Commentary: CBS promises deadly dull Katiecast

Wow. It’s t-minus 33 days and counting to the Katie Couric News Show on CBS and it looks as if the producers will turn television news on its head after all! They're promising something "unlike anything that currently exists on a network evening news broadcast!"

It was announced today: "Free Speech": a segment of opinion and commentary from a wide range of Americans...

”‘Free Speech' will be unlike anything that currently exists on a network evening news broadcast,” said Rome Hartman, Executive Producer, CBS Evening News. “We are not looking to pit one side against another or to broadcast shouting matches -- there's already more than enough of that on television. And it won't be a collection of the 'usual suspects' or 'talking heads;' in fact, we intend it to be just the opposite of that.”

Free Speech will feature a wide and diverse group of voices commenting on an array of subjects. One night, the segment may feature a well known national figure speaking out on a current issue in the news, while the next night, someone may offer a humorous take on a trend in the culture, or it might be Bob Schieffer's unique take on Washington or the world….

Of course, they add: “At the outset, it will be from people we seek out. We DO hope to eventually find a way for people to pitch us…”, but-- whoa!

Hold on a second. Commentaries? People looking into the camera reading prepared essays off the TelePrompter? Including people who are not trained in the use of TelePrompter as Katie is? Old glad-to-be-anywhere Bob Schieffer offering a homespun take on the Beltway crowd? Jon Stewart reading a piece written by one of his Harvard-reared staff?

In the words of Ed Murrow, we can “see it now”:

“I’m Al Gore. Here’s what I think of global warming…’
“I’m Larry David’s wife on alternative energy…”
“I’m James Brady on gun control…”
“I’m Rosie O’Donnell on gay marriage…”
“I’m Rob Schneider on Mel Gibson…”

What is this? Radio? The Wilton-North Report? Don’t they realize that there is no deader segment on any newscast or live show than the part where some civilian reads a prepared essay off a TelePrompter? Someone from the West Coast bureau should send some tapes of KTLA’s Hal Fishman, who does a commentary a night.

Les Moonves, are you approving this? You’ve been cutting away at CBS News, destruction is nigh, so go ahead, blow it up! Pit one side against another! Broadcast shouting matches! God. Back in the 80s, working for WNBC-TV News, we had to log the Tom Brokaw show every night, and sit through closeted old John Chancellor’s (“Chancel-LORE,” as the old queen would remind anyone within earshot in his fussy later years) soul-sucking commentaries. Our eyelids begin to drop just thinking about it.

And that's they great innovation they came up with after Katie's promo tour? Maybe they'll learn to not hand-pick the audiences next time around.

Here’s the problem as we see it: TV news execs may gut a division and dump a show, but when it comes to getting the replacement on the air, they fall back on the comfort factor and rely on the same producers who worked on and created the shows of the past. New executive producer Rome Hartman, we’re sure, is a very nice fellow. But he’s been with CBS News since 1983! He’s a CBS lifer. He’s indoctrinated in the CBS way of life (see the Prologue to Tabloid Baby) and hasn’t experienced the world or newsgathering outside the privileged rarified CBS fishbowl.

Hint: New blood. New ideas.

A new theme song by the guy who wrote the Titanic soundtrack is window dressing. Unveiling “commentaries” as some kind of revolutionary news feature tears open the chest and reveals the heart of the operation.

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

Then again, Les may be letting the last of the CBS Mohicans be hoist on their own petards. Because with a start like this, don’t expect Katie to be with the show for long, or for the show to be on the air much longer.

Commentaries? Sheesh.

The Katie Couric Countdown:
Thirty-three fingers to liftoff!

Forget Mel! TMZ is back to what really gets it hot

Posted today on TMZ.com:

What is it about Matthew McConaughey that's so hot? Well, it definitely helps that he's been spotted a lot lately riding a bike on the beach in skimpy spandex shirts.

Don't you mean spandex shorts?

In any case, great lines, Harvey & company! It's just too bad we have to read between them to figure out the real story.

Was Mel Gibson inspired by fine art?

Simone Leigh
"Sugar Tits"
Canvas, sugar & fishing wire

Why TMZ gets so much praise for the Gibson scoop

We’re amused and a little amazed by the kudos the corporate tabloid website TMZ.com has received for breaking the Mel Gibson anti-Semitic sugar tits tirade story.

The leaking and posting of the arrest report has been hailed as an Internet journalism breakthrough. And today, there’s talk of TMZ being turned into a television show.

So it’s time to again point out that TMZ is not a renegade band of misfits beating the big boys on news stories. It's not even The Smoking Gun. It’s a corporate enterprise, an offshoot of the celebutainment show Extra; a big business division of Telepictures, owned by Time Warner and AOL. It's a case of corporate suits honing in on the action and buying up the alternative to the pap they dish out-- just as the news networks co-opted tabloid television with their Datelines and Primetime Lives and the syndicators devolved into Insiders, ETs, Access Hollywoods and Extras.

Harvey Levin, TMZ’s managing editor, is a Telepictures executive, attorney and former TV reporter who was placed reluctantly as the head of the Internet operation when his TV show Celebrity Justice was canceled and he was deemed too old for Extra’s team of pretties.

So the TMZ TV series idea isn't a surprise. That's probably been the plan from the start, as big corporations use the Internet as a cheap, grassroots testing ground. Next step in the plan would be to throw the website a big fat scoop-- and then promote the hell out of it.

For months, TMZ has been playing the standard, inconsequential Lohan-Hilton-Simpson-Brangelina tabloid game, upping the ante with some corporate-financed stalkerazzi action, sending kids with cameras to nightclubs and other celeb haunts in hopes of attracting a ruckus. They‘ve gotten a few, like when billionaire boy Brandon Davis was goaded into an ungentlemanly obscene rant about Lindsay Lohan (and nastily ran it on the site) and when Woody Harrelson fought back and busted one of their consumer cameras.

With these and other incidents, Harvey Levin and TMZ only got bad press for their greasy approach to celebrity tabloid and their ownership by a big corporation that makes money off those celebs.

Then came Mel. The landing of the Gibson story helped Time-Warner change the headline with a massive public relations campaign that got them big links on AOL’s Drudge Report and copycat stories by lazy media around the world.

So is TMZ breaking new ground? The Smoking Gun has been posting exclusive police reports and mugshots for years. Defamer has been the real source for brave, politically-incorrect Hollywood coverage. This site has kept the Patrick McDermott case alive and broke the story of the war profiteer’s multi-million dollar rock star Bat Mitzvah bash.

The details of how TMZ got the arrest report are blurry, but on the surface sounds like Tabloid 101. Back in the days of A Current Affair and Fox, when a story was too dirty to be told on television, it would be given to one of the Murdoch group's newspaper tabloids. Then the story could be told on television, safely attributed to the tabs. Often a scoop obtained by a producer or bought by the company would be given to a reporter in a need of profile boost (all these specifics can be found in Tabloid Baby).

Harvey Levin has crowed that his group is not beholden to publicists and will go where the story leads. From experience, we know that boast will hold out until Nick Lachey's publicist blacklists Extra because of the dirty work on the website. In Hollywood, Mel Gibson's an easy target. But the day Brad Pitt punches out a TMZ kid stalkerazzo, George Clooney will start organizing boycotts again.

Meanwhile, who leaked the police report? To whom in Time Warner was it leaked? And how did it wind up on TMZ.com?

A wise man once said… Follow the money…

Mel's "Sugar Tits" have cinematic roots after all

"...Gibson then noticed another female sergeant and yelled, "What do you think you're looking at, sugar tits?"

Our Man Elli in Israel recalled the term as the name of a character in an old western movie.

Elli scores a base hit... as we find in Gordon Park' 1976 blues biopic, Leadbelly:

starring Roger E. Mosley as Leadbelly... Paul Benjamin as Wes Ledbetter... Madge Sinclair as Miss Eula... John Henry Faulk (look him up) as Gov. Neff... Ernie Hudson in his feature film debut... and...

Rozaa Jean as... Sugar Tit!

Mel's agent takes the words right out of our mouth

embarrassment = embarrassed
shame = ashamed
no excuses = inexcusable

It seems that Mel Gibson’s camp has been keeping an eye on our site and taken a pointer or two from our common sense view of his sordid early morning of infamy.

The New York Times reports today that in a phone interview, “Mr. Gibson’s agent Ed Limato of International Creative Management, described Mr. Gibson as embarrassed and ashamed, and said: ‘He obviously has a problem, and he’s doing everything he can to make amends. The other night was inexcusable.’”

On Saturday, we wrote:

“ No excuses for Mel Gibson....

“Considering Mel Gibson's upbringing, controversy, religiosity, Catholic guilt and apparent inner rage, it is very possible that he did indeed come to his senses with a deep sense of embarrassment and shame."

Ha! We've taken a bit of heat from some of our closest friends, competitors, colleagues and contributors for being perceived as, in the words of one, “way too apologetic towards/sympathetic of Gibson.”

Hey, we try to not kick 'em when they're down. We've spent too much time in too many bars, heard too many things best forgotten by morning, and been grateful that at least one of our evenings was not recorded by a stenographing, videotaping deputy (while our mates wish that notes from their nights weren't recorded on cocktail napkins by one of ther own).

And a look at Gibson's eyes in the photos of his fateful night should strike a chord in the heart of anyone who's dealt with a rehab candidate in the family.

But in light of today's New York Times, maybe you all have a point!

Now Ed, about Sugar Tits...

Sugar Tits Shirts! (Why didn't we think of that?)

We knew that term had legs. And we knew something good would come out of the sad Mel Gibson episode.

Slick & Twisted Clothing is selling baseball shirts featuring the term of endearment of the week.

So now how about tank tops?


Brilliant update: Mel Gibstein t-shirts!

McDermott Search: Back to Square One?

The media is obsessed with sad Mel Gibson, whose alleged anti-Semitism was ingrained by a demented father who moved his family from America to Australia after winning on Jeopardy.

But the bigger story evolved in the Malibu compound of another Australian entertainer, just down the PCH from where he was arrested…

What happened to the search for Patrick McDermott?

The mysteries beyond the walls of Mel Gibson’s Malibu neighbor have only deepened since an Australian news reporter used our clues to search for Olivia Newton-John’s alleged boyfriend, and the syndicated infotainment show Extra apparently played a cruel trick on viewers and fans by using the momentum of the case to violate their trust with a cynical publicity stunt.

It’s been thirteen months since McDermott disappeared from an overnight fishing trip, and approaching a year since the journalists who created Tabloidbaby.com returned from the Coast Guard station in San Pedro, California to produce the first television reports on the case and the bizarre fact that Newton-John had neither reported her alleged lover missing nor acknowledged the possibility that he could be alive and in peril.

It’s been six months since Tabloid Baby reported exclusively that McDermott was believed to be alive and had been seen in an around the remote town of Todos Santos in the Baja region of Mexico.

It’s been two months since Australian reporter Nick Papps followed our lead and reported from Todos Santos that McDermott had been spotted with a female companion and may still be in the area.

It’s been six weeks since the syndicated infotainment show Extra piggybacked on Papps’ scoop by sending a private investigator and “PI cam” (instead of a journalist) to Todos Santos to retrieve a visor reportedly worn by McDermott, trumpeted an “exclusive” ingvestigation and promised its viewers that it would send the hat out for DNA testing.

It’s been four weeks since Tabloid Baby reported that Extra had not done any reporting all, but had been handed the hat and interviews by intrepid local reporter Kathy Aviles, who kept a detailed journal of the McDermott timeline on her newspaper’s website.

It’s been three and half weeks since we reported that Extra’s McDermott “investigation” was merely a ratings-seeeking stunt, and that its producers had returned the McDermott visor to Todos Santos—without DNA testing and quite possibly contaminating the evidence.

It’s been a week and a half since Kathy Aviles’ McDermott journal was removed from the El Mirador website.

So it appears the search for Patrick McDermott is at a dead end. Or is it?

Extra’s top producers have refused to respond to Tabloid Baby’s requests for an explanation about the show’s actions in the McDermott case, or whether the show is part of a cover-up (Extra is a Time-Warner property; Newton-John records for Time-Warner).

Nick Papps has moved on.

Kathy Aviles will not say why her McDermott journal has been removed from the Internet. But she has offered it on request.

The U.S. Coast Guard considers McDermott’s case to be “open” and is keeping at least one investigator on the case. However it is unlikely to expend much manpower to bring him back to face comparatively minor “deadbeat” charges (though in wake of the life insurance policy reportedly left to his son, fraud could be a possibility).

Throughout this period, the only other journalist who did a full, unbiased search for the truth in this case was veteran producer and writer Michael Lynn, whose E! True Hollywood Story on Newton-John got him as close to an answer as lawyers would allow.

Who will pick up the pieces and find the truth about what happened to Patrick McDermott. The Tabloid Baby has at least one award-winning journalist and producer who is champing at the bit for a chance to do it (and he’s not Tabloid Baby’s author or our man in Israel, but another veteran newsman whose instincts and abilities hold our editor in awe).

Mr. Murdoch? Think of the cross-promotional possibilities.

Extra? Why not hire him as a freelancer? He’ll even bring along the Extra PI cam.