Senate Committee Said to End ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Inquiry

LOS ANGELES â€" Citing an unnamed Congressional aide, the Reuters news service on Monday reported that the Senate Intelligence Committee had ended its inquiry into Central Intelligence Agency cooperation with makers of the film “Zero Dark Thirty.” The investigation began after three Senatorsâ€"Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin and John McCainâ€"publicly objected to what they saw as the film’s incorrect portrayal of torture as having helped in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Those objections came at the height of an Oscar campaign that closed on Sunday with no major awards for “Zero Dark Thirty,” which was nominated for best picture and had once been seen as a strong contender. According to Reuters, the investigation was closed on Monday after it had gathered material indicating that C.I.A. officials did not actually tell the filmmakers that torture helped to find Bin Laden, though they helped in the development of the film’s characters.

Senate Committee Said to End ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Inquiry

LOS ANGELES â€" Citing an unnamed Congressional aide, the Reuters news service on Monday reported that the Senate Intelligence Committee had ended its inquiry into Central Intelligence Agency cooperation with makers of the film “Zero Dark Thirty.” The investigation began after three Senatorsâ€"Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin and John McCainâ€"publicly objected to what they saw as the film’s incorrect portrayal of torture as having helped in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Those objections came at the height of an Oscar campaign that closed on Sunday with no major awards for “Zero Dark Thirty,” which was nominated for best picture and had once been seen as a strong contender. According to Reuters, the investigation was closed on Monday after it had gathered material indicating that C.I.A. officials did not actually tell the filmmakers that torture helped to find Bin Laden, though they helped in the development of the film’s characters.

Oscar Telecast Attracts 40.3 Million Viewers

ABC’s telecast of the Oscars Sunday night didn’t get great reviews, but the ratings partly made up for it: the show attracted 40.3 million viewers, the most for any entertainment show on television in three years. Even more importantly for ABC, the audience surged among the viewers the network most wants to reach, viewers between the ages of 18 and 49.

Seth MacFarlane was brought in as host specifically because of his appeal to younger viewers. And whether he was primarily responsible â€" or whether it was the roster of more popular films â€" the show eclipsed its rating in the 18-49 category by 11 per cent over a year ago, growing to a 13 rating from an 11.7.

The total audience for the show was up 3 percent from the 39.3 million who watched in 2012

Online Piracy Alert System to Begin This Week

The Copyright Alert System, a program of escalating warnings and prods against people suspected of online copyright infringement, is finally going into effect this week, more than a year and a half after the plan was announced as part of an agreement between the entertainment industry and five major Internet service providers.

The Center for Copyright Information, the organization created to administer the system, announced on Monday that the Internet providers would begin putting it in place “over the course of the next several days,” though it gave no specifics. The Internet companies are AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Verizon and Time Warner Cable.

In the alert system, media companies monitor online traffic through a third party and can complain to Internet providers if a file is downloaded illegally. The suspected violator is hen given the first of six warnings, some of which carry “educational” messages and must be acknowledged. After the fifth and sixth warnings, the customer’s Internet speed can be slowed to a crawl.

The Center for Copyright Information says it will not ask for repeat offenders’ Internet access to be blocked, but most service providers have the right to do that if a customer violates its terms of service. The findings can be contested for a $35 fee, to be refunded if an appeal is successful.

The introduction of the alert system has been notably slow. Nearly a year passed before the group had a leader in place, and its own prediction failed when it said in October that the system would be coming in two months. Part of the reason for that might be the relationships between media companies and Internet service providers, which in the past have often been adversarial over is! sues of piracy and control.

So-called graduated response programs like the Copyright Alert System have been tried in other countries, with mixed results. France’s Hadopi law, passed in 2009, set up a system of three “strikes,” culminating in a fine. More than a million warnings have been issued through that plan, but a recent government report said that its effects were “hard to evaluate precisely.”

Debating ‘House of Cards’ 2: How to Reap the Cable Whirlwind

Welcome back to “House of Cards,” the Recap. Today, Ashley Parker and David Carr take on episode two and tease apart the collaborations between the various estates in Washington. Abundant spoilers so proceed at your own viewing peril. If you missed the first installment, you can read it here. More to come in the next few days and in the meantime, please consider weighing in with a comment below.

Episode Two
Synopsis: With the help of Zoe Barnes, Frank Underwood plants a story that will prove the undoing of Michael Kern, the president’s pick for secretary of state. Mr. Underwood also dispatches with the original author of the much-lauded education bill and begins rewriting it himself alongside a team of young aides.

Parker: This was the episode where we got to see the president’s original nominee for secretaryof state, Michael Kern, spiral downward into national news chum. The catalyst An original specious story by none other than Zoe Barnes, of course, loosely tying Mr. Kern to an anti-Israel editorial that ran in the college paper he edited. First, the image of Mr. Kerns trying to laugh off the charge on the Sunday shows goes viral and inflames supporters of Israel (“We do not consider the issue of Israel and Palestine a laughing matter,” says the president of the Anti-Defamation League), Mr. Kern’s subsequent stutter-stepping angers the Arab community, and by the end of the episode, he’s withdrawn his nomination.

Welcome to a Washington news cycle.

For all Ms. Barnes’s talk of going “online,” the “House of Cards” news cycle was driven in the traditional way, by front page stories in the morning paper, and the news shows on Sunday. In reality, Tweets and blogs and chattering pundits would have also played a leading role.

But it was interesting to watch this episode ag! ainst the backdrop of the Chuck Hagel confirmation process that’s unfolding now. Mr. Hagel’s secretary of defense nomination began in a fireball, with the former Republican senator having to apologize for past comments he’d made about gays and Israel. Then Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, raised questions about honorariums Mr. Hagel may or may not have received from sketchy sources (“I’m saying, it’s a question worth asking,” Mr. Underwood tells Ms. Barnes on the show) and then the whole nomination was sidetracked by a completely false charge that Mr. Hagel had taken money from a group called “Friends of Hamas.” (No such group even exists).

But David, what did you make of this “House of Cards” news cycle, which really seems to get away from its characters â€" the White House, the nominee â€" and suddenly, no matter what they try, just can’t be reined back in

Carr: I was struck by the same thing. Given the habits of the controlling habits of this curent (real-life) administration, that the media tail rarely wags the dog. But sometimes, given the overheated news cycle, custody of a story goes up for grabs. The series does a great job of showing the echo chamber as it builds to a roar, drowning out any actual debate.

I love the scene where Mr. Underwood watches the nominee nervously laugh at the wrong moment and, realizing his work is done, simply clicks off the television and moves on to the next delicious morsel.

There is something operatic and over-the-top about Mr. Underwood that both attracts and repels. For example, he deadpans to the camera: “You know what I like about people They stack so well,” Who says that No one, but it is still fun to watch. In the same way, the surreptitious meetings between Zoe Barnes and Frank Underwood against spooky federal backdrops and subway stops are hilarious. What congressman retails his own leaks to journalists Isn’t that what staffers are for Still, it makes for good television and puts ! the two s! trivers â€" one a congressman in search of payback and the other a journalist on the make â€" in the same frame.

The show continues to get the newsroom stuff pretty much right on the nose. Constance Zimmer is near perfect playing the experienced. world-weary senior reporter Janine Skorsky. I recognize her. She is a good reporter and a serious person in a changing world, trying to maintain her footing and her standards. First she ignores Zoe Barnes and her greasy approach to the craft, then she attempts to push back when it is clear Ms. Barnes may be a threat. “You were a metro scrub and now look at you,” she says, half in wonder and half in disgust.

In the same way, watching Ms. Barnes steady herself for her first remote cable news hit is very good meta-television. Everything she wants, everything she hopes to be, everything she is striving for, is on the other side of that lens. When the camera lights up - three, two, one â€" so does she. Zoe Barnes, the byline, has arrived.

Prker: In the last decade, television and print journalism have become so inextricably bound that it’s hard to imagine one without the other. There was a time â€" or so I’m told â€" when print journalists were simply print journalists: they reported, they wrote, and they left the on-air prognosticating to those folks whose silky hair and blessed bone structure seemed destined for television gigs.

Now, all reporters are expected to report, write, blog, Tweet, Instagram, shoot video, do radio hits and appear on television. Often, it feels like, all at once. But the reach of television, as Ms. Barnes seems to intuit, is still stunning. Write a lead, A1 story that drives the conversation, and you may get a “good job” from your editor and your mom; appear on a midday cable show for three minutes, and old high school classmates will mysteriously materialize in your inbox, to say how impressed they were to look up and catch you on their screen. (What, you almost want to ask the former ! star socc! er player, were you doing watching CNN at 1:43 p.m. on a Tuesday)

But just as Mr. Underwood watches Ms. Barnes deliver her scoop live on-air, so do real-life aides, staffers and politicians watch reporters say their piece on cable news. And that television-elevated profile, in part, can be what makes sources more likely to talk to you, the reporter, in the future.

The Mitt Romney campaign was notoriously tight-lipped and disciplined. Some senior staffers had an ability to go days without ever responding to press e-mails and phone calls. But my press corps colleagues, who also did cable hits from time to time, said the quickest way to get a sure-fire response from Team Romney was to shoot them an e-mail that read, “I’m going on MSNBC in 10 minutes, and I need to know …” Only then did the floodgates briefly open.

Zeleny to Move From Times to ABC News

Jeff Zeleny, a top political reporter for The New York Times, was hired on Monday by ABC News, which said he will become the network’s senior Washington correspondent next month.

Mr. Zeleny will cover Congress and politics for the network, the ABC News president Ben Sherwood said in an internal memorandum. “Jeff will bring his many talents to all our broadcasts and platforms,” Mr. Sherwood wrote. “No stranger to the Sunday morning shows, he will contribute regularly to our ‘This Week’ roundtable.”

Mr. Zeleny joined The Times in 2006 after six years at The Chicago Tribune. He covered President Obama early in his national political career, when Mr. Obama was a new and relatively unknown senator from Illinois.

At The Times, Mr. Zeleny rose to become a national political correspondent and one of the news organization’s best-known reporters. He appeared frequently on television to discuss the 2012 presidential campaign. His impending hiring was first reported by Politico last week.

ABC made a number of assignment changes in its Washington bureau two
months ago when Jake Tapper, the network’s chief White House correspondent, moved to CNN.

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The Breakfast Meeting: NBC Ratings Tumble and Twitter Hacking Can Undermine Brands

NBC’s ratings have plummeted since a great prime-time run last autumn, Bill Carter reports. NBC’s viewership has dissipated to numbers never before seen by any broadcast network â€" certainly not during sweeps month. In February NBC was not only well behind its competitors but also the Spanish-language channel Univision. The numbers are so bad that NBC may have to offer “make-goods,” or free advertising time, to cover shortfalls of ratings guarantees. Audiences for once-promising sitcoms like “Go On” have disappeared; new shows like “1600 Penn” have drawn little notice; and “Do No Harm” became the lowest-rated network drama on record before being canceled after two episodes. “Saturday Night Live,” the network’s highest-rated show even though it is 38 years old, was the only silver lining.

It is every brand manager’s nightmare: hackers breaking into a product’s soial media accounts, an occurrence that is happening more often, Tanzina Vega and Nicole Perlroth write. It happens frequently on Twitter, where security measures for both personal and branded accounts amounts to nothing more than a username and password. Burger King’s Twitter feed was recently hacked â€" its logo was replaced by the McDonald’s arches and its tweets ranged from unprintable to incomprehensible â€" but Burger King is hardly alone. Social media accounts for NBC News, USA Today, Donald J. Trump, the Westboro Baptist Church and even the “hacktivist” group Anonymous have been victims. The hacking has led to calls for stronger security measures, and means more business for social media management companies like HootSuite.

“Argo” won best picture at a very musical Academy Awards Sunday night, Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply report. But in a field with many promising candidates the awards managed to take in a wider variety of films than in some years, with Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi” winning four awards, including best director; “Les Misérables,” which won three; and “Django Unchained,” which won two, including best original screenplay for Quentin Tarantino. The evening was filled with surprises and contradictions, Alessandra Stanley writes, more because of host Seth MacFarlane than the awards themselves. Mr. MacFarlane, the creator of “Family Guy” and other animated television shows, crooned standards and carried himself like Fred Astaire while delivering crude jokes about Jews in Hollywood, women and even President Lincoln. Combined wih too many fatuous award presentations, the broadcast became one of the longest and most self-conscious Oscar ceremonies ever. Dress choices were a bit more daring than usual, Eric Wilson reports. Sleeves were in short supply and straps might as well have been illegal. Anne Hathaway’s Miuccia Prada dress, which she chose at the last minute, stole the show.

Netflix’s new series, “House of Cards,” proves that the company is getting better at seeing the future, David Carr writes. Netflix’s streaming media service collects a huge amount of nuanced data from its 33 million customers, which helps shape its choice of television shows to license and which first-run progr! amming to! create. Data has always been crucial in creating programming, but some television executives worry that focusing too much on it will keep networks from pushing for innovative new content.

Barnes & Noble’s e-reader the Nook may not be long for the increasingly-packed tablet market, Leslie Kaufman writes. The company announced that losses from its Nook media division in the third quarter of fiscal year 2013 will be greater than the year before, and that the unit’s revenue for all of 2013 would be far below projections of $3 billion. A person familiar with Barnes & Noble’s strategy said that the quarter convinced the company to move away from manufacturing its own devices and bolster its online library. The pity is that the some of the latest Nooks were great e-readers, as this article by David Pogue shows.

The new food magazine Delish, published by Hearst and available only at Walmart stores, has proved a bright spot in the otherwise bleak retail magazine market, Stuart Elliott writes. While food magazines in general are performing better than many other categories, Delish’s success might be because of an interesting marketing scheme. Walmart customers who buy another Hearst magazine, like Country Living or Good Housekeeping, get a free copy of Delish.

Glenn Beck Begins Campaign to Urge TV Systems to Add His Web Channel

Glenn Beck is beginning a campaign to get his Internet channel, TheBlaze, onto cable and satellite television systems across the country, and the one system that already carries the channel, Dish Network, is backing him up.

The campaign will begin on Monday when Mr. Beck starts promoting GetTheBlaze.com, a Web site that asks fans to contact their television provider and request the channel. He will talk about the site on his nationally syndicated radio show and link to it on his social networking Web sites.

“You probably pay good money every month to your TV provider for access to channels like MSNBC and Al Jazeera America â€" channels that you might not watch, or even agree with,” Mr. Beck wrote in a letter on the Web site. “Adding TheBlaze will ensure that you and your family have a source of news and analysis that you can trust and that doesn’t betray your values.”

Mr. Beck has previously indicated that he plans to position the channl as a libertarian news and entertainment source, thereby coming into relatively direct competition with Fox News Channel, where he hosted a hugely popular 5 p.m. talk show for nearly three years. The plan is rather audacious, partly because TheBlaze is owned by Mr. Beck’s company, Mercury Radio Arts, not by a media conglomerate like Fox’s parent, News Corporation.

Twenty months ago Mr. Beck left Fox and started GBTV, the subscriber-only Internet channel that he later renamed TheBlaze.
Within a year he had 300,000 subscribers, no small feat for any Web site. But by then he’d also decided he wanted to get back on old-fashioned TV. In ! September 2012 Mr. Beck announced a carriage deal with Dish, the first of what his company hoped would be many such deals. Simply stated, the economics of television are better â€" TV channels get small per-subscriber fees, whether or not the subscribers ever watch, and the advertising possibilities are enormous.

Dish has a period of exclusivity with TheBlaze, so no other cable or satellite system can carry the channel quite yet. The companies haven’t disclosed how long this period lasts, but it is probably ending soon, because TheBlaze is starting its campaign now. Such campaigns are attempted all the time by small, independently-owned channels, often with little success. Ordinarily cable and satellite systems are reticent to carry new channels; in fact, the trend is in the other direction, toward dropping independent channels altogether.

But what Mr. Beck has â€" and wat other small channel owners don’t have â€" is an audience of millions on the radio and on the Internet. And some help from the Dish Network. In a statement provided by a spokesman for the channel, Dave Shull, the Dish senior vice president of programming, said, “TheBlaze and Glenn Beck bring a unique perspective to Dish’s broad spectrum of political programming on all sides.” When the channel was added last fall, he said, “We had customers sign up quickly, and we saw new customers join Dish. In fact, subscriptions attributable to TheBlaze outpaced our projections by 80 percent, proving that Dish is giving customers what they want with a choice in programming, not to mention the technology to choose how to watch it.”

Even with Dish’s endorsement, it remains to be seen whether other cable and satellite systems â€" such as DirecTV, Comcast and Time Warner Cable â€" will agree to carry TheBlaze. They may simply point out that viewers can find it on the Internet.

A spokesman fo! r TheBlaz! e did not immediately comment on whether the subscription channel would be taken off the Web as a condition of gaining carriage on television.

That was something Al Jazeera accepted when it bought Current TV in January for an estimated $500 million. (Mr. Beck said
he tried to bid for the channel, but was rebuffed by Current’s co-founders, Al Gore and Joel Hyatt.) Al Jazeera currently streams its English-language news channel on the Internet free, in order to reach more viewers, but it will stop doing so when it officially takes over Current this spring.

“Having an online presence is critical to proving to distributors that a network’s content and brand are powerful and can draw an audience and subscriptions. But then they’re also saying, ‘Don’t put too much stuff online for free, because then the value prposition to the cable subscriber is less,’ ” Lynne Costantini, a former Time Warner Cable and Scripps Networks executive, told The Wall Street Journal in January.

Ms. Costantini has been a consultant for TheBlaze. Now she is joining the channel full time, as president of business development, to lead its effort to get on television.

The “Get TheBlaze” campaign will commence in phases and last for at least nine months. Mr. Beck wrote in his letter: “This journey for truth that we are on is much bigger than you and I; the future of liberty is hanging in the balance. All of us have a choice to make:
sit on the sideline, or get involved.” He described TheBlaze not just as a family-friendly news and entertainment channel, but a cog in nationwide political change.

“If we succeed then we change the media. If we change the media, we control the debate. If we control the debate, w! e change ! politics. And if we change politics, we change the country,” he wrote.

TheBlaze has more than 40 hours of programming a week, including simulcasts of Mr. Beck’s radio show, a nightly show of his just for the channel, a nightly panel conversation about the news, and a couple of documentaries and reality shows. In January Mr. Beck described ambitious plans for the channel, involving more news reporting (“We are currently looking for our own Woodwards and Bernsteins,” he said) and a libertarian bent. “I consider myself a libertarian,” Mr. Beck said.

Soft-Drink Giant Wants Consumers to Be ‘Impressed’

“McKayla the not-impressed Olympian” sounds as if it might be the title of a song or a book. But as most Americans with access to a TV set, computer, smartphone or mobile device know, it is a reference to McKayla Maroney, an American gymnast at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.

Ms. Maroney’s facial expression â€" a scowling kind of glare, or a glaring kind of scowl â€" when she learned she won a silver medal, rather than a gold, after a vault performance on Aug. 5 was captured in a photograph by Brian Snyder of Reuters that captured the popular imagination.

Soon, the idea that “McKayla is not impressed” turned up as a Tumblr page and became an Internet meme. Ms. Maroney even offered a version of the expression hen she and the rest of the United States 2012 gymnastics team met President Obama in the White House â€" and the president joined in.

This week, the Dr Pepper Snapple Group will proclaim that Ms. Maroney has finally found something that impresses her: five new soft drinks that are entries in the lower-calorie category of the carbonated-beverage market along with Dr Pepper Ten, which the company brought out in 2011.

The “Ten” in the name refers to the fact that each 12-ounce serving of the soft drink contains 10 calories. Dr Pepper Snapple is adding 10-calorie versions of five additional brands: 7Up, A&W, Canada Dry, RC and Sunkist.

Ms. Maroney is to appear in New York on Thursday in a section of Penn Station that Dr Pepper Snap! ple will fancifully rename “Ten Station” for the day. The promotional event will be focused on one new variety, 7Up Ten â€" which, when said fast, kind of sounds like a sports score.

Although planning is not completed, a tentative schedule calls for Ms. Maroney to meet the public from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Those meeting her will be encouraged to sample 7Up Ten and take photographs in which they share their “impressed” looks with her.

The goal of the promotional event is to “leverage the meme” and “turn it on its head, that we’re finally getting her impressed,” said Regan Ebert, senior vice president for marketing at Dr Pepper Snapple in Plano, Tex.

“What we’re hoping is the fact she’s finally impressed” will “get digital buzz across the Internet,” Ms. Ebert said.

Ms. Ebert was asked if she was familiar with what happened when Clara Peller, who became famous in 1984 for being unimpressed when she asked “Where’s the beef” in commercials for Wendy’s, declared a year later that she had “found it” in a commercial for Prego Plus spaghetti sauce. Wendy’s fired Ms. Peller and her ad career ended.

Ms. Ebert said she recalled the incident and described the agreement with Ms. Maroney as different.

Other marketers “have approached” Ms. Maroney and asked her to declare herself impressed with their brands, Ms. Ebert said, “but she agreed to do it with us, exclusively for us,” because “she enjoys the products.”

Ms. Maroney’s fee is not being disclosed.

Ms. Maroney will not appear in an advertising campaign for the five new soft drinks, Ms. Ebert said, which is scheduled to begin next month. The campaign, by McGarryBowen, part of the Dentsu Network unit of Dentsu, will include commercials, coupons and digital ads.

A social media and digital agency in New York named Code and Theory will work with Dr Pepper Snapple o! n the pro! motional event on Thursday. The company also works with Ketchum, the public relations agency owned by the Omnicom Group.

Analysts at brokerage firms who follow the soft-drink industry estimate that Dr Pepper Snapple plans to spend more than $30 million nationally to expand the Ten concept to include the additional products.