. And if they are getting their news about faith issues from the mainstream media, then they are going to be sadly misinformed about who Jesus is and how He is our biggest liberator.”

Tomeo said that having a relationship with Jesus is key.

“If girls knew who they were in Christ, they would see themselves so much differently. They will feel truly loved and cared for,” she highlighted.

“This doesn’t mean that a young Christian girl is not going to have problems or feel pressured to look or act a certain way. But it does mean that at the end of the day, she knows there is more to life than how many friends she has on Facebook or whether she saw the last episode of ‘The Hills’ or ‘American Idol.’”

“It gives her something else to look forward to and reach for because she knows life is bigger than what’s on TV,” she said.

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Fox News to Start Airing Christian-Perspective Movie Reviews (Christian Post, 111117)

Fox News will soon have Christian-perspective movie reviews on their Friday morning segments. Starting Nov. 18, the Christian movie reviewer, Movieguide, will start airing short segments covering current box office hits.

Movieguide purchased airtime for seven different reviews to appear between now and the end of the year, every Friday from 6 a.m. to noon on Fox. The first review will feature the new Muppets movie.

The founder of Movieguide, Dr. Ted Baehr, said in a release, "We are pleased to be placing our TV show on the Fox News Channel. This gives us another great opportunity to help make family life better, by helping parents make positive movie choices for their children and teenagers.”

Movieguide already does two-minute video reviews on its websites, but they were looking to expand to other channels, and Fox felt like a good fit. Baehr’s daughter Evelyn, who will appear in the first clip on Fox with her father, told The Christian Post today the purpose of the reviews is to “talk about the worldview, analyze the quality, and [give a] summary of the actual film.”

Movieguide exists to give families movie reviews from a Christian perspective using biblical standards. Their website is set up in an easy to use manner. They have the most recent box office hits on the homepage with a star rating guide to quickly and easily show what their assessment of the films are. Users can then click on the individual movies for more details.

Each film reviewed has a rating breakdown that covers how much “Language, Violence, Sex and Nudity” is in a movie. This helps parents easily see what kind of content the movies they are considering for their child has.

In addition to the rating and content breakdown, they also provide a more in-depth analysis of the film, a summary of the plot, a review of the movie and a final section called “In Brief.”

The “In Brief” section adds a final analysis of the film using a Christian worldview. For example, in this section for the movie “Puss in Boots,” they state that the movie was well made, with great 3D animation, but “the plotline is sometimes convoluted, but overall it’s funny and entertaining. Puss In Boots has a strong moral worldview, with redemptive elements.”

The group’s goal is "to redeem the values of the entertainment industry by influencing industry executives and by informing and equipping the public about the influence of the entertainment media."

Tom Snyder, who works with Movieguide and is the vice president of the Christian Film and Television Commission, told The Christian Post their goal is to take a more positive and family-friendly approach to film. They want Christian content to take a bigger role in Hollywood, and accomplish that by influencing industry executives and informing and equipping the public through their reviews of movies.

Movieguide is in its 26th year of operation and people can access their content through the web, iPhone and Android apps, TV shows, and radio programs.

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