According to her HuffPo bio, "Linda Keenan worked 7 years as a head writer/senior producer for various programs on CNN. Before that, she worked as a writer/producer for Bloomberg TV." Now she's a mommyblogger. Which makes her more than qualified to present a series of amusing blind items about childish behavior by famous television newsanchors. After the jump, we solicit your guesses and present a couple of ours.
CNN shouting-head Glenn Beck had mysterious surgery that went terribly awry and now he hates the American health care system. We have no clue what the surgery was for (anyone?), but things went bad. At a hospital that the President of GE goes to! We wish him a speedy recovery, obv, and are excited to see what his righteous, Raymond Chandlerian doctor-hatred will bring forth when he returns to the air. Also we are very seriously (or perhaps ghoulishly) curious as to what the hell this is all about. [TVNewser]
The final two presidential debates before Super Tuesday will be co-hosted at the end of January by CNN, the Los Angeles Times and Politico. Apparently, nobody relayed news of this partnership to LA Times media critic Tim Rutten, who, over the weekend, called CNN "corrupt" and "incompetent" for botching last week's "debacle masquerading as a presidential debate." Awkward! Also, we think it would make some damn fine television if Politico reporter Ben Smith was allowed to ask Rudy Giuliani a question on live TV, such as "How much do you hate me for writing about your mistress slush fund and exposing the blueprints for your presidential campaign?" [LAT]
As we mentioned earlier, Fox News anchor Shephard Smith is raking it in, to the tune of $7 million per year in a recently-inked deal with his network. According to today's story from New York Times media reporter Bill Carter, "Mr. Smith would be making more than anyone at CNN—if reports of $5 million for Anderson Cooper and $6 million for Lou Dobbs are accurate." Did Carter forget that in 2002, the Timesran a piece in 2002 about CNN talkshow host Larry King's potential $14 million salary? Perhaps. Harder to believe is that he forgot the piece the Times did way back in 1998 about King's earnings, which the paper reported at $7 million. He wrote it himself!
CNN is planting its foot into Second Life, if only to claim it was there before the fall. But the news organization isn't looking to understand the virtual void firsthand — it's leaving the actual legwork to the resident population. A genius move. At any given time, there are 80,000 idle thumbs with nothing better to do than lurk about in the big empty and file reports to CNN, sparing the cost of an expensive journalist to the virtual world, as competitors like Reuters have done. We're just waiting to see headlines like "Rain of penises disrupt interview with former virtual masseuse" on CNN's headline crawl.
You cannot possibly have missed the relentless ads for CNN's October "Planet in Peril" documentary, a four-hour eco-soap starring Anderson Cooper, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and (of course!) Animal Planet's Jeff Corwin, the impoverished man's Steve Irwin. The "CNN Worldwide Investigation" (oooh...heavy) took a year to complete, cost the network some serious change, and was hailed as its first high-definition documentary, following the fall launch of CNN-HD. Too bad that sister-company Time Warner neglected to get with the freaking program already—the largest cable provider in New York and LA still doesn't carry CNN in high-definition.
CNN is opening up a new bureau! And a j-school! Larry King will teach! Weekly news meetings will be run by CNN staffers! Oh, except, all of these things will be happening in alleged virtual world Second Life. Beginning next week, says MediaWeek, CNN will open up shop in the 3-D virtual world, allowing its residents to submit i-Reports on "news" happening in Second Life, learn tricks of the trade from leading CNN personalities, and get their news from virtual newsstands throughout the network. "I love that we don't have to take things from the real world and force them in," Susan Grant, executive VP of CNN News Services, told MediaWeek. We love the total insanity of that rationale.
Is the Onion still funny, or have you just gotten used to reading it so you haven't seen it decline from its '90s heyday to the pool of mediocrity it is today? How about Boing Boing, McSweeney's, CNN.com, or Perez Hilton? It's time to feel bad about what you like, for that is the path to enlightenment, or at least to not being that dink who IMs me month-old jokes about Bush.
Monty Mullig, the head of Web technologies at Time Warner's Turner division, which runs CNN and TBS, among others. Despite CNN's efforts to burnish Mullig's profile by featuring him as a talking head, touting CNN's ability to serve up millions of pageviews in crises like the contested 2000 presidential election and 9/11, you've likely never heard of him. But nonetheless, his departure now is instructive. Turner, you see, is rumored to be planning layoffs in Mullig's department. It may seem odd that Turner, whose CNN.com is a runaway success in online news, would be plotting cuts as everyone else is scrambling to staff up with Web developers. But Mullig, and his long, prolific website-building tenure, may have a lot to do with that.
In a weird adapted excerpt from his book on T.V. news that apparently comes out tomorrow, Washington Post nosepicker-columnist and CNN blatherer Howie Kurtz lets us know that the liberal T.V. painted the Iraq war as a bloody place where people get blown up and bad things happen! That is so crazy! How could they?! (Is the rest of his book so ludicrous?)
CNN's coverage this morning of the Clinton Global Initiative featured a wacky live interview with CNN mastermind, United Nations bankroller and possibly compulsive wife-stealer Ted Turner. His inquisitor, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, was clearly pained by the experience. Their conversation included gems from Turner like, "It's the seventh inning and humanity's down two runs!" and "Polio's not as sexy right now as HIV/AIDS or measles or malaria." (Um, the Clinton global public health folks might not sign on to this sentiment!) Also? Ted's sporting some seriously ill-advised facial hair, but it's not like he cares what people think or anything. We can't decide if we want someone to pay him to stay away from the cameras, because maybe he should just have his own crazy public access show?
"CNN is permanently shifting to taped programming for the second hour of "Anderson Cooper 360," scaling back an ambitious programming block created in 2005 to showcase the studio and field-reporting talents of Cooper, who it viewed as an emerging star." Uh oh! [Variety] UPDATE: Meouch, CNN is calling Variety all kinds of wrong on this one.
When Yahoo signed up CNN.com as an online-advertising customer in 2004, bumping out Google, it was seen as a victory that gave Yahoo's then-nascent search business a significant boost. Now, however, Google has reversed that loss, displacing Yahoo as both CNN's search tool and its keyword ads provider. CNN, one should note, is a division of Time Warner, a former investor in Google and a co-owner with Google of AOL. For Yahoo's search business, it's a staggering loss; for Google, a predictable victory.
As of 6:30 this morning, the 4/5/6 line was running at "slower speeds" because of "water on the tracks." Congratulations, New York, we're finally a third world country! If we were terrorists we'd just sit back and let the weather take care of things. Anyway, we weren't the only one with problems. Big trouble up at the Time Warner Center, the Mordor that marks the northern border of Midtown.
After reporting the company's second quarter earnings this morning, "a giddy Sumner Redstone, CBS's chairman, gushed about the performance of CBS and raved about the company's CEO Leslie Moonves. Redstone called Moonves 'the best executive in the media industry' and raved about the 'smart strategic moves' that CBS made to 'position itself in the digital landscape'..." Then he fired him. [CNN]
This weekend on CNN's "Reliable Sources"—one of television's only regular programs to examine how journalists do their jobs and how the media affect the stories they cover— took a look at the very important Lindsay Lohan DUI story. In a strident debate with Parade's Jeanne Wolf, Star Editor-at-Large Julia Allison insists that we're missing the real story: Lindsay Lohan is a reckless driver.
