What a metaphor for the day (week, month) on Wall Street: As the graphic in the corner of the screen displayed the plunge of the Dow Jones on Fox News, it was reporting on a hot-air balloon that came crashing to earth in New Mexico earlier today. The video is to your left.
♦ Sean Hannity has signed a new "multi-year" deal with Fox News. [THR]
♦ Cutbacks at the Wall Street Journal: Reporters will only get one laptop now, not two. [Gawker]
♦ Ratings for Meet the Press have dropped since Tim Russert's passing. [NYP]
♦ The New York Times is shutting down the website for the International Herald Tribune. [E&P]
♦ People is rushing to market a 96-page, soft-cover book commemorating Paul Newman. [Folio]
♦ Dan Rather is seeking to expand his suit against CBS. And he's "only" making $1.5 million a year at HDNet, in case you were wondering. [Bloomberg]
♦ Dreamworks is downsizing. [Nikki Finke]
♦ The Natalee Holloway made-for-TV movie is on the way. To Lifetime, naturally. [NYP]
♦ Ryan Seacrest's radio show is coming to New York. And some people wonder why radio is dying. [NYP]
♦ David Letterman is in talks with John McCain about rescheduling his appearance on the late night show. [NYP]
♦ Sarah Palin will make two appearances on Fox News this week. [Politico]
♦ If your copy of the Times looks a little bit different today, that's because the paper has been busy shuffling around its various sections. [E&P]
♦ The LA Times may lay off as many as 75 staffers this week. [Variety]
♦ How big banks are handing their ad campaigns during this turbulent time. [NYT]
♦ CBS has had a solid start to the fall season. NBC has not. [AdAge, THR]
♦ Anne Hathaway has signed on to appear in Alice in Wonderland, which Tim Burton is directing. [THR]
♦ Why is Jim Cramer employed? That's what we'd like to know. [Romenesko]
This is our LAST DITCH ATTEMPT to stir anticipation for the VP debate set to air in about 18.3 minutes. It's Bill O'Reilly talking to Karl Rove about precisely how dumb Sarah Palin is or is not. O'Reilly assures everyone the vice presidential nominee reads the work of professional John McCain nemeses over at the Times. And Rove postulates that the reason she didn't bring up Plessy v. Ferguson when Katie Couric asked her about Supreme Court decisions is that she just got flustered and froze. Oh yes, that is totally why the landmark decision legalizing abortion was the first and only decision that came to her beautiful mind. How random a brain fart was that? Especially since Palin has shown so much concern for the stubborn legacy of slavery, like that time she mocked Obama for being a community organizer.Anyway, if she only had "confidence" like O'Reilly she would be fine. Because "confidence" is what the Sarah Palins of this world need more of.
Oh, MAN, I had to watch this like three times to believe it: Fox News sent a reporter to Joe Biden's hometown of Scranton today for a story on how Pennsylvania is a "battleground" state. It is not, of course, but you can prove anything on cable news with enough - which is to say, "scant" - anecdotal evidence. So the reporter went to a diner and asked for a show of hands as to who favored which candidate for president. "See, it's split!" he proclaimed when it was all done. What, your primary visual cortex? Click for the full awe-inspiringly-shameless-even-for-Fox clip.
Over the weekend Arkansas governor and minister and former fat person Mike Huckabee's new variety show premiered on Fox News. "We may have the first election in history where it's the winner who demands the recount!" he joked. No kidding. Huckabee went on to excoriate Wall Street and the bailout package congressional Republicans just sabotaged in a strikingly hard-to-dispute monologue that not only only foreshadowed the Nay that just sunk our stock market but also, one suspects, what will emerge as a new populist tone to the network's news coverage. Here's a partial transcript.
You'd think Fox News would be thrilled with the idea of an Obama presidency! Though they made their most important mark as the propaganda arm of the post-9/11 Bush presidency, they began as a channel in opposition to the status quo. Remember Clinton? The one who was president? The modern conservative movement is built around aggrieved victimhood, and Obama in the White House should mean the return of great Fox television. But they seem more concerned, right now, about getting that John McCain guy (who they never even really liked!) elected. They're actually maybe scared that their moment is over? That Rachel Maddow really is the future? How else to explain dumb stunts like erasing an AP report on Sarah Palin from their website after it showed up in search engines. The story was on how prominent conservatives like Kathleen Parker are all terrified that the McCain is sending a genial idiot into the White House based purely on her attractiveness to the base. Not revolutionary stuff. But too hot for Fox, apparently. (Though they did report on Frank Luntz's focus group proclaiming an Obama victory in the debate. No one referenced the group's decision again that night, as far as we know, but the Fox website is still highlighting the video.) Click to view
♦ David Letterman ripped into John McCain once again last night, which he'll probably continue to do as long as he gets this much attention for it. [NYT]
♦ Sarah Ivens is out as the editor-in-chief of the moneylosing tabloid OK! And, no, Bonnie Fuller is not taking over. [NYP]
♦ CNBC's David Faber is writing a book about the Wall Street meltdown, too. [NYO]
♦ ABC won the Thursday night ratings war thanks to the two-hour season premiere of Grey's Anatomy. [TV Decoder]
♦ Brigitte Quinn and Page Hopkins are leaving Fox News. [TV Newser]
♦ The Magazine Publishers of America will announce the winner of the cover of the year on Monday; here are the three finalists. [Jossip]
After a 4chan message board user broke into Sarah Palin's Yahoo Mail account and posted screenshots of her emails online, conservative Fox News pundit Bill O'Reilly went on the air and yelled about it. "I'm not going to mention the Web site that posted this, but it's one of those despicable, slimy, scummy websites," said O'Reilly on his show. "Everybody knows where this stuff is, OK, and they know the people who run the website, so why can't they go there tonight to the guy's house who runs it, put him in cuffs and take him down and book him? " 4chan management responded by changing the banner atop its random image posting board so that it read: "DESPICABLE, SLIMY, SCUMMY." One of the site's members took a more aggressive course of action, and hacked into O'Reilly's subscription-only site, BillOReilly.com, and posted the names, billing addresses, email addresses and passwords of 205 paying subscribers to Wikileaks and 4chan. In a statement, Wikileaks expressed no sympathy for O'Reilly — calling his site's security "nonexistent" — but had plenty for O'Reilly's attackers: "The hack was a response to the pundit's recent scurrilous attacks over the Sarah Palin's e-mail story — including on Wikileaks and other members of the press."
Though she's always been out on a limb as The View's resident conservative, Elisabeth Hasselbeck has found herself increasingly without allies over the past few weeks. First, she prompted a "Don't go there!" from an angry Whoopi Goldberg, then she sold out potential first lady Michelle Obama at a luncheon for Cindy McCain. And were the McCains grateful? Not so much! Why, it's enough to make a gal wonder if there's any place left to turn — and according to the National Enquirer, there is one deep, dark place:
We were hurt when voluble Fox News conservatalker Bill O'Reilly called Gawker a "despicable, slimy, scummy" website last night. Ha, not really. We wouldn't have expected anything less! O'Reilly has always had trouble controlling his temper, ever since his "Fuck it!" days on Inside Edition, when he still had hair. Click to watch this neat one-of-a-kind compilation of Bill's angriest moments over the years. And then SHUT UP.
As everyone with a working internet connection and a pair of rabbit ears atop their TV set may have learned, beloved comedy legend Tina Fey deigned to return to Saturday Night Live this past weekend, playing vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin ("Who's that?") in a performance as accurate as it was sensitive and even-handed. Why, even Palin herself enjoyed the skit, as her spokesperson told CBS News. There's just one catch: Palin watched the whole thing on mute and never turned up the volume dial, which she then had fired. According to Star:
As Ben Smith points out, had a non-conservative non-lady said this, it would probably score almost as high on the outrage-meter than some cesspool blog gloating over identity theft. Still. Here's Bloomberg's Caroline Baum explaining that Hillary voters won't flock to Sarah Palin just because she has tits. Yes, she actually says tits. Then everyone giggles for like ten minutes and also a goofy sound effect is played. [Ben Smith/Politico]
Bravely taking her pro-abstinence, purity-ring-rocking message to the Fox News flock, Jordin Sparks spent a few minutes last night explaining her recent outburst against oversexed Video Music Awards host Russell Brand. The difference between a "non-virgin" and "slut" remains foggy, but, at the very least, Sparks's convictions are burnished here to the fine Murdochian glow that so eluded the MTV class last weekend. The same cannot be said for her remarks on the subject of temptation ("I'm not saying I'm perfect by any means!"), from which conservative firebrand and noted hymen-defense expert Sean Hannity was later forced to rescue her with that metaphorical bucket of ice water known around the Fox offices as "a commercial break." [Fox News]
Griff Jenkins is the new quirky young media figure to be celebrated. Everybody rally for him now! He's pretty young, he wears sort of hipster-ish black frame glasses, and he's not afraid to take on quirky assignments like reporting live wearing only a Speedo (LOL), or inciting riots. The only thing is he works for Fox News. But he's totally not that kind of Fox News guy! When all the famous TV personalities rushed down South to cover Hurrican Gustav, who was left to cover the anarchist protests at the Republican convention? Our friend Griff! And you can't say he didn't do it quirkily:
Liberal peacenik Barack Obama's top secret sit-down meeting with Fox News ahead of the election was revealed in Vanity Fair this week by Michael Wolff, Rupert Murdoch's chosen biographer. So Fox News overlord Roger Ailes decided to go on the record today about all the various machinations at the shadowy back room confab. Did Ailes really have a "cordial" conversation with Obama, as he claims? Or was it actually a "frank discussion," as Obama's people claim? Read the tea leaves before Barack appears on Bill O'Reilly's show tomorrow: The time: three months ago. The place: some hotel room. The players: Obama, his advisers, Ailes, and Rupert Murdoch. Obama's angle: You people at Fox News aren't being fair:
Most celebrities only announce a stint in rehab after undergoing a very public flame-out, so when David Duchovny offered last week (apropos of nothing) that he was being treated for sex addiction, gossip hounds went wild trying to figure out the reasons why. One columnist hot on the case is Fox News gadfly Roger Friedman, last seen trying to put the blame for the Harry Potter delay on star Daniel Radcliffe's magic wand. After a little digging, Friedman got to the bottom of some of the more scurrilous rumors:
Fox & Friends is not just a forum for Fox News to bash people who made fun of the network's bedbug infestation or wrote factual news stories; it's also an opportunity for the show's Beckham-loving hosts to get drunk in the morning, piss off Donald Trump, and issue warnings about Paris Hilton tossing dwarfs. Click to watch this montage of inexplicable clips, all taken from today's show. "What you need to knew..to do..to avoid a new VIRUS!"
