Whoops, Jackson family: Jesse Junior may have been was Senate Candidate #5, the no-longer-anonymous state representative who sent out feelers to the tune of $1 million to disgraced governor Rod Blagojevich in the hopes of warming the senate seat previously held by Barack Obama.
Kudos to ABC for sniffing out the case and then hounding Jackson Jr. until his hand was forced. Bet dad is two minutes away from cutting Junior's nuts off right about now.
Britney Spears kicked off Phase 2 of her comeback tour by "performing" two songs from her new album Circus on last Tuesday's Good Morning America. (Phase 1 of her comeback was putting the new album in the can and releasing a catchy single, "Womanizer.") Though the ABC morning show attracts fewer viewers than NBC's Today, Spears went with GMA only because, supposedly, NBC wouldn't cave to her "ridiculous" demands — like not interviewing her, allowing her to lip-sync, and promising no close-up shots that might reveal she's a half-second behind her own backing vocal, because that is not kosher for a news program, says Gatecrasher. Or, more probably, NBC wouldn't meet the fee that Spears' camp demanded, what with budget cuts and all, and ABC had the funds ready to be wired. (Not that a news program would admit paying for a performance.) But even after GMA scored its Spears coup, Today had an ace up their sleeve: an interview with Brad Pitt, which actually scored 1.1 million more viewers on Tuesday than Spears' gyrating.
Put a mark in the corner for Jeff Zucker: the NBC chief managed to hang onto both Jay Leno and his replacement, Conan O'Brien, while simultaneously answering the problem of how to cut down on those expensive prime time shows: by moving Leno to the 10PM time slot, where his lazy jokes about Paris Hilton being a slut can better reach his geriatric fans.
Leno was supposed to go over to ABC, which, unlike NBC Universal, isn't making those company wide budget-cuts (quite yet), so that was a lot of smooth talking on Zucker's part to coax him back from a midnight competitor.
Why did Zucker bump up his prize horse? Look to his speech this week at some global media summit, a thing where head television honchos meet and chomp on their cigars and discuss the state of the country. Fresh off the merger of NBC's studio and network operations, Zucker says he expects to see changes a'coming now that, you know, there are no ad dollars left to pay for anything.
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Eliot Spitzer's splooge bank got her 15 minutes extended during her 20/20 interview with Diane Sawyer on Friday. Which was, as we all know by now, competing with Brooke Shield's Lipstick Jungle on NBC, which was originally going to be canceled but then got a last minute reprieve by the network when crazed fans started sending in tubes of lipstick.
So how did the woman who dresses like a professional escort to attract high profile New York men do against Ashley Dupre?
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Ashely Dupre, you are adorable. And not in the way Joe Francis thinks. Last night in your "not-paid-for" interview with ABC's 20/20, you recounted your affair with the ex-governor, and how your hourly fee brought down the Spitzer administration.
As Diane Sawyer tries to keep the curls of her lips down, she asks you to define the difference between prostitution and your former trade, "escorting." And you're just so cute when you finally admit they are the "same, perhaps," but also different.
ABC will not order more episodes for Pushing Daisies, Eli Stone, or Dirty Sexy Money, which is a cutesy way of saying, these shows have been canceled. In other news, we watched all three of these shows religiously, which is evidence of the kind of pull we have (effectively, zero).
Everyone loves a good investimigative journalism, especially when it deals with those highfalutin bank jerks that stole all our money and made the economy go all frowny-face, and then get their golden parachutes and jump out of their solid gold helicopters and land in a secret resort in the Caribbean with all the bailout money. Those guys are the worst.
But sometimes a station gets a little over-eager in their coverage, as was maybe the case when ABC reported on the AIG conference in Phoenix that cost $350,000 and included nice amenities and such.
How did ABC get the story wrong? Well, they didn't realize AIG needed expensive retreats to keep their image up.
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Now that Queen Oprah has announced her show on ABC will end after 2011 (hmm…right before the next election cycle…) what will become of the world's only African-American billionaire? Set up more schools in Africa? Try to get some more magazines off the ground only to have them shuttered? What?
No, Ms. Winfrey doesn't plan to go without a fight, and her leaving ABC is only a closed door that opened a window to allow the most influential woman ever to spend more time on her OWN.
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MSNBC, ABC, and CNN all reported their largest online traffic ever in the minutes leading up to Barack Obama's win for presidency. According to the people in charge of keeping track of the Internet, the 'net saw their greatest surge ever with "average of 8.5 million visitors per minute" on news sites that generally average 3.0 million.
And that's so good! And even more amazingly than everyone simultaneously going on the Internet on a night that's previously been held dominance over by television news networks, is the fact that none of the websites crashed. That is particularly astounding, considering that websites like Twitter have a hard time carrying even their normal load on their server, but somehow MSNBC and other networks were able to make it work.
Just goes to show, some things are better left to the big boys.
Patrick Dempsey appeared on Ellen DeGeneres' talk show yesterday and, yes, the conversation turned to actress Brooke Smith's recent axing from ABC's Grey's Anatomy.
Some suspect ABC gave Smith the boot because her on-screen lesbian relationship was getting a bit too serious. Dempsey gave no credence to those rumors — not because they're not true, but because network executives told him what to say:
Neilsen Ratings for Last Night So ABC Wins the day with 13.1 million, but altogether 78.6 million watched Obama own it. Those are better numbers than any of the debates, and the best ratings sweep since the Super Bowl. And that requires whole armies of contenders battling each other.
Jennifer Lopez deserves your respect. Here you were, thinking that she was just some middling pop star who's made a career out of having a big booty and being a mediocre triple threat, and then she turns it all around by showing her true face as one of the most devious con artists since that guy who dated Anne Hathaway.
How, you may ask, has J-Lo managed to swindle big bucks from networks like NBC and TLC?
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Hope you've cleared your schedules for an Obamarafic night: At 8:00 p.m. Barack will be giving a 30-minute infomercial/speech/nobody knows on CBS, NBC, MSNBC, and Fox. He will also be the guest on The Daily Show tonight, which runs later but should give Jon Stewart's team enough time to scramble together a couple questions regarding this momentous power play.
But what stations were left out of the love-in?
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Sure, television networks know that come November 4th they'll be out of cash and out of ideas, but until then at least one station plans on having a grand old end-of-the-world time:
On election night, ABC News will transform Times Square into an outdoor global viewing event, with thousands of people watching ABC News coverage of real time election results on three iconic screens — ABC's Super Sign, the enormous digital facade of NASDAQ and the 23-story high Reuters sign.
Cramazing! But couldn't ABC gone in on it with MSNBC, and Fox News, so from left to right screens you get, "Obama is winning" to "Obama is ahead" to "Ohio and Florida still too close to call."
After years of ambulance chasing companies like PETA, The National Enquirer, and her bosses at ABC, bypass-tastic Star Jones has finally gone on the warpath with something that can't find back: her own apartment.
The former View co-host is suing her Upper East Side building for $700,000, after her triplex penthouse was found to have mold in it. And a leak.
This isn't Star's first brush with the court's when it's come to her living situation: in 2003 Star was sued by a landscaping company after she failed to pay them for working on her rooftop garden. She had promised a name-drop for the company when Architectural Digest did a profile on her digs, but never followed through.
Btw, this is the same "unlivable" apartment that Digest called "unapologetically glamorous," which you just know is how the diva likes to think of herself.
HSBC bought all the ad pages in this week's issue of New York magazine, remarkably outbuying all those CBS and and ABC attempts to do the same in People and TV Guide, respectively. Hey, people are still talking about the time Target bought all the ads in The New Yorker a couple years ago!
Still, the HSBC (which, it bears mentioning, is not an American bank so you'd probably be safer there then your current 10-year plan of stuffing hundred dollar bills into a coffee cup under a floorboard) bought the most ad pages (24 total, including web splashes), and spent the most money on their campaign.
So at this point, is it even worth mentioning that the ad-monopoly is affecting how magazines do business, and not necessarily for the better?
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Amidst rumors that Elisabeth Hasselbeck might be leaving ABC for more Republican-friendly pastures, the lone dissent on The View cleared up any ideas that she'd be moving to Fox. And she did not enjoy Joy Behar's comparison of herself to another hate-fuckable blond conservative:
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NBC's Meet the Press is sloooowly dipping in ratings since the death of host Tim Russert. The station was beaten out by CBS's Face the Nation last month, barely ahead of ABC's This Week.
The question isn't: Why is MTP falling, since the answer is obvious: Russert was Meet the Press. The question is, why did it take so long?
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ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and the Associated Press are suing Secretary of State Mark Ritchie and Attorney General Lori Swanson for enacting a law to expand the amount of space news orgs have to remain from polling stations. Previously, the law was the crews had to stand 100 feet away from the booths (inside the buildings), but with the new statutes, that 100-foot circle would start outside the buildings, pushing the networks farther away:
"As a polling reporter moves farther and farther away from the polling place, the likelihood of a voter getting into his or her car and driving away, or of melding into a crowd of non-voters, increases.
"Second, as distance increases, it becomes harder to discern those who are voters from those who are not.
"Third, as distance increases, the statistical reliability of the sample itself decreases because it becomes impossible to interview in the scientifically selected pattern (e.g. every fourth voter, every fifth voter, etc.)."
You can see how this be a problem: After polling, most Republicans veer off to the right of a building to go to McDonalds, while most Democrats tend to get in their car and crumple into a tiny ball to cry. It would be really hard to get a random sampling of the pollsters.
Is it unethical to run political ads during newscasts that discuss politics, especially if the newscasts decry the ads, calling them lies? Um, duh. Definitely. That's a ridiculous question. Then again, television advertising revenues have fallen precipitously as of late. And when there's money involved, ridiculous, easily answered questions have a tendency to become complicated gray areas necessitating really involved articles looking into the matter. Yuck:
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