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Guest Commentary: Some Questions for the New CEO of The New York Times About the BBC Child Abuse Scandal

[Note: This guest blog entry is written by Bill Bauman. For many years Bauman was the GM of WESH, Hearst Television’s NBC affiliate serving Orlando, Fla. He retired five years ago. Bauman’s last guest commentary for us was "What NBC Can Learn…

Oct 30, 2012

TV Doing What TV Does Best

Millions of citizens will be watching TV in the next 24-48 hours, tracking Hurricane Sandy. There will be plenty of people watching from thousands of miles away, like I’ve been doing here in L.A. But there will also be the…

Oct 29, 2012

Discovery Channel, This Time It’s Personal. Lance Armstrong Took Your Brand and Pissed On It In Front Of the Whole World. Doesn’t That Bother You? [Blog Entry Updated on Oct. 24, 2012]

It was a warm, muggy day in June, mostly overcast with some drizzle. It was an omen. The day should have been bright, sunny, and one of the best days yet in the close to year and a half that…

Oct 18, 2012

Why Lance Armstrong Needs Oprah Winfrey in the Worst Possible Way

When I was a teenager growing up in a middle class neighborhood here in Los Angeles in the mid-‘60s, it occurred to me that you lived in either a Newsweek house or a Time house. The parents of my friends…

Oct 11, 2012

The Genius of Nikki Finke, and Her Boss, Jay Penske. And the Selling of Variety to Penske

It was a far more genteel world almost 30 years ago when I was a reporter at The Hollywood Reporter and when I turned down a job offer to work at Variety. When I started at THR as the cable…

Oct 9, 2012

Roger Ebert Says This Is Something Every Movie Lover Must Do During His or Her Lifetime. I Wholeheartedly Agree. This Thursday May Be Your Last Chance to Do This

One of the ways movie companies fought to retain the popularity of movies shown in theaters once TV caught on big-time in the 1950s was to make the big screen even bigger. The most notable of these techniques early on…

Oct 1, 2012