BIRDS OF A FEATHER PARTY TOGETHER

John Eggerton reports in Broadcasting & Cable

HA HA: Bush, Rove, Crack Up Press Corpse

White House adviser Karl Rove boogied, backed by NBC’s David Gregory, Brian Wiliams burped the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and the President cracked wise, all to the general delight, and occasional gales of laughter, of journalists gathered for the Radio & Television Correspondents Association dinner in Washington.

Rove was a better sport than a dancer, tapped by the surprise entertainment–Whose Line is It Anyway’s Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood–for an improv rap number featuring “MC Rove,” with Gregory as one of his backup dancers, and based on information supplied by Rove that, among other things, he collected stamps and liked to “tear the tops” off of small animals.

Rove got into the spirit of the bit, though when President Bush was asked to supply a rap nickname for Rove, his response was “Your Fired!” Sherwood then suggested Rove had offered his resume to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of a host of legislators in attendance at the annual dinner at the Washington Hilton.

TV WEEK: DEMAND FOR AD REFORM

Half the TV ads kids under 12 see are food ads, says a new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation that could further fuel Washington pressure on media companies and marketers in the face of rising childhood obesity.

BILL BERKOWITZ: NEIL IN THE KINGDOM

In late February, only a few days after Saudi Arabia beheaded four Sri Lankan robbers and then left their headless bodies on public display in the capital of Riyadh, Neil Bush, for the fourth time in the past six years, showed up for the country’s Jeddah Economic Forum. The Guardian reported that Human Rights Watch “said the four men had no lawyers during their trial and sentencing, and were denied other basic legal rights.” In an interview with Arab News, the Saudi English language paper,

Bush described the country as “a kind of tribal democracy.”

Neil Mallon Bush, the son of President George H. W. Bush and the brother of President George W. Bush, attended the forum to renew old family friendships and to drum up a little business for his educational software company. “The Jeddah Economic Forum has been very productive,” Bush told Arab News. “I have been to this conference four times since 2002. I have seen it develop from the very beginning. There was less participation in the past, now there is more international participation.”

These days, Neil Bush is the chairman and CEO of Ignite Learning, a company devoted to developing technology-assisted curriculum. Ignite calls it COW: “Curriculum on Wheels.” In an interview with Arab News’ Siraj Wahab, Bush talked enthusiastically about his company’s mission: “We are building a model in the United States for developing curriculum that is engaging to grade-school kids, and our model is to deploy this engaging content through a device. So it is easy for any teacher to use our device through projectors and speakers. The curriculum is loaded on the device. We use animation and video and those kinds of things to light up learning in classrooms for kids. It helps teachers connect with their kids. We are planning to develop an Arabic version of that model.”

According to Wikipedia, Ignite was founded in 1999 and has “raised $23 million from U.S. investors, including his parents… as well as businessmen from Taiwan , Japan , Kuwait , the British Virgin Islands and the United Arab Emirates.

MEASURING MEDIA DIVERSITY
New Report from Center for American Progress

ARIANNA ON THE FUTURE OF NEWSPAPERS

STUDY: ONLINE READERS READ MORE

In a surprise finding, online readers finish news stories more often than those who read in print, according to the Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack study released Wednesday at the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference here.

When readers chose to read an online story, they usually read an average of 77 per cent of the story, compared to 62% in broadsheets and 57 per cent in tabloids. The survey, in which 600 newspaper readers from six different newspapers were studied, utilized electronic eyetracking equipment that readers wore while they read broadsheet, tabloid and online editions of newspapers. The research, conducted last year, focused on 100 readers from each newspaper.

Among the findings: that more text was read online than in print. In addition, nearly two-thirds of online readers read all of the text of a particular story once they began to read it, the survey revealed. Findings also revealed that news event photos received more attention than staged or studio images, while colour got more interest than black and white.

THIS SUNDAY—3 HOURS OF ALEXANDER COCKBURN ON CSPAN

FROM PORTSIDE—A CESAR CHAVEZ DAY?

March 31 will be a special day in nine states and dozens of cities — Cesar Chavez Day, honoring the late founder of the United Farm Workers union on the 80th anniversary of his birth. That’s important, but it’s way past time that a national holiday was declared in
his honor.

Like Martin Luther King Jr., who’s rightly honored with a national holiday, Chavez inspired millions of people to seek — and to win — basic human rights that had long been denied them and inspired millions of others to join the struggle.