Long Knives…

And what are we to make of this from FTVLive? I know what I make of it…it has a familiar ring to it.

Seems the fierce internal competition plaguing the media section of the New York Times these days is apparently forcing their reporters to be extra sensitive about getting beat. Not surprising then that media reporters there are now taking credit for breaking news more than an hour after a network press release was sent out.

After My Network TV announced Monday at 4 pm that they were moving from a broadcast network model to that of a hybrid programming service, Bill Carter slapped it up on the Times’ TV Decoder website at 5:12pm proclaiming that “News Corp” was “expected” to make a major announcement about My Network TV. Huh? Seems as though a rogue News Corp internal source led Carter astray and he took the bait without bothering to do any actual reporting or even a basic Google search which would have turned up at least two stories within the hour on the programming change. Carter was forced to update the post later to clarify that an announcement had been made (http://tvdecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/mynetworktv-once-a-network-now-a-hybrid/)

Perhaps the embarrassment over this episode led to Times editors dismissing the story from Tuesday’s paper and shunning Carter’s byline from print which doesn’t bode well for his story count of late. Observers have noticed in particular that one time TVNewser Brian Stelter’s (by the way, TVNewser was so much better when Brian was editing it) byline count has been rising exponentially in the past six weeks. FTVLive looked into this and the difference was pretty staggering….Stelter had 38 stories make it into the paper vs. Carter’s 7 pieces.

Looks like the young kid is just kicking the Old vet’s ass.

Look out Billy Boy, the Times is looking to save some money and we’re pretty sure you are making a lot more money than Brian.