Bill Keller Will Go Wherever He Wants, Suckas
In your waterlogged Thursday media column: Bill Keller defends his Iran trip, Jon Stewart is cruelly eviscerated, the Weather Channel wants big ratings so it can then fail like other TV networks, and the internet reigns supreme.
New York Times editor Bill Keller's back from his weeklong reporting stint in Iran, and he's a little miffed about the haters out there! In an email to E&P, he writes: "I've had a few bizarre vibes from people outside the NYT who are puzzled by my presence in Tehran. Do people in the media crit game really think editors are supposed to be desk jockeys who never go get a sense of the story?...Or is the idea that when a big, exhausting news breaks visiting editors should hole up in the hotel and let the reporters do all the work? Weird." Bill Keller, you are a decorated foreign correspondent and an honorable editor and really people just didn't think it was fair your stories were all over the NYT front page, cause you're the boss, and also you have lots of reporters who can do that stuff already, anyhow. Friends? Okay, we're friends.
Jon Stewart made fun of CNN for all its Twitter-mongering and whatnot, which makes it look like Rocketboom or something. Big mistake, Jon. You've earned the wrath of CJR: "Stewart's broad-brush treatment of CNN amounted to not only a rare misstep for The Daily Show's normally trenchant media criticism, but also a missed opportunity." BURN.
The Weather Channel is determined "to draw an audience in primetime, one of its lowest-rated time periods." Maybe it would be easier for the Weather Channel to just have three total employees, each covering an eight-hour on-air shift that consists of them standing in front of a big weather mad, while local weather forecasts crawl on the bottom of the screen, so people could watch for five minutes to find out what the weather's like, which is really their "core competency"? Also TV network ad sales are getting even worse, so there's not much to aspire to. NBC Nightly News' solution: having Brian Williams walk around.
In a new poll, a majority of Americans say that if they could have just one news source, it would be the internet. TV, newspapers, and radio were all well behind. Sure, it all sounds great until the electricity goes out. Then it's back to town criers.