BC Beat

May 9, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Dove’s real women – slightly overweight, surgically un-augmented – have absolutely, positively not been retouched.

Unilever, parent company of Dove, Ogilvy & Mather, the creative agency that devised the game-changing Campaign for Real Beauty, and photographer Annie Leibovitz, who took the pictures, all chimed in with statements of denial today.

The controversy was kicked off by a New Yorker profile of Pascal Dangin, the celebrity retoucher of New York’s Box Studios, who works with Leibovitz. Writer Lauren Collins quoted Dangin saying he retouched pictures in the Dove ads, a campaign that has sold millions of crates of body lotion and anti-wrinkle cream by advocating normalizing ...Read More

May 7, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

CBS News almost had its own “Dewey Beats Truman” moment during the Indiana primary Tuesday night.

The network went out on a considerable limb, calling Indiana for Hillary Clinton a few minutes after 8 p.m.

Evening News anchor Katie Couric delivered the prediction during the opening minutes of NCIS.

But as the night wore on and more precincts reported in Barack Obama’s favor, Clinton’s lead became decidedly thin. The on-screen graphics at CNN, MSNBC and Fox News declared the contest “too close to call.”

Kathy Frankovic, director of surveys at CBS News, ...Read More

May 6, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (1)

Hillary Clinton’s appearance on Sunday’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos has been psychoanalyzed as much for the fraught past history between the two protagonists as for some questionable network staging decisions that left the show's host at a clear disadvantage.

Stephanopoulos launched the hour with an uncharacteristic full disclosure that he had worked for President Clinton from 1991-96. When interviewing either of the Clintons in the past, there were no such disclaimers. So the decision to address his resume at the top was probably an effort to deflect or contextualize jabs like the one Hillary threw at him Sunday.

After he tried repeatedly to get her to admi...Read More

April 18, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (6)

Can we all just take a breath?

The finger-wagging outrage over ABC’s debate on Wednesday is a bit over-wrought.

“Shoddy” and “Despicable” – The Washington Post

A “Train Wreck” – The Philadelphia Daily News

“Petty” and “Shallow” – The Atlantic

“Embarrassing” and “Shameful” – The Huffington Post

ABCNews.com has been inundated with thousands of angry e-mails from viewers upset over what many perceive as an overwhelming amount of below-the-belt questions directed at Sen. Barac...Read More

April 17, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (6)

Dick Cheney was not the "entertainment" for the evening, but the famously churlish vice president tapped his funny bone (with the considerable help of talented writers) to deliver a ribald address at the 64th Annual Radio and Television Correspondents Association dinner Wednesday night in Washington.

The honorees at this years RTCA dinner included NBC News Washington correspondent David Gregory, who accepted the Joan Barone Award. And CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan, who was this year's David Bloom Award winner.

Cheney was at the dinner in President George W. Bush's stead, as the president was otherwise occupied hosting a dinner for Pope Benedict XVI. The presiden...Read More