NYTV

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?

 read more »

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 »

ST. PAUL—The helicopters hovering over downtown St. Paul on the afternoon of Sept. 1 had long before become such a customary sound that they weren’t heard anymore, but as Griff Jenkins, the chipper and youthful-looking 37-year-old reporter for Fox News, stood outside the Xcel Energy Center contemplating his next assignment, they became relevant again.

“Apparently, they’ve confiscated the protestors’ jars of urine,” he said. “That makes me feel better.”

The air was sticky. A police officer in riot gear walked by. A German shepherd followed in his wake. Mr. Jenkins gazed to the west where, on the other side of a tall security gate, a teeming mass of bandanas, beehive beards and messenger bags was churning, chanting, shaking fists, banging drums and striding through the streets.  read more »

A few minutes before 11 p.m. on Aug. 25, Rachel Maddow was sitting behind a desk in a double-decker, alfresco television studio her television network, MSNBC, had erected near the old train tracks that cut through downtown Denver, from which Ms. Maddow was to punditize to the public from the near environs of the Democratic National Convention.

“It should be noted that this is a four-night infomercial,” she said.

The heat of the afternoon sun had long before dissipated and a mild breeze blew across the city. After four hours of live television, Ms. Maddow and her colleagues at MSNBC were looking sun-tired as they wrapped their coverage of the opening night of the Democratic convention.  read more »

“This will be much funnier than Morley Safer,” said Jeremy Bronson.

It was Monday afternoon, and Mr. Bronson, 28, who until recently worked as a supervising producer on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, was on the phone with NYTV from Los Angeles. Earlier this summer, after nearly six years as a producer in the Washington bureau of NBC News, Mr. Bronson decamped to Hollywood to pursue a career in comedy.

His first job upon leaving the TV news business is, naturally, making fun of the TV news. Mr. Bronson is now working full time as a writer for Chocolate News, a new show starring In Living Color alum David Alan Grier, which will debut on Comedy Central this fall.  read more »

On the morning of Sunday, July 20, NBC News paterfamilias Tom Brokaw was wrapping up Meet the Press, where he has been anchor since the sudden and untimely death of Tim Russert.

The weekly round table had ended, and it was time to say goodbye to his guests, NBC political director Chuck Todd and NBC White House correspondent David Gregory.

When the segment ended, both reporters sat with their hands neatly folded in front of them and awaited the frugally dispensed approval of Mr. Brokaw.

“Thank you very much, David Gregory, our NBC White House correspondent and, of course, star of MSNBC’s The Road to the White House,” said Mr.  read more »

On Wednesday, July 2, with the national news cycle threatening to slouch into a summer lull, a promising story suddenly popped up from an unlikely spot, several thousand miles south of Barack Obama’s cute daughters in Chicago and equally far removed from Christie Brinkley’s messy divorce in the Hamptons.

According to the wire services, a team of Colombian special forces, disguised as humanitarian workers, had pulled off a daring rescue, tricking armed Marxist-inspired rebels, known as FARC, into turning over 15 longtime hostages. Among the freed captives: French-Colombian activist politician Ingrid Betancourt and three American contractors, all of whom had been held against their will in the jungle for more than five years.  read more »

“The good TV and the bad TV were often in conflict,” said Aaron Brown.

It was a recent Wednesday afternoon and the longtime television anchor and correspondent was sitting at a table in Harry’s of Hartsdale, a nearly deserted steakhouse, a few short blocks from his home in Westchester County. He was reflecting on his career.

Mr. Brown was dressed casually, in a short-sleeved black cotton polo, a bit of white stubble standing out on his well tanned chin. He leaned back in his chair and, by way of demonstration, tapped his right shoulder and then tapped his left. The angel speaking into one earpiece, the devil whispering into the other.  read more »

On the morning of Sunday, June 22, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams made a much anticipated announcement at the end of Meet the Press, which he was moderating in the wake of Tim Russert’s sudden death of a heart attack nine days earlier.

“Beginning next week, my friend Tom Brokaw has agreed to step in as moderator of Meet the Press, to get us through this election season,” said Mr. Williams. “And allow me to add, during these past difficult days, Tom’s been an enormous comfort here in this Washington bureau.”

A comfort: yes. A full-time presence in Washington: no.  read more »

What does the long-term future hold for local television news business? Unclear. What does the short term promise?

Widgets.

On Wednesday, June 18, executives as WCBS, the CBS-owned and -operated station in New York City, unveiled a new online business venture in which they will supply “widgets with real-time news feeds” to a network of local blogs.

Reached on the phone recently, Dan Shelley, the director of digital media for the station, explained that WCBS was offering bloggers a variety of different widget packages to choose from, ranging from sports to entertainment to breaking news.

“We have a ‘water cooler’ section, which is a robust section full of weird news stories,” said Mr.  read more »

At 1:30 p.m., the line of mourners on Mount Saint Alban in Washington, D.C., for Tim Russert, NBC Washington bureau chief and host of Meet the Press, who died so suddenly last week at the age of 58, stretched all the way from the front doors of the St. Albans School Refectory out to Wisconsin Avenue.

Before the hearse arrived bearing Russert’s dark wooden casket, the presidential motorcade had arrived; President George W. Bush and Laura Bush were among the first mourners. Then the hearse arrived to bear Russert’s casket into the refectory, followed by his son, Luke, and his wife, Maureen; then a host of his famous television news friends.  read more »

Over the past few weeks, HBO has announced a series of moves to stem the tide of speculation that the network is faltering. After canceling 12 Miles of Bad Road, a series starring Lily Tomlin, HBO announced deals with Oscar winners Alexander Payne (of Sideways and Election fame) to develop a dark comedy called Hung, about a man who divines power from his generous equipment; and Alan Ball, the creator of Six Feet Under, who is working on not one but two shows for the network. (One of those is about vampires, the other about a women’s prison.) Then came the news that Frank Rich would join Tina Brown in serving as a “creative consultant” to the network.

“In recent years, since giving up criticism in 1993, occasionally someone has asked me to look at something, whether it was a play or a manuscript, and to try and tweak it or whatever,” said Mr. Rich. “I love this stuff so much. This is a way to kind of do it in a less amateur fashion and on a more regular basis. It’s a way to satisfy this craving I have had.”

HBO needs the help. Even as its documentary, original-movie and comedy programming remain strong, the network has been without a new hit series for some time now. Lucky Louie tanked. John From Cincinnati is practically a punch line. In Treatment, the five-day-a-week peek into therapy that aired this past winter, was a little too much like, well, therapy to draw a mass crowd. The Wire, which reliably delivered critical acclaim for five seasons, is over.

And Flight of the Conchords? Although it was renewed, that show is kids’ stuff compared to the shows that kept HBO series so far ahead of the rest. What they do next has to be big, smart, serious, bold. But what can journalists do to make that happen?

 

HBO’s SOPRANOS FINALE a year ago drew 11.9 million viewers, meaning that over a third of HBO’s 30 million subscribers at the time tuned in to witness the end of Tony on television. By contrast, HBO’s most recent series, In Treatment, drew such poor ratings on its debut—under a half-million viewers—that the network decided to stream it for free online. Their popular miniseries John Adams did better—with an average of 2.2 million viewers over seven weeks—but it was hardly a blockbuster, and it was temporary.

So what’s next? Besides the development deals with Mr. Payne and Mr. Ball, pilots have been ordered for a Darren Star adaptation of Tracy Quan’s Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, and Surburban Shootout, based on a U.K. series, about a woman in the suburbs stuck between two housewife gangs. (Showtime, it should be noted, also has a call-girl show in the works, and Weeds, which is also about a housewife in the suburbs, is a steady hit for the rival network.) Neither of HBO’s projects have yet been green-lighted; they may be old before they see the light of day.

This is the first time in recent years that HBO, which for so long has been at the very forefront of creative programming, has been without a hit or a hit-in-the-making. Remember when Entourage debuted? Surely the network wasn’t helped by the departure of programming guru Chris Albrecht last year. That’s when Richard Plepler, a longtime PR man for the network (after whom Tony Soprano’s surgeon was named in “The Sopranos”), became co-president of the premium cable network, along with Michael Lombardo in L.A.

Since then, Mr. Plepler has earned the reputation of a man about town who is not exactly shy about using HBO’s money to harvest connections among the city’s elite power brokers and creative talents, which he thinks will benefit his network.

“Frank is an enormous talent who understands our brand and what makes HBO unique,” said Mr. Plepler. “To have a part of his energy focused on the network can only be a good thing for us.”

Roughly five months ago, Mr. Plepler and Mr. Lombardo also signed former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor Tina Brown to a deal that Mr. Plepler says is “spiritually” similar to that of Mr. Rich’s.

Ms. Brown said that since January, she’s pitched two projects—an idea for a series and an idea for a movie—that the HBO executives liked and are in the process of “taking a little further.” According to Ms. Brown, she does not regularly meet with the HBO heads, nor do they send her material to vet. Typically, she contacts Mr. Plepler or Mr. Lombardo at her own discretion. “It’s up to me,” said Ms. Brown. “If I collide with some interesting material, I’ll call or e-mail them. Sometimes it’s something I’m interested in doing. Sometimes it’s something I think they should know about. Richard wants to encourage people who have good relationships with the creative community to simply be thinking about HBO when they’re out and about. It’s working out well.” Next Page >

On the morning of Wednesday, May 14, Torrey Meeks, a 25-year-old freelance writer and producer in Las Cruces, N.M., rolled out of bed and checked his various Web pages. “Unbelievable,” he thought to himself. “This thing is blowing up.”

The previous afternoon, Mr. Meeks, along with thousands of others, had taken his first (and second, and third … ) look at the Internet’s viral video du jour—specifically, a decades-old clip, freshly unearthed on YouTube, featuring news anchor Bill O’Reilly (long before his current Fox News fame), unleashing a curse-filled tirade on the set of Inside Edition.  read more » Next Page >

Not long ago, Chuck Scarborough, the news anchor of WNBC-TV here in New York, was working on a story about the future of electric cars. For the piece, Mr. Scarborough conducted an extensive interview with one of the creators of the Tesla Roadster. In the end, as so often happens in an evening newscast, only about 45 seconds of the interview made it onto the air.

“But it was a cohesive interview that one could listen to, if you were so inclined, for the full 19 minutes,” said Mr. Scarborough. “So I put the whole thing on our Web site.”  read more » Next Page >

On Tuesday, April 29, Chad Hurley, the pup-faced 30-year-old CEO of YouTube, popped up on the Internet along with the mayor of New Orleans, the governor of Louisiana and an executive from Google to invite the 2008 presidential candidates to participate in a “town hall meeting” to be held on Sept. 18 at the convention center in New Orleans, where, 32 months ago, thousands sought refuge from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

In the YouTube clip, the image of a bridge spanning a broad, muddy river flashed onto the small screen as the boosters took turns talking about the vague parameters of the would-be debate.

A Google senior vice president promised an “online discussion” and “a real-time forum.”

An accompanying press release noted that the showdown might be televised. Or not.

“The Internet has opened up public dialogue in ways we never imagined possible,” said Mr. Hurley of YouTube.

Their invitation had the distinct aura of something that had not been fumigated by the relevant authorities; in the increasingly big business of televised presidential debates, it was not an invitation at all, but a challenge—to the candidates, the major television networks, and to that man behind the curtain, the Washington-based nonprofit called the Commission on Presidential Debates.

For the past 20 years, in the general elections, these three parties have determined who debates whom; who moderates; and where the debate is hosted.

And recently, New Orleans, Google and YouTube have all seemingly smarted from being excluded. Sure, they’ve teamed up with television networks before, to add if-you-must Webbish features to the highly rated run of primary debates. CNN worked with YouTube. MTV hooked up with MySpace. ABC partnered with Facebook. Somewhere along the way, questions submitted by homespun Web heads became all the rage, and a whole new crowd of media executives, like the Voice of God broadcasters before them, threatened to bloom into full-blown podium hounds. For a low-key nonprofit like the commission, that could be dangerous. The organization has maintained its monopoly over debates largely by capably brokering sensitive deals between the major TV networks, the candidates, and the Republican and Democratic party leadership. And by choosing moderators and questioners who are palatable to everyone. And that does not include what Time magazine, in its 2006 Person of the Year cover, called “You.”

It is not for lack of trying to deal directly with the commission and the networks that Google and YouTube are going commando. According to sources familiar with the situation, long before they gave up and went their own route, executives from Google (and its somewhat recently purchased video-sharing sibling YouTube) were the first digital pooh-bahs to push the commission about a potential partnership.

The tentative talks began in May 2007, when Bob Boorstin, a former speechwriter for the Clinton White House who now serves as a communications executive for Google, set up a meeting with the commission’s leaders in Washington, D.C. At the time, as part of their ongoing efforts to boost their companies’ profile in the nation’s capital, Google and YouTube execs were already working with CNN honchos to host what would become two well-received primary debates.

But Mr. Boorstin, a seasoned political operative, must have already been looking ahead to the general election. Presumably in order to make a splash in the fall, Google would have to win over Janet Brown, the executive director of the commission. But after the meeting, Ms. Brown remained noncommittal.

To wit: Early that summer, Ms. Brown hired Elizabeth Wilner, the former political director of NBC News, to help the commission research what was being done with the Internet in the primary debates. What worked? What didn’t? Who were the players?

That summer and into the fall, Ms. Wilner went on a preliminary listening tour of sorts, introducing herself and the organization’s mission to various Internet players. Along the way, she met with everyone from Yahoo! to AOL to Google.

In November, after months of sifting through applications from universities and institutions around the country, the commission announced it had chosen four sites for the 2008 general-election debates: Hempstead, N.Y.; Nashville; Oxford, Miss.; and St. Louis. Next Page >

“This is not your father’s Watergate,” said James Rosen.

Mr. Rosen, an on-air D.C.-based correspondent for Fox News was speaking to NYTV on Monday afternoon. Next month, Doubleday will publish Mr. Rosen’s first book—a revisionist history of Richard Nixon’s downfall, called The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate.  read more » Next Page >

On the night of Wed. April 16, comedian Mo Rocca walked across the stage in the spacious auditorium at the Hilton Washington on Connecticut Avenue in Washington D.C. and thanked several hundred reporters, politicians, and celebrities for showing up at the annual Radio and Television Correspondents Association Dinner.

"I know that the White House Correspondents' dinner in about 10 days gets most of the glory," said the ubiquitous political satirist and sometime MSNBC contributor. "I think of this one as sort of the Nicky to that one's Paris Hilton. This is sort of the Jamie Lynn to that dinner's Britney. Well that dinner is sort of like CNN. This one is MSNBC."  read more » Next Page >

On Monday morning, shortly after 7 a.m., Mark Sollars, a chatty teenager in a gray hooded sweatshirt, stood in a crowd at Rockefeller Center and glanced over a police barricade at the alfresco portion of NBC’s Today studio.

Sensing a potential interview subject, NYTV pounced. So what exactly should Katie Couric do next with her career?

“Katie should come back here,” said the young demo-defying Today fan. “This is where she belongs. Everyone loved her here.”

Nearby, production assistants had decked out a slab of Today’s outdoor set in Western décor (haystacks, etc.), in anticipation of an upcoming feature on lasso lessons.  read more » Next Page >

“We’re mostly a bunch of newspaper hacks,” said Jim VandeHei, the executive editor of the political media entity Politico, which, if you are, statistically speaking, like most Americans, you are more likely to recognize as the somewhat obscure co-sponsor of some of this election season’s televised presidential debates than from its Web site, politico.com, or its printed Beltway cheat sheet, The Politico.

He was talking about himself and his boss, John Harris, whom he followed out of The Washington Post in 2006 to join the nascent Allbritton-owned media property amid some print-industry-rankling hubris.  read more » Next Page >

“I’m going to stay for sure through the inauguration.” That’s what Bob Schieffer, the host these last 17 years of CBS’s Sunday morning, half-hour news program Face the Nation, told TV Guide’s Stephen Battaglio at the end of 2007. “Quite frankly, I don’t know what I’m going to do after that.”

Neither does CBS News. Which must be why he told The New York Times recently that he was going to put off his retirement for an indefinite period of time at the behest of CBS News president Sean McManus.

“We’re going to have a transition period, maybe try some people out,” Mr. Schieffer said.  read more » Next Page >

 

 

Above: Jefferson Han demonstrates his Perceptive Pixel technology.

On the night of the Super Tuesday presidential primaries, John King and Wolf Blitzer stood in front of a camera in a studio at CNN’s headquarters at the Time Warner Center and provided some live analysis of the night’s upcoming contests. Behind them was a device that looked like a widescreen television, showing a map of the United States.

The conversation eventually focused on California. While Mr. Blitzer gave a basic run down of the state, Mr. King turned and touched the screen with each of his forefingers. As he pulled his fingers slowly in opposite directions, the map of California expanded.

“The delegates for the Democrats, the way they proportion and decide who gets those delegates is going to be very important,” said Mr. Blitzer.  read more » Next Page >

On the morning of Friday, March 21, Chris Wallace woke up at his home in Washington, D.C., grabbed some fruit and yogurt, and turned on the Fox News early show, Fox & Friends.

Steve Doocy, Gretchen Carlson and Brian Kilmeade were talking about Barack Obama’s recent characterization of his grandmother on a Philadelphia radio show: She was a “typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, there’s a reaction that’s been bred into our experiences that don’t go away and that sometimes comes out in the wrong way.”

“Can you say ‘typical white person’ if you’re white?” asked Mr. Doocy. Of course not, noted Ms. Carlson. There’s no way that Senator Hillary Clinton could use the phrase “typical black person,” they noted. “So there is a certain double standard in society,” said Ms. Carlson. And also: “I sort of take offense at that line: ‘typical white.’”

Mr. Wallace was getting a little bit annoyed.

“I didn’t think it was fair. I didn’t think it allowed Obama to make his point,” Mr. Wallace later told The Observer in a telephone interview. “I thought it made it sound like he was just engaging in a racial stereotype, which I think he was. But it was in an interview, not in a speech. I thought that as he went on and finished the thought over the next sentence or two, he softened that kind of harsh phrase. And saying, listen, a typical white person who has grown up and had a certain set of experiences, and reacts in that way. I thought he was softening it. I didn’t think we were providing the full context of what he was saying.”

After breakfast, Mr. Wallace went to work and began his usual Friday routine, patching into sister programs to promote the lineup of guests he is expecting on the next broadcast of Fox News Sunday.

Between “hits” with affiliates around the country, he kept an eye on the Friends. “Typical white person,” “typical white person,” “typical white person,” he heard over and over again.

“I think I was especially disturbed by the fact that the clip as they played it—which cut off after ‘typical white person’ without Obama’s elaboration—did not do justice to his explanation,” he said.

Soon it would be time for him to pop in on Fox & Friends to do his shtick; he made a snap decision.

“Hey, listen, I love you guys but I want to take you to task, if I may, respectfully, for a moment,” said Mr. Wallace on air. “I have been watching the show since six o’clock this morning when I got up, and it seems to me that two hours of Obama bashing on this ‘typical white person’ remark is somewhat excessive, and frankly, I think you’re somewhat distorting what Obama had to say.”

Over the years, Mr. Wallace’s brusque manner has raised the hackles of many a subject. According to Time magazine, Mr. Wallace, during a press conference in March 1987, asked Ronald Reagan a particularly tough question about Israel’s involvement in arms sales to Iran. Famously, in September 2006, during an interview with President Bill Clinton, Mr. Wallace referenced the reporting in Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Looming Tower, and asked Mr. Clinton, “Why didn’t you do more to put bin Laden and Al Qaeda out of business when you were president?” A red-faced Mr. Clinton responded, in part, by accusing Mr. Wallace of a “conservative hit job.” This past November, during an interview on his Sunday show, Mr. Wallace asked Fred Thompson, then a presidential candidate, about all the “buzz” about his “disappointing” campaign. A visibly angry Mr. Thompson responded by accusing Fox News of being biased against him.

Back in the studio, the members of the Fox & Friends crew seemed similarly miffed to find themselves on the receiving end of their colleague’s bluntness. (Mr. Wallace is the son of Captain Confrontation himself, CBS’s Mike Wallace.) In response, Mr. Doocy and company defended their analysis. Mr. Wallace stuck to his point. “I still love you,” Mr. Wallace said in conclusion. “Yup, okay,” replied Mr. Doocy. “An odd way of showing it.”

On Monday afternoon—with clips of the confrontation having seemingly ricocheted to every far-flung corner of the Web and with everyone from official Obama bloggers to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews rushing to pat Mr. Wallace on the back—NYTV caught up with Mr. Wallace via phone. The longtime newsman said that in retrospect he had mixed feelings about making the remarks.

“I didn’t have any second thoughts about the substance because I still believe what I said was right,” said Mr. Wallace. “But after the fact, you do think to yourself—on a professional level with colleagues I very much like and respect—should I have done that off camera?” Next Page >

A recent episode of 'Race For the White House.'

“MSNBC and NBC are one,” said Phil Griffin. “We’ve said that for over a decade. It actually is true now.”

Mr. Griffin, the senior vice president of NBC News, was speaking on the phone to NYTV on Monday afternoon. He had brought up the unification of the two news operations as a way of explaining the internal politics underpinning the launch of MSNBC’s new prime-time show, Race for the White House, which premiered on March, 17 at 6 p.m., replacing Tucker.  read more » Next Page >

On the morning of Wednesday, March 12, reporter Dan Rice was riding shotgun in the WNBC “Chopper 4” helicopter, roughly 2,000 feet above then-Governor Eliot Spitzer’s apartment on the Upper East Side, when he noticed something strange.

For the past half hour, Mr. Rice and his ace Norwegian pilot Lars Andresen had been hovering above Manhattan, along with a handful of other news choppers, waiting for Mr. Spitzer to emerge from his apartment at 80th Street and Fifth Avenue. At the time, the governor was on the verge of stepping down. And the plan was to provide aerial coverage of Mr. Spitzer’s drive to his office on Third Avenue near 40th Street, where he would presumably deliver his resignation speech.  read more » Next Page >

“Happy Super Tuesday,” the prolific conservative talk-show pundit Glenn Beck told viewers of Turner Broadcasting’s stepchild cable news channel, Headline News, on the evening of Feb. 5. “We’ve got a very low budget. This is, like, the fourth-most-impressive election team on television.”

It was just his excessively self-effacing way of countering the slogans coming out of the big cable channels that night: CNN’s “Best Political Team on Television,” MSNBC’s “The Place for Politics,” Fox News’ “Best Political Analysts.”

Mr. Beck was on the phone with NYTV on Monday afternoon, discussing his latest professional gig: hosting live coverage of big political nights for Headline News.  read more » Next Page >

Tuesday, March 4, around 8 p.m., Bill O’Reilly bounded across a chilly studio on the first floor of the News Corp. building on Sixth Avenue toward the desk at the back of the room.

There, the members of the Fox News Super Tuesday II political team—Brit Hume, Juan Williams, Bill Kristol, Nina Easton and Fred Barnes—were wrapping up another back-and-forth session, chewing over the night’s early returns. Mr. Kristol made an observation about the rationality of voters. A producer announced a break.

The team would have a few minutes to stretch its legs. As they backed away from the desk, Mr. O’Reilly approached.

“Throw Juan Williams out of here,” Mr. O’Reilly bellowed with a half-grin.

Mr. Williams and the rest of the Fox politics team chuckled. The longtime NPR contributor gave way to the longtime NPR adversary. A few minutes later, Mr. Reilly was sitting next to Mr. Hume, delivering his five minutes of commentary, before departing for the night.

"NBC News cannot continue to openly root for one presidential candidate, thereby teeing off everybody else in the country, and expect to prosper,” he told his viewers. “Number one, it's corrupt. If they're going to be the Obama network, NBC News should say that we're rooting for Obama."

The Media Mob headed for the elevator. Alexis Glick of the Fox Business Network was waiting in the wings, ready to deliver some commentary on the state of economy. She was dressed in blood red.

Up on the second floor, the Fox News control room was buzzing. There was a much-ignored sign on the door warning no food and drink beyond this point. A man flew by, two slices of pizza precariously stacked on a paper plate.

Marty Ryan, silver-haired control-room warhorse who serves as the network's executive producer of political programming, stood calmly in the heart of the madness, answering questions, giving orders and deciphering the banks of monitors in front of him.

Dotted among the monitors were the faces of correspondents standing at campaign locations across the country—Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island, Vermont—waiting to be called into action, waiting for some precious airtime.

But just now, they were not playing for the cameras that were trained on them. One reporter was adjusting his seat, another wiped his face with a towel. A blond correspondent ran a brush through her hair. It was like watching a Harry Shearer “Found Object” video, in 10-part harmony. The din of the control room provided the soundtrack—a Robert Altman-like tapestry of densely layered noise.

“Hemmer first.”

“Ninety seconds.”

“Get Brit.”

“Make it tight.”

"Where’s Michael?”

“Is that better?”

“In Ohio.”

“I have him.”

“Sixty seconds.”

Of the hundred or so screens, the Media Mob began fixating on one way down in the corner of the room. The screen was labeled “Future.” It was completely dark.

Time to check in with the prognosticators!

Up on the 14th floor, Fox News had set up their “Decision Desk” in a space adjacent to the dot-com newsroom. There a team of stat hounds hunched over laptops, rifled through bags of mini candies (Tootsie Rolls, Reeses Pieces Peanut Butter Cups) and crunched the numbers as they came in.

Michael Barone, a Fox News contributor and the principal big brain behind the Almanac of American Politics, sat in a nearby fishbowl of an office, looking at numbers and seemingly peering into the future.

At 9:19, a bald-headed fellow, sporting glasses and a goatee, piped up. “Call Rhode Island for Hillary.” Everyone nodded and shifted their gazes to a bank of screens on a nearby wall. Sure enough, seconds later, the announcement appeared that Senator Clinton was the projected winner of Rhode Island. A few minutes later, MSNBC and CNN followed with the projection. Next Page >

On Feb. 5, during MSNBC’s Super Tuesday political coverage, anchor Keith Olbermann joked that during this long primary season, it sometimes seemed like everyone in the business had already anchored a debate. “I think most people at home have now moderated one as well,” said Mr. Olbermann.

If Katie Couric was watching at home, chances are she wasn’t laughing. Eight months and more than 20 debates into podium season, Ms. Couric has yet to get anywhere near the big stage.

How did the highest-paid anchor on evening television get upstaged by Brian Williams, Brit Hume, Charles Gibson, Wolf Blitzer, Tim Russert, George Stephanopoulos, Campbell Brown, Chris Wallace, Natalie Morales and on and on?

The official explanation from CBS: Ms. Couric was the victim of circumstance.

“I wish we had been able to work it out,” said Sean McManus, the president of CBS News. “I think [Ms. Couric] would have been really good at it. I think it would have been a good showcase for CBS News. But it just wasn’t to be this cycle.”

But recent conversations with competitors, current and former CBS News employees, and experts in the TV-debate business raised the question whether CBS News, facing a perpetually shrinking budget and having already committed to a reported $15 million a year to Ms. Couric, has enough resources—emotional and financial—to deliver big for their biggest star.

Throwing a debate is a budget-busting expenditure for a news division because of both the cost of setting up a staging facility and because of the advertising revenue lost due to the limited commercial inventory during such news events—but what networks gain is a voice in the election cycle, for the network and for the network’s rising and established stars.

In the past, CBS has not been reluctant to shell out money to maximize on the Katie Couric phenomenon.

“You think about how much they wasted early on in billboards and other crap, wouldn’t it be smarter to invest in substance now?” said one source, with knowledge of CBS’s aborted debate plans. “Either the network is fundamentally dedicated to spending the money, or they’re not. If you’re really dedicated to bumping your news to another level, you host a debate. But there’s either no interest or no follow-through.”

Mr. McManus said that CBS News remains committed to all things political, including hosting primary debates.

“It wasn’t a financial decision,” said Mr. McManus, of this season’s shutout. “It’s a programming decision and finding an appropriate time to put it in prime time. It does cost a fair amount of money in preemption costs to put them in prime time. But that wasn’t the primary reason it didn’t happen.”

The story began back on May, 16, when the Democratic National Committee announced the dates, locations and media sponsors of six DNC debates. CBS would host one in Los Angeles on Dec. 10. It was a choice assignment because of (a) the timing (it would be the final debate before the Iowa caucus) and (b) the location. As CNN would later prove at the Kodak Theater on Jan. 31, a debate in L.A. is bound to attract stars—Jason Alexander!—and eyeballs.

Shortly thereafter, during the summer of 2007, CBS News informed the DNC that they wanted to hold the debate inside a studio at the CBS Television City in Los Angeles and—notably—without a live audience.

According to several sources, that idea didn’t sit well with the DNC. Holding the debate in a closed studio rather than in front of a live audience is seen by those in the business as a classic cost-saving gambit—and one (collateral damage!) that would deny Democratic diehards and donors the opportunity to show up and get crazy for their candidates. The plan was also at odds with the terms already hammered out with the Democratic candidates. Negotiations sputtered. According to sources, at several points over the summer, the debate appeared on the brink of death.

At the same time, CBS News executives were grappling with the absence of political director, Molly Levinson, who had gone on maternity leave in July. Barbara Fedida, a CBS News executive charged in part with recruiting talent, began looking for somebody who could fill in and help Ms. Couric prepare for the debate. According to sources, CBS eventually reached out to a number of individuals, including former NBC political director Elizabeth Wilner; and—more surprisingly—to Michael Feldman, a former senior adviser to the Clinton-Gore administration and a founding partner of the Glover Park Group.

In some quarters, word of the latter meeting raised eyebrows.

“Networks use political consultants as outside contributors to do commentary all the time,” explained one source with extensive knowledge of TV debate logistics. “But you should not have one in charge of your debate preparation. The debate is a news event. They should know better.” Next Page >