What’s Hot:
Muzzled – There were a lot of hot stories this week involving cable news talking heads but the biggest of them all was Brian Stelter’s expose of the deal between News Corp. and GE to cut back in the 8pm crossfire between MSNBC and FNC. This was just Part 1 “The story breaks”. Part 2 “The Fallout” happens next week. Maybe. Or maybe not.
CNN and Birthers – While MSNBC and FNC deal with a story they don’t want to deal with (see above), CNN is dealing with its own story that won’t go away. Between Jon Klein publicly backtracking on comments regarding alleged spiking of the “birther” story and then word leaking out about CNN allegedly putting a stop to Lou Dobbs appearing on O’Reilly’s show to talk about birthers, CNN must be somewhat happy that this will take a back seat to the GE/News Corp. deal for at least one day; Monday, when eyes will be glued to Countdown and The Factor to see if the shows’ respective hosts will dare to comment. If they don’t, the story will fade and CNN will again be front and center.
Racist? – Not to be outdone, Glenn Beck put his own foot in it…some would argue the “it” was his own mouth…when he made the assertion that Barack Obama was a racist on Fox and Friends. FNC gave a hands off style explanation to TVNewser, which now rings rather hollow after the News Corp./GE deal story broke. Apparently some things can be restrained at FNC after all.
What’s Not:
Beer Summit Coverage – Talk about pandering to a story. All the networks went off the deep end covering Barack Obama’s overhyped “Beer Summit”.
Remedial Geography – Confusing Iraq with Egypt makes a network look stupid. Hopefully someone got their walking papers over this inexcusable mistake.
Declining Numbers – It was a negative leak to a blog that revealed CNBC’s bad numbers for July, but the numbers speak for themselves.
