Archive for the 'Newscasters' Category

04
Mar

Miles O’Brien: Any Way the Wind Blows?

By Simon Scowl 6 Comments Digg! Digg this
Categories: Newscasters

Today is the last day of the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change in NYC, made up of over 200 scientists from around the world who believe that — to make a long story short — Al Gore is full of polar bear doodies. Here’s how CNN’s Miles O’Brien capped off his report about the conference on last night’s Anderson Cooper 360°, which was the latest installment in their not-at-all-fearmongering “Planet in Peril” series (courtesy of Newsbusters):

“Even the Flat Earth Society didn’t fold its tent in 1493.”

That’s right: If you dare to be skeptical that WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE FROM GLOBAL WARMING!!!, you’re just like the people who still thought the Earth was flat a whole year after Columbus came to America.

Has O’Brien always been so convinced that WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE FROM GLOBAL WARMING!!!? Possibly not. Here’s what he had to say on CNN 15 years ago (courtesy of News Hounds):

“If the Gulf Stream were to shift again, the British Isles could be engulfed in polar ice and Europe’s climate could become frigid.”

Hot, cold, whatever! I guess I’m not smart enough to understand how Global Warming is going to plunge Europe into another ice age. O’Brien uses the movie The Day After Tomorrow to reconcile the two. I don’t really get that, but then, I’m no scientist. And even if I was, disbelief in Global Warming is heresy! Hey, man, that’s science for you. You gotta have faith.

11
Feb

Keith Olbermann Apologizes on Behalf of David Shuster for Saying Something Keith Olbermann Once Said Without Having to Apologize to Anybody

By Simon Scowl 1 Comment Digg! Digg this
Categories: Newscasters and U.S. Left-wing Politicos

P.S. Why is saying that a male U.S. general is being pimped completely different from saying the female child of an ex-President is being pimped? (Hint: “Fail” isn’t a reason, even if you type it in all caps.)

P.P.S. Guy Branum, writing in Slate, is right on the nose: “The treatment of Chelsea Clinton as a special figure in American politics has to end. If she’s shy, she should return to private life. If she wants to campaign for her mom, she should get our respect, but she must also expect our scrutiny.”

05
Feb

Florida Used to Be a Magical Place for Kids

By Simon Scowl 1 Comment Digg! Digg this
Categories: Bad Boys & Girls and Newscasters

According to USA Today, former TV reporter Al Zimmerman was charged Friday in Tallahassee with eight counts of “using a child in a sexual performance.” Kiddie porn, in other words. Which is bad enough all by itself, but here’s what makes it even worse: Zimmerman was a spokesman for the Florida Department of Children and Families.

Zimmerman, 40, is accused of abusing two teenagers. One of the boys may have ties to the state child-welfare agency, according to the St. Petersburg Times.

“Here is an agency that is really trying hard to regain a very good image. Unfortunately, this particular activity hurts the image,” DCF Secretary Bob Butterworth tells the Palm Beach Post. ”All of us feel like he absolutely betrayed us.”

Zimmerman’s MySpace page has been taken down, but Google still has a cache.

About me:
I put my pants on one leg at a time.

Who I’d like to meet:
Someone who hates to cuddle afterwards, a friend that likes to pay for everything, and someone from another planet

Are you there, Michael Jackson?

Zimmerman’s MySpace also lists a brief resume from his TV news days: WMAZ-TV in Macon, Georgia (where he had a DUI); KENS-TV in San Antonio, Texas (where he has an outstanding warrant for grand theft); and Bay News 9 in Tampa, Florida. So the DCF’s background check must have consisted of, “Have you ever done anything bad? No? You’re hired!”

Let’s hope the cops look into his activities in those other cities. When you think about it, TV news seems like a perfect job for a pedophile: You move around all the time, you meet lots of people, and everybody just figures you’re such a creep because you work in local TV.

09
Jan

Nocturnal Rationalizations

By Simon Scowl 6 Comments Digg! Digg this
Categories: Newscasters and Television Actors

Mary McNamara at the LA Times sums up what’s bugging me about the late-night hosts coming back to work:

Leno, O’Brien and Stewart have made points of publicly supporting the strike, in which they participated for two months, and yet there they all are, crossing picket lines and writing for television and, presumably, getting paid for it…

While Stewart and Colbert didn’t cop to writing their stuff, clearly they were not improvising — it’s hard to argue you are working without a script when you have film clips and visual aids cued up. Both hosts made direct references to this contradiction. At the end of his show, Stewart “checked in” with Colbert only to catch him sporting a hilarious, Hasidic-like beard and shredding documents. “Is that a script, Stephen?” Stewart asked in mock severity. “No, no,” said Colbert. “Don’t you see my strike beard? But I am very alarmed by how prepared you were, and I will be making a call…”

How long jokes by writers about writers will remain amusing remains to be seen, though I think we’re talking hours rather than days. And the self-mocking tone of the quip only emphasizes the underlying problems — yes, Stewart and Colbert are performers, but they are also writers. Writers clearly writing during a writers strike.

Don’t these guys have any money saved up? Are they worried about not being able to find another job? I’ll admit I’m a little confused by all the behind-the-scenes wrangling, and it’s got to be a frustrating, no-win situation for them. But they really missed an opportunity to stand with their fellow writers. Despite all their lip service, they caved.

In Stewart’s case in particular, it’s disappointing. His whole first show back was all about how unfair it is that he can’t get the same deal as Letterman. Except Letterman owns The Late Show, which is why he was able to work out a deal, while The Daily Show is owned by Viacom, which isn’t negotiating with the WGA. Stewart has to know this. So why did he break the strike and violate his union’s rules to spend a half-hour complaining about breaking the strike and violating his union’s rules?

Alright, alright… 22 minutes.

21
Dec

First There Was “Truthiness”; Now Comes “Strikiness”

By Simon Scowl 2 Comments Digg! Digg this
Categories: Newscasters and Television Actors

The New York Times  reports:

Comedy Central’s pair of popular news satirists, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, will return to their television shows on Jan. 7, two months after production was suspended because of a writers’ strike …

In a statement, the two hosts said they would prefer to return to work with their writers. “If we cannot, we would like to express our ambivalence, but without our writers we are unable to express something as nuanced as ambivalence,” they stated.

How droll! Now, to all you Red Staters who are calling them scabs and such, there’s a little thing you might not know about called satire. See, Writers Guild of America members Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert aren’t really breaking the picket line. They’re making an ironic commentary on the very concept of breaking picket lines. Get it?

12
Dec

Barbara Walters is a Serious Journalist

By Holly Won't 0 Comments Digg! Digg this
Categories: Newscasters

babawawa.jpgBarbara Walters says celebrity interviews are now beneath her, claiming:

“I am not going after the tabloid stuff, I don’t do it.”

As Jossip rightly points out, the word missing from the above is “anymore.” She said she was tired of celebrities right before her “The 10 Most Fascinating People of 2007” program aired, which included such Nobel Prize winners as David and Victoria Beckham, Justin Timberlake, Katherine Heigl, and Jennifer Hudson.

So, half the list. And Harry Potter scribe J.K. Rowling, who topped Walters’s rankings, wouldn’t even sit down with her for an interview. So much for being a serious journalist!

06
Dec

How Not to Catch a Hypocrite

By The Oversneer 6 Comments Digg! Digg this
Categories: Newscasters

keith-olbermann-shhhh.jpgLeave it to ass-tard Keith Olbermann to find a hypocrite where there isn’t one.

RADAR Online reports that on Tuesday night’s Countdown …

… Keith Olbermann connected the dots between faux-populist wind-bag Lou Dobbs and illegal immigrants. The logic goes like this: When she’s not sucking Facebook, Dobbs’s daughter is into the elite sport of horse jumping, a pastime that’s propped up on the backs of undocumented workers, according to a book cited by Olbermann. Using the transitive property, that means Lou Dobbs is responsible for the employment of the illegal aliens he so passionately rails against nightly. Also according to this logic, Lou Dobbs employs Kevin Bacon.

Here’s some more Olbermann logic: If you eat lettuce, spinach, or avocados picked in California, or if you have ever sipped on a Napa Valley cabernet or merlot, you may no longer object to illegal immigration — since undocumented migrant workers do much of the heavy lifting out there. I wonder what Olbermann’s three most recent lunches consisted of …

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