WHAC is live blogging the first show….

ICN only caught a few minutes and needs to see more of the three hours to really form an opinion. But Blitzer sure does look very alone standing out there in the middle of a room with a big video screen wall. And someone at CNN should send a royalty check to MSNBC for stealing their crazy camera movement shtick….

Although they don’t directly compete with one another CNN’s premiere of The Situation Room and MSNBC’s premiere of Live & Direct are competing directly with each other for press coverage. Both CNN and MSNBC issued press releases about their new programs’ debut shows….

MSNBC…

“Rita Cosby: Live & Direct” bolts out of the starting gate Monday, August 8 (9-10 p.m. ET) with the first television interviews of Michael Jackson jurors Eleanor Cook and Ray Hultman. The two jurors admit to Rita they are haunted by the notion they may have let a guilty man go free. They also describe the atmosphere surrounding their deliberations as one filled with intimidation and fear.

CNN…

During today’s premiere of CNN’s The Situation Room, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff will speak with CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer about plans to guard the United States from terrorist attacks inside its own borders.

In addition, CNN’s Kyra Phillips will deliver an unprecedented look inside one of the world’s most famed situation rooms. For today and Tuesday, Aug. 9, Phillips will report from Cheyenne Mountain, Colo., home of the NORAD Command Center and the Joint Operations Center for the Northern Command.

The NY Post’s Michael Starr takes a look at Rita Cosby’s debut tonight in the context of a new wave of aggressive female hosted cable programs that includes Nancy Grace and Greta Van Susteren…

RITA Cosby, the pugnacious, former Fox New Channel reporter, joins the club tonight.

Along with FNC’s Greta Van Susteren and Headline News anchor Nancy Grace, Cosby will be initiated into a small, elite sorority of cable-news women who have - in just the last year or two - invented a new TV archtype.

They are the hard-nosed hosts of prime-time news shows - a generation younger than Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer, who have advanced to the top ranks through their charm as much as their intelligence.

The AP’s David Bauder (via the NY Post) notes Greta’s ratings for her Aruba coverage spiked last month…

Bringing a microphone and camera crew to the gates of an Aruba landfill this past week, Greta Van Susteren returned to the island that her nightly Fox News Channel program has figuratively called home recently. Van Susteren’s “On the Record” has relentlessly followed the mysterious disappearance of 18-year-old Natalee Holloway of Alabama while on a graduation trip to Aruba in May.

Critics find it an obsession bordering on the bizarre, twisting traditional notions of news judgment and becoming Exhibit A in the media’s fascination with missing people - as long as they happen to be young, white, female and pretty.

But while doing this, Van Susteren has been rewarded with her biggest audiences since making the switch from CNN three years ago.

CJR Online’s Liz Cox Barrett profiles CNN’s “Inside The Blogs” Abbi Tatton and
Jacki Schechner…

LCB: What sort of feedback have you received from bloggers, beyond the self-promotional, hey-talk-about-me emails that I’m guessing you see from time to time?

JS: We don’t get a lot of self-promotional emails. We do get a lot of suggestions and story ideas. Bloggers themselves are starting to recognize the value of a segment dedicated to their collective voice.