‘House of Cards’ Recap, Episode 12: The Guns End Up Aimed Inside the Corral

Who is vetting whom Ashley Parker and David Carr untangle Episode 12 of “House of Cards,” and tease apart Frank Underwood’s visit to a captain of industry living in a middle place. He goes bird hunting, but if you poke around here, you will find plenty of spoilers, so by all means avoid if you haven’t seen it. If you are caught up on your episodes, but behind on recaps, you can find all of them - Episodes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 or 11 â€" right here.

Episode 12

Synopsis: The president sends Frank Underwood to the Midwest to vet a potential (new) vice president â€" but it turns out there’s more vetting going on than meets the eye. Zoe Barnes joins with her colleague Janine Skorsky to unravel what could be their biggest story yet.

Parker: In this episode, we see Frank Underwood sent to St. Louis ostensibly to vet Raymond Tusk, an eccentric billionaire, as a possible replacement vice president. But shortly after he arrives, Mr. Underwood realizes that it is he who is being vetted, and that the president and Mr. Tusk are old friends. Mr. Tusk, in fact, was the one who initially advised the president against making Mr. Underwood secretary of state â€" “One of the largest mistakes I’ve made,” he concedes.

“You’ve proven yourself to be quite difficult â€" Kern, the teacher’s strike, now Matthews,” Mr. Tusk says, accurately chronicling a partial list of Mr. Underwood’s behind-the-scenes disloyalties to the administration.

We also see Zoe Barnes and Janine Skorsky begin to team up, to puzzle out a story that could bring Frank Underwood down.

Up until this point in the show, it always seemed as if the president was a naïve, vanilla figure, getting played by Mr. Underwood. But maybe the president is savvier than he first appeared, onto the majority whip from nearly the outset. And ditto Zoe Barnes. Here, we see her turn fairly quickly on Mr. Underwood, as she realizes that the scoop of his downfall might be bigger than the morsels he’s been feeding her.

What do you think, David Is this yet another example of Frank Underwood being behind the curve Just how much does the president know And has Mr. Underwood lost control of just about every narrative

Carr: One of the rules of the game as played in the Beltway is that everyone is a player. Mr. Underwood often acts if he is plotting in a vacuum, when in fact there is the game he is playing on his own chess board â€" I’ve always felt that the interludes where he shoves pieces around is heavy-handed â€" but there are also other chessboards, other players, other games all over town.

I love Frank’s raw hatred of the outing in the woods with Mr. Tusk. At first, you think he is getting dragged through the woods like a carcass, and then you realize that Mr. Tusk knows that he hates every second of it and is doing it for the fun and provocation of it.

And there is much to love in watching Zoe Barnes and Janine Skorsky make common cause, less about their former antagonism, which is by now ancient in the life of the series, and more about watching the pure pleasure of journalists smelling a large story.

Bygones become bygones because there are bigger fish to fry. “Show me your notes,” Ms. Skorsky says matter-of-factly. “I know he was your source.”

Their nostrils flare, their hands become like birds flitting over documents and you can sense that they will soon be in full gallop. They begin to ambush, gather and marshal facts. Watching a major story unfurl, even a fake one on a television show, is a mighty thing.

Given that there is a dead congressman in the middle of the story, they both know that stakes are high and you can see they mix their own thrill of pursuit with worries about where it might lead.

Parker: And here, we get a glimpse into what animates Ms. Barnes â€" like all journalists, it seems, she’s eager for a good, high-profile story. She was originally willing to sleep with Mr. Underwood and do his bidding when the reward was juicy A1 nuggets. But when it looks as if the better story might involve bringing him down, she’s more than game for that, too. Her only hesitation seems less born out of concern for betraying Mr. Underwood, but for revealing that she has slept with him.

But yes, it’s great to watch Ms. Barnes and Ms. Skorsky conspire in stairwells, half-talk, half-barge their way into Congressional offices, and hop on planes to track down that one elusive source who can lead them to the next, equally elusive source. And so we see the story start to come together.

Still, I can’t imagine that Ms. Skorsky, Ms. Barnes, and even Mr. Underwood’s own wife have a sense of how high or how deep the Russo affair runs. Might we be coining yet another “gate” â€" Russo-gate â€" by the season’s end

Carr: Betcha Ms. Underwood knows or soon will know what her darling little Francis is capable of. In a show chockablock with moral and ethical eunuchs, she seems to have the most ice running through her veins. She is a classic ends-over-means tactician, rendered all the more spicy by the fact that she runs a supposed do-gooder nonprofit organization. Looking back over the season, one of the deep satisfactions of watching “House of Cards” has been its refusal to suggest that any one part of the Beltway apparatus is morally superior to the other.

People in government like to think they answer to greater gods and journalists like to think that they are on a mission from god, while nonprofits act as if they were always on the side of angels, when in fact, all are capable of moral mis- and malfeasance when it serves their ends. If you think about it, only Remy Danton, Mr. Underwood’s former staffer who has gone over to the lobbying side, is really consistent in terms of who he is and what he represents. As a lobbyist and a fixer, he understands that brute force and large sums of cash, strategically applied, can melt away the pretense of civic-mindedness and reveal the self-interest that lurks around every corner in the capital.

Barbara Walters Said to Be Nearing Retirement

Barbara Walters, whose television career spans more than a half century, will retire in May 2014, an executive familiar with the newswoman’s plans said Thursday.

The formal announcement of Ms. Walters’s plans will probably be made this May on her ABC daytime program,  “The View.” The executive familiar with the plans said the following year will include a number of specials and retrospectives of Ms. Walters’s long career in television on her network, ABC.

Ms. Walters’s decision follows a year in which her health became a national story. She suffered a concussion in Washington after the inauguration. That developed into an infection that was ultimately diagnosed as a case of chicken pox.

In 2010, Ms. Walters underwent a successful heart bypass operation.

In recent years, Ms. Walters, 83, has stepped back from a number of her longtime roles, limiting the number of interview specials for which she has become famous. But she maintained her base at “The View,” a consistently successful program she created.

The future of that program has recently been the subject of much speculation, with one longtime host, Joy Behar, leaving and another, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, rumored to be coming to the end of her tenure.

But most of Ms. Walters’s career was spent at network news divisions, first at NBC, where she became the first prominent woman to anchor the “Today” show, and then at ABC. There she started as the first woman to anchor a network evening newscast and went on to become one of the network’s chief correspondents, with the newsmagazine “20/20” as the base for many of her interviews.

She also gained fame for her annual interview special that preceded coverage of the Academy Awards, a program that was often among the highest-rated news specials of the year.

Retirements Contributing to Largest Senate Turnover in Decades

The announcement on Tuesday by Senator Tim Johnson, Democrat of South Dakota, that he will not run for re-election in 2014 brings the total number of senators who have retired or resigned in the 113th Congress to eight.

While eight retirements is not a record, the 113th Congress is the third consecutive legislative session to experience an unusually high number of Senate retirements. Those retirements have combined with defeats at the ballot box to create the largest turnover in the Senate in nearly 40 years.

Since the 1972 congressional elections, which is as far back as our database of retirements goes, the Senate has typically seen about six retirements in each Congress. Beginning in 2009, however, senators have been leaving at a significantly higher rate. Before the eight retirements â€" so far â€" in this legislative session, there were 10 in the 112th Congress and eight in the 111th.

In total, 26 senators have retired since January 2009. That is just two retirements short of the recent peak, from 1991 through 1996, when 28 senators retired. And there is plenty of time left in the 113th Congress for more retirements to come.

But retirements don’t tell the whole story of turnover. Though the 1990s still holds the edge in the number of retirements, the past few election cycles have brought in more Senate freshmen than that era did.

“This is the largest number of turnovers since the 1970s,” Dr. Donald A. Ritchie, the Senate historian, said.

Senate.gov has data on freshman senators going back to 1914, the first election after the Seventeenth Amendment established direct election of United States senators by popular vote. The number of new freshman senators elected to each Congress was generally lower in the second half of the 20th century than it was in the first half. The average number of new senators per Congress in each decade ranged from 15 to 17 from 1914 through 1940, but it then fell to 10 or 11 through the first decade of the 21st century.

The 1970s were an exception. The era immediately after Watergate saw a jump in retirees, which contributed to an increase in Senate freshmen. There were 18 new senators elected in 1976, 20 in 1978 and 18 in 1980.

The current period â€" beginning with the 2008 elections â€" have seen a similar, though slightly smaller, jump in new senators. Fourteen freshman were elected to the Senate in 2008, followed by 16 newcomers in 2010 and 12 in 2012.

In part, the current turnover is a generational shift. “People who came [to Washington] in the late 1970s and early 1980s â€" the last major turnover â€" are now leaving themselves,” Dr. Ritchie said. “Every 20 or 30 years, there’s just a large crop of people who come in at the same time and so they also tend to leave at the same time.”

Some also argue that more senators are retiring because, as David Karol, an associate professor in American Politics at the University of Maryland, said, “Post-Congress is a lot more lucrative then it used to be.” Legislators can make a lot more money in the private sector or lobbying their former colleagues.

Finally, some contend that increased partisanship has made the Senate less hospitable. When Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine retired last year, she pointed to “political paralysis” as the main reason.

Whatever the cause, the eight retirements so far in the 113th Congress mean that we should continue to see more turnover into the 2014 elections.

The Breakfast Meeting: NBC Calls Cooper About ‘Today’ and Hearst Chief to Step Down

Reports of a surprising phone call from an NBC executive to CNN’s Anderson Cooper have fueled speculation about possible succession plans for Matt Lauer, the co-host of the “Today” show, which has had slumping ratings, Brian Stelter writes. NBC tried to quell the rumors, but three television industry insiders confirmed that Mr. Cooper was asked this month whether he would consider hosting “Today.” It is unclear whether Mr. Cooper might be interested in moving from “Anderson Cooper 360,” his nightly program on CNN, to a morning show on NBC, but rumors of the call come as NBC is finalizing plans to have Jimmy Fallon replace Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show.”

Frank A. Bennack Jr., who has run privately-held Hearst Corporation for nearly 30 years, announced on Wednesday that he is stepping down, Christine Haughney and Robin Pogrebin report. Mr. Bennack diversified Hearst with investments in television, a ratings agency and health care information. Steven R. Swartz, the company’s chief operating officer for the last two years, will succeed Mr. Bennack on June 1.

Weight Watchers found its latest celebrity endorser â€" Ana Gasteyer, the former “Saturday Night Live” comedian and “Suburgatory” star â€" in a very unusual way, Andrew Adam Newman writes. Ms. Gasteyer became a devotee of Weight Watchers’ diet program without the company’s knowledge and posted on Twitter regularly about her experiences using it. The brand contacted her in February, and they have since worked on commercials featuring Ms. Gasteyer singing weight-loss related songs, marking perhaps the first time a brand spokeswoman was found on Twitter.

Justin Timberlake epitomizes the personal brand with the release of his new album, “The 20/20 Experience,” which sold 968,000 copies its first week, according to Nielsen SoundScan, Ben Sisario reports. The album’s release was accompanied by a media blitz of appearances on shows like “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,” commercials for Target and, most importantly, extensive use of social media to connect with fans who yearn for “insider” access. Mr. Timberlake’s extensive promotion ensures that he sells many more albums than artists near him on the charts who lack the resources to mount such a campaign.

The Supreme Court dismissed a class-action antitrust lawsuit against Comcast on Wednesday in which more than two million current and former subscribers sought to prove that the company had unfairly eliminated competition and overcharged customers, Edward Wyatt reports. The 5-to-4 decision, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, said that the proposed class of Comcast subscribers failed to meet formal legal guidelines to certify that wrongdoing was common to the group and that damages could be measured on a classwide, rather than an individual, basis.

Tim McCarver, Fox’s No. 1 baseball analyst, plans to retire after the 2013 season, Richard Sandomir reports. Mr. McCarver said that he had no plans to continue working for Fox or its forthcoming sports channel, Fox Sports 1. Fox may have to look outside its studios for a replacement.

Criticism of Germany’s economic policies in the European Union and Cyprus in particular has taken a distasteful turn, Melissa Eddy writes. Cypriot protesters have taken to comparing Germany’s economic policies to its dark past. Some media outlets have taken a similar tack; a column by a university professor who compared German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s policies to Hitler’s was removed from the Web site of the Spanish newspaper El País after a flurry of criticism.

After Casting Wide Net, CNN Finds Co-Host for Morning Show

In his search for a new morning television host that lasted months, the new head of CNN, Jeffrey Zucker, considered dozens of names, some boldface and some unknown. It wasn’t until he paired Christopher Cuomo, the former ABC anchor he hired in January, with a young Washington correspondent named Kate Bolduan that he thought he had a perfect match.

On Thursday, in something of a surprise, Mr. Zucker named Ms. Bolduan the co-host of CNN’s forthcoming morning show, which has attracted considerable interest in the television business this year, given Mr.
Zucker’s past life as a former producer of NBC’s “Today” show.

“We were floored with excitement when we saw Chris and Kate together on screen,” Mr. Zucker said in a statement, referring to the “screen test” of the two hosts that took place about four weeks ago.

Mr. Cuomo and Ms. Bolduan will lead the new show, which will have its premiere in the late spring, replacing “Starting Point,” which was hosted by Soledad O’Brien.

They will be joined by Michaela Pereira, a new hire by Mr. Zucker who is a morning host on KTLA, the most popular local morning newscast in Los Angeles. “Chris, Kate and Michaela are a dynamic team that will give our viewers in America a new way to start their day,” Mr. Zucker said in his statement.

Mr. Zucker has declined interview requests since taking over as chief executive of CNN Worldwide in January. But his pairing of Mr. Cuomo, 42, and Ms. Bolduan, 29, suggests that he sees an opening for a morning show that is generationally different â€" or, to put it more bluntly, a morning show that has younger faces.

The top producer of the forthcoming program will be Jim Murphy, who ran ABC’s “Good Morning America” in the late 2000s while Mr. Cuomo was the news anchor of that program. Mr. Murphy, whose hiring was announced internally in February, said in a telephone interview that the CNN program would be a “wide-ranging morning show.”

“We’re not going to reinvent the wheel,” he said, seemingly trying to manage expectations. “But what we will provide people, I think, is a fresher, more energetic, more conversational and more interesting morning show than what they’re used to.”

Some of the specifics about the format and the content are still being sorted out, Mr. Murphy said. But he indicated that the new show “will not be all politics like MSNBC is,” referring to “Morning Joe,” or “as consistently about social issues as Fox is,” referring to “Fox & Friends.”

Both “Morning Joe” and “Fox & Friends” routinely outperform “Starting Point” in ratings, which may be part of the reason why Mr. Zucker has decided to start over from scratch and make a new show. “Starting Point” was plagued by executive-level disagreements about what the show should and shouldn’t be. Ms. O’Brien’s associates complained that the show wasn’t supported internally or promoted externally.

Mr. Zucker and Mr. Murphy seem determined not to repeat those missteps. Mr. Murphy said in the interview that “we really did cast a wide net” as the new management considered possible co-hosts for Mr. Cuomo.

Of Ms. Bolduan, he said, “It is a surprising choice, and we know that.” That’s because Mr. Zucker originally planned to pair Mr. Cuomo with Erin Burnett, a better-known host who CNN hired away from CNBC two years ago. But the plan fell apart, reportedly due to Ms. Burnett’s unwillingness to move to the morning time slot. She currently hosts a 7 p.m. newscast, “Erin Burnett OutFront.”

CNN executives portrayed this as a good thing, because it led them to Ms. Bolduan, who wowed Mr. Zucker and his lieutenants. Mr. Cuomo and Ms. Bolduan had obvious chemistry when they tried hosting together in an internal test, and that’s what morning producers look for when they put people together.

Ms. Bolduan, who at 29 will be the youngest morning host on any major television network, will move to New York from Washington for the new job. She is currently a congressional correspondent for CNN. She joined the channel in 2007 as a correspondent for the CNN service that provides news to local television stations. She was promoted to the main channel in 2009. Ms. Bolduan has gained a little bit of hosting experience lately by co-hosting one hour of “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer” in Washington. But she hasn’t anchored elsewhere, so the new morning show could have something of a learning curve.

“It is a huge opportunity to work on this new show,” she said in a statement on Thursday. “Knowing that we have the resources of some of the most experienced executives in the business, the backing of a brand like CNN, and to be able to sit alongside such great people as Chris and Michaela â€" I can’t think of a better combination.”

Executives at CNN have said they know â€" and they want others to know â€" that the rebuilding of the channel’s daily schedule will take time. But the channel’s recent ratings lows suggest that it is primed for a comeback of sorts. “Starting Point,” for instance, averaged just 234,000 viewers last year, CNN’s lowest total viewer number in that time slot in more than a decade.

Inside the network, there is confidence that Mr. Zucker can increase its market share in the mornings. Mr. Zucker is the producer credited with taking the “Today” show to first place in the ratings in the 1990s. He went on to become the chief executive of NBC, until Comcast took over the company in 2011.