Officially, Ellen Weiss, National Public Radio's senior vice president for news, has resigned.
But it sure looks like -- or, since this is radio, sounds like -- the exec who axed Juan Williams in a telephone call last month for speaking his mind on Fox News Channel was at least pointed in that direction.
NPR CEO Vivian Schiller got a vote of confidence from the public broadcasting programming service's board. But in its statement, the board "expressed concern over her role in the termination process and has voted that she will not receive a 2010 bonus."
That board, by the way, is currently headed by WUWM-FM (89.77) general manager Dave Edwards.
Schiller, by the way, apologized after the firing for how the whole thing was handled.
Again, that's the official stuff, which came after an internal investigation into the firing of Williams for expressing his fears about seeing people in "Muslim garb" on an airliner. That investigation found the firing to be hasty and mishandled.
Whatever bigger problem NPR execs had with Williams' role as a commentator on Fox News, the folks at the top should have been far more concerned with the impact firing him would have on NPR itself, energizing forces that would love to destroy it.
Of course, after Williams was fired, Fox News offered him a better financial deal, and he was on the cable news outlet Thursday talking about the departure of Weiss.
Said Williams, "She represented a very ingrown, incestuous culture in that institution that’s not open to not only different ways of thinking but angry at the fact that I would even talk or be on Fox, angry at the fact that people have different perspectives and that a conservative perspective might emerge either on Fox or even NPR."
Here's the video of the comments from Williams that started this whole thing:
On TV: CNN's new 8 p.m. interview host Piers Morgan has announced that his first guest will be Oprah Winfrey when his show premieres on Jan. 17.
- Katy Perry has signed to guest star on CBS' "How I Met Your Mother" as another potential girlfriend for hapless Ted. I'm guessing she won't be around for very long.
- Bill O'Reilly will interview the president on Fox's Super Bowl pre-game show on Feb. 6. Barack Obama has been interview in the past two Super Bowl's by CBS' Katie Couric and NBC's Matt Lauer.
- WTMJ-AM (620)'s Charlie Sykes will appear alongside Madison Capital Times associate editor and columnist John Nichols on Wisconsin Public TV's "Here and Now," which airs in Milwaukee at 10 a.m. Sunday on Channel 10. The two are part of a discussion on the new Scott Walker administration.
- Time Warner Cable's Dennis Krause was named the 2010 Wisconsin Sportscaster of the Year by the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association, the fourth time he's picked up the honor and the second time since joining the cable company's Sports32.
- Discovery Channel has given the go-ahead to a Chicago version of its "Cash Cab." Comedian Beth Melewski will drive the cab in a spinoff of the New York-set game show that will start airing this summer.
"Live to Dance" could die an early death: The attempt by Paula Abdul to turn her "American Idol" fame into her own "reality" competition showed some real problems in its first week.
While the Tuesday premiere of CBS' "Live to Dance" did OK (pulling in more than 10 million viewers), Wednesday's audience dipped 25 percent from the previous night, according to Nielsen Media Research numbers. Night two had fewer than 8 million viewers.
Whatever your ratings are, you don't want them moving downwards.
Here's a little bit from "Live to Dance" featuring a Paula-obsessed dancer (which looks like a parody of a dance show):
Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.
A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.
In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.
When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.
