TV News LIES

The News Corporation said on Monday that it had reached an agreement in principle to buy the Shine Group, the production company run by Rupert Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth.

The agreement assigns Shine, which produces hit TV shows like “The Biggest Loser” and “MasterChef,” an enterprise value of about $673.5 million. Analysts and industry observers have seen the widely anticipated deal as the latest effort by Mr. Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive, to bring three of his children back into the News Corporation empire.

Out here, there's a sisterhood of female journalists. Even if you'd never be best friends at home, there's a mutual respect among women who live with danger and discomfort to do their jobs. The attack on Lara Logan, a veteran of the world's war zones, was not just chilling but deeply, deeply sad.

We all know we're not immune from the violence that we cover. If we didn't know it at the beginning, the friends we've lost to bombs and bullets are constant reminders. Anyone who's been out here a few years has witnessed so much tragedy, it makes you wonder how happiness continues to survive.

Social networking has changed the balance of political power, he said, “but everything we know about technology tells us that the current forms of social network communication, despite their enormous current value for politics, are also intensely dangerous to use. They are too centralized; they are too vulnerable to state retaliation and control.”

In January, investors were said to have put a value of about $50 billion on Facebook, the social network founded by Mark Zuckerberg. If revolutions for freedom rest on the shoulders of Facebook, Mr. Moglen said, the revolutionaries will have to count on individuals who have huge stakes in keeping the powerful happy.

Asked what most viewers and observers of Fox News would be surprised to learn about the controversial cable channel, a former insider from the world of Rupert Murdoch was quick with a response: “I don’t think people would believe it’s as concocted as it is; that stuff is just made up.”

Indeed, a former Fox News employee who recently agreed to talk with Media Matters confirmed what critics have been saying for years about Murdoch’s cable channel. Namely, that Fox News is run as a purely partisan operation, virtually every news story is actively spun by the staff, its primary goal is to prop up Republicans and knock down Democrats, and that staffers at Fox News routinely operate without the slightest regard for fairness or fact checking.

Former MSNBC television personality Keith Olbermann, who departed the cable news network in January, is expected to announce on Tuesday that he's joining the public affairs channel Current TV, The New York Times reports.

Because Olbermann's exit from MSNBC includes a clause that prohibits him from joining another TV outlet for an undetermined amount of time, it's not clear when he'd be starting at Current TV. But it appears that the move has been in the works for some time. According to the Times, the Internet domain name TheOlbermannShow.com was registered two days before his on-air announcement that he was leaving MSNBC.

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"Isn't that what they do in socialist countries?" Steve Doocy's question sounded like a spontaneous reaction to what he apparently saw as the threat Barack Obama would pose to freedom of the press. It wasn't. The Fox News host's inflammatory question had, in fact, been scripted the night before in an email sent by a Fox producer.

The incident, which occurred on the October 27, 2008, edition of Fox & Friends, came during what appears to have been a network-wide campaign to tie Obama to socialism in the month leading up to the presidential election. Internal Fox documents obtained by Media Matters and a review of the network's pre-election coverage show that Fox hosts, producers, and other journalists were involved in the effort.