Cindy Adams woke up on Election Day knowing exactly where to spend her evening. There were parties all over town. Lefty celebrities would be out in force. But the longtime gossip columnist for the New York Post wanted to be at the place she felt would be “the heartbeat of the world”—namely, the CNN Grill.

Like many of her pals in the media, Ms. Adams had first frequented the CNN Grill during its original iteration at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. There, the cable news network had sequestered a centrally located sports bar, plastered the walls with flat-screen televisions tuned to CNN, concocted some thematic drinks (the caucus cooler!) and threw open the doors.  read more »

On Jan. 10, 2005, CBS President Leslie Moonves sent his employees a novella-length memo with the subject line “The Independent Panel Issues its report.”

CBS had formed said independent panel months earlier, in the fall of 2004, in order to investigate the development, preparation and aftermath of Dan Rather and company’s flawed report on President Bush’s military service. The report had aired on 60 Minutes Wednesday on Sept. 8, 2004, a few months before the presidential election, and had subsequently embroiled the network in a scandal that came to be known as “Memogate.”

In his memo to the staff, Mr.  read more »

In recent months, bad news in the financial world has translated into big news for CNBC, and big news is good news for a 24-hour cable news network. With national interest in financial news at a fever pitch, the business news network has been posting its highest ratings in its 19-year history.

And now, owner GE is rewarding them with … budget cuts!

Bosses at CNBC, The Observer has learned, are now preparing to scale back budgets. Sources inside CNBC have heard that the figure could approach a 10 percent overall budget cut.

“We’re committed to having the best team in business news worldwide,” said CNBC spokesman Kevin Goldman.  read more »

On the afternoon of Friday, Oct. 31, Katie Couric sat down in the Olympic Flame diner at the corner of 60th Street and Amsterdam, and ordered a cup of coffee. Outside, the weather was mild. Beams of sunlight streamed through the window. A woman dressed in some sort of elfin costume strolled down the sidewalk.

Ms. Couric said that as a kid, her mother liked to dress her up on Halloween as a drunken doctor. The coffee arrived.

O.K., Ms. Couric, it’s trick or treat time: What would you want from CBS, the network that paid you a reported $15 million a year to lure you from your perch at NBC’s Today?

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On the afternoon of Thursday, Oct. 23, around 1 p.m., Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet.

Mr. Griffin was sitting at a table at the Sea Grill restaurant, overlooking the ice rink at Rockefeller Plaza, the nerve center of NBC. From the wallet, he pulled out a tattered CNN work ID from the early ’80s, a memento, he said, from his first job in TV. He always kept the CNN badge on him. “Not sure why,” he said.

He cast a sideways glance at the photo of his 20-something-year-old self, smiling from beneath a mop of brown hair, which has since mostly disappeared with age.  read more »

On the afternoon of Tuesday, Oct. 21, John Wallace, the president of NBC Universal’s local media division, stood in a television studio on the sixth floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza and spoke to a room full of employees about the future of local news.

The space, which decades ago served as the studio for The Tonight Show (that is, until Johnny Carson decamped for the West Coast), now serves as the broadcasting home of Sue Simmons, Chuck Scarborough, Len Berman and the rest of the WNBC News Channel 4 team.

Shortly after 2 p.m., WNBC staffers convened in the studio in part to hear management’s latest take on their future livelihood at 30 Rock.  read more »

Before Nicolle Wallace took over the role of senior adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign, the wrangling on the evening news in recent weeks over Sarah Palin’s performance in interviews with CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric might have been the kind of on-air debate she relished.

“Governor Palin did fantastic,” the 36-year-old told The Observer in a telephone interview on the afternoon of Oct. 6.

But since she took on this high-level communications job with the campaign in May of this year, Ms. Wallace has had to relinquish her spot as a G.O.P.-credentialed commentator for CBS News.

Her analysis would have been provocative: In the aftermath of the Palin-Couric encounters, pundits took turns pummeling the Alaska governor’s apparent lack of preparation and arguing about just how much the interviews had damaged her credibility as a vice presidential candidate.  read more »

“I am writing in frustration over the tenor of the general coverage on McCain this past week,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, top economic adviser to the Republican presidential candidate, Senator John McCain, wrote in a blast e-mail to financial reporters over the weekend.

One could be forgiven for thinking he was talking about the events of Tuesday, Sept. 16, when he was briefing reporters in Miami on his candidate’s prescriptions for solving the Wall Street crisis, and burnishing his candidate’s credentials as former chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.

What, one reporter asked, had he done on commerce that gave him expertise on the present financial meltdown?

“He didn’t have jurisdiction over financial markets, first and foremost,’’ Mr.  read more »

On Saturday, Sept. 6, Drew Griffin, a correspondent for CNN, arrived with his camera crew at the home of Chuck Heath, the father of Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin.

Mr. Griffin was there for an interview. He had landed in Wasilla, Alaska, three days earlier, fresh off the Hurricane Gustav story, and was now charged with reporting on the life of the charismatic Alaska governor for a CNN documentary to be called Sarah Palin Revealed. There, alongside the driveway of Alaska’s first dad, Mr. Griffin saw something he’d never seen before: A 15-foot tower of stacked moose antlers. Holy Alaska!

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On Tuesday afternoon, Phil Griffin, the president of cable-news network MSNBC, had had enough of the interviews and was getting angry.

Roughly 48 hours earlier, Mr. Griffin had announced his decision to remove Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews from anchoring big political nights for his network. Henceforth, according to Mr. Griffin’s dictum, NBC News’ chief White House correspondent, David Gregory, would handle the news duties for MSNBC. Mr. Matthews and Mr. Olbermann would shift into purely revved-up pundit mode.

This morning, Mr. Griffin was batting back a report from the New York Post that Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of NBC’s parent company General Electric, had facilitated the change after “a lot, maybe thousands” of shareholders had called up to complain about Mr.  read more »