Category: media

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central’s pair of late night satirists whose shows have been in reruns since the writers’ strike began, have announced that they will resume production, sans writers, in January. Both hosts are members of the Writers’ Guild, and are therefore crossing their own picket line.

The FCC has voted to limit the exponential growth of cable TV giant Comcast. “The new regulation will limit Comcast to 30 percent of the pay-TV market in the United States, halting the billion-dollar acquisitions that have made it the largest cable company in the nation.”

David Letterman’s production company will meet with officials from the Writers’ Guild later this week in an effort to craft an “interim agreement” that would allow striking writers to return to CBS’s two late-night talk shows when production resumes in January. The Guild is hoping to negotiate multiple such agreements with individual production companies, thereby giving them leverage over the major studios.

“Noah Cowan, co-director of the Toronto International Film Festival for the past four years, is leapfrogging into a new role as artistic director of Bell Lightbox, the new home of the festival and its sister organizations in the TIFF Group. Cameron Bailey, veteran film critic and festival programmer, will take over Cowan’s old job as co-director of the festival.”

Comedies about unwanted pregnancies have been abundant this year. (Abortions as a result of same have been nonexistant.) Does the wave of baby films signal a change in Hollywood morality?

“The late-night talk show hosts are returning. But the stars are not yet ready to come out for them” if it means crossing the writers’ picket line, it would seem. Or, more to the point, no star wants to be the first to accept a booking on Jay or Dave or Conan and face the wrath of the writers alone.

US Senators angry at the FCC for relaxing rules on cross-ownsership of media, vow to block the commission’s new rule.

The television industry is “facing its worst labor crisis in two decades, a crippling writers strike that’s reshaping the business of TV and threatening to permanently shift the viewing habits of millions of Americans.”

“Music downloads have once omni-powerful labels squealing like stuck pigs, porn-makers predict DVD sales will drop to zero within five years as people turn to free stuff on the net, and TV networks are fretting over their slide towards irrelevant middleman status.”

“Broadening the reach of BBC journalism is a priority. Performance in news and current affairs is rightly seen to be strong but the BBC is not always serving everyone in the audience as it should, with those who fall within the category of ‘low BBC approvers’ perceiving a performance gap.”