Ad Age’s Claire Atkinson speculates about a sooner than expected debut of Fox Business Channel. (via Jossip)

Other tipsters say Fox News producers told folks they’re expecting the launch this month, while analysts say recent meetings with News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch and President Peter Chernin left them with the distinct impression that the Wall Street-focused sibling is close to birth. A message for a Fox News spokeswoman was not returned by press time.

UPDATE: FTVLive has FNC execs shooting down the story.

Tonight on Countdown the subject of the Malmedy massacre and Bill O’Reilly’s accusation that Americans massacred Nazis came up again. On Tuesday’s Factor, O’Reilly had Wesley Clark on again and, as with the first time the two talked about it, O’Reilly again claimed that Americans massacred Nazis in Malmedy. The first incident was chronicled on ICN here…

A clip from The Factor was played of a viewer email pointing out to O’Reilly that the Americans were massacred and not the Nazis. O’Reilly responded that some Nazis were executed after Malmedy: “In the heat of the debate with General Clark, my statment wasn’t clear enough Mr. Caldwell…after Malmedy some German captives were executed by American troops.”

Olbermann then retorted:

Wrong answer. When you are that wrong - when you are defending Nazi war criminals and pinning their crimes on Americans and are caught doing so - twice - You are supposed to say, “I’m sorry, I was wrong” and then you’re supposed to shut up for a long time.

Instead FOX washed its transcript of O’Reilly’s remarks Tuesday. Its website claims O’Reilly said “In Normandy” when as you heard in fact he said “In Malmedy”. The rewriting of past reporting worthy of George Orwell has now carried over into such online transcription services as Burells and Factiva.

Transcripts are notoriously sloppy so I’m not convinced that it’s a given that FNC changed the wording. The likelihood is that the transcription service got it wrong.

UPDATE: Crooks & Liars has the video…

FNC will be broadcasting a one hour special on Saturday June 3rd at 10 pm ET. The special “The Battle For Arab Democracy” is hosted by Brit Hume and will examine the influence of democracy and U.S. Policy in the Middle East.

Middle East expert Dennis Ross will present the different ways the U.S. can approach the future of the Middle East when military means alone prove insufficient. Featuring exclusive interviews with world leaders, including US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, “The Battle for Arab Democracy” is an instructive look at how the United States can spread its values and win the battle of hearts and minds in the Middle East.

UPDATE: It’s not Sunday but Saturday…

CNN’s Todd Leopold writes about Anderson Cooper’s book and has an interview with Cooper.

He admits to having mixed feelings about his job. “Dispatches” is full of self-deprecation, acknowledgements that preparing a news story is as much about separating your emotions from the story — through gallows humor, tunnel vision or simple numbness — as it is about investing your emotions in the story.

” ‘I’ve become what I once hated,’ I thought to myself — sadly, not for the first time,” he writes at one point, describing his presence at the scrum during Terri Schiavo’s last days.

But he’s taken care to hold on to his humanity, aware that it’s something that’s easy to lose.

This raises all sorts of conflict of interest questions about where to draw the line in regards to how a network handles a book by one of its employees. I think CNN would have been better off not doing this. This is different from what happens on FNC where a show host like O’Reilly, Cavuto, or Gibson plugs his book. If Cooper plugs his book on AC 360 I’m fine with that. This is another thing entirely in my opinion.

Macleans.ca’s Lianne George has a review of Anderson Cooper’s book “Dispatches From the Edge”…

The book, now being heavily promoted on his show, feels at once like a worthy cultural document and a self-indulgent screed. The latter seems surprising from someone who says he strives to keep himself out of the story. One topic that is glaringly absent from Dispatches is that of his private life. In particular, Cooper’s sexuality has been a source of broad speculation for some time. But it’s a subject he refuses to address publicly. “I do my job and that’s really what I’m about,” he says. “The rest I have no interest in talking about and people can make up their own minds and think what they want.”

Yet what could be more intimate than discussing the suicide of his brother? On the day of Carter’s funeral, a small party of photographers snapped away as Cooper helped his grieving mother out of the car. “I hated them: circling like vultures over our barely breathing bodies,” he writes in his book. “I’d forgotten that moment, that feeling, until this past year, when I found myself reporting outside Terri Schiavo’s hospice.”

The New York Times’ Stuart Elliot writes about the BBC World News as one example of British Media trying to make inroads in the U.S.

The campaign for BBC World News, carrying themes like “News beyond your borders,” portrays the network as providing coverage that is impartial and objective, enabling viewers, as several ads declare, to “see both sides of the story.”

In other words, “Fair and balanced,” but for real.

“In some ways the electorate is saying it’s tired of partisanship in Washington, so conceptually there is an opportunity for a new voice to enter the cable news arena that is less polarizing,” said Ed Keller, chief executive at the Keller Fay Group, an agency in New Brunswick, N.J., that specializes in word-of-mouth marketing. He likened BBC World News’ chances of drawing viewers to the ability of a third-party candidate for president “to make waves” in 2008.