Silicon Alley Insider’s Michael Learmonth blogs about Jeff Zucker’s comments at Today’s UBS Media Conference. This Zucker quote lept out at me…

12:47: Zucker once again reminds Wall Street that lagging NBC network doesn’t matter much to NBC U bottom line. This is a boilerplate stuff from Zucker over the past year:

“In terms of the mix of our assets the name of our company is NBC Universal, NBC gets the lions share of attention–but the fact is NBC is now just a tiny piece of the company. 50 pct of the company is now cable.”

If it’s not such a big deal then why is NBC News fretting about what to cut in Operations (and probably elsewhere), which will impact MSNBC, because of the lagging performance of the NBC network, particularly the Entertainment division? I hear they’re holding more budget meetings later this week…

CNN announced this evening that Carl Bernstein had joined the network as an analyst…

Award-winning journalist and best-selling author Carl Bernstein, best known for his reporting work with Bob Woodward about the Watergate scandal, will join CNN this election season as an analyst, it was announced today by Jon Klein, president of CNN/U.S. He will appear on the full line-up of CNN’s broadcasts and election coverage.

Most recently, Bernstein wrote the best-selling biography A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton, a detailed portrait of the former first lady and current Democratic presidential candidate. The book, published by Knopf, garnered reviews as a thoroughly reported and balanced biography and was recently selected as one of Amazon’s Best Books of 2007, ranking in the Top 5 of customers’ picks for biography. (See attachment of selected reviews.)

“Carl stands out as one of the pre-eminent journalists of our time and a respected, well-connected commentator on the American political scene,” Klein said. “We are delighted to have him as part of the Best Political Team on Television and look forward to his insightful analysis.”
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Cable News Daily Live Ratings for November 30, 2007

P2+ Total Day
FNC – 959,000 viewers
CNN – 554,000 viewers
MSNBC – 321,000 viewers
CNBC – 247,000 viewers
HLN – 257,000 viewers

P2+ Prime Time
FNC – 1,684,000 viewers
CNN – 880,000 viewers
MSNBC- 590,000 viewers
CNBC –235,000 viewers
HLN – 423,000 viewers

25-54 Total Day
FNC – 249,000 viewers
CNN – 181,000 viewers
MSNBC – 129,000 viewers
CNBC – 74,000 viewers
HLN- 97,000 viewers

25-54 Prime Time
FNC – 335,000 viewers
CNN – 220,000 viewers
MSNBC – 239,000 viewers
CNBC – 82,000 viewers
HLN –125,000 viewers

Morning programs P2+ (25-54)
FOX & Friends – 885,000 viewers (221,000)
American Morning- 415,000 viewers (167,000)
Morning Joe – 233,000 viewers (62,000)
Morning Express w/ Meade- 201,000 viewers (108,000)
(more…)

CNN announced that the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation will be awarded the network’s first CNN Hero Award.

CNN honors the legacy of Christopher and Dana Reeve and their foundation dedicated to paralysis sufferers with the inaugural CNN Heroes’ Hero Award. This award – to be presented at the first annual “CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute” on Thursday, Dec. 6 – was created to recognize individuals who devoted their lives to helping others and whose names have become synonymous with their causes.

The Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation is dedicated to curing spinal cord injury by funding innovative research and improving the quality of life for people living with paralysis through grants, information and advocacy. The couple formed the foundation after Christopher Reeve’s tragic horse-riding accident in 1995 that left him paralyzed from the neck down.

“When Christopher Reeve moved his fingers five years after he was told they would never move again, he was really pointing the way for all of us to follow,” said Peter D. Kiernan, the foundation’s chairman. “The Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation accepts the wonderful Heroes’ Hero honor from CNN with great thanks and an ironclad commitment to follow the path that Chris and Dana identified.”
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Politics1.com says that it has heard that MSNBC conducted focus groups on Tucker Carlson’s show and out of that came the order to drop the bow tie…

Preppy conservative pundit Tucker Carlson became known nationally for his trademark bow ties when he was the co-host on CNN’s defunct Cross-Fire. CNN even ran an ad back then with the headline: “The Man, The Legend, The Bow Tie.” Yet sources tell Politics1 that after conducting focus groups, MSNBC ordered Carlson to dump the bow ties and start wearing a standard neck ties for his current Tucker show. “You take away a man’s mojo and then you complain about his ratings” asked Alain Jean, co-organizer of the SaveTucker.org group.

The St. Petersburg Times’ Howard Troxler is the latest person to pile on CNN and the YouTube debate…

Here’s an idea for the next YouTube-style debate:

No media screening of the questions.

CNN did a lousy, even offensive, job in Wednesday night’s debate in St. Petersburg.

I don’t just mean that they let in Democratic ringers. I mean that CNN put on a parody of what it thought ought to be a Republican debate.

CNN International was the first to break the news that the British teacher had been pardoned by the President of Sudan. Here is CNNI’s release on the story…

CNN International today broke the news of Gillian Gibbons’ pardon by the Sudanese president at 0805 GMT, and also secured the first live interview with Lord Ahmed, one of the two British Muslim politicians in Sudan to help secure her release.

In an interview with CNN International, presenter Adrian Finighan asked Lord Ahmed: “Have you managed to speak to the Government back home to let them know of your success?”

Lord Ahmed replied: “Well I am sure that they will be watching CNN and I am sure they will be watching other news channels and they will get the news…these days the news channels are much faster than even us and I’m sure that they’ve got the good news.”
(more…)

The New Orleans Times-Picayune’ s Dave Walker writes about Brad Pitt appearing on Larry King Live. Pitt already appeared with Ann Curry from New Orleans on the Today Show this morning in a segment that was reaired on MSNBC.

Brad Pitt’s ongoing publicity campaign for his New Orleans housing redevelopment project will continue at 8 p.m. Wednesday with an appearance on CNN’s “Larry King Live.”

King and Pitt are both in New Orleans and scheduled to tape the hourlong interview today (Monday, Dec. 3) for replay later in the week.

A part-time New Orleans resident, Pitt is spearheading “Make it Right,” a $12 million effort intended to restore some of the homes lost to Hurricane Katrina flooding with new eco-friendly, storm-safe dwellings.

CNN, the L.A. Times, and The Politico announced two debates in January just before Super Tuesday…

CNN, the Los Angeles Times and POLITICO announced today that the California Democratic Party will sanction the Jan. 31, 2008, Democratic presidential primary debate in Los Angeles. Scheduled less than one week before Super Tuesday, this debate will be the candidates’ final face-off before primary voters in more than 20 states flock to the polls on Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2008.

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer will moderate, with journalists from the Los Angeles Times and POLITICO participating in the questioning. This is the only debate that the Democratic Party of California has officially sanctioned in the 2008 race for the White House.
(more…)

AOL’s Money and & Finance is doing a poll on a Best and Worst of 2007 and under the category of Most Annoying Money Personality (page 15 of 16) one cable news personality made the nomination list of four; Maria Bartiromo. The other three were Robert Kiyosaki, Mark Cuban, and Martha Stewart.

I missed this Saturday since FishbowlDC rarely posts updates on the weekend so I don’t go there but FishbowlDC has an update to the Citizens United fracas with CNN over its Broken Government doc featuring statements from both Campbell Brown and Davide Bossie…

The Hollywood Reporter’s Paul J. Gough writes about how what gets said at the debates tends to get overshadowed by how the debates come off…

“For almost all of these things, the postdebate stories have been dominated by sidebars,” says Tobe Berkowitz, dean of Boston University’s College of Communication.

CNN wanted to talk about its record ratings for its Democratic debate November 15 in Las Vegas and its YouTube debate Wednesday. But it was hard to crow when it spent so much time on the defensive.

Berkowitz says he hasn’t been impressed with CNN’s debate telecasts, starting with bringing the candidates onstage like what he calls a game-show format.

“It’s been show business. It’s been a disservice — how many gimmicks we can pile into what should be the serious business of democracy,” he says.

The Daily Illini editorializes against the editing out of Keith Kerr’s question by CNN for replays of the YouTube debate…

Instead of acknowledging the mistake in future reruns, CNN has attempted to edit history by completely removing the question and the candidates’ responses. By doing so, it did a disservice to its viewers.

It would not have been unreasonable to insert a graphic during Kerr’s question revealing his association with the Clinton campaign. Even though Kerr did not make an effort to reveal his affiliation during the event, the candidates’ responses were still valid. By removing them, potential voters were deprived of an opportunity to get more information about their positions.

Acknowledging that something went wrong in an Internet-driven debate that included a talking snowman and gunfire would not have damaged CNN’s public image as much as this does. If a candidate had committed a mistake on the level of CNN’s, say using incorrect statistics or flip-flopping, the network would run the clip perpetually for however long it was newsworthy.