Earlier this evening on the Abrams Report, Dan Abrams responded to Anderson Cooper’s attack on MSNBC and FOX last night over Aruba coverage. Earlier, ICN Commentors say, Abrams called Cooper a hypocrite. Later in the show Abrams launched into a devastating attack on Cooper…
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Denis Horgan blogs today on the Missing White Woman phenomenon but takes a different tack…

But, while we have to take a number to get in line to thump the “media” for its over-coverage of this distressing story, we also might give some small appreciation to the fact that people are following it in a way you could wish they were following, say, the war on Iraq story.

Rubbing our superior hands together over the exploitive cable TV types, it is hard to dismiss the fact that when they give the latest in the unending series of MWW (”Missing White Women”) stories, the public eats it up.

Maybe the public, too, deserves its share of responsibility for the coverage. In the obverse of the Field of Dreams exhortation, if you build it and they do not come then you will not build it again; if they do come, you will never stop.

ICN agrees with Horgan that the Cable Nets to a great extent are just covering stories that interest the public and the MWW saga resonates. But ICN would also point out that there’s lots of things out there that the public would eat up if presented to it on TV. Just look at what happens to local news during a sweeps period. Does that mean that Cable Nets should automatically cater to their whims because it generates big numbers? At what point does the desire for ratings get trumped by the Cable Nets charter to deliver actual news? ICN doesn’t have the answer but hopes that the issue is at least being discussed….

This one has been making the rounds today on the internet. A window washer made an unscheduled appearance during an interview on MSNBC between Chris Jansing and Mantill Williams. The washer was cleaning windows in MSNBC/NBC’s Washington bureau and dangled back and forth behind Williams. A slide show of the incident is here….

Update: Countdown ran the bit as part of Great Moments in TV. One of the segments was Carlson talking to a woman who was shoving hot dog/sausages down her throat. Another one was a replaying of the now infamous clip of CNN’s Rick Sanchez getting zapped with a stun gun. After that clip Olbermann zinged Sanchez…

“Yeah but he used to do that like that when he was here and nobody was hitting him with anything”

FOX keeps on rolling along like a well oiled machine. Its Total Day numbers beat CNN’s Prime Time numbers. Good news for MSNBC…Cosby’s show broke a downtrend line that started on premiere night and the numbers were higher than Wednesday night by a significant amount. The show still hasn’t gotten back to debut night levels though. But at least it shows that the show can go back up. And that’s important because it means that the viewing public has not dismissed the show out of hand…yet. Whether this is something MSNBC will be able to build upon is too soon to tell though. It was the first time in a lonnnnnnng time that MSNBC’s entire primetime lineup broke 350,000 on a non breaking news flash type day. On the other hand, without a breaking news story to boost viewership as happened Wednesday, The Situation fell back to its usual 150,000 level. So far the switch has not produced any tangible benefit for the show. Showbiz Tonight took it on the chin bad, scratching at the 7 pm hour. ICN believes this was the first time a HLN program has scratched in primetime since the new format launched.
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Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine notes Anderson Cooper’s rant/accusation last night about other cable news channels overdoing the Natalie Holloway story when there is no news. ICN can see the blowback coming now…

UPDATE: “Perhaps Anderson should worry more about the future of CNN and the meltdown going on there instead of pontificating on what the number one cable news network is doing,” said a Fox News spokesperson.

UPDATE 2: Word is filtering in through user comments that Dan Abrams took Cooper on tonight. Can anyone send ICN an exact transcript?

Jon Scott will host a special titled “Company of Heroes” on FOX tomorrow night about the aftermath of the Battle for Fallujah. Billed as an investigative documentary, FOX News Correspondent Greg Palkot traveled with the marines of India Company 3rd Battalion 5th Marine as they made their way through Fallujah and he will be exploring the personal stories of some of these soldiers…

Traveling to their hometowns, Palkot speaks with several India Company Marines and their families, including Captain Brian Chontosh and the wife of Lance Corporal Antoine Smith who died in Fallujah, and reveals the impact of urban warfare after the battle had ended.

The two hour special airs Saturday at 9 pm EST.

This one slipped under pretty much everyone’s radar screen when it first aired but someone posted about it yesterday on the TVSpy board. Environmental activist group Greenpeace is up in arms over a comment Tucker Carlson made on the show The Situation when he said on the air that he respected the French government for blowing up the Greenpeace ship The Rainbow Warrior in 1985. One person was killed in that action.

From “The Situation with Tucker Carlson,”
MSNBC, June 22, 2005

CARLSON: I am objectively pro-France. You know, France blew up the Rainbow Warrior, that Greenpeace ship in Auckland Harbor in the ’80s. And I’ve always respected them…

MADDOW: That made you like them?

CARLSON: Yes. Yes. It won me over.

The whole Greenpeace version of the story is here and includes Carlson getting into a dispute over characterizing the incident as terrorism or vandalism. An AP version is here on the TVSpy board…

Dana Stevens in Slate pretty much trashes CNN’s The Situation Room under the heading “Blitzed Out”…(via Romenesko)

CNN’s new afternoon news show The Situation Room (not to be confused with MSNBC’s The Situation With Tucker Carlson, which has just been banished to the attic of an 11 p.m. time slot) is the latest example of what CNN President Jonathan Klein describes as his network’s “newfound dedication to being the newsy alternative.” In a landscape of nearly indistinguishable cable yammerfests, The Situation Room’s main claim to innovation is twofold: It’s live, and it’s three hours long. This unusual combination means that the show manages to be at once an impressive technical achievement and a colossal bore.

Besides being very, very live and very, very long, the most notable thing about The Situation Room (weekdays 3 to 6 p.m. ET) is its anxiety to define itself as a different kind of news show. In the words of Jon Stewart on last night’s Daily Show, The Situation Room is “Wolf Blitzer’s show, but with giant screens. Same old s**t.” The show’s quintessential visual: Blitzer standing in front of a bank of long, narrow screens, each showing a live newsfeed from a just-reported or upcoming story. There’s a lot of Terminator-style graphics pulsating around the edges of the screens, as digital clocks tick off the exact time in different parts of the world. In Vienna, Austria, it’s 11:03:01 a.m.! In Crawford, Texas, it’s 2:03:25 p.m.! Stuff is happening in different time zones, and we here in The Situation Room plan to glancingly refer to at least some of it!

Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post takes the media to task for obsessing over missing white women stories like Natalie Holloway.

How silly of me; of course no one is going to make it stop. Certainly not Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren, who’s spent so much time in Aruba looking for blond, missing Natalee Holloway that she probably qualifies for a Dutch passport. Leaving no stone or sand dollar unturned, Van Susteren has ridden this sad little story to her best Nielsen ratings ever. Hey, who cares about Iraq? They’re draining the pond! They’re digging in the landfill!

At least Van Susteren is upfront about why she sticks with the story. “I’m always happy when the viewers are happy,” Van Susteren told the Associated Press. “I obviously don’t program for the people in the newsroom or my friends or the people I went to law school with. I program for the viewers.”
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Meanwhile, the case of Latoyia Figueroa, a pregnant 24-year-old woman of color missing in Philadelphia, is being used as a kind of make-up call. You know what a make-up call is: When a referee in the NBA calls a foul on one team and then the replay shows it wasn’t really a foul at all, he quickly calls a cheap foul on the other team as a way to even the score.

In this case, the replay showed that the number of missing women of color who had received the full 24-7 Damsels treatment was precisely zero. So, nagged by a persistent blogger, the cable networks grudgingly devoted a couple of days to Figueroa. Then they dashed back to Aruba and breathlessly reported the latest “developments” in the Holloway case.

Never mind that there haven’t been any real developments. The same guy’s been in jail for weeks, and the crack Aruban authorities still can’t even say that a crime has been committed, much less by whom. People aren’t watching this story to follow an unfolding mystery, because it refuses to unfold. There must be another reason why producers and viewers love it so.

Marketwatch’s Jon Friedman goes behind the scenes at CNN during the Peter Jennings story…(via WHAC)

On Aug. 7, CNN weekend anchor Carol Lin and her colleagues began hearing reports that Jennings was near death. Quite obviously, Jennings, the anchor of “World News Tonight” for 22 years and an international celebrity, was a very newsworthy subject.

But for Lin, the possibility arose that CNN would have to decide whether to break the story or allow ABC, Jennings’ professional home for four decades, to report it first. Complicating matters, CNN is crawling with former ABC staffers.

“Even if we were able to get confirmation, we’d decided to wait,” Lin said. “I guess it was something you wouldn’t expect to see in the era of blogs. Everyone has a different set of circumstances,” she said.