The Comcast-owned MSNBC will be the subject of a protest next week at the cable giant’s annual shareholders meeting in Philadelphia.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, a Tea Party group invited 60,000 activists to show up at the meeting to accuse the network of masquerading left-leaning propaganda as news.
Wait, so does this mean they aren’t aware of the same criticism lobbed against Fox News… except from the other side?
Total minutes devoted to yesterday’s Prop 8 coverage on cable news.
Simple, effective, shareable.
And the world rights itself. The guy who deserves a weekend show gets a weekend show, and Chris Hayes gets a front-and-center spot.
A Pennsylvania electronic voting machine has been taken out of service after being captured on video changing a vote for President Obama into one for Mitt Romney, NBC News has confirmed.
http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/11/06/machine-turns-vote-for-obama-into-one-for-romney/
(Photo by J.D. Pooley/Getty Images)
This situation was directly affected by a video posted to Reddit — which had initially pinpointed it as fraud. It appears to have been a mis-calibrated machine. Anyone else see stories like this today in their neck of the woods?
— Ernie @ ShortFormBlog
Today in the internet having a direct effect on the election.
![theatlantic:
Foxy Ladies: Why One Network Applies So Much Makeup
Of course, TV news shows have always put a premium on appearance, more so for women than for men. And it’s hardly a revelation that some networks place more pressure on women than do others: C-SPAN has no makeup room at all, just a collection of powder compacts that guests can use if they are so inclined. At MSNBC, Rachel Maddow is known to prefer minimal makeup, while other anchors want more, and the artists oblige with a range of choices, from neutral tones to berry hues. Bloomberg TV tends toward the corporate aesthetic; CNN favors a professional style that makes women and men look crisp, as if they have been ironed. As for Fox, suffice it to say that there is a YouTube montage devoted to leg shots of Fox anchors, who are often outfitted in body-hugging dresses of vibrant red and turquoise, their eyes enhanced by not only liner and shadow but also false lashes. A Fox regular once commented to me that she gets more calls from network management about her hair, clothes, and makeup than about what she says. “I just think of it as a uniform,” she said of her getup.
Read more. [Image: Charles Ommanney/Getty]
A truly surface-level issue with some beneath-the-surface implications.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m99y7vzjkn1qcokc4o1_500.jpg)
Foxy Ladies: Why One Network Applies So Much Makeup
Of course, TV news shows have always put a premium on appearance, more so for women than for men. And it’s hardly a revelation that some networks place more pressure on women than do others: C-SPAN has no makeup room at all, just a collection of powder compacts that guests can use if they are so inclined. At MSNBC, Rachel Maddow is known to prefer minimal makeup, while other anchors want more, and the artists oblige with a range of choices, from neutral tones to berry hues. Bloomberg TV tends toward the corporate aesthetic; CNN favors a professional style that makes women and men look crisp, as if they have been ironed. As for Fox, suffice it to say that there is a YouTube montage devoted to leg shots of Fox anchors, who are often outfitted in body-hugging dresses of vibrant red and turquoise, their eyes enhanced by not only liner and shadow but also false lashes. A Fox regular once commented to me that she gets more calls from network management about her hair, clothes, and makeup than about what she says. “I just think of it as a uniform,” she said of her getup.
Read more. [Image: Charles Ommanney/Getty]
A truly surface-level issue with some beneath-the-surface implications.
A look back at pre-split MSNBC: How did a news brand, meant to be the ultimate TV/online integration, split in two? Sixteen years after the fact, we look back at the circumstances that at first made MSNBC a good idea for Microsoft and NBC News, and the difficulties that eventually led the two companies to go their separate ways. For fans of cool tools, we made this with Jux, which is something of a Tumblr for slideshows. Check it out.
Under the joint venture, NBC News was the exclusive news provider for MSN.com, which now will be able to negotiate partnerships with other news organizations in order to appeal to the widest possible audience.
MSN.com has begun hiring for a new news operation — as yet unnamed — that will launch in the fall, he said.
The company also plans wider alliances beyond a single network.
It’s official: MSNBC.com is now NBCNews.com
Howard Kurtz may not have had the exclusive, but his timing wasn’t far off.
The End of an Era: Although Microsoft abandoned MSNBC’s cable-news network back in 2005, the company has maintained a partnership with NBC in relation to MSNBC.com. Now, The Daily Beast’s Howard Kurtz is reporting that NBC is set to purchase Microsoft’s share of the news site and plans to rebrand it as NBCNews.com. Chief executive Charlie Tillinghast is expected to remain in his position, though he and roughly 300 other employees will likely move off of Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington campus. No word on how this might affect affiliated sites like Newsvine or BreakingNews. source
(Update: TVNewser has taken exception to Kurtz’s claims of having any sort of “exclusive” regarding the future of MSNBC. Kurtz has responded on Twitter, telling followers that “Obviously there’s been reporting that NBC-Microsoft divorce might happen, but the news is it actually *is* happening.”)
I can’t add much to what’s already been (and will be) ...
One of the perks of being an early employee...
Over the last 90 days, the Digg...
#FMMDI (at 30 Rockefeller Plaza)
Thanks. I guess my thoughts are as follows:
1. I think...
Two Months Ago I set out to interview the principal cast...
What do YOU think they’re talking about?
Here it is, everyone: A single-serving Tumblr you can get behind, about those endlessly-mockable chyrons that MSNBC in particular seems to spend too much time making awful. (ht @AntDeRosa; HuffPo Live employees @CharlianneJames and @RickyCam take full credit)
If you go to Yemen where I was, and you see the unexploded cluster bombs, and you have the list and photographic evidence, as I do, of women and children that represented the vast majority of deaths in the first strike that Obama authorized on Yemen, those people were murdered by President Obama, on his orders, because there was believed to be someone from Al Qaeda in that area.Jeremy Scahill, national security reporter for The Nation • Leveling a dire condemnation against President Obama, on the topic of U.S. drone strikes. Scahill was speaking on MSNBC’s “Up With Chris Hayes” (clearly a show accustomed to recent controversy), and as one could expect his remarks have drawn wide criticism. This is an issue Scahill is very close to — he’s reported from Yemen before, and claims one strike he investigated killed some 35 people, 14 of them children. Redstate.com founder Joshua Treviño pushed back, suggesting he was saying something ‘no reasonable person’ would. We think there’s a very worthy conversation to be had about the moral ramifications of this new sort of warfare, we just hope it doesn’t become too intense at expense of the dialogue. source (via • follow)
Conor Friedersdorf: In Defense of Chris Hayes
Very few Americans wake up early on weekend mornings to watch public intellectuals chat. For the tiny number who do, Up With Chris Hayes, a show hosted by Chris Hayes of The Nation, has distinguished itself for its unusual success bringing thoughtful, intellectually honest conversation to cable news. The show’s producers try to cover what they judge to be important, even when more trivial topics would result in higher ratings. During the panel portion of the show, the host and most guests actually grapple with fraught issues rather than shying away from them. Straw men, ad hominem attacks, and cheap point-scoring are exceptions* rather than the rule. Partisan hackery is discouraged. And Hayes tends to highlight rather than elide complicating facts and arguments that cut against his ideological instincts, preferring to interrogate his own views and to treat positions with which he disagrees fairly (something I’m attuned to because my politics are different enough from his that we’re often at odds).
Despite all this, Hayes is suddenly under fire for weekend remarks he made about heroism, war, and politics. Our public discourse is such that anyone can find him or herself viciously denounced by complete strangers based on a single sound-byte from which everyone extrapolates wildly. This controversy is worth highlighting because Hayes’ words and the reaction to them helps explain why so few broadcasters forthrightly discuss complicated, controversial subjects. Hayes subsequently issued an apology, but it’s his critics who’ve behaved badly.
An impassioned defense of Chris Hayes. We’ve read a few in the past day or so.
“On Sunday, in discussing the uses of the word “hero” to describe those members of the armed forces who have given their lives, I don’t think I lived up to the standards of rigor, respect and empathy for those affected by the issues we discuss that I’ve set for myself. I am deeply sorry for that.
As many have rightly pointed out, it’s very easy for me, a TV host, to opine about the people who fight our wars, having never dodged a bullet or guarded a post or walked a mile in their boots. Of course, that is true of the overwhelming majority of our nation’s citizens as a whole. One of the points made during Sunday’s show was just how removed most Americans are from the wars we fight, how small a percentage of our population is asked to shoulder the entire burden and how easy it becomes to never read the names of those who are wounded and fight and die, to not ask questions about the direction of our strategy in Afghanistan, and to assuage our own collective guilt about this disconnect with a pro-forma ritual that we observe briefly before returning to our barbecues.
But in seeking to discuss the civilian-military divide and the social distance between those who fight and those who don’t, I ended up reinforcing it, conforming to a stereotype of a removed pundit whose views are not anchored in the very real and very wrenching experience of this long decade of war. And for that I am truly sorry.”
An update to our earlier post on the matter.
Copyright 2009-2013 Ernie Smith • Ask us stuff! • E-mail us • Follow us on Twitter • Follow us on Facebook
