Tag Archives: programming

Rutgers University Makes It Rain On Them Shows, Pays Snooki More Than Commencement Speaker!!

PISCATAWAY, N.J. — The pouf is mightier than the pen when it comes to speaking fees at New Jersey’s largest university. The Rutgers University Programming Association paid Snooki of the reality TV show “Jersey Shore” $32,000 Thursday to dish on her hairstyle, fist pumps, and the gym, tan, laundry lifestyle. That’s $2,000 more than the $30,000 the university is paying Nobel-winning novelist Toni Morrison to deliver Rutgers’ commencement address in May. Money for Thursday’s appearance came from the mandatory student activity fee. Freshman Adham Abdel-Raouf told the newspaper he thought the price was a bargain given Snooki’s popularity. Source

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Rutgers University Makes It Rain On Them Shows, Pays Snooki More Than Commencement Speaker!!

Wonder Woman Twirls, Twirls, Twirls Her Way To NBC

Evidently there’s a thin slice of pie we didn’t quite see on Jack Donaghy’s NBC Programming Priority chart — Refusing & Then Immediately Picking Up A Superheroine Drama. After initially joining every network in America in turning up its nose at David E. Kelley’s Wonder Woman pilot, NBC changed its mind and has picked it up.

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Wonder Woman Twirls, Twirls, Twirls Her Way To NBC

NPR Publicizes Apology of Sarah Spitz for Limbaugh Death Wishes, Insists She’s Not on Their Payroll

NPR’s blog The Two-Way is running the apology of public-radio producer Sarah Spitz, who claimed to her fellow liberals on JournoList she would “Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out” if Rush Limbaugh were dying in front of her. But they also wanted to insist that her ties with NPR were few: In fact, Spitz has never been an NPR employee. For many years, she has worked for  KCRW , a public radio station in Santa Monica, California, as a producer and publicist. KCRW is one of some 900 independently-operated public radio stations across the country that air NPR’s news, talk and entertainment programming. Like network TV affiliates, they air national programming but act autonomously. At 2:10 p.m. ET, Spitz issued this statement: I made poorly considered remarks about Rush Limbaugh to what I believed was a private email discussion group from my personal email account. As a publicist, I realize more than anyone that is no excuse for irresponsible behavior. I apologize to anyone I may have offended and I regret these comments greatly; they do not reflect the values by which I conduct my life. NPR also wanted to relay that their Santa Monica affliate offered regrets:  And in an email to NPR, Jennifer Ferro, KCRW’s general manager, said “the private comments made by one of our employees, Sarah Spitz, are regrettable for all of us at KCRW.” Sarah is a longtime employee of KCRW. Please note that she is not affiliated or employed by NPR, nor does she work as a journalist, as has been incorrectly reported in the media. Sarah was not acting in her position as KCRW Publicity Director when she wrote these comments. She spoke in the heat of the moment without consideration to the impact her words would have. We’ve all said things we didn’t mean and don’t reflect our core values. We believe that was the situation in this case. KCRW has, and always will be, dedicated to civil discourse and the free exchange of ideas. Since 1991, Spitz has contributed  six pieces to NPR’s flagship magazine programs,  Morning Edition and  All Things Considered , about arts and culture in the greater Los Angeles area, on a freelance basis. Her most-recent story , about an art exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), aired in 2006. Three pieces — profiles of writer Ariel Dorfman and choreographer David Rusev, and a report on a literary conference — predate NPR’s Internet archive. Anna Christopher, NPR’s senior manager of media relations, says that, since The Daily Caller posted its piece this morning, just after midnight, she has been in touch with organizations that have misidentified Spitz. Many of them, including The Daily Caller, have corrected the error. As the Spitz story shows, there is a bit of blur inside the public-radio system when it comes to the programming and the payroll. Spitz worked for KCRW, but she offered freelance reports for NPR. KCRW gets taxpayer money from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and sends some of it back to NPR in fees for its news programming. Spitz’s show Left Right & Center is on the NPR Podcast directory and airs across the country on almost 40 NPR affiliates .  By the way, Spitz also produces a show called The Politics of Culture, with such recent topics as “Homophobia in Sports” and “Alt-Econ: A Radical Approach.”

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NPR Publicizes Apology of Sarah Spitz for Limbaugh Death Wishes, Insists She’s Not on Their Payroll

Hours After Fireworks, Pacifica Aired Michael Moore Saying Americans Will Be Rejected from Heaven

Pacifica Radio, funded in part by federal grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, has a habit of ruining the patriotic holidays with their programming. On Memorial Day, their show “Democracy Now” hosted radical leftist Noam Chomsky railing against the “grand criminal” Ronald Reagan . On July 5, while many were still warmly recalling the Independence Day fireworks displays, “Democracy Now” aired a special interview with leftist filmmaker Michael Moore , who concluded by suggesting taxpaying Americans (even anti-war taxpaying Americans) aren’t getting into Heaven due to their government’s warmongering. Moore said he would tell President Obama to withdraw all U.S. troops now from Iraq and Afghanistan, because the wars there were immoral: I just wonder sometimes, who do we think we are as Americans, that we’re not going to have to answer for this someday? You know, whether we answer for it here or there, or if you’re a religious person and you think there’s a life after this, you know, what do you think is going to happen up at the Pearly Gates when they check your citizenship and go, “Oh, you were an American? Ha, well, here’s your list of crimes”? “Oh, yeah. No, I was against the war! I was against the war!” “Did you pay your taxes?” “Well, yeah, you got to pay your taxes.” “Well, then you helped fund this, didn’t you?” “Oh, yeah.” “OK, well, you know, turn around. You’re not coming in the Gates. ” I just—I think that there’s so much good that we could do. You know, if you travel the world, you know that people like us as people, as individuals. There’s something charming about our naïveté and our, you know, right? I mean, you know, “Hey! Hey! How ya doin’! Hey, yeah! I’m from Detroit! Yeah!” They could spot us coming. But I think we’re capable of a lot of good. And when you have a billion people on this planet that tonight cannot drink a cup of clean water, two billion who don’t have clean sanitation, what if we used our money to do that? I read this crazy statistic—and I have not fact-checked this, I’ll just throw this out there—but it was something like, for $15 billion or something like that, we could dig so many—x number of wells in the third world that would greatly reduce that number of how many people don’t have clean water. And I’m thinking, $15 billion is what we’ve been spending almost most every month on Iraq and Afghanistan. So, one month of the killing machine could give clean water to virtually all the people that don’t have it? Wouldn’t you rather be known as, you know, a citizen of a country that a child 10,000 miles away, while growing up, drinking clean water, saw that plaque on that well that said, “Brought to you from your friends in the United States of America”? That’s how I’d like to be known. Earlier in the show, Moore thanked the nuns who foiled his school newspaper career since he wrote the Catholic Church was a “woman-hating institution.” He said he showed his film “Sicko” to elderly nuns in Michigan and “nuns are great, because they know the [bleep] that goes on in the Catholic Church, and they were always more radical and more antiwar and all that, because obviously they were suffering their own oppression being nuns and just taking it out on the rest of us.”

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Hours After Fireworks, Pacifica Aired Michael Moore Saying Americans Will Be Rejected from Heaven

Mark Halperin Signs On at MSNBC; But Wait, He Used to Bash ‘Irresponsible Partisan Niche Media’

TV Newser and other sites reported yesterday that MSNBC has named Time’s Mark Halperin to be its “senior political analyst,” continuing his regular gigs on the set of Morning Joe, but also adding his observations to other programming. Would that include the hard-core opinion shows like Olbermann and Maddow? Not if those stars read Halperin’s comments about our “irresponsible partisan niche media” from the Jewish newspaper Forward in 2006. ”It’s going to take citizens, whether they have strong ideological views or not, to appreciate the necessity, in a free democracy, of a powerful, responsible, unbiased press,” Halperin continued. “If the country doesn’t care if we have that, if the view of the people of America is, ‘We want irresponsible, partisan, niche media,’ that’s what we’ll have. It’s going to take consumers of news, voting through their subscriptions and their eyeballs, to have an unbiased press. Most of the trend lines are bad.” Halperin was offering one of his occasional admissions of liberal media bias that so frustrate the left-wing blogosphere. (Typical was Salon.com’s Alex Pareene, with the headline “Mark Halperin now paid to be wrong about everything on MSNBC.” He contrasts him as far inferior to MSNBC’s other recent addition, David Weigel.) Halperin argued in 2006 that conservative new media was dominating the discussion (which, er, made Obama’s election impossible?):  “We’ve gone from a system with major national news organizations strong enough to umpire, but who did it in a way that Republicans saw as liberally biased and in important ways was liberally biased,” he said. “That system has been replaced by one that favors conservatives through the new media, which masquerades as a referee but is simply part of the partisan shouting on one side or the other. The old system favored liberals but was a better referee. The new system favors conservatives but is no referee at all. Best would be if we could strengthen national news organizations and eliminate liberal bias.” So perhaps Halperin meant that only conservatives are responsible for creating “irresponsible, partisan niche media.” That would make him a nice match with Bill Press, who thinks only the conservatives engage in “toxic talk.” He may want to avoid Olbermann in the hallway with that talk of how it would be “best” to eliminate liberal bias.

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Mark Halperin Signs On at MSNBC; But Wait, He Used to Bash ‘Irresponsible Partisan Niche Media’

The Weekly Andy Cohen WTF Moment: Kelly Ripa and Andy on Gay Tension and ‘Virgin Pancakes’

We may not know why Bravo’s Senior VP of Production and Programming hosts a weekly late night talk show where he interviews various reality stars while sipping on a Maker’s Mark, but by God, we’re committed to chronicling it in all its weirdness. (While we’re on the subject, we’re also not sure why Andy Cohen blogged about his Memorial Day weekend in a Bravo.com post titled We’re All Going to Die .) With that in mind, then, let’s examine the WTF -iest moment from last night’s Watch What Happens , featuring special guest star Kelly Ripa.

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The Weekly Andy Cohen WTF Moment: Kelly Ripa and Andy on Gay Tension and ‘Virgin Pancakes’

Fox Announces 2010-2011 Primetime Schedule

NEW YORK — Fox presented its primetime schedule for the 2010-2011 television season on

TV Bites: NBC Bans Reporter From Upfronts After Programming Leak

Lil Wayne’s Arrest: Concert Organizer Looks Back On The Night

Radio exec says he advised Wayne’s crew against bringing tour buses into New York. By Shaheem Reid Lil Wayne, 07.22.07 Photo: MTV News Ebro Darden, Director of Programming for New York’s Hot 97 and KISS-FM, was one of the people who spearheaded Lil Wayne’s New York concert on July 22, 2007 — after which he was arrested on the attempted gun possession charges that are sending him to jail today. Darden, a veteran of radio for over 20 years, said he and his staff urged Wayne and his entourage to not to travel to the Beacon Theater on their tour bus. “They decided they wanted to drive their tour buses through Manhattan because they didn’t want to ride in regular cars that day,” Darden recalled. “I suggested against it, but obviously [he’s] the type of person that likes to be in an environment he’s comfortable in. That’s where he lives a lot. He spends a lot of time on that tour bus. Leaving that tour bus in one place and jumping in the car and going to another place was uncomfortable. So we parked the tour buses outside [the theater]. “My reaction to the actual incident at first was, ‘Damn. Didn’t he know he was in New York? ‘Cause they don’t play that,’ Darden continued. “I didn’t know the particulars — if the gun was his, if the gun was in somebody else’s bag, if it was in his bag. I just knew that somebody I like as an artist got caught up in something, same way a lot of artists that we love in hip-hop have got caught up in having possession of firearms in New York. [New York authorities] don’t play , especially if you are coming through New York and are an out-of-towner coming from somewhere you can actually carry a firearm, the odds are high that they’re gonna catch you with one to be able to make a an example out of you. You’re gonna get caught up.” Outside the Beacon Theater that night, tension was very high between police and a group of hip-hop luminaries, such as the Diplomats, Ja Rule, Irv Gotti and DJ Khaled, who came to support Weezy at his first headlining New York concert. Police, mounted on horses practically pushed a crowd — which included Juelz Santana and Jim Jones — down the block. Wayne himself had a tough time getting in the building and going through security. Onstage during his performance, Weezy said police harassed him. “I just went through the worst f—-in’ feelin ever with y’all police,” he fumed onstage. “This may be one of the only times you see me because of how they treated me.” Darden said he had no control over the police’s behavior. “Security is security,” he said. “At any event, we try to do the artists a special service because they’re coming to do a service for the audience. You still gotta go through security. We don’t own the buildings; we definitely don’t own the police. This is hip-hop, so most buildings and most police, we’re not on their good side. They’re not really going show us any special concessions. They’re gonna try and make it difficult for us. Just like they’re gonna try and make it difficult for the cat on the train. If you’re in hip-hop, you kinda accept a little bit of that burden. It’s unfortunate.” The hip-hop stars say that the treatment by the police got no better for them as they left the Beacon. “Leaving the Beacon was weird for me,” Khaled told MTV News last year. “I felt like [police] was just watching everybody. It didn’t feel right. Everybody was backstage, undercovers, I heard Ja Rule got pulled over. And nobody was doing anything wrong. That’s why I didn’t really understand it. Me, I didn’t leave from backstage. I left with the crowd. When I was leaving, I was hearing all this stuff about people getting pulled over. I feel hip-hop is a target for no reason right now.” “I remember that day, a couple of people got arrested, I got pulled over,” Santana told MTV News last year. “They followed me uptown. You can’t just go and try get n—as for no reason. Say a n—a did have a gun. We’re on defense. By the time somebody tries to [do something to me] and [the police] get to me, I’m just explaining the story. That’s the position we in. C’mon. The people that’s trying to get us are looking out to see when the police aren’t there,” he said. Wayne and Ja Rule were both arrested on weapons charges. In October, Wayne pleaded guilty to attempted gun possession and is expected to begin serving a year-long sentence today, of which he’s expected to serve eight to 10 months. Darden is one among many who feels that Wayne’s musical career won’t flag while he’s in jail. “He’s got a great catalog at this point,” he said. “The airplay is going to continue. I think people are rooting for him. He didn’t hurt anybody. The Young Money album , the [upcoming] Drake album , his album, even the Birdman album: The music that features him and the music that is his own is gonna stretch out from March to March [of next year]. It usually takes a record 8-12 weeks to take off. Then it’s probably another 8-12 weeks tacked on the back of that where it has a life. So you’re talking four to six months that a record could be around getting airplay. If you have three or four records lined up that are bona-fide, we might not even notice he’s gone. I think that’s what their plan is: shoot a bunch of videos, have a bunch of music, you might not even recognize he’s gone.” Related Videos Lil Wayne Goes To Jail Lil Wayne’s ‘Road To Rikers’ Related Photos Lil Wayne And Friends Live In New York Related Artists Lil Wayne

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Lil Wayne’s Arrest: Concert Organizer Looks Back On The Night

How to Know When Gay Rumors Are True

Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston are all up in our grill again . This must have something to do with those gay rumors . Every famous male gets them at some point, but how can you tell whether or not they’re true?

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How to Know When Gay Rumors Are True