Murphy Out at Nightline

George Murphy is out at ABC News' Nightline, though it is not clear whether he was fired or will be allowed to resign.

The Nightline senior director has not been at work for several weeks after ABC found out he was endorsing the Sony Vegas editing system, including during a planned appearance at the NAB convention in Las Vegas last month.

ABC just signed a big deal with Avid for its editing equipment, which was announced at the convention. There is also a written policy against product endorsements of any kind.

Murphy was pulled from the NAB conference agenda and an online story in which he sang the praises of the Vegas system, disappeared from at least one techie Web site at about the same time. Though part of the story, "Nightline is the Right Line for Sony Vegas," was still acessible on videoguys.com at press time.

Murphy has also been also selling Sony products through an online "software superstore," according to the bio for his aborted NAB session.

ABC had no comment.

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.