What’s Hot/What’s Not: 04/15/12

It’s an all Not Hot edition…

What’s Not:

MSNBC and Mika Brzezinski – MSNBC allowing Brzezinski to moderate a Presidential forum on Women’s issues at the White House raised all sorts of conflict of interest issues…

The Fox Mole – Moles are blind aren’t they? This one wasn’t just blind but dumb as well. He posted outtake FNC video on Gawker and that was it, he got hunted down and fired. He then went on Reliable Sources to whine about his job prospects.

TJ Holmes – Holmes put out a tweet suggesting he would be returning to CNN. Only he wasn’t. Then it was announced this his new gig at BET would be a comedy news show, thus ruining what would have been a promising broadcast journalism career. It must be that he doesn’t want to do straight news anymore. It had better be because it’ll be very tough to go back now.

Roger Ailes Speaks – His talk to journalism students contained too much bulletin board material. He dissed Sarah Palin and then had to put out a statement walking it back, insulted Soledad O’Brien, and erroneously claimed that his network never in its history had to take down any news story. Ailes rarely talks publicly but maybe he shouldn’t speak so often.

The George Zimmerman Freak Show…

The New York Times’ Brian Stelter writes about the media freak show that’s going to ensue if George Zimmerman goes to trial…

While a trial of Mr. Zimmerman, who was charged last week with second degree murder in Mr. Martin’s death, will most likely not start for months, if ever — The Sentinel over the weekend reported that most such charges in Florida are settled with a pretrial plea — some in the news media are already predicting blanket coverage by television networks and Web sites.

If the case goes to trial, “it has the potential to be as big as the O. J. Simpson trial — and just as divisive,” said Piers Morgan, the CNN interviewer.

Morgan is wrong. This won’t be O.J. II. It will be Rodney King II and regardless of the outcome whatever racial divisions that were exposed after OJ was acquitted will pale in comparison. You can already tell this will be worse than OJ because there was comparatively little racial issue discussion in the run up to his trial. With Zimmerman racial overtones have been present since day 1.

FNC = Career Death?

NewsBusters’ Brent Baker writes about Joe Muto talking on CNN’s Reliable Sources about not being able to get hired elsewhere because he worked at FNC…

Muto, an associate producer for The O’Reilly Factor until Wednesday, told Howard Kurtz “I sent out dozens and dozens of resumes. CNN must have gotten twenty resumes from me.”

But, “I was blackballed within the industry, that people, hiring managers, see Fox News on your resume, and they say ‘this guy’s a conservative, this guy’s a nut, we don’t want him in our organization.’ I was completely blackballed within the cable news industry after working at Fox News.”

When I wrote that article on MSNBC’s POV metamorphosis; specifically the part about putting yourself in the position of an MSNBC anchor, that particular passage originally sprang out of a private discussion I once had regarding talent going to FNC and whether doing so could be career suicide. You could substitute “MSNBC” with “FNC” in those passages and have it be almost exactly the same result. It’s not just working at MSNBC that threatens your career chances. Working for FNC can be just as bad a stigma. It’s like the Roach Motel for two of the three cable news nets: “Talent goes in but won’t come out”.

So hearing Muto say that he couldn’t find a job elsewhere on the technical side is not surprising to me. But at the same time I’m not 100% convinced that it was all FNC’s reputation that blocked Muto from getting hired elsewhere. There is a glut of qualified people out there after all.

The Hazards of Live TV: #25,156

From an emailer…

FNC tried to air the press conference of President Obama and the Colombian President.

When the Colombia President was speaking they did not get the audio feed with English translation and did not air it.

When President Obama started to speak they got the audio feed with Spanish translation only and went back to Greg Jarrett who voiced his frustrations on the audio and they took a break.

CNN said they would air the President’s comments but must have the same issue with they weren’t airing it.

MSNBC has the same video feed as FNC and CNN but has the correct audio feed.

CNN eventually managed to get the same video feed with English audio for the Q&A session.

FNC apparently can’t get the English audio feed and is skipping the event.