Connie Chung and Maury Povich's short-lived MSNBC weekend bickering gets the send-off it deserves: Connie singing off key the piano (and nearly breaking her sternum during a dismount). Its programming like this that confuses us even more on how former MSNBC president Rick Kaplan was let go.
The rumor mill churned, and the axe dropped: Rick Kaplan is out as head of MSNBC after two years on the job. He calls it a "resignation," we call it "the most drawn out ousting since Dan Rather." Kaplan announced his depature in a staff memo, where he was certain to point out his accomplishments:
Together, we've increased MSNBC's viewership 25% in primetime and 19% in dayside. Over just the last year, we've had great success across the board, with Hardball and Countdown coming into their own. All of our primetime programs have improved tremendously in their production and content. Together we had a great election year in '04 and you're poised to improve on that excellence this fall.
Inexplicably left out of the farewell: The unfortunate hiring of Tucker Carlson, Rita Cosby's ratings disappointment, and what medication Chris Matthews is fed to keep his head from imploding.
The full memo, after the jump.
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While we certainly can't vouch that this is the Julio who runs his hands through Anderson Cooper's greys, we're gonna to go with it just to see if we can get lucky going with one of these "rumored to be" Internet scuttlebutts. So meet Julio Cesar Recio, the soon-to-be-25-year-old boyfriend of our own McDreamy. Julio supposedly spends his daylight hours managing the wine importer Peerless. Oh, the prospects of getting Coop drunk enough to strip off that slate grey Zegna suit and give us a shoutout in his new book.
Julio Cesar Recio is da man!!! [eff Anderson Cooper, his lover is hotter]
Today, May 16, isn't just the anniversary of the first Academy Awards ceremony (in 1929, they were presented at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, back when L.A. faggotry was kept on the downlow). It's also the birthday of a very special Jossip friend: MSNBC's Tucker Carlson. He looks younger than his 37 years now that he's lost the bowtie — and, as he recently demonstrated on The Situation, he's still got the moves.
What else does Tucker have? A very special gift for our own Intern Wendy, whose diligent evening cable news watching for our regular "Cable Quotables" feature earned her some special (creepy?) recognition from the Tuck Man himself. See what Tucker snail mailed over, after the jump.
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TVNewser has the latest from Seacaucus, where MSNBC chieftan Rick Kaplan has some exciting new changes to spice up ratings:
I'm happy to share with you some news about a primetime schedule adjustment we're going to make beginning next Monday. Rita and Joe are going to switch timeslots. Joe will move an hour earlier to 9pm and Rita will take his place at 10pm. Both Rita and Joe have great programs built around their unique personalities and this change will support their continued growth. We've had a lot of ratings growth this year with Chris and Keith and I'm confident that this change will improve our audience flow and allow us to extend that momentum to the second half of primetime. Tucker will continue to round out our primetime lineup at 11pm.
That is: Shuffling papers at least gives the impression Kaplan is doing something about slagging ratings. And putting Rita up against Greta Van Susteren and CNN Headline News impresario Nancy Grace? Smart move. Oh, and Tucker Carlson is still resident bastard child. Happy cable primetime!
Memo: Joe At 9, Rita At 10 [TVNewser]
Ever since Tucker Carlson abandoned his bowtie – and will someone please tell us how long that's been going on – cable news just hasn't felt the same to us. And then Intern Wendy reminds us that while the costumes and talking heads might change, the dialogue and subject matter yield the inexplicable duality of being both mundane and radical.
• "You know when I don't like leaking? When I'm trying to sleep at night. Anyway, you have to go to the bathroom, there's a leaking sound that drives you crazy. " — Potty talk from Chris Matthews, Hardball, April 7
• "Plus, a look at how Jesus is sweeping the entertainment industry." — Beating out Buddha once again, A.J. Hammer, Showbiz Tonight, April 7
• "Not every man goes out and orders hookers when he`s frisky." — Stating why it really is hard out there for a pimp, Nancy Grace, Nancy Grace, April 7
• "Little people dressed up like KISS and porn stars hunting Bin Laden? I love this show." — Musing on how to beat Rita Cosby in the ratings, Tucker Carlson, The Situation, April 11
• "Yes, and I have met Jared Paul Stern and his wife, whom he calls Snoodles." — Breaking a scoop on the Page Six scandal, Dominick Dunne, Larry King Live, April 12
• "Who's better armed, the secret service or Nugent?" — Interviewing Ted Nugent, Michael Smerconish, Scarborough Country, April 12
• "I'm sorry, this is—sometimes you just feel like dropping a 747 worth of Jugs over the Islamic world, you know what I mean?" — Giving his take on the riots against Playboy magazine in Indonesia, Tucker Carlson, The Situation, April 12
• "Females, you see a girl in a short skirt and high heels don't you have some lust?" — Chatting with a potential candidate for the priesthood, Larry King, Larry King Live, April 13
• "80, his age, her IQ." — Sharing what Hugh Hefner and Paris Hilton have in common, Keith Olbermann, Countdown, April 13
Every weeknight, cable news gives us so much to choose from: O'Reilly, Cosby, King, Carlson, Matthews, Van Susteren. But so many options isn't just a time suck — it's also perfect fodder for a listicle of medocrity.
So we sicced Intern Wendy on the primetime arena of talking heads to score some entertaining quotables that remind us: When in doubt, choose QVC.
• "Doctor, have you taken a look at these women they he would marry? They all — I think there were four of them. They all look like sisters, OK? Freaky!" — Managing to find kinkiness among the corpses, Nancy Grace, Nancy Grace, Feb. 27
• "I'm collecting donations. It's beer. It's a beer fund." — A true victim of Hurricane Katrina, giving Anderson Cooper another reason to cry. Anderson Cooper 360, Feb. 27
• "Did you know that the same technology in that search for Natalee Holloway is now keeping our ports safe?" — Rita Cosby, explaining why our ports are screwed, Live and Direct, Feb. 27
• "I'm saying once you accept that marriage is no longer just between one man and one woman. Why does it have to be limited to two men or two women?" — Tucker Carlson getting his freak on, Scarborough Country, Feb. 28
• "You know, she cleans up real nice when $450 million on the line." — Joe Scarborough, not accepting that Anna Nicole Smith still wouldn't date him, Scarborough Country, Feb. 28
• "… yes, well, and you said it's attractive to women, you said?" — Why read the mystery when you can read the orgy part? Rita Cosby, talking about Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code, Live and Direct, Feb. 28
• "We Christians must help people in need, but do we have to enable them?" — Proving he still doesn't get that "Love Thy Neighbor" stuff, Bill O'Reilly, The O'Reilly Factor, March 1
• "372 million pornographic Web pages; 72 million people visit porn sites each year." — Showing she's the go to girl for porn stats, Rita Cosby, Live and Direct, March 1
Here at Jossip, we predict the future. As in, sometime in the near future, Rick Kaplan is gonna get the boot at MSNBC — something we've been rumoring about for months. But he's not the only one on the chopping block. Everyone at MSNBC – save the Tucker's, Rita's, Chris's, and Joe's – might be seeing more pink than their Secaucus makeup room can offer.
TMZ has learned that active discussions are underway at MSNBC to kill all live, daytime programming and replace it with taped shows.
High-level sources connected with the cable network also tell TMZ that MSNBC President Rick Kaplan will be booted from the network when his contract is up — within a year.
MSNBC's daytime, live news lineup has been anemic, compared to FOX News Channel and CNN. Since September, MSNBC has attracted an average of 267,000 viewers between 9AM. and 6PM, compared with 626,000 viewers tuning in to CNN and 1,125,000 viewers watching FNC.
Any final decision regarding programming will not affect nighttime shows, specifically 'The Abrams Report,' 'Hardball with Chris Matthews,' 'Countdown with Keith Olbermann,' 'Rita Cosby: Live and Direct,' 'Scarborough Country' and 'The Situation with Tucker Carlson.'
All live daytime programming shelved for .. Imus reruns? Bob Wright sure knows how to pick 'em.
UPDATE: This just in to Jossip from a a Rick Kaplan mouthpiece:
This is ridiculous and is wrong on every level. MSNBC, which under Rick Kaplan has seen a real uptick in ratings of late, and is by definition a news channel, is not going to abandon live news.
Abandoning Tucker Carlson, on the other hand, remains a very real possibility. We assume.
We probably wouldn't have noticed MSNBC's sudden acknowledgement that nobody trusts the media if we didn't see these promo spots back-to-back, but alas, we did.
From Tucker Carlson's promo spot:
I promise never to hold back my opinion, always to show stability (no matter how I really feel), and to make sure on my show you're not only thoroughly informed but completely entertained.
And then, in Keith Olbermann's spot:
I promose to make sense of every news day. Give me an hour and I'll give you a grip on what's really going on.
Are MSNBC's anchors (read: top brass Rick Kaplan) developing a passive-agressive guilt-trust complex with all these (empty) promises? Perhaps. Either way, we doubt we've seen the last of these spots, if only because we've yet to see Rita Cosby face the camera one more time and promise to get the big interviews.
If we marked our calendar correctly, today right now is the very last episode of Connected Coast to Coast, the Ron Reagan-Monica Crowley mashup that's delivered plenty of inter-office laughter directed Rick Kaplan's way. We offer a hearty goodbye to our friends at Connected and wish them well in cable news heaven. Or at the new NBC News Channel, whichever.
Richard Johnson & Co. are expanding on a Los Angeles Times item yesterday that hinted CBS News is ready to announce a deal with Katie Couric. Sure, the media crits have been expounding on the idea for weeks and months, but Page Six claims the announcement could come "any day now." And when the Sixers spit it, you know it's gospel.
But the media movement doesn't stop there. ABC, not content to be completely forgotten about, is prepared to announce Charlie Gibson will take over Peter Jennings' old job, leaving Liz Vargas to swing in the 20/20 wind.
And most interesting to us, former Good Morning America and Primetime Live exec producer Shelley Ross will be responsible for ousting Rick Kaplan. She'll soon be sitting in his Secaucus office — and within weeks shouldering the blame for dismal Nielsens.
But back to Katie for a minute. If she does wave goodbye to her $13 million-a-year gig at NBC for a better paying anchor chair assignment and a flip-flopped sleeping schedule, it'll mean one thing in particular: CBS head Les Moonves didn't take Jon Friedman's advice to groom his own star. And that just makes us wish we had a heart to break.
Katie to CBS? [Page Six]
NBC's Couric May Jump to Rival CBS [LAT]
Related: Jon Friedman should keep his letters to himself
• Dick Cheney is the original source of the Valerie Plame leak, despite what the veep's chief of staff Lewis Libby told a federal grand jury. Scooter says he got the name from journalists, while some legalese leakers say it was Cheney who informed his wingman. (And then the game of telephone stopped when Sally's mom made the girls turn the lights off.) [E&P]
• We heard over the weekend that Wenner Media was dropping its book division entirely, but now it turns out it's just department chief Bob Wallace who, along with his assistant, is out the door (who, it's no surprise to share, we hear has "long been unhappy" with the gig). The publishing unit will stay on, but only because its ties to Disney's Hyperion Books allow Jann Wenner to maintain control of a media "empire." And just when Wallace actually got a staff! [WWD]
• Don't get the wrong idea: When Viacom splits itself into two major units, chairman Sumner Redstone doesn't plan on exiting, nor (he says) did he ever give that impression. Instead, he'll help fuel ego battles between Tom Freston and Les Moonves. [NYDN]
• Three hours of American Morning just isn't enough, so CNN is cutting Daybreak from the 9-10am slot for a fourth hour of O'Brien Squared chatter. [TVNewser]
• Meredith's purchase of five magazines from Gruner + Jahr might actually have been a wise decision: first quarter profits are up 11 percent. Morale, meanwhile, hovers at Conde Nast levels. [Des Moines Register]
• As expected, David Lee Roth is taking over Howard Stern's West Coast market on Infinity, while Adam Corolla mans the East Coast gig. Stern, fresh off learning his studio would be outfitted with waterproof walls, is already disinterested. [SmartMoney]
• Diane Sawyer is not taking over Peter Jennings' World News Tonight gig, lest you think a major media company would put a woman in such a commanding position. For the record: We said "woman," not Elizabeth Vargas. [Houston Chronicle]
• Does anyone want the top spot at Men's Journal? Zinczenko? Foxman? Essex? Bueller? [WWD]
• Don't let Fairchild's "She's so Jane" ads fool you: Brandon Holley is no Jane Pratt, and her mass market push for Jane isn't going over well with editors. They're jumping ship like Chris Mitchell.
• Dan Rather is gung ho about reopening President Bush's National Guard story, but CBS News isn't thrilled with the idea for, ahem, obvious reasons.
• The hurricane coverage continues to bolster ratings for the cable news networks, with Fox News remaining in the lead with an average 1.2 million daily viewers. 'Cause you knew Roger Ailes was going to milk death and destruction for every last viewer.
• Anderson Cooper didn't have any luck avoiding the Gulf Coast's harsh weather and he can't avoid trouble on the housing market either. His West 38th Street loft, originally listed at $2.2 million, has dropped to $1.795m in its second price cut.
• Even though the New York Times didn't exactly apologize to Geraldo Rivera for implying he staged a Hurricane Katrina rescue, the Fox News journo doesn't plan on suing.
It was so nice of VP Dick Cheney to come back from his fly fishing holiday in Wyoming to do a presser in Mississippi. But the locals, uh, weren't so happy to see him.
This just went down during a live interview.
Random Guy: Go fuck yourself Mr. Cheney. Go fuck yourself.
Reporter: Are you getting a lot of that, Mr. Vice President?
Cheney: It's the first time I've heard it.
And certainly not the last.
UPDATE: ThinkPress has the video.
MSNBC's Randy Meier describes this missing lass as "a model."
Just in case you thought cable news was bucking the trend of focusing on missing hot white girls.
When CNN president Jonathan Klein said he wanted his cable news network to be less tabloid-y, we had no idea he meant it.
Israeli soldiers in their underwear doesn't count, does it?
One more homoerotic snap after the jump. And for those of you who actually want to know what's going on in these photos, go here.
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All that complaining over Fox News' horrendously biased coverage may be for naught, at least according to a new study referenced as the sole source for Alan Krueger's New York Times item on the subject.
Specifically, the economists ask whether the advent of the Fox News Channel, Rupert Murdoch's cable television network, affected voter behavior. They found that Fox had no detectable effect on which party people voted for, or whether they voted at all.
So if you've been keeping score at home, Diddy's (remember, there's not "P." now) Vote or Die campaign had more affect on voter turn out than Fox News. We're not sure whether that's frightening or calming, but mostly because we're struggling to fight off last night's Ambien.
• It's now just "Diddy" for Sean Combs. Formerly Puff Daddy, Puffy and P. Diddy, the rapper-producer-designer wanted to "simplify things" with his latest name change. Certainly, one less syllable will do the trick.
• Eminem has got Mariah Carey all hot, and not in the way he claims to have had her back in 2002 during their supposed fling. He's playing voicemail messages on-stage during his Anger Management tour that he claims she left for him in 2001, but her camp says it's an impostor on the line.
• Moral is low at Martha Stewart's Bedford estate. Even as she's about to cash in on her comeback, the cooks, gardeners and other staffers are without health insurance or retirement packages.
• NBC is denying they're willing to have Ashlee Simpson return to their set to promo her second album. But with ratings what they are, they should be jumping at any chance for viewer interest to resume. Meanwhile, she's supposedly not targeting Lindsay Lohan in her upcoming single "Boyfriend."
• Just remember, Anderson Cooper shoved first. The CNN 360 anchor is calling out his cable news colleagues for their "downright ridiculous" coverage of Natalee Holloway's disappearance in Aruba and now MSNBC's Dan Abrams is returning the jabs.
In this truly terrible CNN screengrab, we find ourselves on unsure footing. If we can only enlist ourselves in, generously, two wars, which do we choose from: The War on Terror, Culture War, Iraq War or War on Cancer?
But really, CNN's all-day cancer coverage is just a chance for Sanjay Gupta to tantalize us with his sexy medical smarts.
The name of today's media hero is Eugene Robinson, and as soon as we can figure out how to untie this damn Kaballah string we're going to lay down our prayer mat and start reciting our daily affirmations in his favor.
You see, Eugene is tackling the issue no other media want to address: the obsession with the missing white-girl obsession.
Now that the bat is out of the cave (or whatever that expression wants to be) that media fawn over missing white girls – and that it's only through the power of blogs that any missing person with skin pigment is getting attention – cable news and newspapers are chronicling just how outlandish their coverage has been.
On the other hand, fellow passengers on the Damsels bandwagon — CNN, MSNBC, and, to a lesser extent, the broadcast networks and the major newspapers — are so eager to display their high-minded earnestness that they've been running stories about "the phenomenon" of missing-white-woman coverage. They act as if said coverage were a natural disaster, like an earthquake or a tornado, rather than a series of deliberate decisions made by executive producers and editors in chief.
Just let us know when this meta-meta coverage gets to be too much for you. At that point, we'll offer up an analysis of the meta-meta coverage that's sure to rock media trends.
