Media Business

Now that the takeover of the Washington Post by Jeff Bezos is beginning, the Amazon.com billionaire is being deluged with unsolicited advice. One such uninvited adviser is Patrick Pexton, the paper's former ombudsman who wrote up an "open letter" urging Bezos to do a number of things. Not all of it is bad advice but what stands out is his personal animus against the Post's sole conservative…

After decades of submitting to biased questioning from liberal journalists in their presidential debates, the Republican National Committee is now considering allowing conservative media figures like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Mark Levin to host such affairs. This move is now being considered in light of the ongoing media campaign that RNC chairman Reince Priebus has been conducting…

Conservative PR guru and Reagan biographer Craig Shirley has an excellent piece over at Breitbart in which he explains why it is utterly detestable that anti-American leftist Jane Fonda was cast as Nancy Reagan in the new Hollywood film Lee Daniels' The Butler, and not, it's not just her infamous pose with North Vietnamese anti-aircraft guns. Fonda, Shirley notes, sought to slam the door on…

Media mogul Mort Zuckerman wins this weekend’s funniest line on a political talk show. Asked by the host of PBS's McLaughlin Group why successful billionaires would invest in a dying business such as newspapers, Zuckerman replied, “Because they no longer wish to be billionaires” (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

On April 25, New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter gave new CNN boss Jeff Zucker a “C” for his performance turning the ailing network around. On August 9, two days before he is hosting CNN’s Reliable Sources, Stelter raised Zucker’s grade:

The Washington Post is a legend in the minds of the Washington elite, so its financial decline has caused quiet panic. As NPR media reporter David Folkenflik put it, “You think of stories like the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, these are all stories where The Washington Post led the nation's understanding, the world's understanding of some major issues.” Outside the liberal media, you wonder how…

Imagine the hand-wringing that would ensue among secular journalists were Franklin Graham or Bishop Harry Jackson to write a memoir with a mainstream media religion reporter on board as a credited co-author. Surely much ado would be made about an ostensibly objective journalist assisting a politically engaged, conservative clergyman to write a book the proceeds of which would go into his…

Actor Alec Baldwin is famous for his uncontrolled rage and far left political views which is why, if a report from Mediaite is to be believed, he's decided it's time to showcase them for the moonbat audience of MSNBC. According to the site's Joe Concha, Baldwin will soon be hosting a show each Friday night at 10pm, a comparative deadzone for television. But hey, why not? It's not like Baldwin…

"NBC News hired Chelsea Clinton when she had zero journalistic talent, so the idea that NBC News or NBC entertainment isn't going to be friendly to Hillary is just a silly, silly thing," NewsBusters senior editor Tim Graham told The Blaze's Andrew Wilkow in an August 6 interview on Wilkow!. Graham called out  NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd as one prominent journalist dismissive of…

The Reuters news wire has an interesting little piece today that reveals that Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos not only seems to have agreed to buy the Washington Post for much, much more than its market value, but that agreed to the initial asking price rather than try to haggle it down. Jennifer Saba has the story:

Amid the hubub yesterday over the sale of the Washington Post, a decidedly smaller media business item got lost: the sale of Newsweek magazine to the owners of the International Business Times website. At the present, no details on the terms of the deal were announced. In 2010, Newsweek was sold by the Washington Post to a left-leaning stereo equipment billionaire named Sidney Harman for $1…

 "Try a little editorial balance, that might bring in a few more readers to the [Washington] Post," Fox News Channel's Neil Cavuto advised Jeff Bezos in a segment on Cavuto's 4 p.m. Eastern Fox News Channel program Your World. "Last time I checked, that has not hurt Fox News, or the Wall Street Journal, or even USA Today" which are media enterprises which are "all known for hearing all sides or…

Social media is not only influencing politics. It's also impacting what television programs Americans watch. A new study released moments ago by Nielsen found that Twitter activity can cause "statistically significant changes in Live TV Ratings":

The Boston Globe newspaper has been sold by its owner, the New York Times Company, for $70 million in cash to investor John W. Henry. Included in the deal were the Times’s stakes in two other smaller papers, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and Metro Boston, a free tabloid. The Times had purchased the Globe company in 1993 for $1.1 billion. Adjusted for inflation, the New England Media…