Glenn Beck, who left Fox News for his online TheBlaze TV network, has decided to return to television. Today, the conservative talker is expected to announce a deal with the Dish Network to bring his streaming network to television subscribers, the first of what he hopes are many deals with more traditional distributors.
Katie Couric scored the best opening-day share for a daytime talk show since the premiere of “Dr. Phil.†Her overnight rating was a 2.8, although the full audience number won't be known for a couple of weeks.
Michael Lewis had extraordinary access to President Obama for a profile in this month's issue of Vanity Fair, including playing in the president's regular basketball game, but even the best-selling author of “Liar's Poker,†“Moneyball†and “The Blind Side†had to submit his quotes for the customary approval by the White House before publication.
Bad news for “Girls†fans: they'll have to keep going to their parents' house for dinner Sunday night. HBO's Alison Moore told a TechCrunch conference the channel had no plans to create a separate HBO Go service for noncable subscribers.
Joe Scarborough told Politico that he had â€no plans†to run for president in 2016, contradicting a photo caption by Douglas Brinkley in this month's Vanity Fair. He added that the photo and interview were actually done in 2010.
The absence from some news outlets of any marking of the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks offended critics, online and off. NBC's “The Today Show†was criticized for not observing a minute of silence, which has become traditional to commemorate each of moments when the planes struck the twin towers. (The show was in the middle of an interview with the mother of Kim Kardashian on the subject of breast enlargement.) And as Poynter notes, neither The New York Times nor The New York Post featured the anniversary on their front pages. Margaret Sullivan, The Times's new public editor, discussed the issue in her blog.
The Man Booker Prize, the British award that attracts more argument and certainly more organized betting than any other literary prize, announced its shortlist. Among the writers: Tan Twan Eng, Alison Moore and Will Self.
In an interview with The New York Times, John Paton, the head of Digital First Media Group, said the bankruptcy of its subsidiary, the Journal Register Company, its second in the last three years, has been humbling. “It's pretty damn public and it's pretty damn embarrassing,†he said, but added that the bankruptcy of the newspaper company was “the absolute right thing to do.â€
Facebook has now responded to a blog post by Robert Mankoff, the cartoon editor of The New Yorker, who explained how the social site had blocked a cartoon showing Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. His conclusion: under Facebook's rules, men's nipples are O.K., female nipples are not.
Facebook's response, which is as amusing in its own way as the original blog post, follows: “Recently, we mistakenly blocked a cartoon as part of our efforts to keep the site safe for all and quickly worked to rectify the mistake as soon as we were notified. Facebook is a place where almost a billion people share click more than a trillion links a day. Our dedicated User Operations Team reviews millions of pieces of this content a day to help keep Facebook safe for all. Our policies are enforced by a team of reviewers in several offices across the globe. This team looks at hundreds of thousands of reports every week, and as you might expect, occasionally, we make a mistake and block a piece of content we shouldn't have. We have already taken steps to prevent this from happening in the future and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience.â€
