Beat the Press

Super Bowl commercials are expected to be entertaining not controversial. But this year, CBS has drawn fire for deciding to air a commercial with University of Florida star Tim Tebow discouraging abortion.  CBS did reject a spot for a gay dating site.

The media's endless fascination with the Scott Brown story seems downright, well, endless. Only in the down time between his election victory and his swearing in, the lack of actual news turned the Brown coverage from serious subject to silly season.

That's our first topic this week.

No. 2 is the meteoric rise, fall, arrest, probable rise again, blah, blah, blah, of conservative media darling James O'Keefe, the 25-year-old filmmaker/provocateur responsible for the undercover ACORN takedown that prompted Congress to cut the urban activist group's funding. O'Keefe was arrested entering the Louisiana office of US Senator Nancy Landrieu with other young activists dressed as telephone repairmen, raising the question: Is he a journalist, or a joke?

Our third topic is the Super Bowl ad controversy. Superbowl advertisements have been provocative for years now, but an anti-abortion ad starring possible NFL No. 1 draft pick Tim Tebow of the University of Florida is pushing the debate toward morality and politics. CBS also rejected an ad for a gay dating site and forced a video game maker to remove the words "Go to Hell" from its commercial, raising questions about standards and double-standards.

Panel peeves follow.

The panel: Emily hosting, Callie, Joe, Adam Reilly subbing for Dan K., and Kara Miller in the guest panelist chair.

The media-watch vultures have begun to circle over MSNBC weeknights at 8 p.m., anticipating that the show widely considered to be the great liberal counterbalance to Fox News will soon be a bloated carcass.

Jeff Bercovici, the media guy for Aol Daily Finance, says Olberman's ratings in the 25-54 demographic have tanked over the last year, down 44 percent in January from the same period in 2009. That column earned Bercovici an Olbermann blast during his Worst Person in the World segment, in which Olbermann inexplicably called Daily Finance a "right wing site."

Olbermann also countered with some numbers of his own, insisting that his 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. "Countdown" broadcasts were both up in January over December and that his 8 p.m. show still owned a substantial lead over CNN and HLN. Olbermann didn't mention Fox's ratings, probably because the "The O'Reilly Factor" has more than three times his audience among 25-54 year olds.

But it's not all about the numbers. Several commentators have written lately that Olbermann's over-the-top histrionics are getting tiresome - the latest example being his thinly-supported rant about U.S. Senator-elect Scott Brown.

The rant - in which Olbermann branded Brown  "an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, teabagging supporter of violence against woman and against politicians with whom he disagrees" - earned Olbermann the Jon Stewart treatment.

Adding insult to injury, Stewart will be bumping up the ratings of Olbermann's Fox rival for the next two nights, making a must-see-TV appearance on O'Reilly.

What role should the government have in preserving public-interest journalism? If you’re a First Amendment absolutist (and I consider myself to be pretty close), you might immediately respond with a resounding “none.” Yet such purity has never been the reality in American life.

Heavy postal subsidies from the earliest days of the republic helped create the most vibrant newspaper and magazine industry in the world. To bring matters up to the present, media corporations are now given virtually free use of the broadcast airwaves, theoretically owned by all of us, with little expectation that they will fulfill the public-interest obligations that were once required of them.

Earlier today, John Nichols (at right in photo) and Robert McChesney (at left) visited Northeastern to promote their new book, “The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again.” (You can read excerpts of it here and here.) I won’t pretend to write an objective account — I introduced them, and we all said nice things about each other. Rather, I want to discuss briefly their idea that at a time when journalism is in crisis, government ought to step in and prop it up to the tune of some $30 billion a year — a number they say correlates, in 2010 dollars, with what was spent on postal subsidies in the 1840s.

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Scott Brown’s election has been called a referendum on healthcare, and President Obama and the economy.  The media has not stopped speculating on what Brown’s win meant even without reliable election day exit polling.  So what is the speculation based upon?

At a time when the religion is playing an increasingly more important part of the news, the religion beat has been cut back around the country.