WE Blog

Rush Limbaugh will be on the air for at least eight more years, and he’ll get paid a fortune for it: more than $400 million, including a $100 million signing bonus, according to a new deal he signed this week. After nearly 20 years in national syndication, Limbaugh still attracts a huge audience - nearly 20 million weekly listeners.

The New York Times magazine has a long profile of Limbaugh. It notes how he is an American icon, but that his fans and critics don’t agree on what he is iconic for. The article reports: “Serious people have called him a serial liar and a moral philosopher, a partisan hack and a public intellectual, nothing more than a radio windbag and nothing less than the heart of the Republican Party.”

The death today of Tim Russert, 58, was a shock and a big loss. Russert, moderator of “Meet the Press” and NBC’s Washington bureau chief, was known for his unrelenting questioning. “There wasn’t a better interviewer in television,” Barack Obama said. John McCain called Russert the “pre-eminent journalist of his generation.” But I liked best NBC anchor Brian Williams’ description of Russert as a person: “aggressively unfancy.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin isn’t a bad choice for Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” — given the selection criteria. As the magazine explained, the selection is not an endorsement but a “recognition of the world as it is and of the most powerful individuals and forces shaping that world — for better or for worse.” In picking Putin, Time noted that “at significant cost to the principles and ideas that free nations prize, he has performed an extraordinary feat of leadership in imposing stability on a nation that has rarely known it and brought Russia back to the table of world power.”
Runners-up were Al Gore, J.K. Rowling, Hu Jintao and Gen. David Petraeus.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee

The guest list on Don Imus’ new talk show today on WABC-AM spoke to how many friends the shock jock still has, including presidential candidates Chris Dodd and John McCain, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and political odd couple James Carville and Mary Matalin. Imus’ addition of African-American comedians Karith Foster and Tony Powell to the cast serves his contention that being fired for his comments about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team was a “life-changing experience.” But for listeners who felt his absence since April — and especially his ability to get newsmakers to speak candidly — the question is: Can Imus be both funny and politically correct?
Posted by Rhonda Holman

Hollywood is working on a movie based on the story of former New York Times reporter Judith Miller. It sounds as if the movie is portraying the Miller character as a hero who was willing to go to jail rather than reveal her sources. But will it also show the Miller character being used by the administration to get uncritical news stories published about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction? Will it show her helping sell a war?
Posted by Phillip Brownlee

Bill O’Reilly is under fire for some recent racial comments, but some of it has been taken out of context. O’Reilly tried to relate on his radio talk show how a couple of experiences showed him how we share the same American dream, regardless of race, and how rap stereotypes aren’t representative of African-Americans.
Some liberal critics have taken the comments out of context to make them seem more offensive — such as his surprise that eating at a restaurant in Harlem was like eating at any other restaurant in New York City. But the New York Times media blogger argued this was no “Imus Moment.” O’Reilly’s comments, he argued, show how sheltered O’Reilly has been and may possibly reflect a "casual racism," but that they were intended to report his conversion to a new way of thinking.
Still, as one blogger sarcastically applauded: “Congratulations, Bill. It took you half a century to figure out that Flava Flav does not represent the behavior of all black people. Next week perhaps you’ll learn that every Jewish person doesn’t act like Jackie Mason and every white person doesn’t act like Larry the Cable Guy.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee

The board of directors of Dow Jones agreed to a tentative deal Tuesday night to sell the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch (in photo) and his News Corp. for $5 billion. The final decision must still be made by the Bancroft family, which has a controlling interest in Dow Jones.
Former Eagle editor Buzz Merritt argued in a commentary on our pages this week that the sale matters to you even if you don’t read the Journal. That’s because most of the national and world news come from five providers: the Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press.
If the owners of major newspapers are more interested in squeezing out profits than in quality news reporting, democracy suffers — because citizens don’t get the information they need to make good decisions and monitor the government.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee

Dan Rather isn’t backing off his criticism of his former employer, CBS News. Rather complained on a radio talk show Monday that CBS executives tried to lure viewers to “CBS Evening News” by “dumbing it down and tarting it up.” The executives quickly accused Rather of sexism toward new anchor Katie Couric. But Rather told Washington Post critic Tom Shales that he was referring to the content of the news show, not to Couric, and he raised valid concerns about how the news media are replacing hard news with entertainment. “We have enormous life-or-death issues and challenges facing us in this country and the world today,” Rather said. “Everything from the dismantling of civil rights enforcement within the Justice Department to the war in Iraq to news of secret prisons in Europe and, of course, the next presidential election.
“And yet, for some reason, Paris Hilton is the big story on newscast after newscast.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee

Katie Couric has not helped CBS News’ ratings, the New York Times reported. It’s still in third place, and ratings continue to dwindle. CBS producers had hoped that Couric, as well as a spiffed-up broadcast, would attract younger viewers. Though it did draw in younger women, her sunny, morning-show disposition hasn’t drawn many traditional hard-news lovers.
But speculation over whether a woman delivering the news has stunted ratings is laughable and sounds like something from "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy."
It’s not that Couric is a woman; it’s that she isn’t the right woman for the job.
Posted by Andie Clum