“Beat the Press” – Page 7

Who will be the new panelist on “Beat the Press”?

Over at the “Beat the Press” blog, Ralph Ranalli makes it official: longtime panelist Joe Sciacca is out now that he’s been promoted to editor of the Boston Herald. So who will replace Joe on the WGBH-TV (Channel 2) program? Follow the link, and you can make your own suggestions.

Scientology’s bought-and-paid-for journalists

Ralph Ranalli at Beat the Press has an excellent analysis of the Church of Scientology’s hiring of three journalists to review the St. Petersburg Times’ critical reporting on the church.

Public radio listeners will be the winners

Best of luck to my “Beat the Press” colleagues Emily Rooney and Callie Crossley, whose hour-long programs debut today on WGBH Radio (89.7 FM) — Emily at noon and Callie at 1 p.m.

Rooney is competing with one of my favorite people in radio, Robin Young, whose “Here and Now” is broadcast on WBUR (90.9 FM) from noon to 1. Crossley is up against syndicated fare on ‘BUR except on Fridays, when “Radio Boston” airs.

So I’m hoping the public radio audience expands and everyone wins. Including the listeners.

Ted Koppel may anchor ABC’s “This Week”

My “Beat the Press” colleague Callie Crossley has the best idea for George Stephanopoulos’ replacement on ABC’s “This Week”: Gwen Ifill, who would have been a far better choice to succeed the late Tim Russert on “Meet the Press” than David Gregory — predictably — has proved to be.

But if an Ifill hire isn’t in the works, we might get the next best thing. The Politico’s Mike Allen reports that ABC is negotiating with legendary “Nightline” anchor Ted Koppel, now in busy semi-retirement, to moderate “This Week” three Sundays a month.

Koppel was one of the finest broadcast journalists of his generation — the successor to Murrow and Cronkite to a far greater extent than any of the folks who have anchored the network evening newscasts in the post-Cronkite era. He’s a tough interviewer and would bring unparalleled gravitas to the job. Ducking a question from Ted Koppel is not the same as ducking a question from Jake Tapper, Terry Moran or anyone else.

I do have one reservation. After Russert’s death in 2008, I thought retired anchor Tom Brokaw was an excellent choice to fill the moderator’s slot on an interim basis. Instead, Brokaw seemed cranky, sour and bored.

The Brokaw lesson is that it would be great to have Koppel back — but only if he’s prepared to bring his “A” game.

Photo (cc) by Tim Brauhn and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Share your thoughts on Obama’s presser

Friend of Media Nation Jon Keller has written a post at Beatthepress.org in which he endorses Dana Milbank’s account in the Washington Post of President Obama’s “prepackaged entertainment” at Tuesday’s White House news conference.

As you may already know, Obama called on Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, saying, “I know that there may actually be questions from people in Iran who are communicating through the Internet. Do you have a question?”

I don’t want to provide too much set-up before turning this over to you, but here is what Pitney wrote for HuffPo about what happened. Pitney says that though he was invited to prepare a question based what Iranians had been talking about online, no one at the White House knew what he was going to ask; and that though he was, indeed, escorted into the briefing room, he had been told ahead of time that there was no guarantee he’d be called on.

Now, I have two questions for you, which I want you to answer only after reading Keller, Milbank and Pitney.

1. If you relied solely on Milbank’s account, would it be your understanding that Obama knew what Pitney’s question would be?

2. Since, according to Pitney, Obama neither knew the question nor had promised to call on him, did either the president or his press operation do anything wrong, unethical or even disrespectful to the other reporters in the room?

A primer in getting to “no”

In this week’s Boston Phoenix, Adam Reilly observes that New York Times Co. executives mangled things with the Boston Globe and the Newspaper Guild so thoroughly that you’re left wondering if a “no” vote was what they wanted all along.

I’ve been wondering the same thing, though for the life of me I can’t see how this benefits the Sulzbergers. Now that they’ve made it official that they want to sell the Globe, the last thing they need is an unfair-labor case before the National Labor Relations Board, which could drag on for months.

Over at the Beat the Press blog, former Globe staffer Ralph Ranalli explains how Globe publisher Steve Ainsley and Times Co. management snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

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