Journalism

According to a newly unsealed report from a PBS-hired external investigator, former talk-show host Tavis Smiley’s alleged misconduct dates back decades and spans inappropriate sexual comments and touching, verbal abuse, as well as sexual relationships with subordinates and guests on his show.

President Trump has made two major attempts (so far) to use his power to intimidate and control independent media. The second attempt was his intervention to deny Amazon a $10 billion Pentagon contract as retribution against the Washington Post. The first was ordering the Justice Department to block an AT&T merger, in order to punish CNN. And while the courts ultimately stymied the latter move, Trump is attempting to keep up public pressure on AT&T and its ownership of CNN.

Fox News averaged 2.5 million viewers per night in 2019, the most in its 23-year history, making the network the most-watched channel on basic cable. According to Nielsen, Fox News beat out ESPN, with its 1.78 million viewers, and third-place MSNBC, which drew an average of 1.75 million viewers in primetime. Fox topped its cable competitors for a fourth straight year, Nielsen said.

After pushing back its debut from last November, the nascent cable news channel will go live during Black History Month.

At precisely 6 p.m. Tuesday — just six hours before a new year begins — CLTV will sign off the air forever. With that, a 27-year piece of Chicago broadcast history will come to an end — the victim of a changing media landscape, a proliferation of digital news sources and out-of-town owners who took over parent company Tribune Media earlier this year.

David Zurawik: “This has been a decade of revolutionary, existential media change most of which would have happened had he never stepped off that elevator into the heart of the nation’s political life.”

A shooting in a Texas church left three dead Sunday and countless others reeling — not only because they witnessed it in real life, but because the events were captured on a livestream feed of the service, which was then replayed across the major news networks. But was that replaying ethical?

2019 will go down as the year of the media apocalypse. Nearly 8,000 newsroom jobs disappeared this year in a flurry of layoffs, buyouts and mergers. Digital outlets like BuzzFeed and Vice eliminated entire areas of coverage while legacy media giants like Gannett cut hundreds of positions after a merger. And some local news outlets shut down altogether, leaving huge swaths of the country with no local papers at all.

New jobs posted to TVNewsCheck’s Media Job Center include an opening for a morning news executive producer at the CBS O&O in Dallas-Ft. Worth, KTVT.

Threats of “retribution,” more accusations of “fake news” and the end of the White House briefing made 2019 the darkest yet for journalists in the Trump era.

Ad-supported cable business’ fortunes continue to decline unless it’s live programming — news and sports. Cable news networks Fox News and MSNBC and sports-focused ESPN repeated as 1-2-3 atop all basic cable networks in total viewers in Live+7 Nielsen ratings for 2019. That is all the more impressive because live non-entertainment programming gets very little delayed viewing, and even more important for advertisers who put a premium on ad-supported content where commercials can’t be skipped.

Fred P. Graham, a legal affairs reporter, television anchor and author who covered the Supreme Court, the Justice Department and the major trials and controversies of a tumultuous juridical era for The New York Times, CBS News and Court TV, died on Dec. 28 at his home in Washington. He was 88.

America lost a quarter of its journalists from 2008 to 2018, the vast majority of them covering local issues, according to University of North Carolina professor Penny Muse Abernathy. Newsrooms lost at least 3,800 jobs in 2019 alone. She estimates the country has lost 2,100 newspapers since 2004, 70 of them dailies. In that environment, the chief executives for three top chains, people in charge collectively of more than 700 newspapers reaching more than 12 million subscribers, agreed to interviews with The Washington Post to share their thoughts on the future of their companies and of local news.