CJR Daily’s Felix Gillette writes about this week’s news about UPN and The WB merging and how some FOX affiliates will lose out in the merger, a detail Gillette says was ignored on FNC, which is owned by the same parent company that owns the FOX affiliates…

For years, News Corp. distributed UPN content through a handful of its local stations in major markets across the country, including Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington. As virtually everyone except Fox was reporting, News Corp. had been excluded from the merger — a development that had left many of its local stations with gaping holes in their future programming.

Yesterday, Fox News once again reported on the nascent networks’ formation and once again failed to mention News Corp.’s resulting predicament.
(more…)

I touched on this a bit yesterday but CNN’s official release today expands on that…

In a special edition of The Situation Room, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Paula Zahn will anchor the network’s coverage of President George W. Bush’s fifth State of the Union address on Tuesday, Jan. 31, beginning at 7 p.m.

CNN correspondents Dana Bash, Candy Crowley, Ed Henry and John King, CNN senior analyst Jeff Greenfield, and contributors Paul Begala, William Bennett, Victoria Clarke, J.C. Watts and others will provide reports and analysis throughout the network’s prime-time coverage of the address. The network’s special coverage will also include the Democratic Party’s response by Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine.

Following the Democratic response at approximately 10:30 p.m., CNN’s Anderson Cooper takes over anchoring duties, broadcasting live from the balcony of the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C. For this special edition of Anderson Cooper 360°, he will be joined by congressional members and analysts, including former presidential advisor David Gergen, Arianna Huffington, House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Andrew Sullivan.

CNN’s Larry King hosts a special edition of Larry King Live beginning at midnight with top political leaders and analysts.

NBC announced today its News Division’s plans for covering the Olympics. It’s rather lengthy. MSNBC’s on-air staff contribution relies heavily on Tucker Carlson, Chris Jansing, and Alison Stewart.

On NBC’s 24-hour cable news channel, MSNBC, Chris Jansing, Alison Stewart and Tucker Carlson, will anchor special Olympic coverage. U.S. Olympic gold medalists Sarah Hughes and Natalie Coughlin will join as on-air contributors. MSNBC will offer special live programming leading into and out of its Olympic coverage, which begins on Monday, February 13 and will include men’s and women’s hockey and curling. Jansing and Stewart will anchor the network’s pre-Olympic coverage from Torino, highlighting the athletes, their families, emerging stars and dramatic stories from the Games as well as the beautiful country where the Olympics are being held. Tucker Carlson will anchor MSNBC’s daily post-event coverage from MSNBC headquarters and will take a look at the day’s events with contributions from Jansing and Stewart. Hughes, a gold medalist in women’s figure skating and Coughlin, a five-time Olympic medalist in women’s swimming, will join MSNBC’s Olympic coverage for analysis and commentary.

The actual schedule for the Olympics for all NBC channels can be found here…

UPDATE: According to NBC’s Olympic Media Guide, Lester Holt will anchor a live weekday newscast on MSNBC from Torino. This will be Holt’s first anchoring duties on MSNBC in over six months.

And the Palm Beach Daily News’ Jan Sjostrom has him…(via Romenesko)

The anchorman whose boss once characterized him as ice compared with his successor’s fire was anything but chilly in the impassioned speech he delivered Tuesday at The Society of the Four Arts.

“Truth no longer matters in the context of politics and, sadly, in the context of cable news,” said Aaron Brown, whose four-year period as anchor of CNN’s NewsNight ended in November, when network executives gave his job to Anderson Cooper in a bid to push the show’s ratings closer to front-runner Fox News.

Brown said he tried to give viewers a balanced diet of light and serious news with NewsNight. “But I always knew when I got to the Brussels sprouts, I was on thin ice,” he said.

TV Guide’s Stephen Battaglio interviews FNC’s Brit Hume about the State Of The Union. But somehow the new World News Tonight tag team gets brought up…

TVGuide.com: Do you have anything special planned for your broadcast on Tuesday? Are we going to see something we haven’t seen before?

Hume: Yeah, we’re going to have Jessica Simpson and Matt Damon. No, we’re going to have the usual team. Our White House correspondent [Carl Cameron] at the White House; our congressional correspondent [Brian Wilson] will be on the hill. My analytical team from Special Report will be with me and augmented by others.

TVGuide.com: I know you have a job during the evening news hours, but I was wondering, as an alum of World News Tonight, if you’ve seen the new broadcast and what you think of it.

Hume: I’ve just seen glimpses of it, and it didn’t seem terribly compelling. But they’re just getting started, so it’s too early to tell. Experience in an anchor is something that viewers value. It gives them the sense that the person they are watching knows what’s really important and can be trusted to handle major news. I think the people ABC has tapped for its anchor team [Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff] are attractive people, and perhaps very talented people, but they seem by relative standards inexperienced.

TVGuide.com: Are you surprised they didn’t go with Charlie Gibson?

Hume: I would have gone with Charlie in a heartbeat.

The Houston Chronicle’s Claudia Feldman writes about the upcoming Enron trial and how the media is covering it…

Fox News Channel’s Dallas correspondent Kim McIntyre, along with FNC Houston producer Melissa Jacobs, will cover the trial and provide live updates from the courthouse in Houston. The cable news network’s Your World with Neil Cavuto also will provide extensive coverage on the trial. So far, CNN has committed to sending only its financial/business reporter, Chris Huntington, but additional resources will eventually be sent to Houston.

BBC radio reporter Lesley Curwen explains why millions will be paying attention:

“Enron made the ground shake. This was the granddaddy of corporate scandals — the one that made us doubt what we were being told as investors, the one that made us look at corporations in a whole new light.”
(more…)

Looks like some Far Left blogs are trying to start a boycott of MSNBC’s Chris Mathews. I’m sorry but this is nuts. Anyone who watched Mathews tear in to Michelle Malkin and the Swift Boat Veterans in 2004 knows Mathews is no Right Wingnut. Yeah, he did say something about Bin Laden and Michael Moore which the Far Left misconstrued in my opinion. But if that’s the worst thing that they can pin on the guy after all these years on the air, that’s pretty dang thin.

Back before ICN started and there were a few of us bandying about the idea of a blog, I said that I didn’t have the time to do one and furthermore if I ever did a blog it would be about politics and the media and be called “Idealogues Suck!” and attack both the Far Right and Far Left for their assenine poisoning of the national debate and their smothering of the numerically dominant, albeit relatively quiet, Middle. Well that never happened but if it had this is the sort of thing I would have gone off on. And for the record “Progressives”, Mathews did not compare Moore to Bin Laden. He compared Bin Laden to Moore. There’s a huge difference in that distinction (Moore being the reference point and not visa versa) which has apparently been lost on you to the point that you’ve transposed and twisted the comparison…

UPDATE: An Emailer pointed out an interesting twist that I hadn’t considered…

If anyone at Fox had said what Matthews did, do you have ANY doubt that he would end up as “worst person in the world”?