ABC News

Tonight on ABC's Nightline, Ben Affleck will report an "essay" on his recent fact-finding mission concerning the humanitarian crisis in the Congo.

"It's fairly clear that in the modern age that there is a currency to celebrity, or celebrity is a currency, really," Mr. Affleck told David Bauder of The Associated Press. "I've discovered that you can spend it in a lot of ways, or you can squander it. You can be taxed, as well. I really started thinking long and hard about how to use that currency as long as I had it."

In 2000, ABC News tapped Leonardo DiCaprio to interview then President Bill Clinton about the environment.

Terry McCarthy of ABC News recently told the Observer that as the level of violence in Iraq has dropped off in recent months, correspondents in Baghdad have had more time to work on feature stories about the state of the country—rather than, say, report on the latest suicide bombing.

Last night, Mr. McCarthy reported one such "believe it or not" feature for World News with Charlie Gibson. The story was about booming housing prices in Baghdad.  read more »

Jamie Tarabay, the former Baghdad Bureau Chief for NPR, was stationed in Iraq in the early months of 2007 when General David Petraeus arrived to take over command of the U.S. forces there.

In the weeks and months to come, like many of her professional colleagues in the war zone, she eventually accompanied Mr. Petraeus on a number of walk-along interviews as he strolled through the streets of the occupied city.  read more »

Martin Bashir, the co-anchor of ABC News' Nightline has been diagnosed with a brain tumor growing on his pituitary gland.

Doctors discovered the tumor recently after Mr. Bashir injured his head on the set of Nightline and was taken to the hospital for stitches.  read more »

Andrew Rice emails his take on (part of) last night’s debate:

Due to unavoidable conflicts--it was my night to cook dinner, and I had to run to the grocery store--I missed the first 40 minutes of the debate last night. I came away thinking that it was actually a very sober, issues-driven affair.  read more »

• 0 comments

The Clinton campaign thinks that the sort of questions Barack Obama faced last night—tough in a way that angered Obama’s sympathizers, but not at all unexpected—were appropriate.

On a conference call now, New Yorker legal writer Jeffrey Toobin just gave Howard Wolfson and Phil Singer the chance to perform some media criticism, asking them if questions about Barack Obama's acquaintances and other "trivia" were a valuable part of the political process.  read more »

ABC News devoted the first 30 minutes or so of the roughly two-hour Democratic debate on April 17 to trivial and petty gotcha questions, which pretty much set the tone for the evening.

“Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?” George Stephanopoulos actually asked Barack Obama—twice.  read more »

Sort of like the idle Colin Powell rumors that swirled before the 1996 and 2000 Republican conventions, we’ve been forced this campaign cycle to endure months of sporadic chatter about Condoleezza Rice’s supposed candidacy for the number two spot on the G.O.P. ticket.

Except that the speculation may have just taken a twist that the Powell talk never did: There’s suddenly reason to believe there might be something to it.  read more »

Yesterday, Long Island University announced the 14 winners of the annual George Polk Awards for excellency in journalism.

Among the winners, ABC News received the award for television reporting for work done by Senior Correspondent Jim Sciutto, producer Angus Hines, and field producer Tom Murphy on a series of reports called "Myanmar Undercover."

From ABC's press release:  read more »

It's that time of the year when, all across New York, even more TV anchors, producers, and news crews are getting ready to pack up their bags and head out to the frontlines of the presidential campaigns.

That group includes, ABC's Charlie Gibson, who will soon be heading out to New Hampshire.

On Saturday, January 5, Mr. Gibson will be moderating back-to-back Democratic and Republican presidential debates at the campus of Saint Alselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire. Mr. Gibson will be joined in the questioning by WMUR-TV anchor and political director Scott Spradling.  read more »

Last December, ABC News President David Westin threw a champagne cocktail party at the division’s executive offices, to celebrate the work of his star investigative reporter, Brian Ross.

Mr. Westin had good reason to toast Mr. Ross. Over the past few years, the network’s chief investigative correspondent has produced widely praised reports on topics ranging from secret C.I.A. prisons, campaign-finance reform, and Congressman Mark Foley’s lewd instant messaging.  read more »

Yesterday, ABC News announced that it had reached a tentative contract agreement with the Writers Guild of America East, which represents roughly 250 ABC News employees. The previous contract had expired in January of 2005. The new agreement, which will go before union members for a vote on December 13, would institute a 3.5-percent wage increase.

"In addition to the annual wage increase, the new agreement, which expires Feb. 1, 2010, includes a one-time signing bonus of $3,700 for full-time employees," reports Crain's. "Part-time workers will get a pro-rated bonus."

Reached by phone on Friday morning, Mona Mangan, executive director of the Writers Guild of America East, told Media Mob that the issue had been "festering" at ABC for a long time.  read more »

The Huffington Post notes that NBC Nightly News had almost a million more viewers last week than the week before, putting it back on top in the ratings--and attributes the bump, plausibly, to anchor Brian Williams' much-hyped November 3 appearance on Saturday Night Live.

The obvious lesson the networks will draw is that the best way to promote their news anchors to a younger audience is by putting them on shows that young people actually watch. In other words, brace for Charlie Gibson on Dancing with the Stars.

On Thursday evening, near a window in a banquet hall overlooking the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. in Times Square, Andy Rooney sidled up to a makeshift bar and asked for a bourbon.

No bourbon, explained the bartender. Wine?

Mr. Rooney shook his head no, furled his massive white eyebrows, and shuffled off into the crowd. The barkeep, having just witnessed the potential genesis of a future Andy Rooney rant on 60 Minutes (“The problem with cocktails parties today, is that there are no cocktails…) kept a straight face.

A few minutes later, Mr. Rooney stood nearby a plate of cured meats and talked with The New Yorker's Ken Auletta about football. "We're both Giants fans," explained Mr. Auletta. NYTV, who sports a terrycloth Redskins bathrobe at home, looked for conversation elsewhere.

We had gathered on the second floor of Disney's Times Square Studios at 44th and Broadway to celebrate the newly published book "Peter Jennings: A Reporter's Life," which bills itslef as "an intimate portrait of the late, legendary journalist and news anchor, in the words of his family, friends, and collagues."  read more »

Last night, Time and ABC News political analyst Mark Halperin was talking to an audience at the at Barnes & Noble on West 82nd Street about his new book, The Undecided Voter's Guide to the Next President.

He said that his new book is geared toward people who "aren't particularly political," focusing less on the campaigns themselves than on "who can do the best job."

"I tried to say, with the information we have about the candidates, who would be the best," he told the audience of about 60 people. "I did what I thought a conscientious voter should do."

Unfortunately for Mr. Halperin, the audience did indeed seem like "political people," most of them retirees who admitted to having lots and lots of time to absorb political coverage. And most of the crowd seemed to be decided indeed, in favor of Hillary Clinton.  read more »

It can often to seem to rank-and-file Democrats as if the Republicans are still in charge of Congress: Nearly a year after their party picked up 31 House and six Senate seats, the war in Iraq still rages, with tens of thousands of more troops deployed now than then. This failure to force even a beginning to the end of the war accounts for the painfully poor poll standing of the Democratic-led Congress, with the party faithful even more restless and frustrated than independent voters.  read more »

Looks like it may not just be ABC News with egg on its face over the Alexis Debat story.

Earlier this week, a French magazine revealed that Mr. Debat’s recent interview with Barack Obama, that appeared in the respected French political journal Politique Internationale, was fabricated. Then today, ABC News’ Brian Ross reported that Mr. Debat—who from 2002 until this June was employed by Ross' news organization as a consultant on terrorism issues—had also published fake interviews in Politique Internationale with Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Alan Greenspan, and Kofi Annan.

But Media Mob has found that over the past several years, Mr. Debat has been quoted as a terrorism expert by a range of major media outlets, including Time, U.S. News and World Report, National Journal, the Associated Press, The Boston Herald, Newsday, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, and The Christian Science Monitor, among others. Along the way, he has also penned opinion pieces for The Financial Times and The International Herald Tribune, and made guest appearances on PBS’s The News Hour with Jim Lehrer—most recently, in June 2006, opposite The New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright, author of the Pulitzer-prize winning study of al Qaeda and 9/11, The Looming Tower.

As for ABC, Debat’s one-time employer, they haven’t yet explained how they got bamboozled into working with Debat for so long. But we’re guessing people are gonna be asking…

Larry Silverstein was on Nightline last night. The ABC News program depicted the World Trade Center developer as a striding, fast-talking, somewhat stubborn visionary "right out of central casting" who was "always, always selling." A pop-up video of the segment can be seen here.  

ABC News' Brian Ross raises troubling questions about Dateline NBC’s hit show.  read more »