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‘The Office’ Gets an Extra 15 Minutes to Say Goodbye

‘The Office’ Gets an Extra 15 Minutes to Say Goodbye

NBC is having a hard time saying goodbye to its most successful comedy of the last decade, “The Office.” Its one-hour finale just got longer.

NBC announced on Tuesday that it had extended the finale another 15 minutes, meaning the last episode, which is scheduled for May 16, will run from 9 to 10:15 p.m.

Greg Daniels, the show’s executive producer and the creator of the American version of the show (it was originally created England by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant), had been lobbying NBC ardently for weeks to add more time because the finale was so packed with farewell scenes.

On the set last month, Mr. Daniels said he didn’t know how he was going to be able to edit the show down to just one hour (including commercials) because he had taken pains to give each member of the show’s enormous cast some suitable goodbye scene.

His campaign won out with NBC’s announcement on Tuesday of the additional 15 minutes, a move that harks back to the old NBC strategy of “supersizing” its comedy hits â€" letting them run a bit longer than their specific half-hour time periods. (NBC will accommodate the extra time by squeezing the drama that follows, “Hannibal,” to run from 10:15 to 11, with fewer commercials.)

The “Office” finale brings the cast together for one last round of interviews related to the nine-year documentary a crew shot at the Dunder-Mifflin Paper Company â€" as well as a wedding.

The news of the wedding has led to speculation about who winds up married. It has increased the speculation that the show’s longtime star, Steve Carell, will make a cameo appearance in the finale after all. (It was previously announced that he wouldn’t.)



Critic’s Notebook: Lil Wayne and Other Rappers Run Afoul of Propriety

Rappers Run Afoul of Propriety in Corporate Conflicts

In hip-hop, as in all things, you get what you pay for, even if you don’t read the fine print.

PepsiCo’s Mountain Dew severed ties with Lil Wayne over some of the rapper's objectionable lyrics.

Three times in recent weeks large companies have learned this the hard way, severing ties with rappers they had previously happily paid to endorse their products: Reebok dropped Rick Ross over objectionable lyrics, and PepsiCo’s Mountain Dew did the same to Lil Wayne, just days after it had cut short an ad campaign it had worked on with Tyler, the Creator.

This is a neon-bright sign of corporate retrenchment in the face of protest, bad press and flashes of moral rectitude. Mr. Ross’s casual lyrics about rape incited a petition and a protest outside a New York Reebok store. Lil Wayne’s lyrics spurred an outcry from relatives of Emmett Till, the black teenager murdered during the civil rights era whom the rapper had mentioned in a vulgar context. Tyler, the Creator was jettisoned after a black scholar called his soda commercials racist.

But these reactions are also a signal of how expendable hip-hop culture â€" and, by extension, black culture and youth culture â€" is to mainstream, predominantly white-owned corporations. These companies have been happy to associate with hip-hop while turning a blind eye to some of the genre’s rougher edges, but at the same time they have remained at arm’s length, all the better to dispose of hip-hop artists once their liabilities outweighed their assets.

This is a familiar story with roots way back in the culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s, during the days of the Parents’ Music Resource Center and the 2 Live Crew obscenity trial, which coincided with hip-hop’s rise as a cultural force, one both alluring and a potential scourge.

Hip-hop’s commercial power and success, penetrating even the least forgiving corners of the mainstream, seemed to ensure that the old stigma and disapproval had all but vanished. (The same goes for the old accusation that hip-hop artists sold out by partnering with big corporations that held purportedly opposing values â€" hip-hop took those contradictions and made them into art.) In this environment rappers looked like safer bets than ever for corporate endorsements: widely known and admired, with a frisson of counterculture still stuck to them. They are outsiders recognizable to insiders, and far better celebrities than the generally faceless titans of dance music or the declining stars of rock.

And yet those old debates have returned with a vengeance in recent weeks, re-energized by the frictionless way social media can speed up conversations. In each instance it was only days between the identification of the offense and the end of the business relationship. In the case of Mr. Ross and Lil Wayne the intense criticism was justified. Mr. Ross alluded to nonconsensual sex with a woman, using slang for Ecstasy, in his verse on Rocko’s “U.O.E.N.O.”: “Put molly all in her Champagne, she ain’t even know it/I took her home and I enjoyed that/she ain’t even know it.” Lil Wayne, on his verse in the remix of Future’s “Karate Chop,” invoked Till as part of an explicit sexual simile. (In each situation the offending verse was part of another artist’s song and therefore might have been policed less vigilantly than if it had been on Mr. Ross’s or Lil Wayne’s own album.)

Mr. Ross’s lyric is reprehensible; Lil Wayne’s is regrettable and tacky. (Lil Wayne is by no means the only rapper to mention Emmett Till in song, but his use is easily the messiest.) Both men issued tepid nonapologies. Mr. Ross eventually progressed to a full apology, but only after prodding.

In each case justice was swift, as companies said, rightly, that their values didn’t jibe with the sentiments of those lyrics â€" and, by extension, those artists.

Except when they do, that is. A cursory glance at any rapper’s catalog, from Jay-Z on down, will be likely to turn up a lyric that’s offensive, in poor taste or eyebrow-raising. By that metric, almost every rapper of note would be ineligible for corporate partnerships.



N.C.A.A. Tournament Final Four Is Moving to TBS

Men’s Final Four Is Moving to TBS

TBS will start televising the Final Four of the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament in 2014 and ’15, advancing the schedule contemplated in its 14-year, $10.8-billion contract with CBS that went into effect three years ago. In those years, CBS will continue to carry the championship game.

The two networks will also start splitting the Round of 8 games in 2014, rather than in ’16.

The changes are a result of an option triggered in the companies’ contract which would have given TBS the Final Four weekend in 2014, with those three games moving back to CBS in 2016.

But Sean McManus, the chairman of CBS Sports, said, “When we started discussing this three months ago, we wanted a scenario that was best for CBS and Turner.” But, he said, neither side wanted to be shut out on Final Four weekend in 2014 or ’15, so they rewrote the language of the option to allow for TBS to have the Final Four both years and for CBS to carry the championship game.

“We came up with a compromise that protects CBS’s interests and Turner’s interests,” McManus said.

David Levy, the president of Turner Sports, said, “From a partnership standpoint, this works for viewers and for our relationship with CBS.”

The TBS-CBS deal allowed all of the tournament’s games to be carried nationally with broadcasts spread out on CBS and the Turner-owned TBS, TNT and truTV networks. The majority of the games are on the Turner channels.



Fox News Anchor Megyn Kelly Renews Contract

The Fox News Anchor Megyn Kelly Renews Contract

Megyn Kelly has renewed her contract at the Fox News Channel, where she has become one of the channel’s best-known news anchors.

Megyn Kelly has signed a contract to stay at Fox News.

Although some contract renewals are mere formalities, this one was not; Ms. Kelly’s future has been the subject of media speculation since late last year. She took meetings with the heads of at least two other television networks. But she decided to stay at Fox News, where she hosts the two-hour afternoon program “America Live.”

It is unknown whether the contract renewal is a precursor to a more prominent role for Ms. Kelly on Fox, the highest-rated cable news channel in the United States. Talent contracts typically do not guarantee certain time slots, but Ms. Kelly has been mentioned in the past as a candidate for a prime-time program.

A spokeswoman for Fox News did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. The news of her contract renewal, confirmed by several people with knowledge of the situation, will come as good news to her fans, of which there are many; “America Live” was watched by an average of 1.1 million viewers in the first quarter of the year, slightly more than the shows before and after hers.

The people spoke on condition of anonymity because contract talks are usually conducted in secret.

Ms. Kelly has worked at Fox News the last nine years, first as a reporter in Washington and then as an anchor in New York. For the last three years she has led “America Live,” from 1 to 3 p.m. weekdays, and co-anchored special reports on election nights with Bret Baier.

She was widely noticed on election night last year when she walked through the corridors of Fox and asked the channel’s voting analysts about Karl Rove’s assertions that the channel had called the state of Ohio for President Obama prematurely. They not surprisingly defended their decision. The moment became a viral hit and bolstered Ms. Kelly’s personal brand as a part of Fox’s news side, not its opinion side.

Not long after that, the Fox News chief executive, Roger Ailes, acknowledged that “a lot of people will try to recruit her” when her contract came due.

In an interview with TVNewser, Mr. Ailes said “we’d love her to stay here and be even a bigger star.” He added: “I’d be stunned if she wanted to go to any other cable channel. That’s a real dive off a high cliff. If somebody wanted her to host the ‘Today’ show or something, she’d have to look at that I suppose.”

Earlier this year, Ms. Kelly spoke with a number of other channels, including CNN, which was very interested in hiring her, according to one of the people who spoke on condition of anonymity. Her representatives also sought a number of meetings with executives at ABC, stirring speculation that she might be in contention for a spot on “Good Morning America.” But “G.M.A.,” the newly No. 1 network morning show, led by Robin Roberts and George Stephanopoulos, has a rather full bench at the moment, and ABC’s conversations with Ms. Kelly went nowhere.

The channel, thanks in part to Mr. Ailes’s charm, has had a remarkably consistent lineup of hosts and shows for the better part of a decade. It also has its two biggest stars, the 8 p.m. host Bill O’Reilly and the 9 p.m. host Sean Hannity, under contract for several more years, all but ruling out any changes at those hours.

But there might be openings at other times of day. It is unknown when the contract of Greta Van Susteren, the 10 p.m. host, will be up for renewal. Shepard Smith, the 7 p.m. host, has a contract that expires at the end of the year, according to TV Guide. In an interview last month, Mr. Smith said he’d had no contract talks yet, but also said: “I love it at Fox News. I love working for Roger Ailes. I want to do what’s best for everybody involved.”



Jeeves Lives, as Faulks Picks Up Where Wodehouse Left Off

Jeeves Lives, as New Author Picks Up Where Wodehouse Left Off

P.G. Wodehouse in 1971.

The British novelist Sebastian Faulks, who will be picking up Wodehouse's characters Wooster and Jeeves.

Nearly 40 years after the last book by the comic novelist P.G. Wodehouse, the aristocratic Bertie Wooster and his faithful valet, Jeeves, are making a comeback.

The British novelist Sebastian Faulks, author of “Birdsong" and a best-selling James Bond book, “Devil May Care," has written “Jeeves and the Wedding Bells," to be released in the United States on Nov. 5, St. Martin’s Press said on Tuesday. Wodehouse, who died in 1975, chronicled the lives of Wooster and Jeeves in 11 novels and 35 stories.

The new book chronicles their latest adventure in a “comic work worthy of the master himself,” St. Martin’s said in a statement. The Wodehouse estate approved of the new book and the selection of Mr. Faulks, who is a longtime fan of Wodehouse.



Presidents Are Viewed More Fondly in the Rear-View Mirror

The rise in approval ratings of former President George W. Bush has received some attention this week, in advance of the opening of his presidential library in Dallas. But that rise is exactly what one would expect, based on the history of other ex-presidents' approval ratings.

Presidents who are unpopular in their final months in office â€" like Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter and the first George Bush, all of whom lost presidential elections â€" typically become more popular out of office. All three of those former presidents had approval ratings exceeding 60 percent at various points over the past 20 years, according to separate polls by Pew and Gallup.

The approval rating of the elder Mr. Bush peaked at 74 percent in early 2000, according to Gallup. Mr. Carter hit 69 percent in 1999, before drifting down to 52 percent in 2010. Mr. Ford reached 71 percent in 1999 (when the economy was booming and Americans were evidently feeling charitable toward their ex-presidents), and he was at 61 percent in 2010. The trend starts before presidents leave office, with their approval often rising in between election day and inauguration day.

“Presidents' retrospective approval ratings are almost always more positive than their job approval ratings while in office,” writes Jeffrey M. Jones of Gallup. “Former presidents likely transcend politics when they leave office, moving into a more nonpolitical role compared with the highly political environment in which presidents operate.”

Even Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, popular throughout much of their presidencies and re-elected by comfortable margins, have had higher approval ratings since leaving office than they did in office, on average.

The pattern here doesn't apply only to former presidents, either. When prominent people leave the battles of daily politics, their approval ratings tend to rise. Hillary Rodham Clinton's favorability rating stood at 65 percent at the end of her tenure as secretary of state, a job mostly above the partisan fray. As recently as 2008, in the midst of her primary campaign against then-Senator Barack Obama, her approval rating was only 48 percent, according to Pew. If she runs for president again in 2016, her rating will almost surely decline from 65 percent.

George W. Bush's trajectory is most similar to that of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Mr. Bush left office with among the lowest approval ratings of any president, hobbled by an unpopular war. Mr. Johnson, worried he would lose his own Democratic Party's nomination because of the Vietnam War, chose not to run in 1968. Mr. Johnson's approval rating hovered around 40 percent in his last year in office, while Mr. Bush's hovered around 30 percent.

By 2010, 49 percent of Americans approved of Mr. Johnson's performance as president, with 36 disapproving, according to Gallup. In a recent Washington Post-ABC poll, 47 percent approved of Mr. Bush's perspective, and 50 percent disapproved.

The one exception to the pattern is Richard M. Nixon, the only president to resign from the office. His approval rating was only 29 percent in 2010 and has not exceeded 40 percent in any poll Gallup has published.

These historical patterns, obviously, are not destiny. It is possible that George W. Bush will become more or less popular over time, depending on events like the Arab Spring and on the details that eventually emerge about his tenure. But it isn't surprising that Mr. Bush has become more popular as a former president than he was as president. It would be news if he were not.



Uncertainty Still Clouds Health Care Law

Three years after President Obama signed the health care reform law, there are concerns that the process of implementing it will be rocky. Even some of the law's supporters are worried.

Perhaps more troubling for the White House, the Affordable Care Act is still not well liked or well understood. The Obama administration had hoped that over time, the legislation would gain enough support to help smooth over the rough patches of putting it into practice. Instead, public opinion has remained mostly static: a plurality of Americans still disapprove of the law, and a substantial portion of the public remains uncertain about what it says, according to recent polls.

There is even confusion about whether the health care law is still, in fact, law. A Kaiser Family Foundation survey [PDF] conducted in April found that 41 percent of American adults did not know that the Affordable Care Act remains the law of the land. A separate tracking survey conducted by Kaiser, which has done far more surveys on health care than any other polling organization, found that roughly half of American adults said they did not have enough information about the law to understand how it will affect them.

The tracking poll found that there had actually been an increase in the percentage of American adults with no opinion about the health care law.

Among those who do have an opinion, more people still regard the health care law negatively than positively, according to a series of recent polls. In fact, the law's net approval numbers stand basically where they did when it was passed.

One reason the Obama administration might still be optimistic is that while surveys have consistently found that a plurality of Americans have an overall negative view of the Affordable Care Act, they have just as consistently shown that large majorities of Americans favor individual elements of the law.

For example, Kaiser has found that about 70 percent of adults support providing financial assistance to low- and moderate-income Americans who do not have employer-provided health insurance, and also that about 70 percent support health insurance exchanges and the elimination of out-of-pocket costs for many preventive services - both elements of the health care law.

Once those benefits become realities, the percentage of Americans who approve of the law may rise. But if the law's rollout is messy, there may be a dip in approval before it has a chance to become more popular.



Colbert Busch Might Win, but Could She Last?

Elizabeth Colbert Busch is the Democratic nominee vying for South Carolina's vacant seat in Congress.Rich Addicks for The New York Times Elizabeth Colbert Busch is the Democratic nominee vying for South Carolina's vacant seat in Congress.

A survey released Sunday by the left-leaning Public Policy Polling showed Elizabeth Colbert Busch, a Democrat, down a single percentage point against former Gov. Mark Sanford, a Republican, 46 percent to 47 percent, in the special election to represent South Carolina's First Congressional District.

South Carolina's first district has been held by a Republican for over three decades, and Mitt Romney carried the district by 18 percentage points in 2012. But Mr. Sanford's personal baggage - his 2009 excursion in Argentina with a woman who was not his wife, and a recent accusation of trespassing at his former wife's home - is helping make the race competitive.

Still, even if Ms. Colbert Busch does win on Tuesday, how long might she be able to hold on to such a solidly Republican seat?

If recent history is any guide, not that long.

Since 1997 (which is as far back as records of special elections go on history.house.gov), candidates who won a special election in a district carried by the opposing political party in the preceding presidential election have had fleeting tenures in Congress.

There have been 59 special elections since 1997, and just 13 candidates have carried districts that leaned away from their political party (a Republican representing a Democratic-leaning seat or vice versa). Of those 13, 12 no longer hold those seats.1 The lone exception is Representative Ron Barber, who won a full term in Arizona's Eighth Congressional District in 2012 after winning a special election to replace former Representative Gabrielle Giffords.

Most of those 13 special election upsets occurred in districts that are less partisan than South Carolina's first district. The following chart shows every special election since 1997, arranged by each district's partisanship as measured by the preceding presidential vote.

Nine of the 13 upsets occurred in districts with a lean of less than 15 percentage points. The partisan makeup of South Carolina's First Congressional District - an 18 percentage point advantage for the G.O.P. in 2012 - would make a Colbert Busch victory one of the biggest special election upsets in recent history, but not quite in the top tier. Four candidates have won special elections since 1997 while overcoming more severe partisan headwinds.2

But no matter the magnitude of the partisan lean, representatives who have won special elections in districts that leaned toward the opposite political party - even if the lean was slight - have had trouble winning re-election.

Here are the 13 special election upsets since 1997, and whether that candidate won the following two elections:

Of the 13 representatives who carried unfriendly districts, eight went on to win a full term. But just four won a second term. Four won three terms, three won four terms, two won five terms and zero won six terms (Mr. Barber is still serving his first full term).

In contrast, the average tenure for all House members has been roughly five terms, or 10 years, in recent Congresses. Incumbent members of Congress are re-elected, when they run, the vast majority of the time.

The fact that special election winners who carry districts that tilt toward the opposing party have shorter tenures in Congress shouldn't be surprising. Special elections often occur under special circumstances, like after a scandal, death and or resignation. Those circumstances often fade.

In addition, House elections have become increasingly nationalized, and ticket-splitting (voting Republican for the House but Democratic for president, or vice versa) has decreased sharply.

Ms. Colbert Busch may be able to beat the odds. Others have, including former Representatives Ben Chandler of Kentucky and Vito Fossella of New York, both of whom earned several terms.

Of course, in order to have that chance, Ms. Colbert Busch will first have to defeat Mr. Sanford, which by itself would be one of the bigger special-election upsets in many years.

1: Representative Bill Foster won a special election in the Illinois 14th Congressional district in early 2008, won a full term that November, lost re-election in 2010, then returned to Congress representing the state's 11th district in 2012.

2: That includes former Representative Charles Djou, a Republican, who won a 2010 special election in Hawaii's First Congressional Cistrict, which President Obama carried by 42 percentage points in 2008.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 6, 2013

An earlier version of this post misstated the political affiliation of former Representative Ed Case of Hawaii. Mr. Case, who represented Hawaii's Second Congressional district, was a Democrat, not a Republican. Because of that error, the post contained several incorrect numbers about special elections in which a candidate won in a district that was carried by the opposing political party in the last presidential election. Those figures have been updated.



Advertising: GE Capital Puts On a Lending Roadshow

GE Capital Puts On a Lending Roadshow

"The Roadshow for Growth" bus tour began in Kansas City this week and will end in Columbus, Ohio, in October.

GE Capital this week is embarking on an elaborate advertising campaign with Slate.com featuring a six-month roadshow across the United States meant to stimulate its lending to midsize businesses.

According to research done by the National Center for the Middle Market at Ohio State University, businesses with revenue of $10 million to $1 billion account for more than 43 million jobs in the United States and one-third of the national private sector gross domestic product. GE Capital underwrites the center, founded in 2011. Steven Winoker, who follows General Electric for Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, called lending to middle-market businesses a “profitable business and a core business” for GE Capital, adding that it is “probably better at originating this kind of business than its competitors because of its industrial heritage.”

According to Mr. Winoker, GE Capital generated 47 percent of total earnings for General Electric last year, up from 28 percent in 2009; he also said commercial lending and leasing â€" a large part of which is to midsize businesses â€" was responsible for about a third of GE Capital’s profit last year.

Mr. Winoker said G.E. generally has a “more advanced view of advertising and marketing and is more aggressive in its approach to marketing than most industrial companies, from its heritage of owning” NBC Universal, whose sale to Comcast was completed last year.

One factor behind the campaign suggested Nicholas P. Heymann, who follows G.E. for William Blair & Company, are possible changes in banking regulations resulting from the Dodd-Frank law’s stress test for 2013 that could limit major banks’ ability to lend to smaller businesses.

“Some of GE Capital’s highest returns on investment come from its middle-market lending portfolio,” he said. “If there are changes from a regulatory standpoint, GE Capital wants to be optimally positioned to take advantage of any void that may be created from restricted money center bank lending.”

The campaign â€" which began Monday in Kansas City, Mo., and is considered native advertising, or content sponsored by advertisers â€" is the most elaborate initiative created by SlateCustom, the custom-publishing arm of Slate.com, the online magazine. Previous native advertising on Slate.com included a campaign by the Dairy Council, which looked at the impact of last year’s drought on dairy farmers, and distribution of a video promoting Coca-Cola’s anti-obesity campaign.

Ian Forrest, vice president of global marketing at GE Capital, said his company had run traditional banner advertising on Slate.com for the last two years. “The performance worked really well against our core target audience â€" middle-market, C-level executives,” he said.

He also said the new roadshow, a collaboration jointly developed by GE Capital and Slate.com, was designed to provide a “holistic, 360-degree view of the middle-market opportunity,” and also to “touch customers, prospective customers, employees and policy makers, to start a dialogue and discussion.” Another goal, he added, is to motivate legislators to pass new regulations in support of middle-market business growth.

“The Roadshow for Growth” entails a bus tour through various cities across the United States. After Kansas City, it moves on to St. Louis, Indianapolis, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, New York, Dallas, Atlanta and Los Angeles, among others. It will end in Columbus, Ohio, in late October.

At each stop, the roadshow will host different events, like town hall discussions, conversations with the city’s mayor, and visits with middle-market businesses. In Kansas City on Monday, for example, there was a meeting with Mayor Sly James and a town-hall session with GE Capital employees, while the Chicago visit on Thursday is scheduled to include a discussion moderated by Jacob Weisberg, chairman of the Slate Group, and featuring Mayor Rahm Emanuel and economist Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the first term of the Obama administration.

Daily blog posts, video and commentary on the roadshow will be published on a special Web site, roadshow.slate.com. The Web site is being promoted as a “sponsored section” on slate.com.

Lindsay Nelson, vice president of integrated programs for Slate.com, said her company had gone to “great lengths” to make it clear to readers that the roadshow’s online section is “a special section brought to you by GE Capital, SlateCustom, National Center for the Middle Market,” via a note on the site and a separate pop-up message.

This disclaimer is no doubt meant to avoid controversy like that generated in January when The Atlantic ran a story on its Web site about the Church of Scientology that resembled its regular content, though it was labeled “sponsored content.”

Mr. Forrest said GE Capital would promote the roadshow on Slate.com, various G.E. Web sites, and through digital advertising on Web sites of Yahoo Finance and Bloomberg. He said the total budget for the roadshow would be between $1.5 million and $2 million.

According to Kantar Media, GE Capital’s advertising expenditures in the past five years ranged from a low of $4.3 million in 2008 to a high of $58 million in 2010; last year’s spending was $9.3 million, almost $2 million of which was for Internet display advertising.

Loren Ghiglione, a professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, said the collaboration between Slate.com and GE Capital raises the question of “what it will do to the reputation of Slate.”

The program’s aim to motivate legislators to pass new regulations supporting middle-market businesses “sounds like lobbying to me. I don’t think that journalism and lobbying are the same thing,” he said.

Sharmila C. Chatterjee, a senior lecturer at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management who studies business-to-business marketing, called the roadshow a “very nice way for GE Capital to connect with customers, establish credibility and gain their trust, three very important things in the day of information bombardment.”

She warned, though, that if the initiative is “hijacked by interest groups and gets politicized, the goal will not be fulfilled.”



Alaskan Media Battle Pits KTUU and Cable Rival

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TED Teams Up With PBS for Education Program

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Book Looks Behind the Scenes at Fox

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USA Network to Explore Sitcoms and Reality Shows

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‘Cops\' Is Moving to Spike TV

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British TV Star Jimmy Tarbuck Identified in Child Sex Inquiry

Another British TV Personality Identified in Child Sex Investigation

LONDON - Another well-known television personality was drawn into Britain's growing child sexual abuse scandal on Tuesday when British news media identified a 73-year-old man arrested over allegations dating back to the late 1970s as the entertainer Jimmy Tarbuck.

The latest arrest, which took place in April, concerns accusations of abuse of a young boy in Harrogate in the north of England.

The police in North Yorkshire acted on information passed on from an investigation into Jimmy Savile, the BBC television host who died in 2011 and who is now linked to hundreds of cases of abuse.

In the aftermath of those revelations, many victims have come forward and allegations have surfaced against around a dozen individuals, including some of the country's best-known television personalities of the 1960s and 1970s.

Earlier this month, another BBC radio and television personality, Stuart Hall, 83, admitted 14 charges of indecently assaulting girls, one age 9. The offenses, which involved 13 victims, took place between 1967 and 1985.

An entertainer and quiz show host from the north of England, Mr. Tarbuck, also known by the nickname Tarby, was a schoolmate of John Lennon in Liverpool and rose to fame in the 1960s and 1970s.

He was identified by the British media, though not by the police, who in Britain do not normally name individuals until they are formally charged.

In a statement, the North Yorkshire police said that a 73-year-old man had been arrested in connection with a child sexual abuse investigation in Harrogate.

“The complaint relates to an incident that occurred in the late 1970s when the victim was a young boy,” the police statement said, adding that the man was arrested in Kingston Upon Thames on April 26 and released on bail.

North Yorkshire police officials said the arrest followed information supplied by officers working on Operation Yewtree, the investigation of allegations against Mr. Savile and others. The Tarbuck case, however, forms a separate investigation, they said.



British TV Star Jimmy Tarbuck Identified in Child Sex Inquiry

Another British TV Personality Identified in Child Sex Investigation

LONDON â€" Another well-known television personality was drawn into Britain’s growing child sex abuse scandal Tuesday when British news media identified a 73-year-old man arrested over allegations dating back to the late 1970s as the entertainer Jimmy Tarbuck.

The latest arrest, which took place in April, concerns the alleged abuse of a young boy in Harrogate in the north of England.

Police in North Yorkshire acted on information passed on from an investigation into Jimmy Savile, a television host who died in 2011 and who is now linked to hundreds of cases of abuse.

In the aftermath of those revelations, which shocked Britons and caused a crisis at the BBC which employed Mr. Savile, many victims have come forward and allegations have surfaced against around a dozen individuals, including some of the country’s best-known television personalities of the 1960s and 1970s.

Earlier this month, another BBC radio and television personality, Stuart Hall, 83, admitted 14 charges of indecently assaulting girls, one aged nine. The offenses, which involved 13 victims, took place between 1967 and 1985.

An entertainer and quiz show host from the north of England, Mr. Tarbuck was a schoolmate of the Beatle, John Lennon in Liverpool and rose to fame in the 1960s and 1970s, winning the affectionate nickname, “Tarby.”

He was identified by the British media though not by police which in Britain do not normally name individuals until they are formally charged.

In a statement, North Yorkshire police said that a 73-year-old man had been arrested in connection with a child sex abuse investigation in Harrogate.

“The complaint relates to an incident that occurred in the late 1970s when the victim was a young boy,” the police statement said, adding that the man was arrested in Kingston Upon Thames on April 26 and released on bail.

North Yorkshire police officials said the arrest followed information supplied by officers working on Operation Yewtree, the investigation set up into allegations against Mr. Savile. The Tarbuck case, however, forms a separate investigation.