JOSSIP REPORTS — With Keith Olbermann back in New York and supposedly making up with Chris Matthews, and Joe Scarborough insisting everyone at the network is going to have Thanksgiving together, everything should be hunky-dorey at NBC News, yes?
No.
Joe Scarborough is still taking shots at Olbermann on the air (excellent video here). Oh, and then there's this little matter of Chuck Todd, David Gregory, and Brian Williams — and Meet The Press. It's a clusterfuck, and these are the details: CONTINUED »
Walking past the newsstand, we're sure to check in on Men's Vogue each month just to see which masculine metrosexual fella they wrangled into a suit and promised not to make him come off too dandy. (This month, it's Eli Manning.The anti-dandy thing didn't work: "Manning favors conservative Zegna suits for big events — receptions on the White House lawn, ring ceremonies at Tiffany — and prep-school casual at home. On the afternoon he invited me over to his Hoboken apartment, he wore pressed jeans, a crisp tattersall button-down, and brown suede loafers with no socks.")
Which is how we spotted CBS News correspondent and tabloid boldfacer Lara Logan peering back at us from the inside pages. Normally, Logan's empowering tale of returning to the U.S. from a war zone would be an excellent Vogue (proper) story: No more Kevlar, hello pencil skirts! But it's Logan's relationship with a married man, and a CNN star, that make her more appealing to the readers of Men's Vogue, where she is a fantasy: Hot and doesn't mind being around guns.
Except this photo of Logan? Yeah, it seems eerily familiar. CONTINUED »
Poor BriWi; the man's schedule for the last couple weeks has been tres hectic. Full Olympic coverage in Beijing, now Denver to cover the DNC, and maybe NBC will give him five hours to sleep (read: blog) if he's lucky.
CONTINUED »
One television watcher is surprised that, after paying nearly $900 million for domestic broadcast rights for the Olympics, NBC wants to talk about the games endlessly, even on its news program. [WaPo]
Bad information often gets a reporter into trouble. WMDs and Judy Miller, anyone? But for Bob Costas, a bad tip didn't get him into trouble — it got colleague Brian Williams into an embarrassing lie. You see, Costas had heard that Bruce Springsteen had, during a live concert, congratulated World's Best Athlete Michael Phelps (who Amanda Beard totally didn't make out with) for snagging his seventh gold medal and then dedicated "Born in the USA" to him. Costas wanted to ask Phelps what he thought about The Boss' personal dedicated, but his interview ran long, so he passed the tip to Williams, who brought it up in his own interview with Phelps. Except Springsteen never congratulated Phelps during the concert, nor did he dedicate a song to him. CONTINUED »
SRSLY, Brian Williams, we all have a crush on Michael Phelps, you don't need to rub it in our face that you guys are both lovin' it:
All he wanted after yesterday’s race was McDonalds. Before our interview, a producer asked him for his order. He initially wanted a cheeseburger, Big Mac and fries. Then I stepped in (having done the research) and told him that the double cheeseburgers here were good, better than in the States. I told him there was no mustard on them, and that the minced onion was kept to a minimum. I could see in his eyes that he realized he was in the company of a fellow aficionado. He changed his order – so excited at the thought of McDonalds for the first time since arriving here in Beijing — and the interview began.
You are such a dork, Williams. You sound like Barbara Walters whenever she starts in about Gabriel Byrne. But to be fair, Matt Lauer is worser.
Know what you get when you spot isolated instances of various television personalities wearing a tie of a certain color? A Times trend story! Eric Wilson spotted folks like Brian Williams, Keith Olbermann, and Bill O'Reilly all wearing ties of a purplish hue in recent weeks, which is apparently their way of announcing they're staying neutral in this heated political climate, where, duh!, wearing a red tie is an obvious sign you're in McCain's camp and wearing a blue tie is the equivalent of licking Obama's feet.
So certain of this trend, Wilson even hooked semi-respectable people into his charade, getting GQ creative director Jim Moore to declare, "Purple is the new neutral," and Bergdorf Goodman's men's fashion director Tommy Fazio to insist, "There are other ways of not being partisan.”
We've seen pure coincidences manufactured into trends before, but OMG, this is ridiculous. Here's why: CONTINUED »
Now that he's on his way to the White House, terrorist-by-satire Barack Obama stands accused of leaning farther toward the center than his left-wing Democratic primary self did. Some might argue that comes with the territory as any candidate progresses into the general election. Fine.
But there's another marked change going on in the Obama camp, and it has to do with his relationship with the press. We noticed three distinct policies that are becoming status quo inside the Land of Change, and they're all rules the press corps now has the grapple with. CONTINUED »
Former firefighter — in real life and on Saturday Night Live — and NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams just happened to be yearning for a chance to bask in some summer sunshine when a "call come in over the fire scanner" (that, uh, sits on his desk?) about "a basement fire at TGI Friday's at 50th and 7th, a block away from our building." So what'd BriWi do? He grabbed his pick ax, oxygen tank, and water hose and shuffled on down the 30 Rock elevator to save the world! [Daily Nightly]
Though Brian Williams filled in the moderator's chair on Meet The Press today, Mr. Tom Brokaw will take over through the election as we suspected. It might've been easy to think Williams was actually quite apt for the gig: He followed Russert's traditional line of questioning that brought up past statements and offered politicos the chance to contradict themselves or reaffirm their past; Joe Biden was today's example, asked about the vice presidency. (He had said before that under no circumstances would he want to be VP. He said that again today. Then he qualified that statement by saying he doesn't want to be VP because Barack Obama just wouldn't ask him — if if Obama did ask, he'd have no choice but to say yes.)
But that's not what Jeff Zucker and Steve Capus had in mind. The official announcement came this morning, and Williams telling viewers at the end of today's broadcast, with 30 Rock revealing Brokaw will take over MTP beginning next Sunday and last through the November election. CONTINUED »
For this week, at least. No decisions about a permanent replacement have been made. NBC News President Steve Capus says they're making decisions week-by-week. Meanwhile, Russert's Saturday show will be replaced with a mix of documentary programming and live news.
On a NBC News conference call this morning, NBC head Jeff Zucker, NBC News chief Steve Capus, and anchor Brian Williams joined in with a number of others to discuss the future of Meet The Press and the D.C. bureau. A source who was not on the call, but overheard a colleague's speakerphone listening session, says Tom Brokaw's name was bandied about. (It's unclear whether Brokaw was on the call.)
More on the post-Tim Russert future is here.
NBC News is doing the respectable thing and not commenting, publicly, about their plans in naming a successor to Tim Russert, whose death on Friday at the network's Washington studios has left them without a Meet The Press anchor, or a D.C. bureau chief. As a show of respect for Russert's family and his colleagues, 30 Rock is holding off on telling anyone what they plan to do come this Sunday.
While NBC News chief Steve Capus and NBC head Jeff Zucker wisely selected Tom Brokaw to moderate yesterday's MTP Russert tribute, with a line-up of the guests the late anchor would've booked himself, there's nothing firmed up for the weeks ahead, claims NBC.
None of that means media's chattering classes aren't placing over-unders on who's going to fill Russert's slot, at MTP or leading the network's Washington unit. There's a list of usual suspects, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. So who's the most likely to take the very big reins?
Let's take a look. CONTINUED »
So after all the chatter about what Katie Couric's big announcement on this morning's Today show would be, and the revelation that she and NBC's Brian Williams and ABC's Charlie Gibson would be announcing a joint one-hour cancer telethon, here's the big reveal. And yes, Katie's legs are on display.
So was it hard to get the competing networks to work together on this? Of course not!, says Katie: "It was wonderfully easy, really. I think the opportunity to do something for the greater good, to set aside our competitive differences, to raise money and awareness for something that affects all of us … I think everyone said, 'Yeah, let's do it.'"
The only question that needed sorting out, then, was which network's morning show would get to make the big announcement. Guess that decision was made from a ratings standpoint. CONTINUED »
Last night on Late Night, Conan O'Brien asked the Big Daddy of television news, Brian Williams, about the Sue Simmons, um, "incident." Who else can give this whole fiasco in some fiasco?
Simmons, who Williams says is a friend, made a "mistake" while "joking" with co-anchor Chuck Scarborough. Hey, that's what she said.
Williams himself acknowledged using "salty language" sometimes. And then he made an Eliot Spitzer joke!
And then he tried to explain the enigma that is Chris Matthews', a task only worthy a theatre critic.
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