A new low point in cable news occurred this week with the focus on Sarah Palin's family issues. Even after Barack Obama correctly and firmly said that family matters should be kept out of political coverage, cable news bloviators, like the gossip junkies they are, couldn't help themselves. CNN's Wolf...

In this week's Advertising Age Bob Garfield in his "Garfield's Review" column writes a blistering open letter to Omnicom's President, John Wren, for allowing his ad agency to create a blatantly homophobic commercial for Snickers.

Garfield writes:

This is from your own statement on corporate responsibility: "As a...

According to many media critics and professionals, the old media are dying. On such Web sites as Newspaperdeathwatch.com, doomsayers are predicting an imminent demise.

Even such really smart people such as Marc Andreesen are predicting death. On his pmarca.com blog Andreesen, co-founder of Netscape and current co-founder and chairman...

My "Barack and Rush" blog created a relative storm of comments and disagreements on the issue of reinstating the Fairness Doctrine. In that blog I wrote that Sen. Obama does not support reinstating it and that Rush Limbaugh would help Obama by criticizing John McCain. To which a guest blogger,...

As reported by Broadcasting & Cable, last week Barack Obama's press secretary, Michael Ortiz, said in response to the trade magazine's inquiry "Sen. Obama does not support reimposing the Fairness Doctrine on broadcasters."

The Fairness Doctrine issue bubbled up recently after reports that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was thinking...

In spite of the fact that Sirius Satellite Radio CEO Mel Karmazin painted an upbeat financial picture for 2009 if the proposed merger with XM Satellite Radio gets approved by the FCC, these two (or one) companies will soon be disintermediated because of nationwide wireless access to the Internet.

The...

I subscribe to Charlie Fink's Quote of the Week, and the one Monday morning was from George Carlin, who passed away over this past weekend and who said "I think it's the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately."

My recent criticism of Sirius Satellite Radio CEO Mel Karmazin was a bit over the top and wrong. In a blog post titled "Are You Sirius?", I wrote: "...the CEO of the merged companies will be Mel Karmazin, who does not have a strong record of keeping his promises to...

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin issued a statement on Monday that if the two satellite radio competitors, Sirius and XM, agreed to several conditions that he would vote to allow the merger because it would be "in the public interest." Do you seriously believe this, Kevin?

The New York Times...

Jim Carnegie's Radio Business Report had an item this week about a radio station, 100.5 Max-FM (WXMM-FM) Norfolk-VA Beach, that "is the first radio station in the world to actually allow listeners total control to program the music. This new concept will allow each listener to select from thousands...

I had lunch last week with a good friend who is wired into the media business, and the first thing he asked me when we sat down was, "Have you heard that Roger Ailes is out at FOX?"

"No, I haven't heard a thing, " I said, "but it makes...

Silicon Valley Insider wrote on Tuesday, June 3:

Now that Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes is accumulating a vast pile of cash from the spin-off of Time Warner Cable and the possible sale of AOL, what will he do with it? Speculation within the media industry...

I hope all of you are following Justin Frank's Huffington Post blog on which he's previewing his latest book, Politics On the Couch. Dr. Frank is asking readers to comment on his posts, which include new sections of the book as he writes them, and to give him...

The HBO two-hour movie, Recount, that debuted last Sunday night to deservedly rave reviews brilliantly and dramatically makes the point that "every vote counts" only when the vote-counting system is not corrupted and politicized as it was in Florida in 2000.

This lesson is especially relevant today, eight years...

My wife, Julia, and I went to a Memorial Day service in the Weekapaug Chapel this past Sunday, and one of the speakers was a veteran of the Vietnam War who had been wounded several times. But when he came home, he was not greeted as a hero because of...

When Jon Stewart was interviewed by Larry King on CNN this past February, King asked Stewart, "What do you think about the candidates?" Stewart, ever funny and ever truthful with his comedic ability to expose the man behind the curtain, at one point asked the rhetorical question "is the...

There has been a lot of speculation about why Barack Obama lost by such a wide margin to Hillary Clinton in West Virginia and probably as big in Kentucky. TalkPointsMemo.com posted a piece by Jonathan Tilove of the Newhouse News Service who suggests it's a Scots-Irish problem of "fighting"...

The same week that the New York Times announced the "involuntary layoffs" (HR speak for "terminations") of 15 newsroom employees, NBC announced "that it will start a 24-hour local news channel along the lines of cable's New York One. It will de-emphasize the identity of the NBC network's flagship station,...

NBCU's CEO Jeff Zucker outed himself as a philistine in an interview with TV Week when he said prior to this week's breaking upfront market that "...we're managing for margin, not for ratings."

TV Week's interview was rather lengthy, but here is Zucker's answer to a question about...

To: Senator Barack Obama
From: Charles Warner

My wife, Julia Bradford, and I have both ardently supported you since the beginning of your campaign when we attended your March, 2007, fundraiser in New York. We are maxed out in our contributions to your primary campaign to become the Democratic...