TV News LIES

CNN's new chief Jeff Zucker turned the Carnival Triumph story into a reality TV show. It's a risky strategy for the network.

One crippled cruise ship, 3,000 American passengers, a golden opportunity for a troubled network. Jeff Zucker moved swiftly and decisively to put his distinctive editorial mark on CNN last week, giving the most telling insight yet into the way he sees the channel regaining its relevance.

The news that Sarah Palin will no longer be a paid contributor to Fox News puts an exclamation point on the end of an era, or at least a chapter, in U.S. political history. She could land somewhere else, and she still has her Facebook friends, but it’s hard to imagine she’ll find a more visible or influential platform than Fox.

The former Alaska governor and 2008 vice presidential nominee has been fading from the scene for some time, as she inadvertently highlighted when she complained on Facebook during the Republican convention in August that the network had canceled her scheduled interviews that night. Her brother, Chuck Heath Jr., told Alan Colmes last week on Fox Radio that his sister is “kind of laying low right now,” though he wouldn’t or couldn’t say when asked why.

Current TV, the small cable news channel that was co-founded by former vice president Al Gore, has been sold to Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based media company.

The acquisition gives Al Jazeera, which is funded by the Qatar government, the opportunity to establish a footprint in the United States, where it already has an English-language version of its Qatar service -- called Al Jazeera English -- but only limited reach.

Almost 5,000 Westchester residents have unrestricted permits allowing them to carry weapons at all times. Over 2,300 residents are permitted to carry guns for work. At least 6,900 residents have shooting permits and more than 11, 200 have target-shooting permits.

Putnam County responded to the Journal’s inquiry by noting it would take time to recover records, but estimated at least 11,000 permits within its borders. Gun proponents note that such access to gun owners’ information presents a danger.

Did the Washington Post and others underplay the story through fear of the News Corp chairman, or simply tin-eared judgment?

So now we have it: what appears to be hard, irrefutable evidence of Rupert Murdoch's ultimate and most audacious attempt – thwarted, thankfully, by circumstance – to hijack America's democratic institutions on a scale equal to his success in kidnapping and corrupting the essential democratic institutions of Great Britain through money, influence and wholesale abuse of the privileges of a free press.

Post-mortems of contemporary election coverage typically include regrets about horserace journalism, he-said-she-said stenography, and the lack of enlightening stories about the issues.

But according to longtime political observers Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, campaign coverage in 2012 was a particularly calamitous failure, almost entirely missing the single biggest story of the race: Namely, the radical right-wing, off-the-rails lurch of the Republican Party, both in terms of its agenda and its relationship to the truth.