Worldscreen.com’s Anna Carugati has an interview with Roger Ailes. (via TVNewser)

WS: News operations are very expensive. How do you get the content and look you want on the screen and still contain costs?

AILES: We’ve done very well from the start. I came up through television-station operations, so I understand cost efficiencies pretty well. We have never missed a major story, nor have we ever not done a major story because of costs. But we also don’t believe that a bureau needs to be 10,000 square feet of cement and a [staff of people] waiting for news to happen. In today’s world, technology moves so fast [you can have] two people in the right place with an uplink. When the tsunami hit, we broke that story ahead of CNN, as I recall, and they had 50 times more people in the region than we did. We were on it and we moved fast and we brought what [equipment] we needed for that moment. As for transportation, when we needed to get into Tora Bora, [the reporter] Geraldo Rivera [offered] some guy $50 and talked him into flying a broken-down helicopter up to Tora Bora and got in a day ahead of CNN. We’ve always operated on a need-to basis. As long as I can maintain that spirit and intensity in the personnel, we’ll be fine. We also subscribe to international news services [that supplement our own coverage]. Occasionally, every news outfit in the world, I don’t care who it is, is either late or misses a story. But our [operation misses stories] no more than CBS, CNN or anybody else.

Yesterday, while CNN touted its gains Lou Dobbs Tonight made against Special Report last month (UPDATE: And again today on TVNewser), it was very quiet about just about everything else, particularly primetime. Earlier this morning TVNewser noted how Countdown continues to chip away at Paula Zahn Now in both the P2+ and P25-54 categories (putting the kibosh on the notion that the Winter Olympics were the reason Countdown did so well).

Now here is more evidence that gives MSNBC reason to smile and CNN, while not needing to panic, might have reason to be concerned. Here are four charts showing April 2005 - April 2006 ratings for the two networks. The last slide in particular shows a clear downtrend line for CNN in the 25-54 Demo category since the beginning of the year…
(more…)

The New York Daily News’ Rush and Molloy write about Anderson Cooper’s new autobiography…

In his new memoir, “Dispatches From the Edge,” Cooper writes that reporting the horrors of Hurricane Katrina cracked open a levee holding back memories of his brother Carter’s 1988 suicide.

“For so long, I tried to separate myself from my past,” Cooper recalls. “I tried to move on, forget what I’d lost, but the truth is, none of it’s ever gone away.”