This article titled “Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol Palin lands US reality show” was written by Ben Quinn and agencies, for The Guardian on Monday 9th May 2011 23.06 UTC

While Sarah Palin’s political star suddenly appears to be fading, at least one member of her family is continuing to make the most of America’s enduring fascination with their adventures.

Bristol Palin, who briefly became a household name in 2008 after her teen pregnancy was announced in the heat of her mother’s campaign as running mate to the then Republican presidential candidate John McCain, has landed her own reality television show.

Producers say she will allow cameras “exclusive access” into her personal life for the first time. The move follows her mother’s own reality series last year, which was greeted by some as a thinly disguised political advert for the former Alaskan governor’s own future presidential ambitions.

BIO, a small US cable channel, said it had ordered 10 half-hour episodes of a documentary series that will follow Bristol Palin and her two-year-old son Tripp as they move to Los Angeles and work for a small charity there.

The 20-year-old daughter of Palin senior had been in and out of the spotlight as a result of her on/off relationship with Levi Johnston, a former high school hockey star who fathered her child and has been attempting to leverage his own profile as a minor celebrity.

However, Bristol Palin took a determined step towards becoming a celebrity in her own right last year by waltzing her way to the finals of a television talent contest, Dancing With the Stars, despite more than a few critics suggesting she has two left feet.

She subsequently bought a five-bedroom house near Phoenix, Arizona, with her earnings from the show and became a spokeswoman for a teen abstinence campaign group. At the time, she was reportedly planning to attend college in Arizona.

But the as-yet-untitled TV documentary will see her moving in with two former child stars, brothers Kyle and Christopher Massey. She and Kyle competed on the same season of Dancing with the Stars. The series, which will follow her work for an as-yet-unidentified Los Angeles charity, is scheduled to air in late 2011, BIO channel said.

“Bristol is the kind of personality BIO is drawn to,” said David McKillop, the channel’s executive vice president of programming.

“Her personal life has been playing out in the media for several years but this will be the first time she’s opening up her real life, with her son and her friends the Massey brothers,” he added.

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This article titled “Piers Morgan’s first CNN outing is second best to Fox News” was written by Richard Adams, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 18th January 2011 22.17 UTC

Is it always going to be second prize for Piers Morgan? For years he was editor of the tabloid that trailed behind Rupert Murdoch’s organ. Now, having taken over Larry King’s role as CNN’s marquee interviewer, Morgan finds himself in second place once again to Murdoch’s Fox News.

According to ratings firm Nielsen, Morgan’s heavily advertised debut on Monday in the 9pm slot for CNN garnered a respectable 2.1 million viewers, a substantial increase on the average nightly figure of 657,000 that King was pulling in the last three months of 2010.

But even with the hype surrounding Morgan’s first guest Oprah Winfrey, Piers Morgan Tonight couldn’t crack Fox News’s grip on the cable TV news ratings. Morgan had the misfortune of running into Fox News’s Sean Hannity interviewing Sarah Palin in the same time slot. That match-up got 2.36 million viewers and continued to make headlines the next day.

Morgan’s show did easily beat MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who was watched by 1.1 million people for her interview with the film-maker Michael Moore, a frequent guest. But as the New York Times’s media correspondent Brian Stetler noted:

Of course, the true test for Mr Morgan will come not on night one or night two, but weeks and months from now.

Morgan’s appearance had a tepid response from US critics – the Los Angeles Times calling it “a non-starter” – but none were harsher than the Washington Post’s Hank Stuever, who damned Morgan’s “very Windows XP-looking set” and concluded:

But after all that buildup, Morgan’s first show turned out to be a fawning and completely unnecessary interview with a successful businesswoman named Oprah Winfrey. It was a droning, previously recorded hour (Morgan has said he prefers to do taped interviews) on a network in desperate need of a newsy, dynamic talk show. The goal was to replace Larry King Live with something better, right?

Morgan’s technique, said Stuever, made Oprah’s previous interview with the notoriously mild Barbara Walters “look like a performance of Frost/Nixon”.

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Oprah Winfrey is getting her own TV network. Discovery Communications and Winfrey announced a deal Tuesday where the Discovery Health network will be turned over to Winfrey next year, becoming OWN—the Oprah Winfrey Network.

Some of Winfrey’s stable of regular contributors could be expected to be part of the programming, including her current talk show, and rights to the use of reruns.

The WGA and David Letterman’s Worldwide Pants have reached an agreement that will allow “Late Show with David Letterman” and “Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson” to return to the air next week with their writers.

WGA issued a statement Friday confirming the agreement, citing the deal as proof that its demands aren’t unreasonable.

“This is a comprehensive agreement that addresses the issues important to writers, particularly new media,” the Guild said. “Worldwide Pants has accepted the very same proposals that the Guild was prepared to present to the media conglomerates when they walked out of negotiations on December 7.

Today’s agreement dramatically illustrates that the Writers Guild wants to put people back to work, and that when a company comes to the table prepared to negotiate seriously a fair and reasonable deal can be reached quickly.”

WGA’s decision to strike a deal with Letterman is unique, because Letterman owns his own shows and is not at the mercy of the big studios. However, similar deals with the large studios are unlikely because they have considerably more at stake than Letterman’s World Wide Pants does.

I have mixed emotions about this WGA strike. I can appreciate what the writers are asking for and I can’t say that it’s unreasonable. There’s just something about strikes of any kind that I find irritating. Maybe it’s not so much the strike itself, but just the gratuitous picketing that I find so irritating.

What’s wrong with having a strike and just staying home or going on vacation? Is is really necessary to stand in the street with a dumb sign and a megaphone? The fact that all the late night shows went off the air made a pretty significant statement by itself without the stupid picketing.

Of course I could be wrong, so if I’m missing something and this whole picketing thing is necessary than please do tell.

-Chris Jones

Riding a ratings wave from “Countdown With Keith Olbermann,” a program that takes strong issue with the Bush administration, MSNBC is increasingly seeking to showcase its nighttime lineup as a welcome haven for viewers of a similar (far-left) mind.

Lest there be any doubt that the cable channel believes there is ratings gold in shows that criticize the administration with the same vigor with which Fox News’s hosts often champion it, two NBC executives acknowledged yesterday that they were talking to Rosie O’Donnell about a prime-time show on MSNBC.

But even without Ms. O’Donnell, MSNBC already presents a three-hour block of nighttime talk — Chris Matthews’s “Hardball” at 7, Mr. Olbermann at 8, and “Live With Dan Abrams” at 9 — in which the White House takes a regular beating. The one early-evening program on MSNBC that is often most sympathetic to the administration, “Tucker” with Tucker Carlson at 6 p.m., is in real danger of being canceled, according to one NBC executive.

Having a prime-time lineup that tilts ever more demonstrably to the left could be risky for General Electric, MSNBC’s parent company, which is subject to legislation and regulation far afield of the cable landscape. Officials at MSNBC emphasize that they never set out to create a liberal version of Fox News.

The problem is that the liberal talking point about Fox News being a Republican channel has been debunked by a Harvard study, which of course MSNBC didn’t report on.

The study, which looked at CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News, found no evidence that Fox News is in the tank for Republicans. Instead, it found that Fox News was the most balanced in its coverage of any cable news provider.

I’ve watched “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” (or at least tried to) and it’s the most distorted, hate-filled news analysis program on television. It’s amazing the sheer amount of disinformation Olbermann spews out on a nightly basis, but it’s funny to watch. Every single guest he has on the program is a left-wing bomb throwing liberal with hatred for Bush seeping from every pore.

Rosie O’Donnell should be a fine addition to the network. Every night at 9 PM America can tune in and hear Rosie’s latest theory about what really happened on 9/11. Maybe she can invite some terrorist leaders on to discuss how mean America is being to them.

-Chris Jones

It looks like Rosie better known as the “9/11 Truther n’ chief” may be getting her own prime time show on MSNBC.

Rosie O’Donnell, who abruptly left “The View” on ABC last spring after drawing attention and ratings for her opinions on everything from the Iraq war to her co-hosts, is in serious discussions to return to television atop a new soapbox: a prime-time show on the cable news channel MSNBC, according to executives on both sides of the negotiations who have been briefed directly.

Under one scenario, Ms. O’Donnell would be given the 9 p.m. slot each weeknight on MSNBC, where she would go head-to-head with two heavyweights of cable talk: “Larry King Live” on CNN and “Hannity & Colmes” on Fox News. Her show would replace “Live with Dan Abrams,” a relatively low-rated program that only recently replaced “Scarborough Country,” which was also little-watched.

But NBC executives, speaking on condition of anonymity because the conversations are continuing, cautioned that there were many elements of a potential deal yet to be resolved. These include when such a show would appear, what Ms. O’Donnell would be paid, and whether she would also be seen on the NBC broadcast network.

MSNBC will then have the most dishonest and hate-filled prime time line-up on television!

French President Nicolas Sarkozy walked out of an interview with CBS television news show 60 minutes, according to a clip of the show released Sunday in advance of the interview’s airing.

A clearly disturbed Sarkozy stood up muttering in French about the question, which was not heard, in a short publicity clip put on the Internet ahead of the 60 Minutes broadcast Sunday night.

Before the CBS news show interview in Paris even began, Sarkozy called his press secretary “an imbecile” for arranging the session on a busy day.

In the interview conducted earlier this month and aired Sunday night, he candidly discussed what he likes about the U.S. But he grew frustrated when asked about his wife.

“If I had to say something about Cecilia, I would certainly not do so here,” Sarkozy replied.

He declared the interview over and said: “Bon courage.” Two weeks later, the Sarkozys’ divorce was announced.

-Chris Jones