The MSN MSNBC board notes that MSNBC anchor Chris Jansing was seen doing primetime updates from 30 Rock tonight. It appears her temporary assignment to NBC’s Los Angeles bureau may be over.

In Monday’s Investor’s Business Daily there’s an article about FBN and CNBC. FBN Executive Vice President Kevin Magee and CNBC President Mark Hoffman are both interviewed…

“There’s no reason business news should be off-putting or an old boys club,” said Magee. “We intend to open up the door and bring more viewers in.”

Whether Fox Business can sell itself as an investment tool for Joe Consumer could be critical to its success.

Its main competitor, CNBC, pulls in 250,000 daily viewers — a respectable number of what industry experts call a prosperous demographic, but not enough to support two stations.

“You can make a good living off those 250,000 viewers, but if all we do is split that with CNBC, we’ll both starve,” said Magee. “What we have to do is grow the pie rather than split it.”

There’s also something from Magee concerning the CNBC/Wall Street Journal deal that runs through 2012…

Magee says the deal won’t prevent Fox Business from contacting Journal reporters for a breaking news story and putting them on the air.

The FNC Sunday schedule has changed since my earlier post this morning. The 10 am Fox News Live is back to two hours. Weekend Live is now on at 12pm ET with Chris Wallace hosting. The Saturday Business Block repeat will now air at 2pm ET but will only be one hour.

CNN’s Political Ticker is noting that CNN obtained a recording of a Mitt Romney address at Bob Jones University…

At an invitation-only meeting held Tuesday with students, faculty and alumni of the fundamentalist Bob Jones University, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney put aside questions about his Mormon faith and focused instead on what he described as his shared values with Christians, according to an audio recording of the meeting obtained by CNN.

Although Romney has often spoken publicly about his efforts to allay the fears of evangelical Christians over his Mormon faith, the audio recording of the event provides a rare glimpse into Romney’s private efforts to court the constituency many see as crucial to his presidential bid.

Cable News Daily Live Ratings for November 8, 2007

P2+ Total Day
FNC – 862,000 viewers
CNN – 500,000 viewers
MSNBC – 267,000 viewers
CNBC – 287,000 viewers
HLN – 243,000 viewers

P2+ Prime Time
FNC – 1,821,000 viewers
CNN – 837,000 viewers
MSNBC- 501,000 viewers
CNBC –334,000 viewers
HLN – 439,000 viewers

25-54 Total Day
FNC – 237,000 viewers
CNN – 158,000 viewers
MSNBC – 94,000 viewers
CNBC – 71,000 viewers
HLN- 97,000 viewers

25-54 Prime Time
FNC – 399,000 viewers
CNN – 229,000 viewers
MSNBC – 174,000 viewers
CNBC – 102,000 viewers
HLN – 177,000 viewers

Morning programs P2+ (25-54)
FOX & Friends – 935,000 viewers (343,000)
American Morning- 389,000 viewers (110,000)
Morning Joe – 227,000 viewers (71,000)
Morning Express w/ Meade. – 218,000 viewers (98,000)
(more…)

Portfolio’s Jeff Bercovici notes something Chris Matthews said on Morning Joe recently that may have raised a few eyebrows at 30 Rock…

Moving into the same building as NBC doesn’t seem to have made MSNBC’s Chris Matthews any more of a team player. The Hardball host was a phone-in guest last Thursday on Morning Joe, where a discussion of Hillary Clinton’s performance in the latest debate abruptly gave way to a Matthews monologue about the declining value of NBC Nightly News:

The Hill’s Betsy Rothstein profiles CNN’s Jessica Yellin…(via FishbowlDC)

In every journalist’s career, there are moments that stand out for reasons both good and strange.

For Jessica Yellin, who recently joined CNN’s Capitol Hill unit after covering the White House for ABC, there are two.

One was traveling on Air Force One with President Bush last year as a White House correspondent for ABC News and being whisked away with a small group of reporters for a meeting in the presidential quarters. At first, the scribes did not want to go. They were caught up watching a movie and were antsy to see the ending.

They didn’t know where they were being led. But soon, the carpet turned more plush, the furniture more exquisite.

They were being led to a meeting with Bush. Yellin looked around, semi-stunned. “I was sitting there saying, Now you literally have a seat at the table,” she recalls.

The Fulton County Daily Report’s R. Robing McDonald writes about a federal discrimination trial brought by former CNN employee Marina Kolbe against her then employer…(via Journalims)

A federal employment discrimination claim against CNN could turn on whether it was legal for the network to designate specific on-air positions for minorities as it sought to increase the diversity of its news staff.

CNN’s attorney has argued that, regardless of its diversity objectives, it hires and fires primarily on the basis of talent. The network says it didn’t renew the contract of roving anchor Marina Kolbe in 2003 because she didn’t measure up to its standards for on-air talent, not because she was white.

Internal CNN memos introduced at a federal trial this week suggest that, beginning in 1999, in some cases a job candidate’s race and ethnicity were key factors in hiring on-air talent.

One memo also revealed a push by CNN to hire “younger, more attractive anchors” to draw younger audiences in what was fast becoming a highly competitive 24-hour news environment.

Kolbe — a white Canadian woman who had worked as a correspondent and as a roving anchor for CNN International, CNN USA and CNN Financial — sued the network in 2003, claiming that her age (then 42) and her complexion were the primary reasons that managers refused to renew her contract and denied her freelance work. Since leaving CNN, Kolbe has worked as a freelance producer.

…Tucker Carlson will still have his CBS gameshow to fall back on…

FNC will be rebroadcasting the Saturday Business Block on Sunday at 1pm ET according to their current online weekend schedule. And with the 10 am Fox News Live apparently expanding to three hours, this means that there will be no Weekend Live on Sunday.

You know the saying a rolling stone gathers no moss? Well, a rolling schedule gathers no traction…

Geraldo Rivera wasn’t on FNC last weekend. Johnny Dollar has the video of Rivera explaining why on this morning’s Fox and Friends…

The Cable Game looks at GE CEO Jeff Immelt’s appearance on Charlie Rose last night and some of the comments he made about CNBC, NBC, and Jeff Zucker…

On CNBC, the context was sort of confused, at least to me, but it seemed that Immelt was criticizing the way that CNBC reports earnings, and how those reports affect stock prices–like his stock price. Immelt called the coverage “crazy.”

Greta Van Susteren secured an exclusive phone interview with former Pakistani Prime Minister Bhutto who is currently under house arrest. GretaWire has more including a link to the full audio clip on GretaCast on iTunes when it’s posted…

Update: Wellll…maybe not so exclusive after all..

Update 2: GretaWire takes on TVNewser for saying she called her interview an exclusive. ICN also called it an exclusive but that was my own imprint as it appeared exclusive to me at the time. I never said she said it was because she didn’t say it was. Still, I probably shouldn’t have said it was.

As you note from my prior blog entry about Pakistan and the fact of barbed wire up around former Prime Minister Bhutto’s house has seized my attention….so, what did I do? I called her (actually, one of our staff - Elizabeth Prann - placed the call for me.) I spoke to her for about 10 to 15 minutes and recorded it. It will be posted on GretaCast as soon as we can get it posted here. Thus YOU can hear what she has to say - you don’t have to read delayed news in a newspaper or have me tell you what she said.

YOU can listen for yourself. (Here is a tease - she describes what is going on in front of her house….the barbed wire, police etc.) Note that we had one technical problem - the call dropped after the first few seconds…but we quickly called back.

Rush & Molloy dish about a little comment Jeff Zucker allegedly made about the Rosie situation…

Rosie O’Donnell’s talk-show talks with MSNBC are said to have broken down because she’d only commit to one year. And she may have been a little too talkative for the network. We told you that Rosie strongly hinted she was in negotiations during a book signing in Miami on Sunday. On Tuesday, kicking off the New York Comedy Festival, she told the audience that whenever people try to keep her from saying something, she just wants to say it more. Her chattiness seemed to irk NBC President Jeff Zucker, who was overheard on Wednesday night grumbling, “This just proves why I shouldn’t do it.”

The Seattle Post Intelligencer’s John Marshall has an interview with CNN’s Lou Dobbs…

On his inspirations in advocacy journalism:

I certainly do not want anyone to infer that I think there is an analogous talent between them and myself. But Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken and Will Rogers inspire me to go to the core of who we are as Americans … they set a standard for bringing the mind to bear on what ails our society.

On his reaction to being profiled during the last year on “60 Minutes” and in the New Yorker:

(Laughs) We never see ourselves as do others, but those perspectives are very important … I do get too full of myself sometimes, but all I have to do is read my clippings to get a more humble view of myself.

Meanwhile, Marketwatch’s Jon Friedman writes about Dobbs…
(more…)

For the second time this week and the third time total, MSNBC’s ticker clock has sped up again. It’s about a minute and a half to two minutes fast. This is ridiculous. Can’t MSNBC keep track of time?

Update: It was fixed within an hour.