-Caveat Lector- Freedom of the corporate press... Washington Post http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7060-2000Nov12.html ABC Fires Radio Host Matt Drudge By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writer Monday , November 13, 2000 ; Page C01 When ABC hired cyber-gossip Matt Drudge to host a syndicated radio show last year, some top executives--led by ABC News President David Westin--tried their best to block the move. Now the suits have gotten the last laugh. Although Drudge's program has been picked up in 135 markets, including nine of the top 10, ABC has just fired him. What makes the timing especially odd is that ABC radio executives had been courting Drudge to move from Sunday nights to five days a week--until corporate higher-ups overruled them. "I see it as punishment for daring to report on ABC's activities," Drudge says. "The whole notion that this is a political payback for my Web reporting is an explosive accusation, but I'm willing to make it." ABC spokeswoman Julie Hoover says the decision was made by Broadcast Group President Bob Callahan, with no involvement by parent company Disney. "Sunday night talk shows are just not a good business," she says. "We're just not going to be in that business anymore. . . . It takes up a lot of your time but makes very little money." Drudge says he never received a complaint about the content of his Sunday show, which is No. 1 in New York in its time slot (and heard here on WMAL-AM). Asked if Drudge's reputation was a factor in the decision, Hoover did not respond directly, saying that while ABC News was opposed to Drudge, "radio marches to its own drummer. They make the decisions." But it may be more complicated than that, given the desire of radio executives to keep Drudge. In fact, ABC's owned-and-operated stations want the controversial columnist to continue the show without the network's sponsorship. Still, the program was not a big moneymaker, generating only about $400,000 a year in revenue for ABC. It's not hard to understand why Drudge would be unpopular in ABC and Disney executive suites. He called Don Ohlmeyer, executive producer of ABC's "Monday Night Football," a liar for allegedly misleading reporters about whether he had met with Rush Limbaugh as a possible color man for the broadcast. Responded Ohlmeyer: "This is a gossip columnist who doesn't really care what the facts are and he writes it and then everybody asks questions about what he writes and then they have a story." Drudge also obtained the manuscript of a book for Disney's Talk Miramax imprint, saying it contained sexual information about some investigators involved in President Clinton's impeachment. Talk Miramax soon canceled "The Insane Clown Posse" but said Drudge's reports were not the reason. In his book "Drudge Manifesto," the author includes Disney Chairman Michael Eisner among "the latest incarnation of vampires" who "have sucked the blood from the fourth estate, leaving behind infotainment formaldehyde." Drudge's 18-month contract, signed in July 1999, was delayed after ABC's Westin argued that he was reckless. But Geoff Rich, executive vice president of ABC Radio, which operates independently of the news division, countered that Drudge's show "wouldn't be on the air if it didn't have a great breadth of support within ABC." After giving up his television show in a dispute with Fox News Channel, Drudge is back to a one-man operation with no links to major media companies. "The air we breathe is free, the airwaves are not," he says. George's Second Act Perhaps the biggest network star to emerge during the 2000 election is George Stephanopoulos--who, as you may recall, was a Clinton spinmeister during the last election. ABC has clearly ticketed him for big things, morphing Stephanopoulos from a mere Sunday commentator to a ubiquitous analyst and campaign-trail reporter. Diane Sawyer, in fact, wants him to serve as a guest anchor. Not everyone thinks this is a great thing. "Stephanopoulos has been dismissed by some as nothing more than a partisan apologist disguised as a pristine and objective--if telegenic and appealing--observer," writes Brill's Content, which has made the former top Clinton aide its December cover boy. Paul Begala, the Gore adviser and MSNBC pundit, yelled at his former White House colleague after the first debate: "Goddammit, George, how dare you call Al Gore arrogant?" Stephanopoulos explained that he hadn't quite said that, and Begala now says: "If I could leap to those conclusions and get so angry, then how will people feel who don't know him or, worse, have a predisposition against him?" Some Bush campaign officials have grumbled about Stephanopoulos, but most political operatives say he's been fair. Stephanopoulos recognizes the dilemma. "The fact that it is such a straitjacket is liberating," he told the magazine. "I just accept that a certain group is going to feel that I am biased no matter what the situation. . . . Is there something about working in government that disqualifies someone permanently from the craft of journalism? . . . If viewers saw me as a flack I would not survive." News Under Pressure Local television stations, it seems, are coming under growing pressure from advertisers. In fact, a third of news directors surveyed by the Project for Excellence in Journalism say they've been pressured to kill negative stories--or do positive ones--about sponsors. The findings, from 25 news directors, are reported in Columbia Journalism Review. One such executive reported his station wanting to do a story on complaints about a local car dealer. "We were told not to do this story [even] before we shot anything," this person said. Another reported "strong internal pressure to drop negative stories or do positive ones" on "consumer, investigative and medical" topics. Two news directors said they were encouraged to do pieces on "station-sponsored" or "company events." And two-thirds of stations now run "sponsored" news segments. The project's broader findings are pessimistic. The amount of enterprise reporting is "withering to almost nothing." Political coverage demonstrated "almost no imagination [or] initiative." Nearly a quarter of all reports consist of out-of-town feeds. Investigative pieces are just 0.9 percent of all stories. And the poor have all but disappeared (they figured in just seven of 8,095 stories examined this year, compared with 336 about entertainers.) Overall, says the project, quality sells--but just 10 percent of stations have earned grades of A during the study's three years. Among the quality stations, 60 percent were going up in ratings and 20 percent holding their own. Among the lousiest stations, 60 percent also had rising ratings--apparently, more than just journalistic quality is involved--but 40 percent are clearly failing. Lights Out CNBC aired a smart Election Night special, anchored by PBS's Louis Rukeyser, that focused on the election's impact on the economy. But some staffers are appalled that the network signed off at 1 a.m., with the election hanging in the balance. A taped National Geographic program followed. Explained CNBC spokeswoman Alison Rudnick: "Basically it was clear to us at 1 a.m. that there was not going to be a resolution in sight. From the get-go, our main mission was to cover these elections from a financial perspective, and we felt we did a great job at it. Our sister networks, MSNBC and NBC, were still covering it." Bias and Blunder Some newspapers do strange things during elections. The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, under orders from publisher Richard Mellon Scaife, pulled all pictures of Al Gore on the Sunday before the election, rewrote an Associated Press dispatch to play down any mention of the vice president and bumped the story of a local Gore rally inside the paper. Scaife is a conservative philanthropist who helped finance the American Spectator's investigations of President Clinton. The rival Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which reported the move, said the Tribune-Review's managing editor protested but that Scaife overruled him. In Maine, meanwhile, it turns out that the Portland Press Herald learned back in July of George W. Bush's 1976 conviction for driving under the influence--and chose not to report it. The paper said the reporter and his assignment editor decided the arrest--which finally broke four days before the election--was too old to be "germane." Editor Jeannine Guttman was quoted as saying that no senior editors were told of the arrest and that "clearly we should have reported the story." � 2000 The Washington Post <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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