What’s Hot/What’s Not: 02/24/13

What’s Hot:

Soledad O’Brien Out At CNN (sort of) – O’Brien will be leaving the network and forming a production company that will produce specials that CNN will air.

Business News Booking Wars – CNBC has been throwing its weight around and apparently has had some success doing so.

Diving in Palau – Dive, dive, dive all trip long at one of the top 10 dive spots on the planet and you too will come back looking like this…

What’s Not:

Starting Point is still on the air – Take it off now in order to prevent an awkward and potentially destructive change over to the new CNN morning show.

Joy Behar to CNN? – I don’t see the upside…

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Booking Wars: Round Two…

The Slant’s Jeff Reeves writes about CNBC’s booking practices. Reeeves gets FBN’s Kevin Magee to comment on the matter…

If I were in the booking department of CNBC, I would think twice about some of this lest big-time CEOs and hedge fund managers tire of the whole affair.

Or as Kevin Magee, the executive vice president of Fox Business Network, said to me more bluntly, “Business leaders are not going to be blackmailed, much less be dictated to by some booker in Englewood Cliffs.”

Magee uses the right word there with “dictated.” The problem is that CNBC thinks it has a captive audience and captive contributors, and thus can tell all parties whatever it feels like.

Ah…but it can. Until someone big enough runs the blockade…someone CNBC can’t afford to blacklist. Someone like Warren Buffett for example. If CNBC dared try that on Buffett, Buffett would laugh in their face and there’s not a damn thing CNBC would do about it.

But for smaller fry “gets”…yes…it’s a real problem for FBN and Bloomberg. I think we may have witnessed just such an incident a while back when Simpson and Bowles bailed out on FBN to be exclusive for Maria Bartiromo. All FBN could do is take the the air and whine about it.