As I wrote in a post earlier this week, Michael Phelps is going to be featured on the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes Sunday. CNN newsman Anderson Cooper will be interviewing the Baltimore swimming star, and I will be writing about the encounter right here after the top-rated show ends.

The interview promises to be a good one with Phelps talking for the first time about having post-Olympics weight issues -- he's up to an all-time high of 205 pounds -- and his widely-discussed high-calorie diet.

The interview airs at 7 p.m. Sunday on WJZ-Channel 13 -- or whenever football ends. To read a preview, click here. 

In an analysis of TV journalism on Wednesday night, I wrote that a red-ball event like the terrorist attacks in Mumbai often provided a great look into a news organization.

But in expressing my dismay at the way MSNBC couldn't let go of the comedic shtick of Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow to provide viewers with a steady diet of hard news and information on Mumbai during prime time, I missed a key point: MSNBC isn't a news channel any more in any way, shape or form. It is a 24-hour used-to-be-news channel that now appears to want to be a cross between Comedy Central's The Daily Show and Fox News from the left.

There are a bunch of implications to that. First and foremost, if true, it means that we are down to one trustworthy cable channel for news and information, CNN, and that is a dangerous situation when there is only one reliable outlet for news in a democracy.

On a less cosmic level, I wonder if maybe I should quit judging MSNBC as a news channel? But by what standards should it then be judged? Comedy? Is it as funny as The Daily Show? Is that what I should asking? I know the answer to that one?

While I have written several pieces since Maddow joined the MSNBC lineup in September expressing my concern about channel embracing an ideologically-oriented, propaganda-tinged approach to news (like Fox at the other end of the spectrum), it was a comment posted yesterday by my colleague, Aaron Barnhart, that got me thinking this way. Barnhart urged me to think of MSNBC as news-talk rather than news. But I think he's being too generous.

Here's part of what I said to Barnhart about the way the Olbermann and Maddow shows broke away from Mumbai coverage after about 10 minutes to go with their usual lists and laughs. (You can read Barnhart's comment and the full response here.):

...Don't you think their subject matter and their flip approach through 90 percent of the Wednesday night shows were totally inappropriate -- as well as a clear indication of how much they have shifted away from news to entertainment? And I would really have to disagree with you that Olbermann's repeat at 10 covered Mumbai until there was nothing left to cover...There was a world of stuff to cover -- they just didn't have the resources or the will, as far as I can tell. CNN was still going strong at 1 a.m., when I turned it off.

...What's going on at MSNBC is a big deal in terms of media and the culture moving away from news and verified information. We are down to one all-news channel that presents information you can count on, and that is not a healthy situation in these troubled times. We don't need more entertainment (Olbermann and Maddow), we need more and better information. PS I really like both Maddow and Olbermann as entertainer (OK, maybe, I should limit that to Maddow). But I watch them a lot and enjoy them. And the irony isn't lost on me either.

Many readers of Z on TV like Maddow and Olbermann, and I totally understand that. Everyone who believes in science and hates the way we wound up in two wars and on the very brink of economic collapse (me included), couldn't help but welcome Olbermann's assault on the Bush administration. But that is not journalism, and it is my job to keep repeating that -- even if no one wants to hear it.

And lots of folks do not. I am surprised at how many readers want to defend MSNBC for leaving Mumbai for fun and games with Keith and Rachel after 10 minutes at the top of each prime-time hour that they control.

To me, that's a loss.

 (Above: MSNBC photo of Rachel Maddow)

 

Millions of Americans might have gone into Thanksgiving mode after work Wednesday, but the news certainly took no holiday. Here's a snapshot of the TV news landscape Wednesday night.

The terrorist attack in India continued with more than 100 dead and an undetermined number held hostage. And MSNBC mostly ignored the huge story throughout prime time for silly lists and sophomoric jokes from Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow.

Meanwhile, on ABC, President-elect Barack Obama, the man who said there can only be one president at a time, all but acknowledged that he is stepping in to try and fill the void left by George W. Bush -- who seemed again to be highly distracted at a time of great crisis in the economy. ABC newswoman Barbara Walters, who interviewed the president and his wife, Michelle, spoke of Obama in her introduction as forced to run a kind of parallel presidency rather than the normal transition operation because of the extreme "lame duck" status of Bush.

Let’s start with the terrorist attack. Breaking news on a holiday often offers the best look into a media organization. With many workers on holiday, you quickly see what kind of depth a news organization has -- or doesn't have. And by their commitment -- or lack of it -- to coverage, you can gauge their priorities.

The Fox News channel does not have anywhere near the worldwide on-staff resources that CNN International does, but it plugged into NDTV (New Delhi Television) for some excellent coverage and images of the early and ongoing attacks. Don't get too excited about Fox's performance, though, by 10 p.m. it was airing a rerun of Greta Van Susteren's softball interview with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

CNN was all over the story, and you could feel its strength build as staffers came back to work and joined in. CNN International had much help in terms of imagery from sister channel IBN (India Broadcast News). CNN stayed on the case throughout the night.

But on MSNBC, no real coverage -- nothing except a brief mention and discussion at the anchor desk in New York. Isn't this a great way to cut reporting costs -- just stop doing it. And then for the vast majority of the broadcast, it's back to the same anti-Bush jokes and banter from Olbermann and Maddow that you get every night. And the sister channel to NBC never even tried to cover the carnage in Mumbai. You might think after punting from 8 to 10 p.m., that MSNBC would at least make an effort at 10 instead of airing a rerun of Olbermann, but not Wednesday night.

Don’t tell me it doesn’t matter that MSNBC embraced ideological propaganda instead of news and information when it handed over the keys to prime time to Olbermann and Maddow. If the terrorist attacks in India don’t warrant coverage on MSNBC in prime time, than nothing short of another 9/11 is likely to stop Olbermann and Maddow from their partisan game playing at what used to a respected anchor desk.

But hard news was not the only news being made on TV Wednesday night. It is remarkable the way Obama is using TV to provide leadership even though he is still 55 days away from taking office. Even more remarkable is the way TV persons like Walters are now talking openly, as she did in her set up, about the need for Obama to do so in light of Bush’s lack of leadership and focus at this dark time in American life.

When Walters asked Obama what his "biggest fear" was, Obama said "there are a lot of things that keep me up at night."

"One of the concerns I have is that the economy is so weakened that the next 60 days are going to be difficult because we've got a president who, even though he may mean well, is now sort of in lame-duck status [and] Congress isn't in [session]," Obama said. "And I don't have the reins of power."

Obama said that he and his team of economic advisers would carefully review the way the Bush administration distributes bailout funds to Wall Street banks seeking emergency assistance and he will do whatever it takes to make his feelings known if he disagrees with Bush’s actions.

Make no mistake; he was issuing a warning in the direction of Bush, even as Walters wondered aloud how the nation would get through the next 55 days with such a distracted leader in the White House.

Once again, listening to Barack and Michelle Obama was like a tonic to soothe the nerves. But Wednesday night, instead of turning off the TV and going to bed reassured, one couldn’t help but take another look at the horror in Mumbai – and feel the jitters of the times in which we now live rise up once again threatening any sense of holiday repose.

(Above: AP Photo of the wreckage in Mumbai by  Anshuman Poyrekar of The Hindustan Times.)

There is nothing like network ego, is there? Look who gets tops billing in tonight’s big interview on ABC with President-elect Barack Obama in the show’s title A Barbara Walters Special: Barack and Michelle Obama.

ABC News released a couple of teaser interview bites with Obama ripping the auto executives who showed up in private jets to bang their tin cups in Congress, and I will include those parts of the interview below. It is good stuff, and the nation has been waiting to hear what Obama thinks of the addiction to excess and privilege that such self-absorbed CEOs have shown despite their failures. On a lighter note, he also talks about trying to keep his BlackBerry -- and even here, he makes a serious point.

This interview tonight is a big deal, and I will be writing about it here at Z on TV after it airs from 10 to 11 p.m.

The interview matters because of the holiday timing and the rhythms of media and American life. It matters, too, because of what Walters represents in the public imagination. And most of all, it matters because it is part of pattern of Obama appearing to undersatnd and starting to use the Symbolic Presidency as well as Ronald Reagan or John Kennedy.

Obama’s grasp of the all-important power of symbols in shaping a nation’s sense of itself is part of what has led me to write about him since August as potentially the last great TV President. He understands that those symbols are circulated to a mass audience and become part of shared consciousness and then collective memory mainly through the media – in this case TV. That’s what I’ll be writing about tonight after the interview airs.

Here’s what Obama told Walters about the auto executives and his fight to keep his BlackBerry.

BARBARA WALTER: How did you feel when you read about the three heads of the auto companies taking privates jets to Washington?

BARACK OBAMA: Well, I thought maybe they're a little tone deaf to what's happening in America right now. And this has been a chronic problem, not just for the auto industry, I mean, we're sort of focused on them. But I think it's been a problem for the captains of industry generally. When people are pulling down hundred million dollar bonuses on Wall Street, and taking enormous risks with other people's money, that indicates a sense that you don't have any perspective on what's happening to ordinary Americans. When the auto makers are getting paid far more than their counterparts at Toyota, or at Honda, and yet they're losing money a lot faster than Japanese auto makers are, that tell me that they're not seeing what's going on out there, and one of the things I hope my presidency helps to usher in is a, a return to an ethic of responsibility.

That if you're placed in a position of power, then you've got responsibilities to your workers. You've got a responsibility to your community. Your share holders. That if -- there's got to be a point where you say, 'You know what, I have enough, and now I'm in this position of responsibility, let me make sure that I'm doing right by people, and, and acting in a way that is responsible.' And that's true, by the way, for members of congress, that's true for the president, that's true for cabinet members, that's true for parents. I want all of us to start thinking a little bit more, not just about what's good for me, but let's start thinking about what's good for our children, what's good for our country. The more we do that, the better off we're going to be.

WALTERS: Should bank executives -- it's almost Christmas time -- forgo their bonuses?

OBAMA: I think they should. That's an example of taking responsibility. I think that if you are already worth tens of millions of dollars, and you are having to lay off workers, the least you can do is say, I'm willing to make some sacrifice as well, because I recognize that there are people who are a lot less well off, who are going through some pretty tough times.

WALTERS: How are you going to get along without your BlackBerry?

OBAMA: (Laughs). This is a problem. I, you know, one of the things that I'm going to have to work through is how to break through the isolation and the bubble that exists around the president. And I'm in the process of negotiating with the Secret Service, with lawyers, with White House staff.

WALTERS: You might have a BlackBerry?

OBAMA: Well, I'm, I'm negotiating to figure out how can I get information from outside of the ten or 12 people who surround my office in the White House. Because, one of the worst things I think that could happen to a president is losing touch with what people are going through day to day.

(Above: ABC Photo of Barbara Walters with Barack and Michelle Obama by George Burns)

The CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes, which has been riding high atop the prime-time ratings with such "big get" interviews as Barack Obama, will feature a conversation Sunday with Baltimore's Olympics swimming star Michael Phelps.

CNN anchorman and 60 Minutes contributor Anderson Cooper is the correspondent asking the questions, and from the excerpts made available he got some compelling answers -- including the fact that Phelps is having some post-Olympics weight issues.

One of the more intriguing segments involves Phelps explaining how it was only through a mistake by Serbian swimmer Milorad Cavic that he was able to win his seventh gold medal on his way to a record eight. Phelps said he entered the water against Cavic exhausted and "had nothing left" as he battled in the 100-meter butterfly.

Without Cavic making a fundamental mistake at the end of the race by "trying to lift his head before he touches the wall," Phelps says he would have lost instead of winning by one-hundredth of a second.

"If his head is down, he wins hands down," Phelps explains to Cooper.

Phelps also tells Cooper he's bulked up to 205 pounds, the heaviest he's ever been -- and that it's not the 12,000  calories a day diet that's to blame. In fact, he says all the talk of a 12,000 calories a day diet is exaggerated. He never eats that much.

The interview airs at 7 p.m. Sunday on WJZ-Channel 13.

Ted Koppel, the celebrated TV newsman and former anchor of ABC's Nightline, is leaving the Discovery cable channel six months before the end of his contract by mutual agreement.

Given the timing, one can't help but wonder if he might soon be announced as the new host of NBC's legendary Sunday morning public affairs show, Meet the Press. He is certainly one of the few TV journalists with the interviewing skills, seriousness of purpose and breadth of political knowledge to carry on where the late Tim Russert left off.

And even though there are plenty of people at NBC News who want the Meet the Press job, there aren't many of them who could look in the mirror and say they are better suited than Koppel to sit in the chair.

Koppel addressed only the matter of leaving Discovery in a statement Tuesday:

"There has been significant change in senior management at Discovery,” Koppel said. “Producing our kind of news-related programs is an expensive proposition. It has long been clear that neither of us is interested in an extension of the current contract. Discovery and I worked on terminating the contract a few months early under terms that both sides found acceptable. We leave with gratitude for the professional opportunities we've been given and for the generosity with which we've been treated."

Koppel and his team, which included long-time ABC News producer Tom Bettag, did excellent work for the Maryland-based cable channel including documentaries on race, cancer, Iran and China. 

You have to give credit to Gov. Martin O’Malley: He is a very good TV performer.

And as much as I sat down last night looking to find serious fault with his new monthly show on Maryland Public Television, there is not much to criticize by way of performance – for him, host Jeff Salkin or the production crew.

It was an informative, fast-paced and professional 30 minutes of public affairs broadcasting. And any citizen who spent that TV time with O’Malley and Salkin knew more about the state of state as the final credits rolled than they did at the beginning of the show.

That doesn’t mean there are not major issues related to the governor appearing on airwaves over which he has ultimate control. Those issues still trouble the heck out of me -- and should concern everyone in Maryland.

What some people don’t understand is that MPT’s federal license to broadcast is held by the state, and that means the governor controls the fate of MPT.

That is not the case in most states. Most public broadcasting licenses are held by universities or community groups, as is the case with Washington public radio station WAMU-FM (88.5) and public TV station WETA, respectively. Universities and community groups are generally more trustworthy stewards of the public airwaves because they are not tempted to use them to try and get re-elected as state politicians are.

So, right at the start of Ask the Governor: Special Edition of Direct Connection, my teeth started to grind as O’Malley jumped all over Salkin’s introduction to thank Salkin and MPT “for doing this” show. Maybe disingenuous is too strong an adjective to describe the governor’s statements of thanks, but MPT could hardly have refused a half hour of time to the man who decides its economic future, now could it.

I hope MPT and O’Malley will be more transparent in future telecasts and clearly explain their relationship at the beginning of each show. Viewers need that information to decide how much credibility they should attach to both the questions and the answers.

But that said, the 30 minutes was full of useful information about budgets shortfalls, possible furlough days for state workers (the governor included), and various tax possibilities from sales to gas. Salkin also got O’Malley to acknowledge that he has had talks with Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown about the possibility of Brown getting a position dealing with veterans' affairs in the administration of President-elect Barack Obama.

I hope Salkin will be able to get tougher in future shows with the man who is essentially his boss, but I am not sure I expect that to happen. I also hope the producers are not screening the calls so that only friendly callers and softball questions get through.

We should be on the lookout for all of that. But we should also acknowledge a promising start Monday night for a show that could give citizens of the state more information at a time when it is surely needed.

Speaking of transparency, I should also acknowledge that the Sun and MPT have an editorial partnership that involves reporters and editors from the Sun appearing on the MPT. 

(Above: Baltimore Sun photo of Martin O'Malley by Jed Kirschbaum)

Alan Colmes, the straw man liberal set up for arch-conservative partner Sean Hannity to always knock down, will leave Hannity & Colmes after 12 years at the cable channel.

In a press release Monday, Colmes characterized the move as being his decision. He said he approached a senior programming executive earlier this year "about wanting to move on after 12 years to develop new and challenging ways to contribute to the growth of the network."

Colmes, who will leave his post alongside Hannity at the end of the year, will stay at Fox News as a commentator and will work to develop a weekend show. Hannity & Colmes is the second highest rated show on Fox behind The O'Reilly Factor, which precedes it.

My most vivid recollection of Colmes and the role he played as Hannity's foil came during a discussion he had in October with former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove, now an analyst on Fox. It came in the wake of an interview by Hannity with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

Colmes dared to disagree with Rove about some matter of Palin's performance, and Rove told Colmes he was embarrassing himself with his foolish opinions.

This is a part-time analyst telling the co-host he's an embarrassment. 

And how did Colmes react? Like the good liberal whipping boy that he was. He did not dare contradict the Rove. Great theater -- if you're a conservative. Terrible journalism.

The question is whether this is a singular event or the first of a series of moves as Fox finds itself in a new situation of being far removed from the the people set to take over Congress and the White House in January.

As for Hannity, while no annoucement was made, rest assured that he is going nowhere. He just signed a new contract and is sure to continue in his current timeslot.

(Photo Fox News Channel)

After 33 years on Baltimore's airwaves, WJZ reporter Richard Sher is retiring effective today.

Sher, who enjoyed one of the longest on-air runs of anyone in local TV anywhere in  the nation, has done virtually everything at the station from co-hosting with Oprah Winfrey to working with such Baltimore TV legends as Jerry Turner and Al Sanders. He also served as long-time host of the public affairs program Square-Off.

Sher broke the news of his retirement last week to colleagues at WJZ in an email that said in part: "hey guys....im just fine thank you... you know i've been thinking about doing other things.....so i decided to move on, with everybody's blessings...the reason i haven't been around...taking vacation time... thanks for all the calls.... love and miss you all.."

Monday, he made it formal with a press release that included the following statement: "I have enjoyed a long, exciting and highly rewarding career with WJZ and have been proud to have been part of a news team that has integrity at its very core."

"Richard has witnessed over three decades of Baltimore news. His firsthand reporting and interviews have connected WJR readers to the people and events that have shaped our community," Jay Newman, WJZ vice president and general manager said in the statement. "We wish him well in the next chapter of his distinguished career."

Some readers might remember that Sher announced his retirement once before -- in February 2004 when he was 62 years old. But just before the retirement was to take effect in April of that year, he rescinded the decision saying the thought of leaving the business was too painful.

Nothing says Sunday at this time of year to millions of Americans like TV football and 60 Minutes. And the person in large part responsible for the quality of both is Sean McManus, president of news and sports at CBS.

(As most Baltimore readers know, McManus is the son of Jim McKay, the legendary and beloved ABC sports announcer and longtime area resident who died earlier this year.)

Sean you know the history of 60 Minutes better than me. But as you recall, the show was not successful when it first debuted in 1968. It was not until it moved to Sunday night after football that it took off. Do you think the football runover past 7 p.m. like you had last Sunday before the Barack Obama interview still matters to 60 Minutes?

Oh, absolutely. It is a huge factor. And football is such a good lead-in. And people are so used to it. So, if the game runs 25 minutes long like it did Sunday, that’s just a benefit. A key part of the success is obviously the lead-in we get. Fortunately, for some reason, all of our announcers are very enthusiastic about promoting 60 Minutes…

Just co-incidence, I guess…

Yes, just co-incidence (laughter). Yeah, and the sports guys are amazingly co-operative with the news guys when it comes to this.

As to 60 Minutes becoming the number one show for the second week in a row, and having the largest audience, 25.1 million, for any hour of TV this year, what do you think is going on?

I think what’s happened is that 60 Minutes without question has established itself as the magazine of record. And as the other newsmagazines have gone totally toward the tabloid direction, 60 Minutes has gone in the totally opposite direction. The best example I can think of is that for two weeks in the past month and half, our lead story was on credit default swaps.

Now if you were to say somebody do you think you can generate a good rating in prime time by leading with stories on credit default swaps, people would say you’re nuts. But those were two incredibly highly rated 60 Minutes pieces. We had three pieces on the Iraqi war this season, and the conventional wisdom is that nobody wants to watch stories in Iraq any more. But those stories were incredibly well rated also.

I just think 60 Minutes has established itself as a must-see program. And the kind of number we had on Sunday just confirms that for us. I’ve always believed no matter what the program is – sports, entertainment or news – if you put on an unbelievably compelling program week after week after week, a lot of people are going to watch it. And I think that is what’s happening on 60 Minutes.

Can you compare 60 Minutes today to other points in its long history?

The brand and the reputation of 60 Minutes, I think, is at an almost all-time high even going back to the glory days when it was the only real news magazine on television. I think what Jeff Fager (executive producer) and the correspondents have done is just remarkable. There a lot of things that are going pretty well at CBS News these days, and this certainly falls in that category.

Sean, during this time of media tumult is there a lesson here for others in the media that says if you have an outstanding product and you stick to your journalistic guns, you’ll be OK business-wise?

That’s a really good point, because there was a lot of temptation at points to say, "Maybe we need do a different kind of show. Maybe we should put graphics in or music. Or maybe we should make it more contemporary." And I have two points to make about that.

One thing that’s remarkable, and I’m not sure a lot of people notice it, is that the show, much to the credit of Jeff and his creative team, is that the show looks vastly different than it did two years ago. I mean, basically, two years ago, the correspondents were sitting literally in front of a cardboard set, and now it’s a three-dimensional magazine. And the graphics used to all be black – and the background was black. Now the background gray. I mean, it’s a very contemporary, modern-looking magazine. It’s the only magazine show in high definition. So, even though it’s a traditional show, being in high def, it really is a state of the art program.

The other thing I must say for a sense of perspective is that two years ago, even though it did not get a lot of attention, 60 Minutes was really facing a crisis. They lost two of the foundations within the span of six months. They lost tragically Ed Bradley who passed away. And they lost Mike Wallace when he retired. So, the two guys who were probably the single most important guys for a decade were all of a sudden gone. I think a lot of magazine shows would have a huge problem. But Jeff said, "Listen, we’re going to keep the current foundation of Steve Kroft, Lesley Stahl and Bob Simon and Andy Rooney and Scott Pelley. But we’re going to inject an Anderson Cooper and a Lara Logan..."

And a Katie Couric

Exactly Katie Couric. … And there are others. Armen Ketayian did an unbelievably great story. And Byron Pitts is going to do two stories this season. So what Jeff’s managed to do is keep the traditional 60 Minutes, so that when you tune in, you’ll see a Steve Kroft or Lesley Stahl. But he’s also started to groom the correspondents for the future. And the fact that we haven’t missed a beat, and in fact are stronger than when the great Ed Bradley and the great Mike Wallace were on the broadcast, I think is an incredible accomplishment.

(Above: CBS Photo of Sean McManus)

 

 

 

Did anyone notice how little TV coverage there was Saturday of the anniversary of the assassination of President John Kennedy? It made me wonder if collectively my baby boomer generating is forgetting the event we vowed never to forget. Or, if there was some other cultural factor at play.

I could find hardly any coverage of the event on television during the day. In the evening, I turned to C-SPAN confident I would find it there in prime time. If not C-SPAN I, I was certain C-SPAN II would be doing books about Kennedy -- even if it only amounted to reruns of prior interviews with authors of the hundreds of Kennedy books.

But the only sustenance I found was on C-SPAN radio. God bless its oral history on Saturday afternoons -- the source of one of my deepest pleasures. The radio channel had interviews taped earlier with the first emergency room doctor to treat Kennedy at Parkland Hospital in Dallas on the awful afternoon in 1963 -- and then a conversation with the deputy press secretary who announced the president's death.

The lack of shared memory on TV was especially troubling in week when the newly-renovated National Museum of American History re-opened  -- and, as a result, the Washington media was full of talk of remembering our past.

Are we forgetting this horrible and defining moment of our past unconsciously? Or, with a new and young president-elect who reminds many of JFK, did the media consciously downplay the anniversary?

Tune in this weekend for more ZonTV.

I will be posting an interview with Sean McManus, the president of CBS News and Sports, who talks about the ways that NFL football contribute to the Sunday-night ratings success of 60 Minutes.

I will also have an interview with Greg Goldman, the executive producer of the new Fox reality series, Secret Millionaire, which premieres Dec. 3. Goldman talks about Baltimore contestant Molly Shattuck and the way his show connects with the troubled economic times in which we find ourselves today.

And any TV news that breaks, we will be here.

What a perfect case study we have this week of the different directions taken by the last two big network TV newsmagazines. One interviews presidents, the other prostitutes. And for once, the high road is the more lucrative one.

As I wrote several times the past two weeks, the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes has been scoring record ratings with a steady diet of substance like correspondent Steve Kroft's wide-ranging interview Sunday with President-elect Barack Obama. The hour with the interview was the highest rated prime-time program of the year.

ABC's 20/20, meanwhile, is hyping its "exclusive" interview tonight by Diane Sawyer with Ashley Dupre. She's the woman ABC News describes as the "high-end call girl at the center of the scandal that brought down former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

No low-end calls girls for this high-class news operation, I guess.

Oh wait, remember the D.C. Madam, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, and the "exclusive" interview ABC News chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross had with her on 20/20? There is, indeed, a glorious history here, is there not?

And what else has 20/20 been featuring in recent weeks? How about Thomas Beatie, the "pregnant man" and Christie Brinkley's ex-husband, Peter Cook. Mix that in a bowl with Ms. Dupre, stir well with talk of "exclusives" and breathless introductions, and you pretty much have the very definition of tabloid TV.

And what has 60 Minutes been up to? Oh, not much. They just about own one of the biggest political stories of the past 50 years, the rise and election of the first African-American president.

Oh yeah, and they have been up to their elbows in the financial crisis that threatens to bring back the glory days of the The Great Depression to a household near you -- if not your own workplace and home. The 60 Minutes team has been one of the only TV news organizations to try and sort out the financial insanity and hubris of the sub-prime mortgage loans and paper swaps that brought Wall Street to the verge of collapse -- saved for the moment only by the Congress and a rush-rush bailout plan.

Did I mention the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that no one else seems to want to cover any more? The CBS News magazine had two stories on of them as well.

If you think I sound biased, I am on this one. It is important to the future of this country that news organizations stay on the case with the kind of stories 60 Minutes is doing -- and not go chasing call girls like ABC News and 20/20.

(Above: ABC photo of Ashley Dupre and Diane Sawyer by Heidi Gutman)

One of the most remarkable stories of the TV season is that the top-rated single hour of prime-time programming is not a reality series or hit procedural drama – but rather a newsmagazine.

And it is not just any news program, but one that is in its 40^th season and has been labeled a "dinosaur" by some pundits for more than a decade. Even more astounding, its producers accomplished this feat of winning an audience of 25.1 million viewers Sunday by sticking to a formula of straightforward, traditional journalism. It was the second week in a row that 60 Minutes finished as the number one program on TV.

All of which led Sean McManus, the president of CBS News, to say in a Baltimore Sun interview Wednesday, "The brand and the reputation of 60 Minutes is, I think, almost at an all-time high even going back to the glory days when it was the only real newsmagazine on television."

Jeff Fager (pictured above), the 53-year-old executive producer, who has been at the helm of 60 Minutes the last four years, talked to me about how the show found its way back to the top of TV heap and how it aims to stay there. A relationship forged with Barack Obama on the campaign trail helped a lot, he says. But the producers are also "all over" the financial meltdown story with several major pieces in the works.

From his conviction that "America wants substance," to his goal of making 60 Minutes into "America’s watchdog," Fager offers a model as to how good journalism can do great business for media franchises that don’t lose their sense of purpose and mission in these troubled economic times.

Here's the interview:

I have written several pieces the last couple of years – including one last week -- challenging the "dinosaur" label that some analysts tried to put on 60 Minutes because of the show’s age. It was an easy label to refute because of your consistently strong ratings. But these past two weeks at number one during this historic period in American life have been something else. What’s your reaction to the ratings?

What makes the season particularly gratifying is that we’ve succeeded by doing what we do best – covering big and important stories and sticking with that. This fall, for example, we have really been on the campaign and the financial crisis and had three stories on the two wars. And winning numbers like this considering what we’ve been focusing on, I find that fulfilling.

It is sort of central to what people expect from 60 Minutes. We really operate on the assumption that Americans want substance – they want that in the reporting that we’re going to bring them. They want us to be covering big stories. And that has been paying off in the number of viewers. And I hope it’s been paying off for the viewing experience as well.

I just want to follow up on your assumption that American viewers do want substance. Can you elaborate? It is so refreshing to hear a news executive say that in an era where so many media outlets seem to be heading in panic in the other direction.

Well, I think it’s a particularly difficult time in the country. And if you just look at the past two weeks, there’s a fascination with Barack Obama -- whether you were with him or not. He’s a compelling figure. There’s something reassuring about a president so thoughtful and articulate and seemingly normal at a time like this.

… And I think we’ve benefited from being on top of the campaign at a time when people want to hear what he has to say. He’s moving into some troubled waters, and because of that, there’s a lot of anxiety out there and to hear him talk about some of these issues is obviously bringing a lot of people into our broadcast.

Your team seems to have understood the importance of forging a relationship with Barack Obama before almost anyone else. Can you talk about how you came to be the place Obama goes to talk with Americans as he did Sunday?

First of all, Steve Kroft, Michael Radutzky and Frank Devine (producers) just deserve so much credit. They’ve been working that camp quite hard and I think earned their trust. And we have done several stories with Barack Obama.

And I know you have done almost as many on McCain.

Yes, it’s true, and we also wanted to focus on Hillary Clinton as well, and actually her campaign made it more difficult for us to do it. They weren’t as interested in co-operating. We did end up doing a little bit more with the Obama people because we actually reported our first story at the time he announced for President.

That said, part of what I think kept us on the front burner is that we have dedicated more of our time than typical to this campaign. And the message it sent to the campaigns was: "These people care about the issues and they want to help their viewers understand where the candidates stand."

I think that was important in terms of building trust. I think the Obama people and the president-elect himself appreciate that the questions they are getting from Steve are substance. And that makes a big difference, I think. He wants to get a message across, but they want – and the McCain people wanted this, too – a sense that we will avoid the petty and really help the people understand the difference between these two candidates.

And I think we did a pretty good job of that by dedicating the whole broadcast of September 21st to the candidates. It showed our viewers – which was also a sizeable audience on that night by the way – that we’re in this for the long haul. That was an important message, and the campaigns heard it. If John McCain had won, I hope he would have felt the same way, "Let’s go on 60 minutes and share our feelings about the country right now as president-elect." So, I do think that made a difference.

But I also think good old fashioned shoe leather reporting means you really do get to know the subjects of the story. And that’s really how you earn a trust – and a certain bond. An I know that there is one between Kroft and the president elect, because they’ve been together a lot. He’s asked very tough questions. I feel like Barack Obama is prepared for that. He’s never shied away from a tough question. But when Steve said to him "why you?" on September 21st -- "why do you think you’re the guy who can do this?" – he may have been a little taken back by it. But, nevertheless, his full answer appeared on the air. In a traditional reporter’s method, you do work your way into a story, and if you’re going to hold onto it, you have to be tough but fair and consistent. I think that’s a big part of what happened here.

Can you talk about how you guys have stayed on your mission at a time when so many media institutions – and I am talking about some pretty good newspapers and TV outlets – have just gone crazy in desperately trying to re-make themselves. I think there might be a larger message for the media in your actions and subsequent success.

Oh my gosh yes, that’s a big source of pride on our floor that we have maintained our central kind of purpose, which is what (founding executive producer) Don Hewitt taught us so well over the years. We really believe in what we do, and it does involve important stories and covering them well and telling them in an interesting way. But not losing the mix that we adhere to on a regular basis, which is that there might be something really hard, and there might be something just plain interesting – something for everybody is the point.

We really have stuck to that in part because I’m not sure we’d be able to anything else very well. If someone said to us, "Hey look, you’ve got to work at getting 18-year-olds into the tent and change the way you're doing things." I couldn’t do it. I’d have to find another job. I know a lot of people on our floor feel that way. And I know a lot of our staff that has been here many years believes in what we do.

And, you know, I think the word "brand" is overused, but, boy, it does mean something when you see that stopwatch ticking. And I think you do great injustice to your core audience that’s been loyal over all the years if you go in a different direction and attempt to pander to something else.

That said, we also get enormous support from CBS. Nobody is saying move in a different direction or do something else. Les Moonves (network CEO) and Sean McManus (president of news and sports) are proud of what we do, and they say so all of the time. So, you need that as well. You see a newspaper that is being told by the publisher, "Why are you covering Iraq?" Well, we don’t get that. We’re an expensive broadcast. What we do is expensive and risky and tough to make interesting sometime. It says a lot about the company and the dedication to what we do. I don’t it for granted, because you see in some of theses news organizations what happens when the people at the top decide this isn’t working.

Can you talk about future stories? Are you going to stay hard on the transition?

Yeah, we’re on it. We’re working on many other fronts. We have these huge stories swirling all around us. We’re not going to let go of the finacial crisis. We have a couple of stories working there that I think are going to be very important. And we’ve got a terrific story coming about oil – actually two….So, it’s not just what’s happening in the White House, or who’s going to take these jobs. We really want to be on many different fronts. Look, it’s an incredible moment in history, and God knows how long it’s going to take the country to pull out of this. But we’re going to try and be all over it.

Speaking of the financial crisis, one last question. There is a lot of confusion and anger about how we got to the horrible place this nation is in today. Do you think part of the ratings surge might be related to Americans turning to you guys for answers and help in sorting it out?

I hope so. I mean, that's our hope. We work as hard as we can to try and be America’s watchdog. You know, what are we being told – and not being told in all this? What are people trying to keep from us? Where are the millions of dollars going? We're all over it.

 

I have tried to ignore this "study" done by two sociologists at the school where I earned a Ph.D. in American Studies, the University of Maryland, College Park.

But I see this survey -- it is not really a study as much as a survey of other surveys -- getting picked by international press services as "evidence" of America as a nation of hopeless TV addicts who are both pathetic and ignorant as they get their daily dose of short-term, instant gratification.

And smoke is coming out of my ears that such wrong-headed, out-of-date thinking should be perpetuated even in the wake of tens of millions of viewers actively engaging in the recent presidential campaign through their TVs -- an engagement that took them into the voting booths.

Here is the university's summary of the study. But, guessing some readers won't get to the end of it, let me raise a few of the many issues I have.

First, people have been socialized through the media and studies like this to feel they have to apologize for watching TV, so it is not surprising that the researchers find evidence of such apology in the answers respondents give even as they acknowledge the pleasure TV offers.

But the last paragraph, is the killer with one of the researcher using the old "addiction" metaphor to sell the results. University of Maryland sociologist Steven Martin likens the short, temporary pleasure of television to addiction: "Addictive activities produce momentary pleasure and long-term misery and regret," he says. "People most vulnerable to addiction tend to be socially or personally disadvantaged. For this kind of person, TV can become a kind of opiate in a way. It's habitual, and tuning in can be an easy way of tuning out."

I am also troubled by the sociologists going beyond their data when they talk about how time might be more "usefully" spent.

Read it at your own risk. If you post a comment, and I will be happy to argue about it until my fingers fall off from typing. 

COLLEGE PARK, Md. - A new study by sociologists at the University of Maryland concludes that unhappy people watch more TV, while people who describe themselves as "very happy" spend more time reading and socializing. The study appears in the December issue of the journal Social Indicators Research.

Analyzing 30-years worth of national data from time use studies and a continuing series of social attitude surveys, the Maryland researchers report that spending time watching television may contribute to viewers' happiness in the moment, with less positive effects in the long run.

"TV doesn't really seem to satisfy people over the long haul the way that social involvement or reading a newspaper does," says University of Maryland sociologist John P. Robinson, the study co-author and a pioneer in time use studies. "It's more passive and may provide escape - especially when the news is as depressing as the economy itself. The data suggest to us that the TV habit may offer short-run pleasure at the expense of long-term malaise."

TV VIEWING DURING A FINANCIAL CRISIS

Based on data from time use surveys, Robinson projects that TV viewing might increase significantly as the economy worsens in the next few months and years.

"Through good and bad economic times, our diary studies, have consistently found that work is the major activity correlate of higher TV viewing hours," Robinson says. "As people have progressively more time on their hands, viewing hours increase."

But Robinson cautions that some of that extra time also might be spent sleeping. "As working and viewing hours increase, so do sleep hours," he says. "Sleep could be the second major beneficiary of job loss or reduced working hours."

STUDY FINDINGS AND DATA

In their new study, Robinson and his co-author, University of Maryland sociologist Steven Martin, set out to learn more about the activities that contributed to happiness in people's lives. They analyzed two sets of data spanning nearly 30 years (1975-2006) gathered from nearly 30,000 adults:

A series of time use studies that asked people to fill out diaries for a 24-hour period and to indicate how pleasurable they found each activity;

General Social Survey attitude studies, which Robinson calls the premier national source for monitoring changes in public attitudes - in-depth surveys that over the years consistently asked subjects how happy they feel, how they spend their time, among a number of other questions.

UNHAPPY PEOPLE VIEW SIGNIFICANTLY MORE

Robinson and Martin found that the two sets of data largely coincided for most activities - with the exception of television.

From the General Social Survey, the researchers found that self-described very happy people were more socially active, attended more religious services, voted more and read more newspapers. By contrast, unhappy people watched significantly more television in their spare time.

According to the study's findings, unhappy people watch an estimated 20 percent more television than very happy people, after taking into account their education, income, age and marital status - as well as other demographic predictors of both viewing and happiness.

UNHAPPY PEOPLE ARE HAPPY WITH TV

Data from time diaries told a somewhat different story. Responding in "real time," much closer to daily events, survey respondents tended to rate television viewing more highly as a daily activity.

"What viewers seem to be saying is that while TV in general is a waste of time and not particularly enjoyable, 'the shows I saw tonight were pretty good,' " Robinson says.

The data also suggested to Robinson and Martin that TV viewing is "easy." Viewers dont have to go anywhere, dress up, find company, plan ahead, expend energy, do any work or spend money in order to view. Combine these advantages with the immediate gratification offered by television, and you can understand why Americans spend more than half their free time as TV viewers, the researchers say.

Unhappy people were also more likely to feel that they have unwanted extra time on their hands (51 percent) compared to very happy people (19 percent) and to feel rushed for time (35 percent vs. 23 percent). Having too much time and no clear way to fill it was the bigger burden of the two.

AN ADDICT'S FIX

Martin likens the short, temporary pleasure of television to addiction: "Addictive activities produce momentary pleasure and long-term misery and regret," he says. "People most vulnerable to addiction tend to be socially or personally disadvantaged. For this kind of person, TV can become a kind of opiate in a way. It's habitual, and tuning in can be an easy way of tuning out.

Former cast and crew members of HBO's The Wire are starting production in Baltimore tomorrow on a new Web series, Life After Lisa, set and produced in Baltimore.

The series, which is written and created by Elena Moscatt, who ran the craft services department for The Wire during its five seasons, is set at a small college in the Baltimore area. Moscatt attended Goucher College, according to the series' Website, www.filmfest.com.

Two of the actors who will be featured in the Web series are Method Man and Corey Parker Robinson, cast members of The Wire. Robinson played Detective Leander Sydnor, while Method Man played Calvin "Cheese" Wagstaff. The series will be produced by Brook Yeaton, prop master on the HBO drama. Moscatt is the executive producer.

The series is described as a "romantic mystery" set in the 1980s, which Moscatt wrote as a screenplay while a student at Goucher. She has since re-written it for the Web with episodes running eight to nine minutes long. The Webisodes will feature original music by Ego Likeness and The Perfects. 

The overnight ratings for Steve Kroft's interview with President-elect Barack Obama and future First Lady Michelle Obama were the highest in almost a decade for the top-rated CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes.

With a 17.4 rating and 26 share, Sunday's edition of 60 Minutes was watched in one out of every four American homes with a TV use. It was the largest overnight audience for 60 Minutes since January, 1999.

The national Nielsen ratings won't be out until Tuesday, but the overnights based on 56 metered markets indicate that 60 Minutes could again be the highest-rated show on TV for the second straight week.

If the overnight ratings hold up, the national audience would come in at  24.49 million viewers. (Because the CBS football game, which preceded 60 Minutes, ran over by some 30 minutes, the final audience measurement could be affected.)

Last week's broadcast, which included an interview by Kroft with four key Obama advisers on the night of his election, was seen by 18.47 million viewers to top all shows.

Read my analysis and see video of the Sunday night interview here.

 

Watch CBS Videos Online

 

Talk about television as a social force in American life.

Last night, a correspondent from the number one show on network TV conducted an interview with the number one "get" in the nation, and millions of Americans could go to bed feeling reassured that someone with brains, determination and grace was working on their behalf to help the country out of the horrible mess in which it is mired.

Click here to see photos from the interview and of Obama since he won the election.

The correspondent was Steve Kroft, of the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes, which last week was the highest rated series on television with an audience of 18.5 million. You remember 60 Minutes, that’s the "dinosaur" many of the media pundits pronounced dead a decade ago.

The "get" was President-elected Barack Obama for the first half-hour of last night’s show, and then, Barack and Michelle Obama for the second half. In some ways, the full hour combined the reassurance of a Franklin Delano Roosevelt Fireside Chat with the First-Family-friendliness of Jackie Kennedy’s TV tour of the White House. But it was all re-fashioned into a smart and in-depth but casual feeling TV conversation for a mainstream audience of today.

What a smart choice 60 minutes made in breaking the show into two parts, and what a splendid job Kroft did of being prepared and touching many of the bases that needed touching by the reporter who got the exclusive with the man on whom a battered nation’s hopes now ride.

Kroft queried Obama on his feelings about the controversial shift in Treasury Department bailout strategy, the troubled auto industry, home foreclosures, the books the president-elect is reading these days and campaign pledges such as the vow to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

Here are some of the bites:

STEVE KROFT: Once you become President are there things that you'll change?

BARACK OBAMA: We have not focused on foreclosures and what's happening to homeowners as much as I would like…We've got to…set up a negotiation between banks and borrowers so that people can stay in their homes. That is going to have an impact on the economy as a whole. And, you know, one thing I'm determined is that if we don't have a clear focused program for homeowners by the time I take office, we will after I take office.

 

STEVE KROFT: Are you in sync with Secretary Paulson in terms of how the $700 billion is being used?

BARACK OBAMA: Well, look Hank Paulson has worked tirelessly under some very difficult circumstances…I think Hank would be the first one to acknowledge that probably not everything that's been done has worked the way he had hoped it would work. You know what we've done is we've assigned somebody on my transition team who interacts with him on a daily basis. And, you know, we are getting the information that's required and we're making suggestions in some circumstances about how we think they might approach some of these problems.

STEVE KROFT: Are they listening?

BARACK OBAMA: We'll find out.

 

STEVE KROFT: The Congress has said there are not the votes in Congress to pass any kind of a relief package for General Motors.

BARACK OBAMA: For the auto industry to completely collapse would be a disaster in this kind of environment…So it's my belief that we need to provide assistance to the auto industry. But I think that it can't be a blank check. So my hope is that over the course of the next week, between the White House and Congress, the discussions are shaped around providing assistance but making sure that that assistance is conditioned on labor, management, suppliers, lenders, all of the stakeholders coming together with a plan -- what does a sustainable U.S. auto industry look like? So that we are creating a bridge loan to somewhere as opposed to a bridge loan to nowhere. And that's I think what you haven't yet seen.

 

BARACK OBAMA: I've been spending a lot of time reading Lincoln…there is a wisdom there and a humility about his approach to government, even before he was president, that I just find very helpful.

STEVE KROFT: Put a lot of his political enemies in his cabinet.

BARACK OBAMA: He did.

STEVE KROFT: Is that something you're considering?

BARACK OBAMA: Well, I tell you what. I find him a very wise man.

 

STEVE KROFT: Have there been moments when you've said, ‘What did I get myself into?’

BARACK OBAMA: I will say that the challenges that we're confronting are enormous. And they're multiple. And so there are times during the course of a given a day where you think, "Where do I start in terms of moving-- moving things forward?" And I think that part of this next two months is to really get a clear set of priorities, understanding we're not going be able to do everything at once, making sure the team is in place, and moving forward in a very deliberate way and sending a clear signal to the American people that we're going to be thinking about them and what they're going through.

Reassuring, but with a healthy dose of adult reality about the sacrifice ahead.

The second half of the show with Michelle Obama sitting alongside the president-elect was a delight. It brought the couple that had become iconic since Nov. 4 back to a human scale, with her teasing him about the shabby apartment and the ramshackle car he had when they first met, and him kidding about how carefully chooses his words when talking his mother-in-law.

I don’t know if what America saw Sunday night will help steady the financial markets Monday morning. But it sure made me feel better – and I’m guessing about 20 million fellow Americans as well.

This is the fifth time Obama has been featured on 60 Minutes the past two years. The newsmagazine and the president-elect have a good thing going. And so far, I believe it has been good for the nation. I 'm, sure there will be complaints by competitors who feel excluded -- particular national newspapers and the other networks. But for now at least, I hope it continues. Under executive producer Jeff Fager, 60 Minutes is one of the most socially responsible franchises in American media.

And it almost never fail to engage and entertain.

 

Barack and Michelle Obama do their first post-election interview Sunday night on 60 Minutes, and I will be writing about afterwards right here.

Earlier in the day at 10 a.m. Sunday, I'll be a guest on CNN's Reliable Sources and we will be talking about Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's media blitz this week.

Please stop back to Z on TV Sunday night and tune in Sunday morning to CNN for Reliable Sources.

Last week, 60 Minutes was the number one show on TV with an audience of 18.47 million viewers. Here's a piece I wrote about the venerable newsmagazine describing it as the "dinosaur" that still rules Planet Television. Beyond the ratings, the show has tremendous cultural clout and serves as a model for other traditional media outlets trying to find their way in the new media world.

Top Chef, the Bravo reality series that numbers among its contestants Baltimore's Jill Snyder, scored its highest ratings ever for a season premiere this week.

The fifth season premiere of the Emmy-Award-winning series attracted 1.870 million adults 18 to 49 years of age and 2.695 million total viewers to rank number one in its time period in all key demographics vs. all cable competition.

The Wednesday night debut of Top Chef: New York was up 27 percent in adults 18 to 49 years of age and by 19 percent among total viewers compared to last year's premiere of Top Chef: Chicago.

Good news online, too:  At BravoTV.com, the Top Chef: New York site generated 1.1 million page views vs. 527,000 for the premiere of Top Chef: Chicago premiere in March.

(Above: Bravo Photo of Jill Snyder by Heidi Gutman)

By now, everyone knows the story of MSNBC being duped by a hoaxster in a report it aired on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. But what's distressing is that no one seems to notice or care about the obvious connection between the cable channel's journalistic faux pas and its recent all-out commitment to ideologically-driven programming.

MSNBC, which was once as solid in its newscasting as NBC, has now become as shoddy and subject to mistrust in what it presents as Fox News, the channel it has taken to imitating from the left.

While MSNBC has enjoyed ratings gains with its embrace of the partisan presentations offered by Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, who joined the network in September, MSNBC has done serious damage to its credibility and that of sister network, NBC. And that is a stiff price to pay for a few hundred thousand more cable viewers a night.

The public's lack of confidence in MSNBC was evidenced by the NBC-owned channel finishing last on election night -- a time when a record number of Americans was looking to TV for information they could trust. What a diminished stature MSNBC now suffers compared to the days when Brian Williams rather than Olbermann was the "face" of the channel as Williams prepared for the day when he would replace Tom Brokaw at the network anchor desk.

Here are the nuts and bolts of hoax story as reported by AP, but again, it's the moral of the story that is not being told.

According to the AP: "MSNBC was the victim of a hoax when it reported that an adviser to John McCain had identified himself as the source of an embarrassing story about Palin.

"David Shuster, an anchor for the cable news network, said on air Monday that Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, had come forth and identified himself as the source of a Fox News Channel story saying Palin had mistakenly believed Africa was a country instead of a continent. Eisenstadt identifies himself on a blog as a senior fellow at the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy.

"Yet neither he nor the institute exist; each is part of a hoax dreamed up by a filmmaker named Eitan Gorlin and his partner, Dan Mirvish, the New York Times reported Wednesday (in first breaking the story). The Eisenstadt claim had mistakenly been delivered to Shuster by a producer and was used in a political discussion Monday afternoon, MSNBC said."

"The story was not properly vetted and should not have made air," said Jeremy Gaines, an MSNBC network spokesman. "We recognized the error almost immediately and ran a correction on air within minutes."

The irony is the way in which MSNBC was hoisted on its own petard. The ratings bump generated by Olbermann and Maddow comes from liberal viewers enjoying the echo chamber between what is in their heads and on the screen at MSNBC. And they will keep tuning in as long as you don't give them any facts that conflict with their world views and prejudices -- because such facts cause cognitive dissonance and tune out.

Of course, what that means is that you providing information, analysis and conversation that has more to do with propaganda than journalism. But who cares? Ratings are ratings, right?

In this case, the "information" that was too good to resists was that Palin didn't know Africa was a continent. It was just the kind of "information" that would delight its viewers. It would create an echo chamber with the world view in the viewers' minds.

Forget going the exemplary journalistic route that CBS anchorwoman Katie Couric went in preparing intensely and then doing a stellar interview with Palin to help viewers access the candidate's knowledge of world geography and affairs. This is easier: just grab the first piece of information that arrives in an email that conveniently fits your audience's worldview and present it on-air as verified fact.

And there are larger ramifications: MSNBC's careless mistake gives Palin followers a wedge to attack the "liberal" media and try to dismiss all of the mistakes and mis-statement Palin made in interviews with Couric and ABC anchorman Charles Gibson. Ask not for whom the gong sounds -- all of us in the media are diminished by such incompetence and carelessness as that of MSNBC.

I do not suspect MSNBC will learn anything from this emarrassment. Oh, they will probably issue more statements about "editorial controls" and ""checks and balances" being put in place to keep it from ever happening again. But it is all hot air, like the stuff that Olbermann blows every weeknight in prime time.

(Photo of David Shuster by MSNBC)

 

 

Sarah Palin, who refused to do all but a handful of TV interviews during the election, continued her all-day blitzkrieg of the medium yesterday with the biggest stops at CNN.

And while neither Wolf Blitzer nor Larry King performed anywhere near the level ABC's Charles Gibson and CBS's Katie Couric did during the campaign, both CNN hosts were a big improvement over the kiss-up interviews by NBC's Matt Lauer and Greta Van Susteren of Fox News this week.

I expected a solid interview from Blitzer, who has a strong and well-deserved reputation as a straightforward journalist. But I never thought I would write the following sentence: Larry King is a tougher, more tenacious and informed interviewer than Matt Lauer. After all, King does not pretend to be a journalist, while Lauer is employed by NBC News.

If nothing else, King's conversation with Palin proves you don't have to engage in mortal hand-to-hand combat to do a useful interviewer that gives the listener a better sense of the person being interviewed. But when you are dealing with a look-at-me, win-at-any-cost narcissist like Palin who seems willing to lie left and right to repair an image that even she knows has been damaged, you have to ask a follow-up question or two and put a liitle steel in the conversation when she starts hardcore spinning.

You can go to CNN and read the full transcripts. But let me just highlight a couple of things Blitzer and King did well.

Rather than letting Palin characterize herself as a dutiful handmaiden simply following the will of the Almighty in each and every political decision she makes without challenge as Van Susteren did, Blitzer asked her this question about comments she made in a forum of the religious right: 

BLITZER: "Gov. Palin, before the election you were speaking with James Dobson of Focus on the Family and you said that you were confident that God would do the right thing for America on Nov. 4th. Did God do the right thing for America?”

PALIN: "I don't know if that was my specific quote. But I do believe that there is purpose in everything. And for me personally I put my life in God's hands and ask him to -- don't let me miss some open door that he has for me, and I'll travel through that. I think the same thing for our nation as we seek God's guidance, his wisdom, his favor and protection over our nation, that at the end of the day, that the right thing is done.

And I do believe that prayers were answered, others who prayed across this nation in the election that this nation would be protected, that we would be safe, that we would be prosperous and favored. I believe that prayer is answered."

First of all, that is her specific quote -- so she is willing even to lie about what she says about God. Second, I wonder what all the people who are without jobs today think about her claim that prayers asking that "we would prosperous and favored" were answered.

Blitzer did his best work in showing the fundamental contradiction between all her sound bite rhetoric about "personal responsibility" and her support of the Wall Street bailout during the election. And he really exposed her inability to think on her feet when he asked as a followup if we should also bail out the auto and other industries.

Each jumbled phrase of her answer -- she doesn't speak in actual sentences most of the time -- seemed to contradict the one that came before.

As for King, give him credit, time after time, he told her in a nice way that she had not answered his question and politely asked her to answer it.

And each time she lied about "wishing" she could have done "more interviews" during the election, Blitzer and King reminded her that CNN was non-stop in its requests for such interviews -- and that she was non-stop in denying them. She even went so far as to blame McCain and his handlers for not letting her speak -- another contradiction that belies what she calls her "love" of her former running mate.

Memo to Matt: See, it's not that hard -- all it takes is a little preparation and a commitment to informing the viewer not kissing up to the person you are interviewing. One job of journalism is to expose public liars -- not give them a bigger and bigger forum in which to spread  them.

(Above: Anchorage Daily News photo of Sarah Palin by Bill Roth)

As much as I hated to see the presidential campaign end last week, there was one happy thought: At least my TV screen would no longer be filled with images of Sarah Palin.

What a fool I was. She is everywhere on TV this week -- from Greta Van Susteren on Fox News, to Matt Lauer on NBC's Today. Sadly, there is even more to come tonight on CNN with Larry King.

And unlike her disastrous interviews with a couple of real journalists in CBS anchorwoman Katie Couric and ABC anchorman Charles Gibson, Palin is running circles around the people she is talking to this week, being allowed to lie left and right while portraying herself as a modest handmaiden of the Almighty willing to walk through any "door" he "opens" for her -- especially if it happens to be at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Lauer and Van Susteren both trekked up to Alaska to get the jump on the 10 million TV interviews she is doing this week. And of the two, Lauer is the biggest disappointment. I expected almost nothing from Van Susteren, who defines bottom feeding both in subject matter and approach to news on cable TV.

But Lauer was such a wimp -- almost as obsequious as the smarmy Sean Hannity in the bended-knees interview the Fox talk show host did with Palin during the election. One of Lauer's lowest moments came when he asked Palin if she felt that Couric had somehow been "unfair" in the questions she asked.

Here's the excerpt:

LAUER: But you didn't think the (Katie Couric) interview was unfair? I mean, the questions were fairly straightforward, weren't they?

PALIN: Sure. Yeah. But, you know, questions about, well, you know, "What do you read up there in Alaska?" To me that was a little bit annoying. Because I'm like, what do you mean, what do I read in Alaska? I read the same things that you guys read in New York -- and there in LA and in Washington state. What do you mean what I read up there? But anyway, just-- just some annoyance, that certainly I'm sure showed through.

Couric didn't say what do you read "up there in Alaska" -- as if it's another planet. She asked Palin what newspapers and magazines she reads. Period. I saw the interview and read the transcript.

And it was devastating that this so-called journalism major couldn't name one newspaper or magazine that she read -- not one.

And now Palin twists Couric's words to make herself look less ignorant, and Lauer lets her run with it.

He should be ashamed -- as should his co-host Meredith Vieira who marveled at how "candid" Palin was during the interview when she and Lauer talked between segments about the first part of the anchorman's conversation with the governor. I'll tell you this, neither Lauer nor Vieira will ever be confused with Couric when it comes to being a journalist and skilled interviewer.

I will say no more about Van Susteren's interview. It speaks for itself. Here is how this craven politician who can't leave the limelight alone was allowed to characterize her political decision-making process for Fox viewers:

"Putting my life in my creator's hands -- this is what I always do," Palin said. "I'm like, OK, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray. I'm like, don't let me miss the open door ... And if there is an open door in '12 or four years later, and if it is something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, an opportunity for me, then I'll plow through that door."

All that was missing on the Fox Channel was a choir of heavenly angels breaking into a song of rapture.

It was a moment so falsely pious and saccharine that I suspect not even Tina Fey and Saturday Night Live could hit the right notes of satire. It reminded me of radio broadcasts from the 1920s with the new breed of radio evangelists like Aimee Semple McPherson -- or maybe the TV cable ministries of folks like Jim and Tammy Faye Baker in the 1980s.

Whatever it was, it sure as heck had nothing to do with journalism. Let's hope Larry King and Wolf Blitzer and all the others do better today with this one-time candidate who should be hanging her head in shame for dragging down the Republican ticket the way poll after poll says she did.

But that's not Palin's style, is it?

And I'm not betting the TV interviewers today will do any better than Lauer and van Susteren.

(Photo of van Susteren in Palin's home by Bill Roth Anchorage Daily News)

Once again, 60 Minutes, the venerable CBS News magazine, has proved the analysts wrong in winning last week as the highest-rated show on all of television with an audience of 18.47 million viewers Sunday night.

Two sets of analysts, actually.

The first group proven wrong by that number one ranking includes those pundits who foolishly assumed America's interest in news, politics and public affairs was suddenly going to end last Tuesday with the election of a new president. The newsmagazine's lead story was a savvy backstage interview taped on election night with President-elect Barack Obama's braintrust. It was an illuminating conversation -- especially in terms of race -- lead by Steve Kroft, and you can read my Sunday night review of it here.

 The second group of know-it-alls are the new-media gurus who have been pointing to 60 Minutes as the poster dinosaur for network news. Last week's tube-topping ratings mark the second consecutive week and the fourth time in seven weeks that TV's number-one newsmagazine made the top 10 list of all shows on TV.

Do you know how many millions (tens of millions) of dollars 60 Minutes has made for CBS since it was pronounced a dinosaur supposedly crawling to the media boneyard?

I will tell you what 60 Minutes is: It's the poster show for all those smart enough to understand that media epochs do not begin and end on a dime. Those who have actually studied media history know that the periods of transition can last decades. And as inevitable as the new media in which I now write this blog are, there are still tens of millions of dollars to be made in network TV news and the newspaper that pays my salary -- for many, many years to come.

And, by the way, it's not all about prime-time dollars -- nice as those are. When you attract 18 million prime-time viewers, you have enormous cultural clout. You are still setting and reflecting the national agenda like no other media.

Way to go, 60 Minutes.

(Photo of Obama advisers from 60 Minutes courtesy of CBS News)

There is a tendency in this country to not want to look back. Once something positive happens, no matter how bad things have been, we want to turn the page.

Last week's election was certainly one of those hopeful moments of passage, and the danger is we will just move forward without learning any lessons from the past three decades about how it is that the nation came to be in the sorry shape it is today.

So, even if you think you have had all the TV politics you can stand, please watch Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story Tuesday night at 9 on PBS. I promise this is the the kind of first-rate history that can keep us from repeating tragic mistakes -- if only we take the time to learn it.

Atwater is the former campaign operative and Republican National Committee chairman who wrote the book on the dirtiest of dirty political tricks until his death in 1991 of a brain tumor. His tactics helped Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush get elected president. If you know about the infamous and racist Willie Horton ad used in the 1988 campaign to destroy Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis, then you've seen the handiwork of the late Mr. Atwater.

But his sleazy tactics extend far beyond Horton.

"He mattered in American politics," Howard Fineman, of Newsweek, says in the film. "Because of the man he got elected, because of the party he shaped. He was very important not only to George H. W.'s victory, but to his son's victory."

And his proteges -- including Karl Rove -- are still on the case and very active in this nation's political and cultural life.

The 90-minute political biography traces Atwater's climb from small-time South Carolina politics to top of the Washington heap in 1989 after the Bush victory over Dukakis.

What a resume: College Republican leader for Richard Nixon in 1972. Internship under the racist Strom Thurmond. And then, a few state races in South Carolina where he falsely accused one candidate of having psychiatric problems and another of fathering illegitimate children. All lies, of course, and he was proud of it.

And then, on to bigger lies: helping Ronald Reagan win the South Carolina primary by planting a false story that one his opponents was "buying the black vote."

And in each instance of an Atwater dirty trick, producer Stefan Forbes tracks down and records testimony from the people involved with Atwater. One South Carolina "journalist" laughs about the way he was "used" by Atwater. Thankfully, one of the men who was destroyed by Atwater and the journalist bears witness with the pain in his voice today to how unfunny the evil wrought by Atwater and the politicians and journalists he worked with was.

Some of the most powerful testimony comes from Ed Rollins, the GOP operative who ran Reagan's campaign in 1984. He gave Atwater his first Washington job only to see Atwater turn on him -- that's the kind of low life Atwater was.

"Lee put a spear in my back, Rollins says in the film. "...It was just a two-year effort to destroy me."

And yet, at the end, as Atwater faced death, he begged Rollins to be his friend.

What a pack of thieves -- and this is the world of 1980s GOP politics from which Roger Ailes, the man who today runs the Fox News Channel, came. Yes, that one -- Mr. Fair and Balanced.

The darkness that Lee Atwater brought to American politics is alive and well. Sarah Palin embraced some his techniques when she took to the campaign trail and talked about Obama "palling around with terrorists." The GOP campaign worker in Pennsylvania who made up a story about being attacked by a black man was using a page out of the Atwater racist playbook -- as was Matt Drudge when he took the lie and ran with it on his Web site.

Sean Hannity was doing an Atwater when he asked question during an interview with Palin loaded with smears against Obama. You will even see a grassroots character that Atwater brought out of nowhere in a South Carolina election who will stunningly remind you of Joe The Plumber.

Forbes and Frontline have done this nation a great public service by making this film. Don't think the political war is over and be so foolish to believe that you can afford to miss it.

(Photo of Lee Atwater courtesy of Frontline)

 

Just as Sean Hannity was rewarded for his ideologically driven nightly program at Fox last month, so has MSNBC today announced a new four-year contract for Keith Olbermann.

The deal guarantees four more years of partisan warfare between Fox and MSNBC. Make of that what you will for the future of cable news  --  and the republic.

I think the rise of the likes of Hannity, Olbermann and O'Reilly is one of the most troubling trends in TV news -- a hard turn toward propaganda and  demogoguery

The new agreement calls for Olbermann to continue as host of his weeknight show, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, according to a statement released by the cable channel.

Olbermann also "will play a prominent role in MSNBC's coverage of all major news events," the cable channel's statement said. He will continue to co-host NBC's Football Night in America studio show.

"Keith Olbermann is at the core of MSNBC's current success," said Phil Griffin, president of MSNBC. "Countdown is our signature program and I'm thrilled that we're going to be able to bring it to Keith's loyal viewers for another four year term."

(Above: NBC Photo of Keith Olbermann by Virginia Sherwood)

Race, race and more race.

From CNN’s Situation Room late Friday afternoon, to D.L. Hughley’s Breaks the News on Saturday and CBS’ 60 Minutes on Sunday, television was filled with talk of race this weekend.

I have been celebrating the promise of this discussion on TV since July when CNN debuted the penetrating documentary, Black in America, with Soledad O’Brien. The catalyst, of course, was the candidacy of Barack Obama. And given his election Tuesday, it is no surprise that the airwaves were filled with talk of race this weekend.

But while I have been thinking and writing the last three months in the belief that pretty much any and all talk of race on TV would be a good thing that made us smarter and more sensitive as a nation, I am starting to see that this is a far more complicated matter. And already there are a raft of questions begging to be asked – and answered.

For example, is it all right for anyone to explore race on TV? Or are only certain people allowed to have the discussion? And are there any approaches or aspects that are out of bounds?

And how about channels – can it happen anywhere, or only on certain channels? And who decides – who has the authority to police the discussion? And what should be done with racial discourses we don’t like on TV? Should they be censored?

There was plenty of food for thought this weekend – and I am sure a banquet in days and weeks ahead. How about the lineup of four white men and one white woman discussing Obama and race on 60 Minutes Sunday night? Is it OK that there was not a person of color in that informed and illuminating discussion on one of TV’s Top 10 most popular shows?

And what about D.L Hughley’s show on CNN? Here’s an accomplished black performer doing sketch comedy, commentary and satire on CNN, and there are plenty of people of color who don’t like his show and want it off the air?

Let’s start with Hughley. You can see what I wrote about the show on this blog when it debuted. More interesting than my review, though, are the responses. There are about 140 of them, which is not particularly high for  Z On TV, but I would urge you to read through some of them.

They run about two out of three against the show, but most surprising to me were the number of people who self identified as black and then demanded the show be taken off the air because they found it offensive. Some said they had not actually watched, but were told it was offensive, and they wanted it off the air.

Never mind that there were also a lot of folks who identified themselves as black and said they liked the show, my question is this: What about freedom of expression? Someone watches five minutes of a comedy show that is trying to be cutting edge, and they don’t like it, and so call for it to be taken off the air. I wonder about the mindset and if TV programmers will crater to it.

There are some very specific comments about the venue of CNN vs. Comedy Central (which carries David Alan Grier’s Chocolate News) and the kind of broad comedy Hughley started out doing as opposed to a more cerebral kind of satire. More on those nuances later. But I should add that Hughley had a strong and revealing interview Sunday night with U.S. Rep. Jesse L. Jackson, Jr., a key adviser to Obama. It was one of the most informative in a day that wall-to-wall with smart Obama-related interviews.

I want to share bites of the 60 Minutes discussion on Sunday and an exchange that O’Brien has with two of her guests Friday on the Situation Room.

Much of the power of the 60 Minutes segment came from correspondent Steve Kroft sitting down in a hotel room and interviewing four of Obama’s top campaign advisers only an hour or so on Tuesday night after his speech in Chicago’s Grant Park. That’s about as good as it gets on access – unless he had Obama himself.

Here is some of what they said about race and the campaign on 60 Minutes Sunday:

Answering Kroft’s question about whether race was a part of planning the election strategy, campaign manager David Plouffe said, "No, honestly, you had to take a leap of faith in the beginning that the people will get by race. And I think the number of meetings we had about race was zero."

Campaign adviser David Axelrod added, "The only time we got involved in a discussion of race was when people asked us about it. It was a fascination of the news media … the political community. But internally, it was not an obsession of ours."

Under follow-up questioning from Kroft, they acknowledged that race did become a factor when the media began playing video of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s former pastor.

"That was a terrible weekend," adviser Anita Dunn remembers. "The excerpts were endlessly looped on television."

According to Axelrod, a turning point was reached when Obama said: ‘I’m going to make a speech about race and talk about Jeremiah Wright and the perspective of the larger issue … And either the people will accept it or I won’t be president …’ "

The conversation that got me thinking along the lines of how TV is changing in relation to its discourse on race, though, was this one on Friday right after Obama’s news conference with O’Brien interviewing Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, who is black, and Terry Jeffrey, the white editor in chief of the Cybercast News Service.

They were talking about what O’Brien described as "awkward moments" during Obama’s session with the news, and she included in that Obama’s reference to himself as a "mutt" as he discussed plans to get a family dog. It seemed as if Jeffrey, who is white, wanted to label it a gaffe. But he was quickly over-ruled.

O'BRIEN: No, I guess my question was, you know, there were some people in the room when we were watching that who said, ooh. And I wondered -- I personal, as someone who is biracial, not offended at all. But I wonder, is that going to read badly?

BRAZILE: No. No, I -- look, I -- again, I thought, when I heard himself say it, call himself a mutt, I cracked up. I'm like, he doesn't look like a mutt, you know, a lot smarter, but...

O'BRIEN: Charming, self-deprecating?

BRAZILE: Yes, but mutts -- mutts are very smart dogs. I know a lot of mutts myself.

O’Brien was smooth and even-handed, and her self-identification lent her an instant authority. After decades of white men with gray hair owning that kind of TV news authority, it was clear the ground in TV Land was shifting this weekend.

(Photo CNN)

 

 

 

I am surprised by how little discussion there has been about President-elect Barack Obama's first news conference Friday in TV terms. After all, the major networks and cable channels did interrupt all programming to carry it, even though there was little news.

So, as the critic who has been arguing for months that Obama is the last great TV candidate and possibly the best since the archetype, John F. Kennedy, I guess I would be remiss if I didn't weigh in with some analysis of the news conference as a TV production. And, for now at least, I have decided to keep reviewing them for the foreseeable future.

After all, Obama and his handlers used TV brilliantly to get elected, so why wouldn't they continue to use the medium to try and effectively govern? And wouldn't it be just as important -- or more -- to understand how they are using TV to get their messages across and to shape citizens' perceptions of the administration and the country at this crucial time in our history?

Overall, for Friday's performance: B-

Start with the use of set design and symbolism.

You can't always control what the network cameras will show, but you can limit what it is possible for them to see. If you can help it, you never let a president walk on to a stage that hasn't been set or dressed. This one was.

Directly behind Obama as he stood at the podium were three huge American flags. And behind them, a rich, blue velvet drape. It wasn't just blue, it was the electric TV blue that the Democrats have wisely appropriated for the party. The drape was a near perfect match in color for the sign on the front of the podium that said "office of the president elect."

And then, there was the long, gray line of men and women standing onstage as Obama entered. I joke about the gray -- some of the people standing there were not that old. But it was reassuring in this troubled economic time to see so much intelligence and experience standing behind the president elect. And so many of them were familiar: Paul Volcker, Robert Reich and Lawrence Summers.

The messages Obama's team wanted to send at the end of this historic week were those of stability, reassurance, command and presidential power -- and every prop and person on the stage spoke to that.

On one side of Obama stood Joe Biden, the vice president-elect, and on the other in the straight-ahead camera shot was Volcker, the former Federal Reserve Chairman -- one older man who is an expert in foreign policy, the other in the economy, the nation's two biggest concerns.

Overall, give the TV production an A- in symbolism, imagery and staging.

But as important as images and pictures are, TV also involves words. And in this regard, Obama did not do very well.

It wasn't just the gaffe about the "seances" of former first lady Nancy Reagan, though, that was pretty bad. Imagine if George W. Bush had something along those lines about a Kennedy widow?

But Obama seemed tight at the microphone throughout the session. I have no doubt he was trying for the badinage JFK managed to pull off with reporters in his TV news conferences, but it was too much probably to hope for in his first encounter. And so, he wound up striking discordant notes and seeming uneven in tone.

Obama will surely get better, and probably surpass Kennedy in using TV to reassure, inspire and guide the country through these frightening and deeply troubled times. But there is no way to give him better than an C- for the verbal part of Friday's production.

I feel certain, though, that there are many and better news conferences ahead.

(Above: AFP/Getty Images photo by Stan Honda)

 

It used to be that America had to wait for Theodore White's The Making of the President books to get the backstage story of the presidential campaigns -- his most memorable being the 1960 saga of John F. Kennedy's rise to power.

Today, it is the documentary filmmaker with access to the candidate who tells that vital story. And if anyone was wondering who that filmmaker was going to be for this epic election, the answer was given yesterday by HBO's documentary maven Sheila Nevins with the announcement that her premium cable channel had reached agreement with actor Edward Norton's production company, Class 5 Films, to air a documentary that has been in production since 2006.

According to HBO's release, directors Amy Rice and Alicia Sams had "unprecedented and exclusive access to the senator and his campaign." In addition to documenting "Obama's historic rise," the film will be "examine American politics and culture through the prism of his candidacy."

According to Norton, who approached Obama and his staff several months before the senator announced his candidacy for president: "Senator Obama's history making race for the White House has given our film a perfect framework to explore the pulse of the country at this vital moment in our history. We believe this film will capture a tipping point in American history when a new generation of leadership emerged and old prejudices were finally vaulted over."

The project was started in 2006 by Rice, a cinematographer who had co-directed the documentary From Ashes. She was inspired by Obama's speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, she says. When Norton's company agreed to produce, Sams was brought in as co-director. Rice and Sams had worked together on a series of short films about public schools in New York city.

No one on TV does documentaries like HBO, thanks to Nevins, a pioneering figure in the genre. And one of the keys to her success in making independent films work for television is in the editing. The as yet untitled Obama film will be edited by Sam Pollard who did Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke and 4 Little Girls, two landmark films for HBO. Pollard, who also worked on Eyes on the Prize, is the money-in-the-bank guy who all but guarantees a winner here.

"It has been a unique experience chronicling the campaign as they shake up the political establishment during this fascinating time in American politics," Sams and Rice said in a joint statement issued by HBO.

Filming will continue through the inauguration in 2009. The airdate for next year has not been set.

But this is the backstage document on this once-in-lifetime campaign for which America will be waiting. Let's hope Norton's team makes good on the access. If anybody can make it work, it's Nevins.

 

 

               

         

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 One of the most encouraging lessons to take from the landmark TV election coverage we were lucky enough to witness in recent months is the truth that good journalism can be good business.

In naming winners and losers in TV election coverage, I can say without fear of contradiction that there is no network, channel or news operation that did better in more ways that CNN.

And no one did worse -- at least on election night -- than MSNBC with Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews seemingly more focused on trying to steal air time from anchorman David Gregory than providing viewers with information and insight.

The latest bit of confirmation comes in the form of Nielsen ratings that show CNN beating all networks and cable channels from 8 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. election night with an average audience of 13.3 million viewers. (The best network performance was 12.5 million for ABC.)

CNN's audience was more than twice as large as the 5.9 million who watched MSNBC, which finished last among the cable news channels. (MSNBC finished 2.2 million viewers behind the lackluster Fox News Channel. Who would have thought that possible with the ratings boost Rachel Maddow seemed to be giving NBC's sister channel)

The list of individual winners at CNN is long and strong. Start with John King, of course, and the Magic Wall. As nice as the technology was, let's not take the wrong lesson from it: It was King's down-to-the-precinct level knowledge and passion for politics that made it so exciting and illuminating on caucus and election nights.

Also, let's not forget the hardest working and most informed team of campaign-trail correspondents on TV: Suzanne Malveaux, Dana Bash, Jessica Yellin and Candy Crowley.

And none of this happens with CNN President Jon Klein and his commitment to down-the-middle journalism that emphasizes verified facts, context and balanced analysis instead of the highly-partisan, ideologically-driven cheerleading-and-hectoring presentation on MSNBC.

NBC News management made an effort, at least, to move Matthews and Olbermann off the anchor desk after their embarrassing performances at the national conventions. But it was mainly show.

While Gregory was named anchorman, Matthews and Olbermann acted like they were still the ones leading coverage Tuesday night. In fact, they even started bickering again on-air as they did at the conventions.

And guess what? America tuned them out on one of the most important news nights of our lifetime -- and went for the fact-and-information-based journalism on CNN.

Let's hope the lesson is not lost on other news executives -- particularly at the local TV news level.

 

In a sense, everyone in TV news won during this long and historic election cycle.

When the coverage started, analysts were certain the Television Age had ended, and we were not somehow instantly in the Era of the Internet. But the medium roared back and became the dominant force in election coverage. Everyone enjoyed record ratings.

That is one lesson to be learned form the election that just ended: Media epochs don't end and begin on a dime. TV, even the part known as the so-called dinosaurs of network television, is still the principal story teller of American life -- even as this TV critic moves almost full time into writing this blog and living online.

But there are many important lessons to learn from the actions of several winners and losers in TV coverage during this dramatic election. I'll be writing about those in a number of posts. But let's start with two of the top honors that go to CBS anchorwoman Katie Couric and ABC anchorman Charles Gibson for their focused, forceful and revealing interviews with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

Before Gibson and Couric, the GOP image machine was successfully selling the largely unknown Palin to Americans as a "frontierswoman." Folksy and bold, that's a good thing in a country that defines its core identity in terms of its relationship to The Frontier. (Think Daniel Boone and John F. Kennedy -- and about 10 million archetypal figures in between).

But what an empty vessel and an act-like-you-know-character Palin came to be seen after just a couple sessions on the evening news with these two network anchors.

Without Gibson and Couric, I do not believe we would have had such powerful late-in-the-campaign negative assessments of Palin's qualification as the one Colin Powell delivered on NBC's Meet the Press, for example.

And Powell's words, which by the way were delivered on one of those so-called dinosaurs and reported second hand by everyone else in new and old media, were devastating to her and the man who selected her, John McCain.

Gibson was steady, methodical and took Palin apart like a professor slightly annoyed at his recognition that the student hadn't bothered to even try and study the night before.

And, boy, did he have gender issues to deal with from those who were angry about the way their candidate came off looking in the interview. Go back and read the comments to this blog about what an evil sexist bully Gibson was for putting his chair so close to Palin's and "intimidating her." Oh yeah, the woman who shoots animals from a plane was scared by old Charles Gibson sitting too close to her on a TV set.

Couric, who has dealt with more gender issues than any 10,000 pioneering women should have to, was the perfect interviewer to bat second in the order. No one could use the gender talk against Couric, and if anyone didn't want to admit it before her conversations with Palin, they had to acknowledge it after: Couric is the best interviewer in TV journalism.

Don't talk me about Bill Moyers or even Charlie Rose. Couric works nuances of conversation most network interviewers don't even know exists. There was a reason she was such a phenomenal success on morning television and it had little to do with her so-called perky persona. It was the interviewing, stupid (and I address that to myself as one of the critics that did not appreciate how incredibly skilled she is one-on-one).

Again, it appeared Palin did no preparation for the exam, while Couric pulled a week of all-nighters. I have never seen a TV interviewer better prepared than Couric, who showed the nation a vice presidential candidate who did not know what a vice president did, seemed to have never read the Constitution -- or a daily newspaper or magazine, for that matter. I wonder how the school that gave Palin a degree in journalism feels about that last point.

No, what Gibson and Couric is not in a league with Edward. R. Murrow exposing Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Palin did not yet -- and probably now never will -- have the kind of power McCarthy did in the 1950s. But she had the makings of being as reckless a force -- and they stopped her in her tracks for now at least.

Here's another winner: Rick Kaplan, the veteran executive producer of the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, who not only worked with Couric to pull that newscast back from the brink of implosion when he took over 18 months ago, but helped remake it into a journalistic winner. The newscast on the night that the first part of Couric's interview with Palin aired was a model of how the nightly news should be done: crisp, focused and confident that the stories it chose to cover that day were the ones that mattered most for its viewers.

This is getting long for the Web, so let's break it into more than one post. In my next installment, I'll talk about NBC News and Brian Williams, CNN and John King, Jessica Yellin, Dana Bash, Suzanne Malveaux and Candy Crowley.

Could I pass on Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews? not after seeing the five-headed monster David Gregory tried to play lion tamer to on MSNBC election night.

And I'm taking nominees if you have some. But, please, tell me why you think the news organization or person is a winner or loser -- and what we can learn from the way he or she performed in election coverage.

(Above: ABC News Photo of Charles Gibson by Donna Svennevik; CBS News photo of Katie Couric by John P. Filo.)

 

 

Forget the hologram of Jessica Yellin, John King's Magic Wall, correspondents coast to coast, and all those analysts packed into CNN's New York newsroom.

The all-news cable channel separated itself from the competition last night, when it anticipated and then went with the story as it shifted from votes counted in New York, to spontaneous outbursts of celebration throughout the land at the news that Democrat Barack Obama had been elected.

The evening's most moving moments came after Obama's stirring speech to a sea of hopeful faces in Chicago's Grant Park last night. As Obama and vice president-elect Joe Biden and their families waved to the crowd, the cameras of CNN took viewers on an emotional and joyous cross-country ride.

The quick-cut TV journey started at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the church of the Rev. Martin Luther King, where a rollicking and joyful celebration was under way. Just before Obama's victory speech, viewers had seen and heard Dr. King's daughter, Bernice, tearfully explaining what the election meant to her: "That my parents' suffering was not in vain."

And then, the cameras cut to Harlem, where crowds paraded and danced in the streets while car horns honked and voices cheered. Ditto in the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco and Times Square in New York.

And from there, viewers were taken to the fences surrounding the White House where another huge crowd had gathered.

And at each stop, the cameras closed in on faces filled with intense emotion. Those faces bearing witness to the moment said more about the hopes and fears of America today than all the words of all the anchors and correspondents that clogged the airwaves last night.

After writing about the TV magic of Obama's speech last night, I raced home from the Sun's downtown newsroom hoping to share some of the remaining TV experience with my wife. As I drove up Charles Street through Mount Vernon, I was met by a crowd of young people banging pots and pans and dancing up the street past toward the train station.

And then, at Cold Spring and Hillen on the edge of the Morgan State University campus, I came upon an even bigger celebration with half a dozen City of Baltimore Police cars cordoning off an area of several blocks so that students could celebrate in the area around the union. And everywhere car horns honked and music played.

CNN had captured that midnight joy breaking across the land last night -- and if I didn't believe that what I saw on my small screen was representative of what was happening in the larger society as I watched it unfold, I did by the time I got home.

TV news is guilty of a million sins, and I make a living writing about them. But last night, as I savored the symmetry between what I saw on TV and experienced in the streets of Baltimore, I let the moment wash over me.

I was grateful to be alive to witness this moment of history, and thankful to the medium of television  for expanding my world beyond Baltimore so that I could experience it with Americans coast to coast.

I know it's technological razzle-dazzle and some purists will argue that the money could somehow be better spent on nuts-and-bolts, boots-on-the-ground journalism, but at 7:15 p.m., CNN beamed a hologram of correspondent Jessica Yellin from Grant Park in Chicago to its election headquarters in New York, and it was stunning.

Bathed in a pool of light and glimmering around the edges, Yellin suddenly appeared in the center of the CNN newsroom to chat with anchor Wolf Blitzer about the huge crowd massing in and around Grant Park in Chicago in hopes of a victory by Barack Obama.

After detailing events in Chicago, Yellin explained the technology that made her hologram possible.

She was standing, she said, in a tent in Chicago surrounded by a ring of 35 high-definition cameras that were in sync via computer with cameras in New York. The 35 Chicago cameras created her image and then sent it to the cameras in New York, so that she appeared in real time as a hologram.

"It's like I follow in the tradition of Princess Leia," Yellin said jokingly.

Blitzer ended the interview, saying, "You were a terrific hologram, Jessica. Thank you very much."

Talk about Tuesday night being historic: It's a safe bet no anchorman ever ended a conversation with a correspondent thanking her for being a good hologram.

Poor Fox News channel. Just before CNN debuted its hologram technology, Fox anchorman Brit Hume was praising his channel's technology that allowed them to show a correspondent against a background so that the reporter almost appeared to be in the background setting -- almost.

The technology that so excited Hume was a modern variation of what Hollywood feature films were using in the 1930s -- I'm not kidding. It was pre-historic by the standards of CNN.

But then, overall, it was an embarrassing night for Fox. By 9:45, shortly after they finally declared Ohio for Obama, Hume & Company seemed as if they didn't know where to turn next. Even analyst Karl Rove couldn't buck them up. It was as if someone let all the air out of the low-tech studio in which they sat.

 

 

There is free media, and then there is free media.

It is one thing to have a free shot at an audience of 12 to 15 million viewers, but to do so you have to field questions from a focused, well-prepared interviewer like Katie Couric or Charles Gibson -- or even David Letterman.

It's another thing when you get a free run at an audience that size on the eve of the election of a lifetime, and the interviewer is ESPN sportscaster Chris Berman asking questions so simplistic they sounded as if they came right out of a high school textbook on interviewing.

The questions Berman was shown asking the candidates during halftime of ESPN's Monday Night Football fell short of being softballs -- they were more like silly putty.

Question 1 for Obama: What did you learn about yourself during the campaign?

"I learned that I don't get too high when things are going well, and I don't get too low when things are tough," Obama said. "That has helped me and the organization stay steady."

Obama then connected the dots for his audience, saying things are tough for the country now, so he thinks being steady will make him a good president. He couldn't have had an easier path to a slam dunk if he had paid for a 15-second TV commercial.

The next big question for both Obama and McCain: If they could change one thing in sports, what would it be?

Obama said he thinks "it's about time we had playoffs in college football."

McCain said he'd like to see and end to "performance enhancing drugs."

It gets worse. Are you sure you want me to go on? OK.

Berman asked both what was the best piece of advice they ever got from sports.

Shock of shocks, both cited lessons learned from a wise high school coach against whom they once mildly rebelled in their youth.

Obama's high school coach told him it's about the team not him. And so, he learned to be a team player, which he also thinks will make him-- are you ready for this? -- a good president.

McCain's high school coach taught him to always do "the honorable thing -- even when you think no one is looking." And guess what he thinks that will make him? You guessed it.

I didn't expect Berman to grill them on their tax plans, health care proposals or qualifications of their running mates. And I understand he was trying to make the interviews work for his Monday night football audience.

But I really think Berman or someone at ESPN could have aimed a little higher in the kinds of questions asked -- and made more of an effort to extract useful information rather then just serving up beachballs and letting the two candidates whack them in any direction they wanted.

After all, this was an audience of millions on the eve of the election of a lifetime.

For the record, as Berman explained, the interviews were conducted earlier on Monday before Obama had heard that his grandmother died.

 

With America facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Fox is about to debut a new reality TV show that will feature rich people giving away money.

And one of those rich persons is Baltimore's Molly Shattuck, wife of Mayo Shattuck III, CEO of Constellation Energy and one of those corporate executives whose golden parachutes have become such a focus of discussion in recent months.

The series, which is called Secret Millionaire, will debut at 8 p.m. Dec. 3 on Rupert Murdoch's Fox television network.

Here is how the network's press release describes the show and Shattuck:

"The millionaires include an internet mogul worth $300 million, a husband-and-wife team who own a multi-million dollar magazine-publishing business, a successful Southern California lawyer, an owner of a restaurant empire, a Baltimore socialite and former NFL cheerleader, as well as a software inventor worth $50 million."

It continues: "The secret millionaires will leave their opulent lifestyles and go undercover to experience life in some of the most impoverished areas of the country including a community devastated by Hurricane Katrina, an old coal-mining town in Schuylkill County, Pa., and areas outside of Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas, where people in need live just minutes from those in upscale, gated communities."

Challenged with living on minimum wage, the millionaires will immerse themselves in situations beyond their comprehension. They will work side-by-side with community members and befriend those in need. During their stay, they decide who of their new-found friends, neighbors or co-workers should ultimately receive their extraordinary gifts of a lifetime – at least $100,000 of their own money."

Here's Shattuck as described by Fox: "Shattuck is married to Mayo Shattuck III, and is the mother of five children. Shattuck is also a civic leader in Baltimore, Md., where her many charitable efforts have focused on raising awareness and funding for the health, education and artistic development of disadvantaged inner city youth. Shattuck previously served as a Corporate Center Director for Sylvan Learning Systems and as a marketing associate for Alex Brown & Sons, Inc. She recently became nationally known when, at the age of 38, she became the oldest cheerleader in NFL history, cheering for the Baltimore Ravens.

In an email to the Sun, Fox publicist Michael Roach characterized Shattuck's involvement as follows: "One of them is Molly Shattuck...who relocated to Shenandoah, Pa., for the shoot to seek out those making a difference in that community."

The most provocative and successful reality TV shows are those that connect with tensions in the larger society, and there sure is a lot of tension these days about the gap between rich and poor.

(Above: Fox photo of Molly Shattuck by Michael Yarish)

 

From the "Weekend Update" desk on Saturday Night Live, to halftime at Monday Night Football, the presidential candidates will take any TV forum they can find to try and get their message out.

Tonight, on the eve of America going to the polls, both John McCain and Barack Obama will be heard during halftime of Monday Night Football in interviews taped today.

I'll be writing about the interviews afterward on this blog. So, after the game, tune in here.

You have to admit that it was inspired and surreal even by the standards of this remarkable election -- John McCain, the real Republican presidential candidate, teaming up with Tina Fey, the actress you plays GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live, to do a shopping channel infomercial.

Some analysts will surely see it as a moment of debasement by a desperate McCain, but it did give him a chance to embrace the poor-me underdog mantle he has wrapped himself in for the last few days -- and to reach a larger audience with it than he could ever hope to garner on his own.

For SNL, it gave them one more big gulp of record ratings and another night at ground zero of the hot spot in American popular culture where politics and TV meet in this once-in-lifetime election. (The overnight ratings were second only to the episode in which Palin appeared -- and the difference was only two-tenths of a ratings point.)

One other thing, to all those McCain and Palin supporters who whine bitterly to this blog about how SNL and Jon Stewart and all the "elite liberal press" never make jokes about the Democrats as they do about the Republicans, read on. Here are bites of the two sketches in which McCain appeared, complete with plenty of shots at Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN – "Good evening, my fellow Americans, I'm John McCain. 

TINA FEY AS GOV. SARAH PALIN – "And, you know, I'm just Sarah Palin."

MCCAIN – "The final days of any election are the most essential.  This past Wednesday, Barack Obama purchased airtime on three major networks.  We, however, can only afford QVC."

FEY AS PALIN – "These campaigns sure are expensive."  (She strokes the rich fabric of her jacket's lapel -- a reference to the $150,000 in GOP that she spent on clothing and accessories for her and her family.)

MCCAIN – "They sure are.  So tonight, we come before you to give you some final remarks on our campaign."

FEY AS PALIN – "And, as part of our agreement with the QVC folks, we're gonna try and sell you some stuff."

MCCAIN – "This has been an historic campaign, so why not remember it with our line of collectible products.  Such as ten commemorative plates that celebrates the ten Town Hall debates between Senator Obama and myself.  They're blank, he wouldn't agree to those debates.  Too bad.  They're still nice plates.

FEY AS PALIN – "And who wouldn't want the complete set of limited edition 'Joe' action figures?  There's 'Joe the Plumber,' 'Joe Six-Pack,' and my personal favorite, 'Joe Biden.'  If you pull this cord, he talks for forty-five minutes. 

(SHE pulls cord)

JASON SUDEIKIS AS SEN. JOE BIDEN (O.C.) -- "I take the Amtrak to work every day.  Then -- after work -- I take it home.  Let me tell you something about Joe Biden..."

MCCAIN – "It's great if you want to clear out a party."

FEY AS PALIN – "Or keep deer out of your yard." 

MCCAIN – "But we're not just here to sell products.  We're here with a message.  We are at a crossroads in American history.  The leadership of the next four years will have many challenges and I believe my experience and my leadership will make a difference.

FEY AS PALIN – "Also too – sorry -- I need to remind you that there are just two minutes left in our 'Washington outsider jewelry extravaganza.'" 

MCCAIN – "Are you someone who likes fine jewelry and also respects a politician who can reach across the aisle?  If so, you can't go wrong with McCain Fine Gold. 

(CINDY MCCAIN displays the  "McCain Fine Gold" like a game show model)

MCCAIN (CONT'D) – "It commemorates the McCain Feingold Act -- and also looks great with evening wear.  Thank you, Cindy."

FEY AS PALIN – "And what busy hockey mom wouldn't want to freshen up her home with Sarah Palin's 'Ayers Fresheners.'  You plug these into the wall when something doesn't quite smell quite right.  Also too, it's good because it reminds people about William Ayers."

MCCAIN – "Having trouble cutting through a tough piece of pork?  Not anymore, with John McCain's complete set of pork knives.  'They Cut The Pork Out!'"

FEY AS PALIN – "So instead of going to one of those elite department stores with their liberal agendas and over-priced items and their gotcha return policies that violate your First Amendment rights, why not do your holiday shopping with us?  (SHE turns to a different camera)  Okay, listen up everybody, I am goin' rogue right now so keep your voices down.  Available now, we got a buncha' these 'Palin in 2012' T-shirts.  Just try and wait until after Tuesday to wear 'em okay?  Because I'm not goin' anywhere.  And I'm certainly not goin' back to Alaska.  If I'm not goin' to the White House, I'm either runnin' in four years or I'm gonna be a white Oprah so, you know, I'm good either way."

MCCAIN – "What's going on over there, Sarah?"

FEY AS PALIN – "Oh...just talkin' about taxes." (SHE winks)

MCCAIN – "Look, would I rather be on three major networks?  Of course, but I'm a true maverick -- a Republican without money.  And I'm not like my opponent; my only showbiz connections are Jon Voight and Heidi from 'The Hills.'  So, I'm here on QVC, and like QVC, this campaign promises you three things: quality, value and convenience." 

FEY AS PALIN – "And great deals on juicers."

MCCAIN – "So when you go to the polls on Tuesday remember, 'Country First,' as a reminder all undergarments are non-refundable and Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!!!

A "Weekend Update" sketch with anchorman Seth Meyers interviewing McCain on last second strategies was more embarrassing for the candidate in my opinion.

MEYERS – "With the election only three days away, most polls show Barack Obama leading John McCain by a slight margin.  Here to comment on his campaign strategy, Senator John McCain."

MCCAIN – "Thank you Seth.  You know, a lot can happen in three days. And while I am confident that we will emerge victorious, I'm also considering a few radical last-minute strategies."

MEYERS – "New strategies, like what?

MCCAIN – "Well you know how people call me "the maverick"

MEYERS – "Yeah."

MCCAIN – "Well, I thought I'd try a strategy called the 'Reverse Maverick.'  That's where I do whatever anybody tells me. I don't ask questions – I just go with the flow.  If that doesn't work, I go to the 'Double Maverick.'  That's where I go totally berserker and just freak everybody out.  Even the regular mavericks."

MEYERS – "That doesn't sound like the best strategy."

MCCAIN – "It isn't.  And here's another bad one.  It's called 'The Sad Grandpa.'  That's where I get on TV and go, 'C'mon, Obama's gonna have plenty of chances to be President! It's my turn! Vote for me!'"

MEYERS – "Yeah, I don't know if I'd do that."

MCCAIN – "OK, then here's a good one. It's called 'The Charleston.'  That's where I only campaign in Charleston, South Carolina.  Really lock it down.  Meet every single resident three or four times.  Or how about 'The Forrest Gump.'  That's where I just start jogging across America and eventually everything works out.

MEYERS – That might work.

MCCAIN – "Or maybe 'The Rocky IV.'  I live alone in the wilderness and pull a sled through the snow until I'm in peak physical condition."

MEYERS – "How would that help you win an election?"

MCCAIN – "It won't.  But if I ever have to fight Vladimir Putin, I'll be ready."

MEYERS – "Alright, well if you had to choose one strategy in the remaining days, what would it be?"

MCCAIN – "Seth, my basic strategy is the one I've stuck with since I started this campaign: connect with the voters, talk with them honestly about the issues, and stand by my record of service to this great country."

MEYERS – "And if that doesn't work?"

MCCAIN – "Probably the 'Double Maverick."

And it wasn't all McCain satire. Host Ben Affleck was brilliant in sketch ridiculing the pompous, over-the-top, self-absorbed MSNBC host Keith Olbermann -- a frequent target on this blog because of my concern about the direction MSNBC has taken as management caves to Olbermann's narcissism.

Affleck also did a funny piece as Alec Baldwin doing a guest appearance on The View.

But ultimately, all roads led back to McCain Saturday -- with even Affleck, a long-time Democratic supporter, offering a mock endorsement of the Republican candidate.

The evening never had the electricity of the season premiere when Fey first appeared as Palin. But it was a fitting end to an incredible run by SNL, which raised the bar forever on political satire for television.

 

Above: NBC Photo by Dana Edelson

PBS filmmaker Ken Burns was honored at the 12th annual Pratt Society Dinner Saturday with one of the library's prestigious Lifetime Achievement Awards, and what a splendid event it was.

Burns, one of the nation's great artists and most eloquent speakers, was in top form, and many of the best and brightest members of the region's philanthropic and cultural leadership communities were on hand to hear him -- and to get the chance to ask a few questions of their own after his talk.

After some 20 year of writing about Burns and his work, I had the honor -- and that is exactly what I consider it to be -- to introduce him. The Enoch Pratt Free Library lifetime award is a major national honor. Past winners include Norman Mailer, E.L Doctorow and John Updike.

Burns, who has uses the media of television and film better than anyone else, to drive viewers to libraries and bookstores, was especially appreciative of being honored by an institution that so celebrates and preserves the written word. He was generally moved to be placed by the Pratt in the highest ranks of American writers.

This was an evening dedicated to celebrating the body of work an American original, and not politics -- despite all the election talk that could be heard at virtually every table during dinner. But as Burns discussed his films -- especially The Civil War, his 1990 landmark production -- he referred several times to a "skinny lawyer from Illinois."

Of course, he was talking about Abraham Lincoln. But later in the speech as he discussed "race and space" as two great themes of American life, he talked about Americans at this moment in history being confronted with the chance to address the fundamental contradiction in the nation's DNA between a founding document that insists that all men "are created equal," and the fact that the words were written by a man (Thomas Jefferson) who owned over 100 slaves and saw nothing wrong with that.

 A few beats later when Burns acknowledged that he might a little partial to "skinny lawyers from Illinois," many in the hall took that as an endorsement of Democratic candidate Barack Obama and broke into applause.

For the record, as Burns made perfectly clear, the "race and space" quote came from novelist Russell Banks who said it in connection with Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn in Burns' film on the 19th century author. Banks was talking about the geography of the frontier and America, not outer space.

One of the things I so admire about Burns is his insistence on getting facts and quotes not only right, but also in context in his films -- and reporters owe him the same diligence in writing about his words and work.

As caught up as Z on TV is in this election, and as anxious as I was about getting home to see Republican presidential candidate John McCain on Saturday Night Live, I would not have missed the Pratt event for the world.

As I said by way of introduction, the word  "filmmaker" does not do justice to Ken Burns. He's a cultural anthropologist with a camera -- and the soul of a poet. And we, the people of the United States, are lucky enough to be members of the tribe he has chosen to spend his life studying. 

Congratulations to Ken Burns,  Pratt CEO Carla Hayden, the library board of trustees and directors, and all the people in Maryland who contribute to making the Pratt one of the community's most engaged and the country's most valued cultural institutions.

 

There is a world events going on this last weekend before the election of a lifetime, and Z on TV will be on it. So, I hope you will check in during the weekend for updates here.

As was the case with Sarah Palin's visit, Republican presidentiual candidate John McCain's campaign has announced an appearance of Saturday Night Live tonight, but NBC has not confirmed. I expect McCain will appear on the show, because he desperately need exposure and air time in the closing hours of the long campaign. So, I will there with a review after the show.

UPDATE (1:30 p.m.): MSNBC says McCain will be on SNL tonight, and that Tina Fey will return as Sarah Palin in a sketch with him. I will definitely be there.

But I am going to have scamble to be in front of the TV by 11:30 tonight for SNL, because earlier in the evening, I am intruducing filmmaker Ken Burns in downtown Baltimore as he receives a lifetime achievement award from the Pratt Library.

Burns is not involved in this election, but he in my estimation the most influential filmmaker of my lifetime, and I wouldn't miss this for the world. Plus, he is to American life what the poet Homer was to the ancient Greeks. He understands the American psyche and soul better than anyone working in TV and film, and I can't wait to hear his take on the election. And I will share all of it with you here.

And who knows what the Sunday morning shows will bring. Tomorrow will be an insane day in media and politics, and I will be sharing my take on the craziness and the glory with you right here. So check back in tonight -- or tomorrow.