Hamas Closes News Media Outlets

GAZA â€" Hamas, the Islamist militant group controlling the Gaza Strip, closed news media offices and a television production company on Thursday for what it called the spreading of false reports and working for Israeli television.

The offices belonged to the Al Arabiya news channel, which is based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and to Maan, a Palestinian news agency based in Bethlehem, West Bank.

Hamas also shut down a local production company called Lens because it had provided broadcast services to I24 News, a new channel based in Israel that broadcasts in Arabic, English and French.

Ismail Jaber, Hamas’s attorney general, said his office had received complaints that Al Arabiya and Maan had “spread rumors and fabricated news” and had provided information that “threaten the social peace and harm the Palestinian people and their resistance.”

He added the closings were temporary, without explaining further.

The move came after Al Arabiya and Maan both reported that some leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt had fled to Gaza after the military ousted President Mohammed Morsi this month. The reports attributed the information to Israeli news media reports and unidentified sources, saying that six Brotherhood leaders were directing pro-Morsi activities in Egypt from a hotel room in Gaza City.

Hamas, which won elections in 2006 and took full control of Gaza in 2007, is an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood movement.

In the wake of the ouster of Mr. Morsi, tensions between the Egyptian military and Hamas have been growing. Egyptian military officials have told state news media that scores of Hamas fighters and snipers have been making their way into Egypt to battle the anti-Morsi demonstrators, and newspaper columnists have accused Hamas of interfering in Egypt’s affairs.

Meanwhile, an employee of Lens said the Hamas-run government’s media office told the company that it was violating a January government decision to bar Palestinian journalists in Gaza from working with or providing services to Israeli news organizations and broadcasters.

The employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the director of the Government Media Office told him that I24 News was a hostile Zionist channel. About an hour later, the police headed for the Lens office and closed it, based on an order from the attorney general.

Congressman Vows to Introduce Bill on Radio Royalties

Representative Melvin L. Watt, a Democrat from North Carolina, said on Thursday that he planned to introduce a bill requiring broadcasters to recognize the performance rights of record companies and musicians, the latest effort in a decades-old fight by the music industry to extract greater royalties from radio.

Radio broadcasters in the United States â€" almost alone in the world â€" pay royalties only to music publishers and songwriters for terrestrial airplay, meaning when songs are played over the air on AM or FM radio. They don’t pay royalties to record companies or performing artists, under the argument that the promotional value those parties receive is sufficient compensation.

The music industry has tried numerous times over the years to change this situation â€" Frank Sinatra was a leading advocate â€" but has always failed.

Mr. Watt said that he planned to introduce a bill before Congress’s recess in August that would establish this performance right for sound recordings. Mr. Watt told the Washington publication The Hill that this could lead to private licensing negotiations between broadcasters and record companies.

Such a bill would not go as far as the last effort at forging a performing rights bill. That bill was introduced in 2009 and would have mandated a royalty. It never came to a full vote in Congress, and although it led to negotiations between broadcasters and music groups, the talks fell apart in 2010 amid acrimony on both sides.

Music groups and broadcasters on Thursday quickly stated their opposing stances over the proposed bill.

“We applaud Ranking Member Watt for taking leadership to end the decades-long injustice that denies performers’ compensation when their work is played on AM/FM radio,” the musicFIRST Coalition, representing record labels, musicians’ unions and other groups, said in a statement.

The National Association of Broadcasters, which has been gearing up for a new fight by promoting a nonbinding resolution in Congress against a change, said that it “strongly opposes a new performance tax that would kill jobs at America’s hometown radio stations while diverting millions of dollars to offshore record labels.”

Mr. Watt’s announcement came just as more news of a growing alternative to royalty legislation emerged. Clear Channel Communications, which has struck a number of private licensing deals with independent record companies, paying royalties for terrestrial airplay in exchange for lower online streaming rates, announced on Thursday that it had made a similar arrangement with the label Innovative Leisure, whose acts include Bass Drum of Death, Crystal Antlers and Classixx.

Amazon Reports a Small Loss

Amazon’s razor-thin profits turned to razor-thin losses, as the Internet commerce giant continued to plow money into warehouses, digital content and other big investments.

With revenue up 22 percent, Amazon showed that the company was still able to deliver the kind of strong sales growth investors have demanded in exchange for buying its stock. So far, those demands do not include an insistence on big profits.

Until it does, Amazon seems content to pour money into initiatives aimed at gobbling up an ever increasing share of spending by consumers.

For the quarter that ended June 30, Amazon said it had a net loss of $7 million, or 2 cents a share, compared with net income of $7 million, or a penny a share, in the same period a year earlier. Amazon’s revenue was $15.7 billion, up from $12.83 billion the year before.

The results were slightly below the estimates of analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters, who expected Amazon to report earnings of 5 cents a share and revenue of $15.73 billion.

The miss did not seem to trouble investors too much. The company’s stock dropped less than 1 percent in after-hours trading after the released of its earnings report.

Glenn Britt to Retire as Time Warner Cable Chief

When Glenn Britt got started in the nascent cable television business in the 1970s, no one knew whether people would pay a monthly fee for something that was already available for free through an antenna. “I thought that it was either going to be a huge thing, maybe in every home, or that it was going to be a complete failure,” he recalled.

Nowadays, the vast majority of Americans do pay companies like Mr. Britt’s Time Warner Cable, not just for television, but for broadband Internet, too. Some even pay for a new home security product. “We keep finding new uses for the technology,” he said, calling this time “the early innings for broadband.”

Keeping Americans paying, in a complex marketplace with new competitors, will soon be someone else’s job. Time Warner Cable, the country’s second-biggest cable company after Comcast, said Thursday that Mr. Britt, its chief executive since 2001, will retire at the end of the year, capping several years of succession discussions and months of public talk about his expected departure.

Mr. Britt, 64, will be replaced by Rob Marcus, who at 48 represents generational change both for the company and the broader industry. Mr. Marcus has been in line for the top job since 2010, when he was named president and chief operating officer.

Mr. Marcus will take over a company that has been transformed in the 12 years Mr. Britt has been in charge. Once known just for piping cable television into homes, Time Warner Cable now considers its main product to be broadband, and it is trying hard to sign up businesses to offset the residences that have switched to DirecTV or Verizon FiOS.

Mr. Marcus said in an interview that his priorities would include residential subscriptions (“We can do better,” he said, after a first quarter of the year that showed a continued decline in television subscribers and a slowdown in growth in broadband subscribers), corporate culture and overall customer service.

“We’ve got to develop a level of emotional connection with our customers,” he said, so that the company isn’t competing on price alone.

While gaining TV subscribers will be challenge, as Mr. Marcus put it (the company had 12.2 million such subscribers at the end of last year, up from 9.2 million when Mr. Britt took over in 2001, and lately the number has been declining), there is more potential on the broadband side. Time Warner Cable had 11.4 million such subscribers at the end of last year, up from 1.4 million at the beginning of Mr. Britt’s tenure. The company had total revenues of $21 billion last year, up from $6 billion the year Mr. Britt took over.

Mr. Marcus’s words may reverberate on Wall Street, where investors approved of the distributor’s 2009 spinoff from the content-oriented Time Warner -- its stock is up more than threefold since -- but want to see its subscription figures improve. Mr. Marcus said the sentiment that the company’s performance has lagged behind other cable providers was based on “isolated metrics over short periods of time.”

Looming over all of this is John Malone, whose recent acquisition of a stake in Charter Communications and subsequent talks with Time Warner Cable about a possible merger have boosted the stocks of both. Time Warner Cable, which has about 12 million subscribers, rebuffed the approach by Mr. Malone, partly because Charter has barely four million subscribers. Given cable’s economies of scale, “smaller companies would benefit from being part of a bigger company,” Mr. Britt acknowledged in an interview. But the benefits for the bigger acquirer “are harder to figure out,” he said, “which is why you haven’t seen us be more aggressive.”

Mr. Britt did not bring up Mr. Malone’s name directly, and would not describe any conversations they have had. He said his retirement plan has had no bearing on the company’s reaction to Mr. Malone, who continues to pursue ways to consolidate the cable industry.

Sirius XM Reports Record Revenue, Aided by Auto Recovery

On Monday, Wall Street was closely focused on Netflix’s second-quarter results of 28.6 million subscribers and revenue of roughly $1 billion. On Thursday, another fast-growing subscription media company was in the spotlight: Sirius XM Radio reported $940 million in revenue for the quarter, a record for the company and more than most analysts had expected.

The satellite-radio provider had $283 million in adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, up 19 percent from the same period a year ago.

But while the pace of Netflix’s subscriber growth worried investors, Sirius has continued to grow quickly, sped along by the recovery in car sales. Sirius reported 25.1 million subscribers, up 716,000 from the same period last year, and the company increased its guidance for the full year, saying that it expected to add 1.5 million subscribers and have more than $3.7 billion in revenue. Shares of Sirius were up a little more than 1 percent in the early afternoon on Thursday.

“The wind has certainly been at our backs with increasing auto sales, and we expect that to continue for the rest of the year,” James E. Meyer, the chief executive, said in an conference call with investors and analysts. Mr. Meyer replaced Mel Karmazin, Sirius’s longtime chief executive, in December.

Mr. Meyer said that there are 54.5 million automobiles in operation with Sirius installed, and that he expected the number to rise to 100 million by the end of 2017.

Sirius also fared well with two particular measurements that investors have paid close attention to. Its “churn” rate, a measurement of customer turnover, has lately hovered around 2 percent, but for the second quarter it dropped to 1.7 percent, meaning that fewer customers were canceling subscriptions.

The number of “self-pay” subscriptions â€" as opposed to those with trial subscriptions subsidized by automakers â€" also grew in the second quarter to a high of 20.3 million, up 9 percent from last year. Subscriptions to the satellite radio service start at about $15 a month.

Sirius’s stock has jumped more than 75 percent in the last year, driven by the company’s improved performance as well as the company’s takeover last year by Liberty Media, which has suggested that it may sell the company or combine it with another of its holdings. This year, Sirius has also completed $1.3 billion of a planned $2 billion stock repurchase plan.

Should Reddit Be Blamed for the Spreading of a Smear?

F.B.I. via Getty Images; Tripathi Family

When a picture of Sunil Tripathi (right) was posted on Reddit alongside an image of Suspect No. 2 in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, it fueled speculation that they were the same person.

On an overcast day in early May, I traveled to suburban Philadelphia to visit the family of Sunil Tripathi, the deceased 22-year-old Brown University student who, for about four hours on the morning of April 19, was mistakenly identified as Suspect No. 2 in the Boston Marathon bombings. The Tripathis had just arrived home after nearly two months spent in Providence, R.I., where they went to organize the search for Sunil, who disappeared on March 16. When I entered the house, Judy Tripathi, Sunil’s mother, asked me for a hug. In a shattered voice, she said, “I need hugs these days.” We sat at the kitchen table and talked, and at one point Judy handed me a photo of a young, smiling Sunil, caught in the motion of throwing a ball. “Look how happy he looks,” she said. For the next two hours,she and her husband, Akhil, and their daughter, Sangeeta, described what happened to them in the early-morning hours of April 19, and how the false identification of their son derailed their ongoing search for him and further traumatized their lives.

At 5 p.m. on April 18, three days after the bombs went off at the marathon finish line, the F.B.I. released grainy photographs of two suspects. For the past month, the Tripathis had been renting a house and spending their days working with F.B.I. agents, Brown administrators and an organization dedicated to finding missing persons. Early on in the search, the family created a Facebook page called “Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi,” which included video messages from family and friends and recent images of Sunil â€" walking the beach with his older brother, Ravi; attending his sister’s graduation ceremony; posing with his mother at a Phillies game.

Minutes after the world first saw the suspects’ photos, a user on Reddit, the online community that is also one of the largest Web sites in the world, posted side-by-side pictures comparing Sunil’s facial features with the face that would later be identified as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The pictures were accompanied by speculation about the circumstances surrounding Sunil’s disappearance and the F.B.I.’s involvement in his search. By 8 p.m., three hours after the F.B.I. released the suspects’ photos, angry messages began to appear on the Tripathi’s Facebook page, and at 8:15 Ravi received a phone call from a reporter at ABC News in New York, who asked if Sunil had been spotted in Boston and if Ravi had seen the F.B.I. photos of Suspect No. 2. Ravi, unclear at what she was getting at, told her there had been no word from Sunil. As the minutes passed and the volume of threatening Facebook messages increased, the Tripathis finally called their F.B.I. contact in Providence, who assured them that nobody withn his office believed that Sunil was Suspect No. 2.

The family had been told that missing people sometimes go to libraries or other places with free Internet service, where they type their own names into search engines to track their cases. The Facebook page was created with the hope that if Sunil searched for himself, he would find loving messages from his family and friends. Now they worried that he would see what was being written about him and take drastic measures to harm himself. Around 11 p.m., at roughly the same time that the news came out that Sean Collier, a 27-year-old police officer at M.I.T., had been shot and killed, the Tripathis closed the page so that no more messages could come in.

The removal of “Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi” was noted by several people in the media, including Sasha Stone, who runs an inside-Hollywood Web site called Awards Daily. At 10:56 p.m., Stone tweeted: “I’m sure by now the @fbipressoffice is looking into this dude” and included a link to the Facebook page. Seven minutes later, she tweeted: “Seconds after I sent that tweet the page is gone off of Facebook. If you can cache it . . .” For Erik Malinowski, a senior sportswriter at the Web site BuzzFeed, the takedown of “Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi” was noteworthy enough to pass along. At midnight, Malinowski, whose Twitter following includes a number of journalists, tweeted: “FYI: A Facebook group dedicated to finding Sunil Tripathi, the missing Brown student, was deleted this evening.” Roughly 300 Twitter users retweeted Malinowski’s post, including the pop-culture blogger Perez Hilton, who sent Sunil Tripathi’s name out to more than six million followers. From there, the small, containedworld of speculation exploded on every social-media platform. Several journalists began tweeting out guarded thoughts about Sunil’s involvement. If the family had taken down the Facebook page, the reasoning went, it must mean that the Tripathis had seen their missing son in the grainy photos of Suspect No. 2.

Jay Caspian Kang is the author of ‘‘The Dead Do Not Improve’’ and an editor at Grantland. He last wrote for the magazine about the shootings at Oikos University.

Editor: Joel Lovell

A version of this article appeared in print on July 28, 2013, on page MM36 of the Sunday Magazine.

Clones Rule as Hollywood Beats Drum at Comic-Con

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Advertising: A Cook-Off Among Chefs to Join Delta\'s Kitchen

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Campaign Spotlight: Collective, a Marketing Agency, Showcases Itself

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ABC Veteran Is Al Jazeera America\'s New Leader

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Johnny Carson Clips Are Coming to iTunes

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Jet Magazine Stays Compact, but With a New Design

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Fox Viewers May Be Graying, but Their Passion Still Pays

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Former Time Warner Executive Is Coming Back to Run Time Inc.

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Advertising: Duracell Offers Praise, and Power, for Everyday Heroes

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Jackson\'s Mother, Defiant and at Times Forgetful, Wraps Up Her Testimony

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Strong Quarter for Netflix, but Investors Hit Pause

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More Latinos Consume News in English, Report Finds

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Booker Prize Nominees Are Released

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2 Editors Promoted at New York Times

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Advertising: Online, a Cereal Maker Takes an Inclusive Approach

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Nascar\'s New TV Home Will Be Its Old One

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Awaiting Another Top Editor, Essence Faces Identity Questions

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Nonpartisan Fact-Checking Comes to South Africa

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World Briefing | Europe: Turkey: 72 Journalists Forced Out for Covering Protests, Union Says

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Revelations by Rowling

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Court Upholds Ruling on Dish Network's ‘Hopper'

Efforts by television networks to stop the Dish Network from supplying its customers an automatic ad-skipping device were dealt another setback on Wednesday when a federal appeals court declined to issue a preliminary injunction against Dish.

The ruling by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court's ruling last fall and lent further support to Dish as it markets the Hopper, a digital video recorder that comes with the ad-skipping feature, which has the potential to undermine the television advertising business. The Fox network, which sought the initial injunction and then appealed, said it was disappointed by the second loss in court and would “review all of our options.”

Fox's parent company, 21st Century Fox, and the parents of CBS and NBC sued Dish after the distributor came out with the Hopper's feature, called Auto-Hop, more than a year ago. Dish quickly countersued. With the injunctions now refused twice, the case may move to trial.

Unlike most digital video recorders, which require users to manually bypass ads, Auto-Hop skips right past all the ads in a show without any user involvement. It's as if the ads are erased, though for legal reasons they are not. When combined with another Hopper feature that automatically records all of the prime-time shows on ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC, Auto-Hop is a godsend for some Dish customers.

Analysts said that Wednesday's affirmation of a November district court ruling could compel other distributors to try adopting similar ad-skipping functionality. But at the moment none have, so Dish can continue to promote the Hopper as a reason to subscribe to its service instead of its competitors.

“This decision is a victory for American consumers, and we are proud to have stood by their side in this important fight over the fundamental rights of consumer choice and control,” Dish's executive vice president and general counsel, R. Stanton Dodge, said in a statement.

Fox's statement pointed out that “the bar to secure a preliminary injunction is very high.”

Rejecting Dish's positioning, it said, “This is not about consumer choice or advances in technology. It is about a company devising an unlicensed, unauthorized service that clearly infringes our copyrights and violates our contract.”

In his ruling on Wednesday, Judge Sidney Thomas of the Ninth Circuit seemed skeptical of Fox's copyright infringement claims, citing the Supreme Court ruling in the Sony Betamax case, which held that home recordings of shows were not infringements on copyright. The judge was more open to Fox's argument that Auto-Hop breached Dish's distribution contract with Fox, but was not persuaded to issue an injunction.

"It seems increasingly clear that the absolute control over all uses of their works that content owners such as Fox want is increasingly slipping through their fingers,” said Glynn S. Lunney, a Tulane University law school professor who has been closely following the Hopper case.

“While copyright never gave them absolute control, when copying and distribution technologies were large, expensive and bulky, as they were for most of copyright's history, copyright could give content owners considerable control over where and how their content was distributed to consumers," Professor Lunney added. "As copying and distribution technologies have gone digital, consumers, not the content owners, are in charge of where and how they experience content. It's hard to know where this sea change will lead us, but Dish's victory is one more sign of consumers' new authority over copyrighted works.”

Sudeikis Says He Will Leave ‘Saturday Night Live'

CBS Entertainment, via Associated Press

Jason Sudeikis appeared as a guest on “The Late Show with David Letterman” on Wednesday.

Jason Sudeikis, a writer and performer on “Saturday Night Live'' for 10 years, confirmed Wednesday what had long been rumored: he will not be back on the show this fall.

Mr. Sudeikis appeared as a guest on “The Late Show with David Letterman” Wednesday and told the news to the host, who apparently had not heard the widespread reports of Mr. Sudeikis's departure.

“I'm definitely done,” Mr. Sudeikis said. “I'm not coming back.”

Mr. Letterman said: “Do they know that? Have you run that by them?”

Mr. Sudeikis said he was leaning toward leaving before this last season, but the show's longtime leader, Lorne Michaels, prevailed on him to come back. Mr. Sudeikis was the cast member who impersonated Mitt Romney and Mr. Michaels knew the show would be putting on numerous sketches last fall tied to the presidential election.

Mr. Sudeikis was known for many other characters, including the Devil on Weekend Update, and had a reputation on the show for versatility. He also has a growing film career, appearing in comedies like “Hall Pass,'' “Horrible Bosses'' and the coming “We're the Millers,'' which is scheduled to open next month.

Mr. Michaels has begun his annual hunt for new talent for “S.N.L.” and now faces the task of replacing Mr. Sudeikis as well as Bill Hader and Fred Armisen, who also have left the show. And next year, the show's head writer and Weekend Update anchor, Seth Meyers, will be leaving to take over as host of NBC's “Late Night.”

Advertising: Welcoming a Royal Baby While Trying Not to Steal the Spotlight

Welcoming a Royal Baby While Trying Not to Steal the Spotlight

An ad on Facebook featuring Johnson's Head-to-Toe Baby Wash, a Johnson & Johnson product. The news fit into an existing campaign for the brand.

When Prince William and his wife, the former Kate Middleton, left the hospital on Tuesday holding their son, Prince George Alexander Louis of Cambridge, they were greeted by a collective cooing not just from the media and the rest of the nonroyal populace, but from advertisers, too.

Pampers encouraged parents to send pictures of their babies.

Amid the baby frenzy in the news media, advertisers took to Twitter and Facebook to send congratulatory messages to the royal family, with brands including Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola and Pampers publishing posts inspired by campaigns the companies had begun before the birth. While the digital media reaction to the campaigns was decidedly mixed, they were examples of how brands are increasingly trying to become part of news-driven cultural moments.

An advertisement for Coca-Cola featured two bottles of the soft-drink with the names “Wills” and “Kate” on them in a congratulatory toast. “Time for a royal celebration,” read the caption, followed by the Twitter hashtag #ShareACoke. The idea came from the company's “Share a Coke” campaign in New Zealand and Australia, where the bottles were labeled with names common in those countries, said Andra London a global communications manager at Coca-Cola.

“We didn't want it to be about pushing a product,” Ms. London said. “We wanted it to be about the happiness of the occasion because that's where our brand values lie.” By Wednesday afternoon, the ad had received more than 10,000 “likes” on Facebook and was shared about 1,700 times.

At Pampers, a Procter & Gamble brand, the social media approach included a short video that was an extension of the “Love, Sleep and Play” campaign the brand announced this month, which encouraged parents to submit photos of their babies to the Pampers Facebook page. “It's such a no-brainer for us,” said John Brase, the marketing director for Pampers in North America. “We want to celebrate all births, no matter if it's the royal baby or the mom down the street in Cincinnati.”

By Wednesday afternoon, more than 3,200 people had “liked” the video on Facebook and had shared it 74 times. “It exceeded our expectations,” Mr. Brase said of the response, adding that the video had been viewed thousands of times.

Tom Morton, the head of strategy at the advertising agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners in New York, said choosing to focus more on branding and less on product placement was safe for brands that do not want to appear to be crass.

“The truth is there's very little to say beyond congratulations,” Mr. Morton said, adding that brands that try too hard to sell a product during an occasion like the royal birth can risk appearing out of sync with the event. “The brands that try to insert themselves and insert their sales into the story are going to be called out for it.”

According to data from Twitter, there were six million posts related to the royal baby from the time Ms. Middleton, formally known as the Duchess of Cambridge, was admitted to the hospital through Wednesday and 150,000 posts that mentioned #RoyalBabyBoy. There were more than 25,000 posts on Twitter a minute when the birth was announced and 18,000 tweets a minute when the family made its first media appearance with the baby.

Data from Facebook showed there were 19 million interactions, including “likes,” shares and posts, relating to the royal baby on Tuesday, which peaked at 8:37 p.m. in London with 31,000 mentions.

The trend of so-called real-time marketing took off after a stadium blackout during this year's Super Bowl, when Oreo and a handful of other brands responded with posts on Twitter referring to the event.

The Oreo ad, which featured a cookie in a darkened space with the tagline “You can still dunk in the dark,” was a success for the brand. Oreo's royal baby ad, however, drew mixed reactions. The ad was posted on Twitter with the tagline “Long Live the Creme” and showed a baby bottle full of milk on a red pillow. Representatives at Oreo said in a statement that while the world was awaiting the royal birth, “we were thrilled to provide our own Oreo welcome in a way consistent with our brand's approach.”

On Facebook, an ad featuring Johnson's Head-to-Toe Baby Wash, a Johnson & Johnson product, featured a baby in a bathtub with a crown made of bubbles with the caption, “Congratulations to the royal couple on their brilliant news.” The ad was posted before the birth announcement and yielded more than 1,500 likes and about 100 shares on the site by Wednesday afternoon.

“While the royal baby ad addresses the joys of a baby being born to a royal family, it's just another example of how we continue to celebrate all families and babies,” said Ivy Brown, a marketing director for Johnson's Baby.

An ad for the real estate company Century 21 included a bit of a sales pitch when it said, “Is There a Century 21 Agent in the House?” and made reference to consumers with expanding families needing an agent to help them find a new home. Matt Gentile, the director of social media for Century 21, said the campaign was relevant to the birth.

“Real estate transactions happen for happy reasons and sad reasons, births certainly are one of the most happy moments,” he said. “You have to be careful but at the same time you can't put out boring content that everyone else is putting out there either.”

A version of this article appeared in print on July 25, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Welcoming a Royal Baby While Trying Not to Steal the Spotlight.

Paula Deen's Cook Tells of Slights, Steeped in History

Dylan Wilson for The New York Times

Dora Charles, a longtime worker for Paula Deen, said Ms. Deen did not treat her fairly, a claim Ms. Deen denies.

SAVANNAH, Ga. - Dora Charles and Paula Deen were soul sisters. That's what Ms. Deen called the black cook from the start, even before the books and the television shows and the millions of dollars.

Cooking for Paula Deen Close Video See More Videos '

Mrs. Charles, third from left, on the cover of one of Paula Deen's cookbooks.

For 22 years, Mrs. Charles was the queen of the Deen kitchens. She helped open the Lady & Sons, the restaurant here that made Ms. Deen's career. She developed recipes, trained other cooks and made sure everything down to the collard greens tasted right.

“If it's a Southern dish,” Ms. Deen once said, “you better not put it out unless it passes this woman's tongue.”

The money was not great. Mrs. Charles spent years making less than $10 an hour, even after Ms. Deen became a Food Network star. And there were tough moments. She said Ms. Deen used racial slurs. Once she wanted Mrs. Charles to ring a dinner bell in front of the restaurant, hollering for people to come and get it.

“I said, ‘I'm not ringing no bell,' ” Mrs. Charles said. “That's a symbol to me of what we used to do back in the day.”

For a black woman in Savannah with a ninth-grade education, though, it was good steady work. And Ms. Deen, she said, held out the promise that together, they might get rich one day.

Now, Ms. Deen, 66, is fighting empire-crushing accusations of racism, and Mrs. Charles, 59 and nursing a bad shoulder, lives in an aging trailer home on the outskirts of Savannah.

“It's just time that everybody knows that Paula Deen don't treat me the way they think she treat me,” she said.

The relationship between Mrs. Charles and Ms. Deen is a complex one, laced with history and deep affection, whose roots can be traced back to the antebellum South. Depending on whether Mrs. Charles or Ms. Deen tells the story, it illustrates lives of racial inequity or benevolence.

Jessica B. Harris, a culinary scholar whose books have explored the role of Africans in the Southern kitchen, said Ms. Deen and Mrs. Charles are characters in a story that has been played out since slaves started cooking for whites. “Peering through the window of someone else's success when you have been instrumental in creating that success is not a good feeling,” Ms. Harris said. “Think about who made money from the blues.”

Ms. Deen ran a restaurant in a Best Western hotel when Mrs. Charles, newly divorced and tired of fast-food kitchens, walked in and auditioned by cooking her version of Southern food. Ms. Deen hired her immediately.

Their birthdays are a day apart, so they celebrated together. When Ms. Deen catered parties to survive until they could open the Lady & Sons, Mrs. Charles hustled right beside her.

“If I lost Dora, I would have been devastated,” Ms. Deen wrote in her 2007 memoir, “It Ain't All About the Cooking.”

Early on, Mrs. Charles claims, Ms. Deen made her a deal: “Stick with me, Dora, and I promise you one day if I get rich you'll get rich.”

Now, Mrs. Charles said, she wished she had gotten that in writing. “I didn't think I had to 'cause we were real close back then,” she said.

That is where the two women's stories diverge. Ms. Deen, through her publicity team, offered a statement denying all of Mrs. Charles's accusations: “Fundamentally Dora's complaint is not about race but about money. It is about an employee that despite over 20 years of generosity feels that she still deserves yet even more financial support from Paula Deen. ”

What is more, the document states, Ms. Deen “provided guidance and support through the many ups and downs of Mrs. Charles's life.”

Investigators for the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson's Rainbow PUSH Coalition have spoken to Mrs. Charles. Robert Patillo, a lawyer for the coalition, visited Savannah in June and July to interview Ms. Deen's restaurant employees, including Mrs. Charles, who still works at the Lady & Sons.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 25, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Deen's Cook Tells of Slights, Steeped in History.

CBS and Time Warner Cable Call a Timeout in Dispute

The two sides in the confrontation between CBS and Time Warner Cable called for a timeout Wednesday night, hours before a deadline that might have removed CBS programs from the cable lineup in cities including New York and Los Angeles.

The two parties announced after 11 p.m. Wednesday that they had agreed to an extension of the current contract through 5 p.m. next Monday. The deadline had been 9 a.m. Thursday.

CBS had made public statements asking for an extension in the negotiations, while Time Warner Cable was holding off on agreeing to one. But the decision to extend makes a showdown much less likely. In previous standoffs between networks and cable companies over compensation for station signals, extensions have generally meant neither side wants to push the dispute to the point where cable customers lose access to channels.

CBS has been demanding an increase in the fees that the cable company pays to retransmit the signals of network stations to its customers. Time Warner Cable has labeled the CBS demands exorbitant. The two sides have both taken out ads denouncing the other as unreasonable, trying to lay the groundwork to blame the other party if the stations were made unavailable to the cable customers.

But despite many previous fractious negotiations over what is known as retransmission consent, CBS has never reached the point where an impasse led to programming being blocked on a cable system.