This summer Bill O’Reilly, the biggest star on Fox News Channel, lent his name — inadvertently, he claims — to a dubious financial scheme peddled by Newsmax, the right-wing Web site.
Mr. O’Reilly was the featured guest in an online video billed as an “Economic Crisis Summit,” which also promoted a financial newsletter and a secret “IRS payout” that viewers could pay to find out about.
The video was first published in June. It was yanked from the Web on Tuesday after a financial columnist questioned why Mr. O’Reilly was promoting “investment flim-flam.”
In response, Fox News said that Mr. O’Reilly was not aware that an interview he granted would be used to solicit subscribers to a financial newsletter.
“They took an interview that Bill did and used it for other purposes,” said Bill Shine, a Fox News executive vice president, adding that “we’re all disappointed in this.”
The AP has issued a memo urging reporters and editors to avoid using the construction “ground zero mosque,” The Upshot’s Michael Calderone reports.
He reported Tuesday that the construction had been creeping into some AP headlines in May, even though it was avoided in the text of stories and despite the fact that other news organizations, such as The New York Times, have refrained from using it altogether.
From the memo:
We should continue to avoid the phrase "ground zero mosque" or "mosque at ground zero" on all platforms. (We’ve very rarely used this wording, except in slugs, though we sometimes see other news sources using the term.) The site of the proposed Islamic center and mosque is not at ground zero, but two blocks away in a busy commercial area. We should continue to say it’s “near” ground zero, or two blocks away.
Joe Scarborough gets a loving Lisa DePaulo profile in GQ, in which we learn that Joe has a serious man crush on Paul McCartney and Mika Brzezinski drinks straight vodka at noon — which, to be fair, is basically evening in morning show time. Also: The sexual tension between them is real. (When one fan squeals, “You should be husband and wife,” Mika deadpans, “We are.”)
DePaulo also looks into Scarborough’s political future:
Everybody wants to know: Will Scarborough run for office again? (He gives excellent nondenial denials.) There are even those who'd like to see him run for president in 2012. "We are in uncharted political waters," says Republican strategist Mark McKinnon, "and Joe Scarborough could be the X factor. He's a genuine conservative but not a knee-jerk. A jerk sometimes, yes, but a lovable one. Yet he'll surprise by taking centrist stands on some issues that don't square up with the base. He's where most of America is. The challenge is that the system today is rigged for the fringes. But Joe is a different kind of cat, and the country is looking for something different, something real and authentic. Like a redneck from Florida with great communications skills that can sell in Manhattan — or Iowa or New Hampshire. And he plays guitar."
The headaches created by companies exercising their new political donation freedoms under the Citizens United decision continue to ripple outward.
MoveOn.org just put out a statement slamming MSNBC for declining to run its ad calling for a boycott of Target after the company gave money to a candidate who wants to ban gay marriage.
“According to MSNBC and GE, it is all right for corporations, like Target, to attack candidates and buy elections, but it is not OK for citizen organizations, like MoveOn, to fight back. This is the height of hypocrisy,” said Justin Ruben, the executive director of MoveOn.org. “Target Corp. decided to use the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision to try to buy the Minnesota governor's election, and now GE and MSNBC are protecting them from deserved consumer backlash. It’s good to know that cronyism is alive and well in the corporate takeover of America.”
We’ve put in a call to MSNBC and will update when we hear back. According to the release, MSNBC rejected the ad because it did not comply with NBC’s "Controversial Issue Advertising Policy," as a direct attack on an individual business.
The backlash against Target for its $100,000 donation to help pay for ads supporting Minnesota GOP gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer, who wants to ban gay marriage, made the front page of The Washington Post today and is being held up as a test case for what corporations risk in entering politics in the post-Citizens United world.
The article contains an important caveat about why this is such a big deal in Minnesota, where Target gave to the pro-business group MN Forward, which in turn gave to Emmer.
Campaign-finance experts noted that Target's contribution came to light only because Minnesota law requires political committees, such as MN Forward, to disclose the money they receive. Many states do not have similar requirements.
Michael Wolff looks into News Corp.’s $1 million donation to the GOP and supports Ben Smith’s original theory that the departure from the company’s previous political donation behavior can be traced back to the departure of Peter Chernin, whom Wolff called “the News Corp. house liberal” in his book on Rupert Murdoch.
But the central advocate for giving the dough has been none other than Fox Chief Roger Ailes. In the past, Ailes has been stymied or neutralized in his quest to have the company put its corporate money where its mouth is, because the No. 2 in the company until last summer, Peter Chernin, was a Democrat.
With Chernin gone, and with Fox News outperforming most other parts of the company, Ailes is the central voice. What’s more, Chernin’s sidekick, corporate PR-guy Gary Ginsberg, who could be counted on to use the threat of bad press to keep Murdoch from giving in to Ailes’ none-too-politic schemes and demands, is also gone — purged, in part, by Ailes.
What’s a bit strange about this theory, though, is that Ailes is conspicuously absent from the list of News Corp. executives who gave to News Corp.’s PAC, News America Holdings. (Murdoch and his wife gave, as did most of the company’s other bigwigs, including Chernin before he left.) Why, if Ailes was more of a fan of political giving than Murdoch, would he not participate in the company culture of political donations?
Perhaps it comes down to the way the donation took place. Because the Republican Governors Association is a 527 group, its donation could come straight from the company without having to be routed through a PAC.
Wolff also argues that the business motive here is not lobbying against onerous regulation, as Jack Shafer argued last night, but rather a quid pro quo agreement for more political advertising on Fox.
NBC got the exclusive live broadcast of U.S. combat troops leaving Iraq yesterday because they asked weeks ago, provoking a debate within the military on the role the press should play in the event, Brian Stelter reports.
Stelter also questioned why Brian Williams said the report by NBC’s Richard Engel constituted an “official Pentagon announcement” when framing the story.
Asked how the NBC broadcast constituted “an official Pentagon announcement,” Steve Capus, the president of NBC News, said the broadcast was such a declaration because “the announcement that the last Stryker brigade was leaving Iraq had not been made” by the military.
David Verdi, an NBC News vice president, added, “The military had said, ‘You are the ones who are going to broadcast it first.’”
Coverage of the Blago verdict converged on three points: It was supposed to be a “slam dunk” for U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald; it wasn’t so now Fitzy’s got “egg on his face” (or is it a black eye?); and Rod Blagojevich will now go off into the sunset with the television cameras he always loved.
White House pool reporting is a high-pressure job, and sometimes people make mistakes. A funny one happened last night, Patrick Gavin reports.
The New York Times' Helene Cooper had her goof Wednesday night when she misidentified Sen. Bill Nelson in a report from President Obama's Miami fundraiser, calling him Sen. Ben Nelson. She also said that POTUS was the one with the wrong name, not her.
She quickly corrected the goof in an email featuring the subject, "Ack! Pool correx."
"Turns out potus was right and pool was wrong," wrote Cooper. "Its bill nelson not ben. Blame the mojitos. Please disregard all refs to ben."
A little drinking on the job? An earlier pool report from Cooper on Wednesday evening declared, "your pool is awaiting their mojitos at the Fountainebleu."
The first test of how Fox will handle gubernatorial candidates on the air after its parent company made news with its $1 million gift to the Republican Governors Association will come tonight, when Ohio GOP gubernatorial hopeful John Kasich goes on “The O’Reilly Factor.”
The RGA has spent big bucks on television ads benefiting Kasich in his race against Democratic incumbent Ted Strickland. Kasich has formerly hosted his own Fox show and even guest hosted for O’Reilly on occasion.
Democratic Governors Association Executive Director Nathan Daschle wrote a letter to Fox News Channel President Roger Ailes asking that the channel run disclaimers about its donation to the RGA in its coverage of governors. Fox News spokesman Brian Lewis dismissed the letter as a “stunt.”
Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria, Sidney Harman’s first choice for a successor to departing Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, is leaving the magazine for its rival, Time.
David Carr got the scoop of where Zakaria would land after The Business Insider’s Joe Pompeo broke, and The Upshot’s Michael Calderone confirmed, the news of Zakaria’s departure.
The move comes as a particularly strong blow to the struggling Newsweek — and not just because Zakaria, with his CNN show, was one of the magazine’s biggest names.
Sources close to the situation tell POLITICO that Zakaria was Harman’s first choice to replace Meacham as the magazine’s editor-in-chief. The men had several face-to-face meetings, but when Zakaria declined, there was a question of whether he would stay at the magazine in any capacity. A last-minute effort to salvage his relationship with the magazine fell through, the sources said.
Newsweek staffers had long feared that Zakaria would defect to Time since the magazine is owned by Time Warner, the parent of CNN, where he is the host of “Fareed Zakaria GPS.”
Zakaria hinted to Carr that the lack of conflict was indeed a factor in his decision.
“All of my work will now appear at one company, and instead of a kind of awkwardness, there is a very real synergy,” he said over a lunch at — where else — the Time Warner Center in Manhattan. “There is a level of sophistication in this building about content, about the ways to promote it, that’s exciting.”
On the rumors that he would be the next Newsweek editor, he said: “I want very much to be in the business of creating content, of doing stories all over the world, rather than figuring out what the business model is for Newsweek on the iPad, although that’s very important work as well.”
It may not seem possible that Washington could handle yet another Sunday show, but here it is: “Ideas in Action With Jim Glassman,” which launched on various PBS stations in February, will be coming to two public television stations in the District starting Sept. 5.
Glassman is a conservative journalist with a résumé touching on just about every Washington media property: former publisher of The New Republic, former president of Atlantic Media, former co-owner of Roll Call and former columnist for The Washington Post. He’s also hosted shows on PBS, CNN and POLITICO’s sister station, WJLA.
During the George W. Bush administration, he served as the chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors and the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, and last year, he was named the founding executive director of the George W. Bush Institute.
That institute, part of the Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, is co-producing the show with Grace Creek Media.
The show will air at 9:30 a.m. on Howard University Television (WHUT Channel 32) and at 8:30 a.m. on Maryland Public Television (MPT).
Ben Smith reports that Democratic Governors Association Executive Director Nathan Daschle is calling out Fox News President Roger Ailes in a letter copied to Fox’s on-air talent roster.
In the interest of some fairness and balance, I request that you add a formal disclaimer to your news coverage any time any of your programs cover governors or gubernatorial races between now and Election Day. I suggest that the disclaimer say: “News Corp., parent company of Fox News, provided $1 million to defeat Democratic governors in November.” If you do not add a disclaimer, I request that you and your staff members on the “fair and balanced” side of the network demand that the contribution be returned.
UPDATE: Fox News spokesman Brian Lewis gave Howard Kurtz his response to the letter, saying: "Nathan's stunt has run its course. His 15 minutes are up. Time to leave the stage."
Kathleen Parker weighs in in favor of building the mosque and community center near ground zero, staying true to her reputation as a conservative who will say things likely to annoy other conservatives (a reputation that makes some on the right doubt her status as a conservative at all).
The crux of Parker's argument is that resistance to the project comes from emotion, not reason, and that 'mosque opponents may lose by winning":
The idea that one should never have one's feelings hurt — and the violent means to which some will resort in the protection of their own self-regard — has done harm rivaling evil. It isn't a stretch to say that the greatest threat to free speech is, in fact, "sensitivity."
This is why plans for the mosque near Ground Zero should be allowed to proceed, if that's what these Muslims want. We teach tolerance by being tolerant. We can't insist that our freedom of speech allows us to draw cartoons or produce plays that Muslims find offensive and then demand that they be more sensitive to our feelings.
Timothy P. Carney, formerly lobbying editor for The Washington Examiner, has been promoted to senior political columnist, joining Byron York and Michael Barone on the paper’s politics page. His columns will appear on Monday and Thursday.
In the paper’s announcement, Editor Stephen G. Smith describes Carney as a “protégé of Robert Novak,” who formerly edited the Evans-Novak Political Report.
Just 32, he’s already written two books: "Obamanomics" (Regnery Press) and "The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money" (Wiley).
Ben Smith reports that WorldNet Daily has dropped Ann Coulter from its Taking America Back National Conference because she plans to speak at a gay conservative group’s event.
"Ultimately, as a matter of principle, it would not make sense for us to have Ann speak to a conference about 'taking America back' when she clearly does not recognize that the ideals to be espoused there simply do not include the radical and very 'unconservative' agenda represented by GOProud," said WorldNet's Joseph Farah. "The drift of the conservative movement to a brand of materialistic libertarianism is one of the main reasons we planned this conference from the beginning."
Coulter called Farah’s concerns “silly” and will keep her WorldNet Daily column.
Newsmax, the right-leaning magazine most famous, recently, for its owner's failed bid to buy Newsweek, is hiring six reporters in Washington and as many as 20 in New York as part of a major expansion.
Keith Kelly reports on owner Christopher Ruddy's plans:
Newsmax, which has a fast-growing monthly magazine and a booming Web site aimed at the Republican-leaning heartland audience, has a $2 million war chest that it intends to pump into expansion of its editorial staff, primarily with additions to its New York and Washington DC offices.
Ruddy says he wants to expand the New York office from four editorial employees to 24 to 25 over the next 18 months and to add about a half dozen in Washington DC.
He said revenues last year were in the $34 million range and he expects them to hit $50 mil lion this year, all by aiming at an audience of Republican-leaning consumers in the 50-plus age bracket. As part of his expansion, the company just hired Matt Belvedere, who had been running the video group for US News & World Report, to be in charge of its video news operation out of Washington DC.
Spencer Ackerman, the national security reporter for Wired’s Danger Room who earned a curious kind of fame this summer when Sarah Palin quoted from his leaked Journolist e-mails on her Facebook page, has interviewed Gen. David Petraeus in his latest post for the magazine’s blog. He’s been reporting from Afghanistan for a week.
Petraeus has been on a press tour lately, giving interviews to the likes of New York Times veteran war correspondent Dexter Filkins, Washington Post Associate Editor Rajiv Chandrasekaran and, later this week, "CBS Evening News" anchor Katie Couric.
But his giving an interview to Ackerman, a young reporter coming out of his own controversy, is notable.
Last month, Andrew Breitbart predicted that Ackerman, like David Weigel before him, would lose his job over The Daily Caller’s publishing his leaked e-mails suggesting the left should respond to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy by picking members of the right and calling them racists. But Wired stood by Ackerman, saying it hired him from the Washington Independent “for his well-informed national security reporting.”
EXCLUSIVE — Katie Couric, anchor and managing editor of the “CBS Evening News,” broadcasts from Afghanistan on Thursday and Friday: In addition to her sit-down and battlefield tour with General Petraeus, a special report — “Afghanistan: The Road Ahead” — will take an in-depth look at obstacles he faces in his new role. Terry McCarthy, who spent time embedded with a U.S. Marines team of bomb disposal experts in southern Afghanistan, has raw footage of the unit on the job in the former Taliban stronghold of Safar Bazaar — including the day of an explosion. Three men, with whom McCarthy and his team spent time, were seriously injured and one later died. Wearing helmet cameras, these specialists take CBS News inside the world of this dangerous occupation. A captain says that after friends are wounded, “We can’t just take some time off and grieve. We have got to press forward until it is our turn to go home and when we reach that point we will deal with this.” www.cbsnews.com/theroadahead
