The Financial Times’ Edward Luce has lunch with CNN’s Lou Dobbs…

I ask him what caused him to switch from being the affable and relatively unopinionated presenter of CNN’s Moneyline in the late 1990s to becoming the angry man of TV. Dobbs answers me between sips of lobster bisque, while I pick my way through organic beet salad. He traces his journey carefully: ”Certainly 9/11 was a fundamental change for all of us,” he says. ”Like most people who live and work in New York, I had friends who died. It was a very personal experience.” But what really jolted him out of his complacency, he says, was the revelation (a few weeks before the terrorist attacks) of gross fraud at Enron. Other corporate scandals followed as the hangover from the late 1990s dotcom-driven boom set in.

As is his wont, Dobbs strays into overstatement. ”I don’t think most Americans realise [Enron] was the greatest corruption in our history. There is a great deal that corporate America has to answer for… corporate America has lost its conscience.”

It is a rallying cry that has found echo across the US. In the mid-term congressional elections last November, large numbers of victorious Democratic party candidates campaigned on something resembling a Lou Dobbs platform - lacerating multinational companies for outsourcing US jobs to China and blaming free trade for middle America’s woes. They have been dubbed ”Lou Dobbs Democrats”.

”If you talk to CEOs today, they don’t know how in hell they are going to get a return out of China - and, if they do, how they are going to repatriate the capital,” Dobbs says. ”They talk about productivity and efficiency, but in fact these are code words for cheap labour. The effect is to put our middle class, which is the foundation of this country, in direct competition with the cheapest labour in the world. It is a perspective I can’t comprehend.”

Today the winners of FOX News Channel’s annual ‘College Challenge’ competition, Brittany Oat and Ted Fioraliso, appeared as guests on FOX & Friends. Both students are from Boston University and were chosen for their piece, “Eminent Domain.” The duo researched, wrote and produced their objective news story about the fairness of government seizing property. In addition to a weekend trip to New York City and a live studio appearance on the network, Oat and Fioraliso received $10,000 with a matching grant to Boston University.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-TX) and Rep. Adam Putnam (R-FL) spoke with CNN’s Dana Bash about Alberto Gonzales. CNN’s Political Ticker has video here

The Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Sandra Eckstein has an interview with CNN anchor Kyra Phillips in regards to the J. Smith Lanier & Co. Charity Classic to Benefit the Brain Tumor Foundation for Children golf tournament which Phillips is honorary chairwoman…

On the day CNN anchor Kyra Phillips was born, her grandfather won a golf tournament and brought the trophy to the hospital as a gift for his infant granddaughter.

Some of Phillips’ earliest memories are of riding in a golf cart with her granddad, Ken Mangan, who loved the game almost as much as his granddaughter.

“I have a picture of me when I was about 3 years old with plastic golf clubs,” said Phillips, who anchors the afternoon edition of CNN Newsroom with Don Lemon, and recently has been in Baghdad.

Cable News turned it’s attention for a good while this afternoon on the story of the gunman in a building at Johnson Space Center in Texas. FNC was first to air with the story when Shepard Smith broke with a FOX News Alert at 3:23 pm. CNN and MSNBC followed at 3:27.

FNC was #1 in Total Day and Primetime in both Total Viewers and The Demo with On The Record having the highest Demo number in primetime.

Cable News Ratings for April 19, 2007

P2+ Total Day
FNC – 955,000 viewers
CNN – 704,000 viewers
MSNBC – 362,000 viewers
CNBC – 213,000 viewers
HLN – 242,000 viewers

P2+ Prime Time
FNC – 1,893,000 viewers
CNN – 1,337,000 viewers
MSNBC – 560,000 viewers
CNBC – 398,000 viewers
HLN – 469,000 viewers

25-54 Total Day
FNC – 319,000 viewers
CNN – 255,000 viewers
MSNBC –150,000 viewers
CNBC – 78,000 viewers
HLN – 105,000 viewers

25-54 Prime Time
FNC – 477,000 viewers
CNN – 411,000 viewers
MSNBC – 222,000 viewers
CNBC – 124,000 viewers
HLN – 192,000 viewers

Morning programs P2+ (25-54)
FOX & Friends – 935,000 viewers (393,000)
American Morning – 731,000 viewers (286,000)
MSNBC Live- 322,000 viewers (135,000)
Robin & Co. – 165,000 viewers (99,000)
(more…)

CNN.com has a special section for the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting spree…

To pay tribute to the lives of the 32 victims of the Virginia Tech massacre, CNN.com has created an online memorial at www.cnn.com/victims. The memorial features profiles of the victims, accompanied by thoughts and memories shared by family members and friends. Online users may submit their own videos, photos or comments to honor the Virginia Tech victims through CNN’s I-Report here

TVNewser has a semi-cryptic email from Alison Stewart which suggests some sort of occupational change for The Most hostess. It was already announced last week that Stewart would be hosting a Sundance Institute series. But is there any relationship between that news and this email?

Kelly Wright will have an exclusive interview with Laura Bush tomorrow on Fox and Friends Weekend. Transcript highlights follow…

On the Virginia Tech massacre:

“My heart breaks for the family members who lost someone at Virginia Tech this week, and for the whole Virginia Tech community. You can tell, if you saw any of that convocation, how tight a community it is. And that’s going to be an advantage for them as they try to heal from such a huge, huge, and brutal tragedy, as it was.”

“We can move on. I mean, we’ll never forget, and it will be really terrible for these families. I met two families who lost their only child, and that kind of heartbreak is very hard for our parents to — parents everywhere to imagine. So it’s going to always be difficult. But, on the other hand, Virginia Tech will be able to move on from it, and there will be a day there where everyone won’t think every moment about their loss. But it’s tough.”

On the amount of progress in the Gulf Coast Region after her recent trip:
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The Virginian Pilot’s Larry Bonko has an interview with Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace…

It’s the flashiest of the Sunday morning news and information shows, with Wallace at times appearing on a split screen with his guests. Wallace’s bulldog style of interviewing should make his father, Mike Wallace, proud. At times, he’ll plunge into an interview by saying, “Let’s look at the record.” Most recently he grilled Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a supporter of the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq, asking, “Where’s the progress?”

The item regarding ratings at 8pm yesterday has been pulled because the report it referred to has been substantially altered. As I didn’t quote the original article, to leave my post up as written makes no sense.

The Chicago Tribune’s Phil Rosenthal writes about NBC and the “manifesto” and the backlash…

All three network newscasts Thursday night prominently reported the backlash against coverage of the Cho video that they all had aired the night before. But, by midday Thursday, NBC and the others had begun judiciously scaling back their use of the material.

John Moody, Fox News Channel executive vice president for editorial, for example, issued a statement saying there was “no reason to continue assaulting the public with these disturbing and demented images,” but he also reserved the right to run the footage again if events warranted.

“It was a new and newsworthy element of the biggest story of the day, the week and, I hope, month,” Moody said in an interview. “I think it was legitimate to run it for a while, while it added new information to the story.”

As does the LA Times Matea Gold
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The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review’s Kellie B. Gormly has an interview with Catherine Herridge…

Peter is acting like many 15-month-old tots: he’s trying to walk, poking his brother and singing “La la la la la!”

Just by looking at him, no one would guess that he hovered close to death almost a year ago, says his mother, Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge. She donated a portion of her liver to save her baby’s life, after he was born with a fatal liver condition.

“He’s really doing very well,” says Herridge, 42. She will speak at Saturday’s Living Donor Appreciation Dinner, sponsored by the UPMC Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute, which provided Peter’s 10-hour surgery on June 6. The invitation-only event is at the Westin Convention Center hotel, Downtown.

“A year ago, Peter was dying,” says Herridge, of Washington, D.C. “A year later, he has a second chance. Sometimes people say to me how healthy he looks, and how happy he looks; I think that’s just a miracle in itself.”

Drudge is reporting that Michael Smerconish is going to be getting a tryout during the timeslot previously occupied by Imus in the Morning. This wouldn’t be the first time Smerconish has been at MSNBC in an apparent tryout role…

The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz writes about the networks cutting back or stopping the airing of pictures and footage from the shooter.

CNN President Jon Klein said his network has “severely dialed back” on the airing of the video, noting: “You could venture into the land of gratuitously overusing it, and we are being rigorous about that. It comes down to a balance between providing a platform to a madman and helping explain a riddle that has confounded many Americans.”

Slate’s Jack Shafer writes about the NBC videos and pictures of the shooter. Shafer starts by accusing FNC and NBC of grandstanding…

“We see no reason to continue assaulting the public with these disturbing and demented images,” Moody wrote.

Seeing as Fox had been running continuous loops of Cho’s horror show ever since NBC News first broadcast it, the network was just a tad late in locating the public’s sensitivities to disturbing and demented images. Moody’s grandstanding reminded me of the scene from L.A. Confidential where the LAPD captain confronts the corrupt detective: “Don’t start trying to do the right thing, boyo. You haven’t had the practice.”

But Fox wasn’t alone in its belated discovery that too much Cho could be too much Cho. NBC News dittoed Fox in this release: “Beginning this morning, we have limited our usage of the video across NBC News, including MSNBC, to no more than 10 percent of our airtime.” CBS News and ABC News—which would have also churned the Cho videos and pictures into a fine multimedia pulp if they had cable outlets—offered similar communiqués.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Melanie McFarland writes about TV coverage of the shooting spree aftermath…

The most poignant remembrance came from Mike and Peggy Herbstritt, who lost their 27-year-old son Jeremy, a graduate student, in Monday’s massacre. Interviewed by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Mike declared that he could not wish for a better child.

Unbidden, he added that he watched some of the coverage Monday night, “and I don’t think the newscasters really understand how hard it is, you know, to lose a son.”

Viewers with long memories may notice this is a stark change from the attitudes of a decade ago. Back then, cameras and reporters would have been accused of chasing these people down, intruding on their pain. How dare they. Have they no sense of privacy?

Of course, that was before 9/11 ushered in a sense of comfort with making the personal public. Before television and radio news began to profile soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and, most pertinently, before the concept of intimate thoughts was blown open by reality TV, MySpace, Facebook and YouTube.

In the context of this week’s tragedy, the camera became an extension of that universe. It is a window allowing us to glimpse into and in some small way touch the lives.

First Dusty Saunders…now Tim Goodman in the San Francisco Chronicle…These guys will probably start screaming “coordinated PR campaign” now…

My description of him in 2005 still stands: “Part Jon Stewart (the funny), Dennis Miller (the erudite and biting sub-references), H.L. Mencken (the skewering of power and stupidity in equal doses) as well as crusading journalist, Olbermann is clearly the future.”

Now, that notion of him having a big week? It’s true. Not only has he stood out in his coverage and comments of the Virginia Tech shooting tragedy, but he was also named on Monday as one of “The Top 10 Most Powerful People in TV News 2007″ by the industry magazine TV Week. He was ranked No. 6 (Fox News head Roger Ailes was first, followed by Olbermann’s boss, Capus, ABC anchor Charles Gibson, ABC News head David Westin and NBC’s Tim Russert. He was followed by CBS News head Sean McManus, a cabal of CNN executives and Jon Stewart).

Also on Monday, NBC Sports announced that it was tapping into Olbermann’s skills by making him an in-studio host for its powerful “Football Night in America” Sunday show in the fall, where he joins fellow brainiac, Bob Costas.

So, yes, a big week.

Newsday’s Diane Werts writes about the video “manifesto” playing on TV…

By midafternoon Thursday, Cho’s footage had virtually vanished, replaced by stills, reporters reading his words and, increasingly, introspective discussions of TV news’ responsibility in such a situation.

“It’s an almost impossible balancing act,” said Fox News analyst Eric Burns Thursday in a chat with anchor Shepard Smith.

Burns cited journalists’ responsibility to report what they know and the public’s desire to be informed, versus sensitivity to its impact on viewers. Burns said if TV news had withheld Cho’s materials, they would have been attacked for that instead.

NBC News president Steve Capus had explained his position on MSNBC’s “Hardball” broadcast Wednesday, claiming his division had held off on broadcasting the footage that arrived that morning. After copying the materials, Capus said, NBC turned Cho’s original mailings over to the FBI and Virginia authorities, who “requested that we not release some of the information until they had a chance to take a look at it.”