Unfortunate headline of the day

Tireless Tony of TKC spotted that gem on the NBC Action News website. Tony says that he was trying extra hard today to make people angry ... but as usual he just made me laugh and think.

WTF-TV: "The Two Coreys"

So I was on with Chip Franklin, as I am every Monday morning on San Diego's news-talk blowtorch:

Download KOGO-6-30-2008.mp3 (or subscribe)

And he asked me afterwards if I had ever seen "Corey vs. Corey," and I said I hadn't seen it at all. Later, I realized Chip was referring to "The Two Coreys," the latest show on A&E where the art of the bleep button is practiced 10 times a minute.

Time Warner gives CableCard customers 44 reasons to cancel their service

If you patted yourself on the back for discovering the joys of the CableCard — a device that allows you to watch digital cable without having to stick one more black box above, behind or below your TV set — well, kick yourself in the shin, because you shoulda figured Time Warner Cable was going to figure out a way to cripple your card.

Not "Save Jericho" again!

Well, you can't fault one of the most chronicled fan campaigns in history for attempting an encore. I mean, you have to be a little nuts to want to spend your hard-earned money to bring back a TV show nobody is watching, right? And since NUTS worked the first time, why not a second helping?

First, though, you've got to see the TV ad.

Bad news, good news, "American Teenager," "Ganja Queen"

And more in my weekly conversation with KOGO's Chip Franklin: Download KOGO-6-30-2008.mp3

What's working for me ...

1. “P.O.V.” Tell me you created a season pass for this. Tell me you caught “Traces of the Trade” last week and will see “Election Day” this Tuesday and “The Ballad of Esequiel Hernandez” next Tuesday on your PBS station.

2. HBO. It's bringing back “In Treatment.” The Polanski doc rocked. And on July 13, “Generation Kill” from the creators of “The Wire.” Showtime can only dream of being this good.

3. Digital TV converter boxes. You fill out a form at dtv2009.gov. A $40 gift card arrives in the mail. And that TV in the rec room doesn't go dark next February.

... AND WHAT'S NOT

1. “America's Got Talent.” An Elvis impersonator? A guy who breaks bricks? Tumblers? In prime time? What is this, 1980?

2. The Screen Actors Guild. When the writers struck last year, the Hollywood studios were cast as the heavy. Now SAG is threatening a strike and hoping to make the studios look bad again. Sorry, but that script got a rewrite.

3. George Carlin, RIP. Not just because he could still be brilliant. I was hoping he'd live to see the Supreme Court overturn the “Seven Dirty Words” ruling that got the feds into the “indecency” business.

What to watch this week

"Ganja Queen"

Fourth of July revelers aren't the only ones setting off fireworks, as an explosive documentary about marijuana and a new ABC Family drama about a pregnant teen also crackle.

Imus and Pacman (not pictured)

Courtesy of Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar, the nicest picture of the Mirror Awards luncheon, as Rory O'Connor and I stood in our far corner of the Rainbow Room while the mucketeys dined behind us.

While this was going on, somewhere closer to New York's sewers than our 65th-floor view, Don Imus was stirring up a minor poopstorm with his racist remarks concerning NFL bad boy Pacman Jones. Here it is Friday, though, and the storm seems to have passed. What happened?

Is Keith Olbermann flip-flopping on FISA?

The segment in question

Perhaps you've been turning on your internal mute button every time you've heard mention of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and I could hardly blame you. For one thing, it seems like exactly the kind of arcane legislation you elected a senator to worry about. For another, the people fulminating loudest about it seem to be on the hard right and hard left.

Kansas City TV ratings: 10 things to know about the May book

UPDATED with more bullet points at the bottom.

As the O'Reilly-Olbermann discussion we've been having proves, there are ratings and then there are ratings. And while I freely admit to big misgivings about television's overreliance on younger demographics — especially as we are going through a longevity revolution — facts are facts, and the fact is, a show that draws a younger audience will pull in better sponsors and more money than a show that draws an older one.

Nowhere is this a bigger challenge than in the news industry. (Tell me about it.) Pulling in a younger audience to watch TV news has never been easy. So this week, Nielsen sent out its May ratings "book," containing the data about age groups and watching habits from viewing diaries — yes, we still diary in Kansas City, at least for another couple years.

Who knew there were debates scheduled? CBS did

Premiere week may be dead at other networks, but it lives on at CBS, as sort of a reminder of simpler, happier, pre-blood-spatter days at Old Tiffany. Below is the fall schedule, which includes the noteworthy semi-apologetic statement down in the release that "The premieres of the Thursday and Friday night dramas have been scheduled outside of premiere week to accommodate the scheduled presidential debate on Sept. 26 and a vice presidential debate on Oct. 2."

A, like we would even have noticed such a thing and B, they've got debates scheduled already?

Idol auditions coming to KC August 8

This couldn't have anything to do with David Cook, could it?

Fairness Doctrine officially dead as campaign issue

Earlier today I got a press release from a right-wing group trying to link House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to efforts to revive the old FCC Fairness Doctrine. That smelled awfully fishy to me, because -- contrary to the hyperventilations of this particular group, whose name I won't mention because I think this was just a fundraising ploy of theirs -- many leading Democrats are opposed to bringing back the Fairness Doctrine.

The Super-Cheesy, Super-Fun, Not Really Family Friendly Garth Brooks 8th Inning Stretch Show!

I finally brought my good camera to the Royals game on Tuesday (another win, raising my personal attendance record this season to 5-2). And thus I was able to capture, in all its big-screen glory, the nightly sing-along that plays out just before they cut off beer sales.

Fenway can have Neil Diamond. We've got the Garth. Here's the slideshow.

Conservatives who defend O'Reilly - talk about an elite few!

In which a reader accuses a guy who watches TV for a living of being elitist.

"Chris Matthews was to Hillary as Ken Starr was to Bill." Really?

At the end of John Heilemann's long, fair-minded and overdue assessment of how Hillary Clinton's star has risen in the past six months, even as her political fortunes have faded, there is this curious attempt to hand out blame for her treatment in the news media:

But when I ask her former staff for particular examples of sexism in the press, they exhibit less restraint. “The whole MSNBC crew,” says Lewis. “I mean, at what point in Chris Matthews’s career do we choose? Then there was night on CNN when [Republican strategist] Alex Castellanos said, Well, it’s appropriate to call some women a white bitch because that’s what they are.”

Well, not to make a rhyme, but that's rich coming from Ann Lewis, the most android-like Clinton loyalist ever to grace a television camera.

This ain't your older brother's TV no more

*"Factory" on Spike*

Whether it winds up a hit or a box-office bust, the “Get Smart” movie has proved one thing to me: I am officially an old guy.

What's working for me:

1. Jimmy Kimmel's contract extension. Fresh off a terrific NBA Finals, where he did a pregame version of “Live” (and scored a three-pointer with his Barack Obama interview), Kimmel was rewarded by getting to do his show until 2010. Hey, isn't that when Letterman's deal expires, too?

2. '60 Minutes Global.' No American news program covers the world better, and now it will be offering the '60' format to other countries to produce their own versions. (Andy Rooney sold separately.)

3. YouTube's Fred. I have no idea why this eighth-grade goofball with the helium voice makes me laugh (and laugh). But I'm not alone.

What's not:

1. Shows about the ultra-rich. Bad enough that TV is loaded with shows about the upper class, now we get CNBC's “Untold Wealth,” airing Thursday, all about the upper crust. Much of the hour is spent gawking at the palatial homes of multimillionaires. I realize it's hard to make working-class Americans look this glamorous, but I wish someone would at least try.

2. Post-Russert guessing games. Thank you, Tom Brokaw, for short-circuiting this creepy bit of speculation. I'm not even sure the favorites to take over “Meet the Press” in 2009 (Brokaw has signed up for the rest of the campaign) even care.

3. The first three minutes of “Fringe.” Fox's J.J. Abrams pilot, now being passed around the Web, features a gross-out opening scene (a virus runs amok on an airplane and, um, people's faces melt). This is going to be the new “Lost”?

The Mirror Awards (or: my free lunch that only cost me round-trip airfare and cabs)

Rob Owen did not come from western Pennsylvania. I didn't see any Seattle Times badges in the Rainbow Room. So that left me pretty much the sole attending representative among the non-East Coast-based nominees for the second annual Mirror Awards for media coverage, a worthy if thusfar hyper-regional celebration of the media professionals who are best at covering ... each other. Four of the five category winners and the overwhelming majority of nominees are based a stone's throw from the top of 30 Rockefeller Center, where these pictures were taken. (Mrs. TV Barn suggested they rename it the New York Mirror Awards. They could put a bust of Walter Winchell in the logo, though I guess then people would think the awards had something to do with classic movies. But in terms of New Yorkers covering New Yorkers, it'd be spot-on.)

Geography, by the way, had little to do with my not winning (complete list is here). I was proud of my piece, but I felt the prize in my category of Best Profile should go to David Folkenflik of NPR (recently relocated to NYC; he joked that a focus group had found that most of the media were located here). However, my second favorite was the winning profile, of the late Gerald Boyd, written by Jeff Coplon (yes, Kansas Citians, that same one who wrote for the KC Times back in the day).

Still, it was nice to meet and reacquaint with some of my friends in the trade I mostly know online, including the folks at Broadcasting & Cable, Rory O'Connor, Rachel Sklar (who owes me a picture she took of me and Rory), Emily Nussbaum, IWantMedia's Patrick Phillips and Boston's Dan Kennedy — who, like me, got travel money to come to New York for the honor of being nominated.

"The Daily Show's" George Carlin tribute

Attended the taping of tonight's "Daily Show," and what a nice way they sent off George Carlin.

"I'm getting awfully tired of people we need, leaving us," Jon Stewart said at the end of the show. When he announced Carlin's death, some audience members — who obviously had not looked up at any of the news tickers or watched a jumbo screen at any point in their touring of NYC that day — could be heard gasping. Then, Stewart introduced a pitch-perfect "moment of Zen": a joke about the Gulf War that Carlin told in 1992 about the war's two main architects: And the punchline: "Just remember the names of the two men running that war: Dick Cheney and Colin Powell. Somebody got blanked in the ass!"

(Yes, I could have spelled out the dirty word for you. But wasn't one of the reasons Pacifica vs. FCC — the ruling that got the government into the indecency business, after a radical radio station played Carlin's "7 Dirty Words" routine — wasn't one reason that ruling was so stupid the fact that most mass media self-regulate their language? Like I just did?)

Anyway, I heard from a network publicist that Comedy Central was planning to air the language unbleeped ... when the show reairs in the middle of the night, by which time it will be in safe harbor from coast to coast. I can't stay up to confirm it, and I don't have a DVR here in New York, but I'm sure they could get away with it.

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Stewart spent a fair amount of time warming up the crowd before the show — almost as much time as his warmup guy, Paul Mercurio. He engaged a couple of his interlocutors in longer conversations, including one woman who announced that since her last visit to the show she had beaten cancer (big applause). Another eager audience member leaped up to say she was a professor at SUNY-Stony Brook and taught a class in which "The Daily Show" was assigned viewing.

Stewart looked incredulous. His immediate and hilarious response: "What do you teach, Bullsh*t 101?"