Even if Rush Limbaugh's personal brand survives the uproar over his sexist remarks — which is looking perilous as even Republicans back away from him — advertisers are continuing to pull out and boycott his radio show, with AOL becoming the ninth sponsor to withdraw its advertising today.

For those just catching up, the polarizing conservative pundit's attack last week on a law student named Sandra Fluke over the red-hot contraception issue has caused a political, consumer and advertising firestorm, even after Limbaugh issued a formal apology to his listeners and advertisers.

Commenting today that his apology was "sincere," Limbaugh also said on-air today that the advertisers who dropped out made a "business decision" and will be replaced, so his listeners shouldn't "worry."

"They decided they don't want you or your business," Limbaugh stated about the advertiser protests. "This show is about you, not advertisers."Continue reading...

It's withdrawal time for millions of viewers of the wildly popular Downton Abbey, the British series that just concluded its second season on PBS. The period costumes, the two-track intrigue of the nobility and working class, the witty dialogue delivered in delicious British accents — all contribute to a success on American television not seen at this level since British classics such as Upstairs Downstairs and All Creatures Great and Small had their lengthy runs on PBS.

As fans anxiously await Season Three of Downton Abbey, however, another Anglophile-wooing TV channel is trying to take advantage of the the hiatus and the halo effect of the show: BBC America.Continue reading...

Big-time press conferences across the globe may need to make room for two more microphones soon. Disney is reportedly in talks to launch a 24-hour Spanish-language all-news channel later this spring with Univision, in a bid to create a cable news channel for English-speaking Latinos.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the Spanish TV giant and the Walt Disney Co., which owns ABC and a host of other cable networks including ESPN, are developing a 24-hour, all-news, English-language channel. Univision “could use the channel to reach more acculturated viewers that advertisers prefer: Latinos who predominately speak English,” the Times reports.

The move would bolster Disney's ABC News division, which has “struggled to be more competitive and has shed hundreds of staff members from its ABC News division because the network produces only a few newscasts.” It would also give a direct line to America's booming Latino population, with roughly 50 million Americans ticking the Hispanic or Latino census box in 2010, a 43% jump up from the 2000 Census. 

Disney is also looking for multicultural growth outside the U.S. Residents of India, prepare to encounter Aladdin at 3 a.m. on your TV.Continue reading...

Reminiscent of the day cable TV crossed the media Rubicon, leaving behind the CableACE Award and joined the grown-up Emmy’s, (1997), print journalism has been overtaken by digital when it comes to recognition.

Beginning with the 2012 Pulitzer Prize, journalism’s highest honor, entries must be submitted online and the local breaking news category will include “real-time reporting” according to the Pulitzer Prize Board.

Underscoring the changes and the importance of real-time reporting, the Board said, “it would be disappointing if an event occurred at 8 a.m. and the first item in an entry was drawn from the next day’s newspaper. The Board also suggested that entrants provide a timeline, in its cover letter or in supplemental material, detailing the chronology of events in a breaking story and how it relates to the timing of items that comprise the entry.”Continue reading...

Across the U.S., newspapers continue to find themselves in dire straits. Bleeding red ink as they lose print subscribers, most cannot compete with the multitude of online news sources available to their readers. According to the Newspaper Association of America, from 2000 to 2009 the total circulation of daily newspapers dropped from 55,773,000 to 46,278,000, while the total circulation of Sunday newspapers fell from 59,421,000 to 46,850,000.

Yet one newspaper is bucking the downward trend. The Deseret News, in Salt Lake City, Utah, has just announced that its Sunday circulation grew 24 percent in 2011, and that its Salt Lake City market area readership increased 26 percent over the past year. In addition, the paper's online market share between January 2010 and September 2011, by page views and visits, far exceeds that of its three leading local competitors, according to data from Hitwise supplied by the Deseret News.

How has this small brand managed to thrive in an industry that is moribund at best?Continue reading...

PBS NewsHour is about to lose $2 million from its budget. The New York Times reports that Chevron is going to pull its sponsorship of the show, which has lasted for four years.

"We constantly review which media we use to reach our target audience given our yearly budget and specific goals," Brent Tippen, a Chevron spokesman, told the Times. "We hope that we will be able to partner with them again at some point in the future."

The San Francisco Chronicle notes that the relationship had gotten some bad publicity in September when PBS ombudsman Michael Getler wrote about an online piece critiquing Chevron's sponsorship video (from its "We Agree" campaign, at top) that had the company claiming that every single last penny of its profits “went into bringing profits to the world.”

The Chronicle reports that Chevron claims that bad PR didn’t have anything to do with the ending of its sponsorship.

NewsHour approached a foundation earlier in the year for sponsorship dollars but was rebuffed, the Times reports. Still, Jim Lehrer, one of the longtime anchors of the show who now only helms it one night a week since stepping down as anchor in May, is confident the show will come up with the cash by year’s end, the paper reports.

At the end of October, Chevron announced that its quarterly earnings more than doubled with the company’s profit rising to $7.8 billion, according to Reuters.

The way much of America sees things, political polarization is a bad thing. Washington politicians still believe that the citizenry want nothing as much as bipartisanship in the nation's capital. Centrist efforts such as No Labels base their entire appeal on a lack of extremes. Even Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign was built largely on a promise of overcoming the nation's political divisions.

But polarization has remained and, no doubt, grown in the fertile soil of economic tribulation lately. And that has been a very good thing for at least one prominent media brand: Fox News. The leading cable news network and one of its most prominent hosts, Sean Hannity, are celebrating the 15-year anniversary of the birth of Fox News and its association with the once-obscure radio talk-show host.

Fox News is flattening the competition from CNN and MSNBC more convincingly than ever, ratings-wise. And the success of Fox News' stalwart appeal to its right-leaning viewers recently prompted MSNBC to stop all pretense and throw its marketing toward its own, but left-leaning, viewership base. MSNBC lately has been doing better in the ratings. Meanwhile, CNN, still nominally trying to occupy the mushy middle, has struggled.Continue reading...

A new HD-only television channel is debuting in early October and it is aimed primarily at guys who have a little extra cash. Even better: a lot of extra cash.

Discovery Communications’ Velocity hits the US market on Oct. 4 and it will be crammed full with lots of football- and auto-related original programming. The channel will be available to Discovery's HD-available footprint of 40 million US homes at launch.

One of Velocity’s partners is the famed NFL Films, which is producing two new series for the channel: NFL Single Coverage, which highlights individual battles within NFL games, and Greatest NFL Rivalries, which focuses on specific games between legendary rivals.Continue reading...