Axcessnews.com’s Alan Fein reports that the Consumer Bankers Association’s President Joe Belew issued a statement about innacuracies in a CNN story that was broadcast Wednesday… (via WHAC)

Belew said the CNN reporter, Kitty Pilgrim, stated at least five times in a 90-second story that “banks” receive an extraordinarily high, government-guaranteed interest rate of 9.5 percent on their loans to college students.

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In a news release Thursday, Belew’s said, “banks do not and never have been eligible to receive a guaranteed minimum interest rate of 9.5 percent.

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“If someone from CNN had bothered to contact CBA or a bank lender, they would have learned the truth”, said Belew.

The CBA then demanded that CNN correct their story.

Campbell Brown will fill in tomorrow on MSNBC Live from 2-4 pm. This will be the first time Brown has ever anchored on MSNBC Live, we believe. Not as big a deal as Katie Couric showing up but it’s close. What isn’t surprising however is that MSNBC hasn’t had a settled, consistent anchor lineup since the fall of last year. Not a week has gone by where you’ve seen the same faces day in and day out five days straight. If this sounds like something you’ve read on ICN before…well you have. And we’ll keep pointing it out until it stops happening….

Here’s a breakdown of numbers (courtesy of FOX News) in the peak period of Shuttle coverage yesterday from 12:30-2 pm. The scrub announcement came at the bottom half of the 1 pm hour…
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Big night for FOX. On The Record came within 70,000 of beating O’Reilly (it did beat its Demo). On The Record’s Demo number beat CNN’s entire Primetime show lineup’s Demo numbers added together. Relatively flat day for MSNBC in primetime. The Situation continues to struggle hard.
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CNBC announced today that Mad Money with Jim Cramer will feature a live studio audience and also New York State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer on July 20th at 6 pm EST…

“This is going to be one intense ‘lightening round’ said Cramer about doing his show in front of his first live in studio audience. “I have always wanted to add the energy of an audience to my show and this is going to be as exciting for me, as it will for my loyal and diehard fans.”

This special edition of “Mad Money” will mark the official premiere of the segment, “Am I Nuts?” The segment will offer people the opportunity to talk to “Doctor” Cramer about the ‘health’ of their stock picks. Like any good specialist, Cramer, who will don a financial lab coat, will offer his best advice to get his patients on a steady diet of the do’s and don’ts and get them “stock healthy.”

The release also says that for the show’s Lightning Round that the “live studio audience will get in on the action and go face to face with Jim”…

Broadcasting & Cable is reporting that an internal email which B&C theorizes is from CNBC President Mark Hoffman, states that Bob Meyers will be leaving his current position and will be assisting Hoffman with other things. Meyers is the Senior Vice President of Prime Time Programming at CNBC and was also in charge of weekend programming. The email goes on to say that Susan Krakower will take over in the interim until a permanent successor is found.

The e-mail praises Meyers for overseeing the development of Big Idea and Mad Money with Jim Cramer (another Krakower project), for his efforts in digital media and with CNBC.com, and as “a key player on the team that managed the on-time and on-budget construction of our new state of the art facility in Englewood Cliffs.”

(via FTVLive)

MSNBC continues to go all out to promote The Situation. First it was special TV spots showing up on NBC prime time. Now it’s full page ads in Time Magazine. This is the biggest publicity commitment ICN has ever seen from MSNBC and NBC for any MSNBC program. And ICN has been watching MSNBC since the day it went on the air. We’ve been watching FOX since the day it went on the air too but that’s not important…