The Hollywood Reporter’s Paul J. Gough writes about tonight’s FBN party at The Metropolitan Museum of Art…

Murdoch, speaking at the circa 15 B.C. Egyptian Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to celebrate the nine-day-old network, said that American business is held up as the standard for ethics and freedom around the world.

“Not that you’d know that from much of the business coverage,” Murdoch said in reference to the rival CNBC that Murdoch is challenging with Fox Business.

He said Fox Business still will cover scandal in the business world, though.

“We’d be just as tough as anyone in protecting investors,” Murdoch said. But he added that Fox Business will celebrate free markets and business success.

Update: TVNewser, who happens to live in NYC where the party was (unlike some of his counterparts who…ahem…shall remain nameless) has more…

TVNewser has the details…

Update: TVNewser updated his original entry

After two years as anchor of CNBC’s Worldwide Exchange, Michelle Caruso-Cabrera has asked to return to reporting for the netwwork. Her last appearance on the early morning show was last Friday. A CNBC spokesperson tells TVNewser Caruso-Cabrera will continue on as a general assignment reporter for CNBC. For now, the anchor duties will be filled by Brian Shactman, who joined the network earlier this year from NBC’s Connecticut station WVIT.

Ian Schwartz thinks he detects bias in a new CNN ad for Security Watch…

This is interesting. The National Organization of Broadcast Employees and Technicians is going to try and organize the MSNBC employees who came over from Secaucus. It’s even waiving the initiation fees. This is the agreement between NBCU and NABET that was signed in September, I guess to address the move of the non-union MSNBC employees to 30 Rock. Any lawyers out there want to tell me what this legal mumbo jumbo means?

Also noteworthy is that there’s a NLRB trial coming up regarding unfair labor practices at CNN. The details are somewhat murky according to this PDF but it appears it has something to do with what goes on in CNN’s D.C. bureau and what goes on in the New York bureau.

Neil Cavuto at the end of his FBN program…

Well that was a fun show. Whether you agree with me or not, tell me what you think. Send email to Cavuto@foxbusiness.com. If you hate the show, again, email O’Reilly@foxnews.

Cable News Daily Live Ratings for October 23, 2007

P2+ Total Day
FNC – 1,033,000 viewers
CNN – 785,000 viewers
MSNBC – 361,000 viewers
CNBC – 265,000 viewers
HLN – 282,000 viewers

P2+ Prime Time
FNC – 2,073,000 viewers
CNN – 1,473,000 viewers
MSNBC- 759,000 viewers
CNBC –401,000 viewers
HLN – 563,000 viewers

25-54 Total Day
FNC – 275,000 viewers
CNN – 292,000 viewers
MSNBC – 146,000 viewers
CNBC – 93,000 viewers
HLN- 116,000 viewers

25-54 Prime Time
FNC – 504,000 viewers
CNN – 525,000 viewers
MSNBC – 297,000 viewers
CNBC – 142,000 viewers
HLN – 201,000 viewers

Morning programs P2+ (25-54)
FOX & Friends – 902,000 viewers (303,000)
American Morning- 475,000 viewers (133,000)
Morning Joe – 217,000 viewers (61,000)
Robin & Co. – 264,000 viewers (124,000)
(more…)

Jack Welch pinch hit today as a host on CNBC’s Squawk Box with Becky Quick, Joe Kernen, and Carl Quintanilla. The four, including Welch, also interviewed Warren Buffett. Transcript of that interview follows…

CARL: IF YOU’RE JUST WAKING UP, MERRILL LYNCH COMING OUT WITH AN ADDITIONAL TWO-AND-A-HALF BILLION DOLLARS IN WRITEOFFS FOR THE 3RD QUARTER. WE HAVE BECKY QUICK TRAVELLING WITH WARREN BUFFETT IN CHINA THIS MORNING. THEY ARRIVED IN DALIAN, HOW LONG AGO BECKY?
(more…)

CNN CNN won Total Day and Primetime’s Demo yesterday thanks to the California fire crisis and the debut of Part 1 of its Planet in Peril documentary.

TOTAL DAY P25-54 (3a-3a)
CNN: 297,000
FNC: 282,000
MSNBC: 150,000

PRIME TIME P25-54 (8-11pm)
CNN: 540,000
FNC: 518,000
MSNBC: 311,000

(numbers are Live+SD)

The L.A. Times’ Andrew Blankstein writes about Glenn Beck’s California fire comments on Monday…

On Tuesday, Beck said his comments were misinterpreted by “a few liberal bloggers.”

“The wildfires in California are a tragedy,” he said during his radio program. “I don’t want anyone to lose their home. I don’t care what their political stripes are. I don’t want a soul to lose their home, and anyone who doesn’t want to make me into an evil supervillain would understand that.”

“Those who don’t listen to the show … , let me give you a little piece of advice,” Beck added. “You have to engage what I would like to call your brain. You actually have to think: I might be making a joke; I might be serious.”

That knife cuts both ways Mr. Beck. You might want to engage that thing you would like to call your brain before you shoot your mouth off with an ill-advised attempt at humor. It can cause trouble, y’know (see: Imus, Don)

Variety’s Brian Lowry reviews FNC’s upcoming special documentary “Facing Reality: Choice” which airs this Saturday and 9pm ET and likes what he sees…

If only other programming on Fox News exhibited the understated restraint of “Facing Reality: Choice,” a special that avoids taking sides in chronicling young women’s experiences with unwanted or difficult pregnancies. Foremost, the conventional documentary draws attention to a fundamental but frequently overlooked aspect of this polarizing debate — that abortion often boils down to a no-win decision left to women who have already made terrible choices to put themselves in this predicament.

Indeed, the case studies in “Facing Reality” include a woman who seemingly treats pregnancy like just another trip to Wal-Mart — the kind of potential mother that even anti-abortion advocates would have to confess appears sadly ill-equipped for the responsibility of parenthood.

Kyra Phillips is in San Diego reporting from Qualcomm Stadium. Phillips said she grew up in San Diego and her parents still reside there. She mentioned at the top of the 2pm ET hour that her Father is a volunteer at the stadium helping translate for people who only speak Spanish. She will interview him later this hour.

The Cox News Service’s Craig Nelson writes about HOT TV pulling the plug on CNN International in Israel…

The news that the Atlanta-based network might soon disappear from a majority of Israeli living rooms will probably not come as a disappointment to a vocal segment of the Israeli viewing public that views the cable network’s coverage of Israel and the Middle East as biased against the Jewish state.

Yet the same crowd is unlikely to be very happy with this week’s announcement about the channel that the cable and telecommunications company HOT is poised to sign to a contact instead: Al-Jazeera English.

Yossi Lubaton, a spokesman for HOT, says a deal with the controversial Qatar-based news network is imminent. It “should be finalized within a few days,” the Israeli English-language daily Jerusalem Post quoted him as saying.

Lubaton insisted that price is the only issue in the contract dispute. The British Broadcasting Corp., Sky News, Fox News and Al-Jazeera charge less for their signal than CNN, he said.

Here are Fast National numbers for Planet in Peril last night vs. the previous four weeks 9-11 time period. For the uninitiated, Fast Nationals are not the final 3a-3a numbers you see posted on the blogs at the end of the day so expect these numbers to change somewhat.

Realizing that your voice is on the air by accident and hurling an expletive in response…

I got this question from an emailer a week ago…

I am wondering, do you know anything about the sudden growth of all these “back in 60 seconds” and whatnot graphics going into commercial breaks that FNC and CNN seem to be using during Studio B, Anderson, H&C, and probably others. Is this something to do with that whole ratings-based-on-commercial-watchers thing or just something to try to make people stop channel surfing?

Sort of. It has more to do with commercial skipping. Nielsen has begun rating commercials and they have had advertisers imbed a tone in the commercial. The commercials are known as “spots”. So when a program is recorded via DVR and played back before 3am to count as Same Day (for a Live+SD rating) or within three days (for a Live+3 rating), they can tell if a spot has been skipped by that tone.

So with this level of accountability out there now in commercials, where advertisers can now see if their spots are being skipped or not, the pressure increases on the channels to do everything in their power to cut down on skipping. One way of doing that it is by spreading out the commercials over the span of the program. This doesn’t mean you see more commercials. Instead you have shorter commercial breaks, but more of them. The theory is this will cut down on commercial skipping (operative word there is “theory”). It appears CNN started doing this first. But if my email questioner is accurate FNC has started doing something similar. I haven’t noticed this happening on MSNBC yet. At least not in daytime.

CNBC announced this morning that Dylan Ratigan will be interviewing members of President Bush’s economic team this morning on “The Call”…

In a CNBC exclusive interview, live from Washington, DC following a cabinet meeting at the White House, CNBC’s Dylan Ratigan sits down with Bush’s economic team for “The CNBC White House Summit.” Ratigan speaks with Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors Edward Lazear, Director of the National Economic Council Allan Hubbard and Director of the Office of Management and Budget Jim Nussle, on a broad range of topics including the mortgage crisis, the diving dollar, and China.

Broadcasting & Cable’s Marissa Guthrie writes about the news networks sending their people out in force to cover the fires in the Southland. However the must read part of the article is actually this…

At least one news division has not been able to secure the number of satellite paths it would like in order to amortize the considerable costs of sending personnel.

Considering the only people interviewed on the record for this story are NBC people I’m going to take a stab that this blind item is about NBC News…

Last night FNC brought out some new graphics for The O’Reilly Factor’s and Hannity & Colmes’ show opens. Hannity & Colmes also sported a new show logo…