Last month, conservative firebrand Glenn Beck proposed the creation of "Independence USA," a libertarian community. And if his vision is unique, the quest for utopia isn't. Read on, and find out how well you know the dreamers and crackpots who have tried to create "perfect" societies.
Parents, are you ready for your children's education to be fair and balanced? News Corp. announced this week that it will collaborate with AT&T to bring digital education services and products to U.S. schools.
Glenn Beck's show still has higher ratings than all of its 5 p.m. cable competitors put together, but it has been losing viewers at an alarming rate. And it's got fewer -- and less prestigious -- advertisers than "The Situation Room" or "Hardball with Chris Matthews." Will Fox pull the plug?
So far, at least, Piers Morgan shows no signs of being CNN's next big star. His ratings have declined steadily, falling below that of his predecessor, Larry King, in his first two weeks on the air. But it may be too early to make a fair comparison.
The Qatar-based network is getting international kudos for its coverage of the growing Middle East crisis. But acclaim and a growing audience don't yet equal profits and market share for Al Jazeera, which has almost certainly been losing money since its launch in 1996.
MSNBC today suspended Joe Scarborough for two days after learning that Scarborough had made eight $500 contributions -- the state's legal maximum -- to Florida political candidates without securing prior permission from MSNBC management.
When News Corp. made high-profile donations to Republican organizations, liberals were outraged, saying it proved that Fox News Channel is a front for the Republican Party. On the opposite side of the political aisle, the same point was made after Keith Olbermann's suspension by MSNBC. The truth, though, is more ambiguous.
At least in part due to comments made by Jon Stewart at this weekend's Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann announced he was suspending his show's well-known "Worst Person in the World" segment indefinitely.
MSNBC management is thinking about changing the name of its website, according to The New York Times, to better distinguish it from its more liberal cable network.
CNN's great 8PM hope, Parker Spitzer, garnered lackluster ratings in its debut Monday night, trailing Fox News Channel, MSNBC, and CNN's own sister network HLN. Television critics, meanwhile, savaged the program.
Conservative books sell -- a fact that the traditionally liberal publishing industry has learned to embrace. HarperCollins plans to join publishers Simon & Schuster, Penguin, and Random House with a conservative imprint of its own, Broadside Books.
CNN is sick of being the punching bag of the cable news world. Explaining why the network replaced the head of CNN U.S., CNN Worldwide President Jim Walton cited what he described as unfair press coverage focusing on CNN's declining ratings, while ignoring its growing profitability.
CNN president Jonathan Klein has been hard at work this year remaking the network's primetime lineup, its most important programming block. But whether or not his effort proves successful, he won't be around to find out.
If you have any doubt that The Wall Street Journal is fast becoming steeped in the corporate culture of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., check these quotations. Like Fox News, it declares victory (prematurely) and expresses contempt for rivals.
Thanks to PolitiFact.com, the Pulitzer Prize-winning website, it's possible to see which political pundits are sticking to the truth and which are making it up. George Will gets high marks; Glenn Beck, not so much.
Should Fox News have to give up its seat in the White House briefing room because of ideological bias? That's what the liberal group Media Matters is saying. But is this issue really worth all the hubbub?
It's unseemly when one of the nation's biggest news outlets drops a wad of cash on one political party. But when you get down to it, News Corp.'s donation to the Republican Governors Association is no worse than business as usual.
The jury found ex-Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich guilty of lying to the FBI but deadlocked on the 23 other charges. Because of one hold-out juror, Blagojevich goes free on charges including allegedly selling the President's Senate seat.
Fox News pundits decry Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who's sponsoring a mosque in lower Manhattan, as a threat to America. But for Fox's parent News Corp., doing billions of dollars in investment deals with a nephew of Saudi Arabia's king is just business as usual. And it shows how much more nuanced it is to run a multinational media giant today.
Just what constitutes "fair use" of copyrighted material has always been hard to define. Now a new website, Mediaite.com, is using that ambiguity to build a business model on other companies' content.
Chairman Rupert Murdoch was optimistic about the advertising outlook for News Corp., which reported earnings of $875 million. He also called the iPad "a real game-changer in the presentation of news" at the earnings call.
"Everyone should have Glenn Beck's problems," says one observer. With top ratings in his TV time slot, a combined radio and TV audience of more than 9 million and an estimated net worth of $22 million, losing a few advertisers isn't fatal.
Skirting campaign finance laws, News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, has found an entirely legal way to put millions of dollars directly into the bank accounts of leading Republican candidates like Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin. He hires them.
Usually conservative in its programming choices, CNN is going for broke as it remakes two-thirds of its prime-time schedule by, among other things, replacing a fixture -- Larry King -- and hiring a scandal-tinged newcomer -- Eliot Spitzer.
Move over Oprah. Fox News host Glenn Beck has turned into a literary tastemaker -- and his book picks are yielding staggering sales figures for the respective authors.
Fox News and Bloomberg both want Helen Thomas's old front row seat in the White House briefing room because of the symbolism they see in it. But what it actually symbolizes is something very different.
Jon Stewart, the host of Comedy Central's Daily Show, has been not-so-quietly waging war with Fox News for years -- and recently he's been turning up the heat.
Fox News has been roundly criticized for selectively citing poll data to make it look like Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to Democratic-led health care reform. Now its sister network, Fox Business, has invited them to participate in an online poll whose outcome seems all but preordained.
There's no love between Roger Ailes (left), head of Fox News, and Howell Raines (right), the former New York Times executive editor who recently called for all journalists of good conscience to oppose Fox. "He's obviously hallucinating in some way," Ailes told me Wednesday.
