In a 180 degree reversal from when his lawyer made the media rounds last year, the CBS producer accused of attempted extortion of David Letterman will plead guilty today and serve six months in jail. Robert Halderman and his lawyer had previously maintained his innocence, but now he'll take a plea deal. (more...)

video Dan Rather, longtime anchor at the CBS Evening News and now of HD Net, has been known for his analogies and anecdotes (Ratherisms). But Newsbusters has caught one that seems to have gone way off the rails during an appearance on the Chris Matthews Show Sunday - involving Pres. Obama and "watermelons." (more...)

In a lengthy New York Times article about the changing business of network news, one sentence has drawn the most attention, about CBS' Katie Couric and CNN's Anderson Cooper. And in a follow-up Media Decoder blog post, Brian Stelter expands on the topic - that Cooper had met with CBS News about a possible anchor job. Let the speculation begin. (more...)

That leaves fewer employed men to go around. And when the ratio is so much in their favor, that gives guys the upper hand....and often means more men behaving badly. So instead of worrying about "marrying up," women should focus on marrying right.."

WTF Polls Did you ever wonder how many Americans want to replace Uncle Sam with an older version of New York Yankees star and former steroid-user Alex Rodriguez? I mean, of course you did, because you smoke marijuana. Anyway, CBS News decided to take the best ideas you probably thought up while you were high and ask a bunch of Americans in the latest 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll. Click through for the results to that question and more! (more...)

According to conventional wisdom, liberals trust CNN and the broadcast networks more and conservatives trust Fox News more. And the results of the newest Public Policy Polling survey bears those results out. But even more specifically, more people overall trust FNC than any other network - and the breakdown shows some surprising results. (more...)

video There have been so many powerful, heartbreaking moments in the four days of since the mainstream media converged on Haiti to cover the tragic earthquake that hit last week. We've highlighted a few from last week: Anderson Cooper, Campbell Brown, Steve Harrigan (we spoke with Harrigan today - more from him later). Here are videos from this weekend, one from each news network, that show the various sides of the incredibly sad story - and the fantastic work being done by journalists in the region. (more...)

Doris Buffett is my new favorite person (next to Diane Savino, of course). Like her brother Warren, she is loaded. And she loves giving away her money to help people. (more...)

Q&A What do Americans think about the way the government is protecting them from future terrorist attacks? Or their financial security? Or their own experience in the job market? CBS News explores these and other issues in a new multi-platform series, "Where America Stands," beginning the first week in January. CBS News & Sports President Sean McManus tells Mediaite why, how and more. (more...)

Twitter has been declared the most popular word of 2009 meaning, I presume, that in less than 12 months the act of Twittering has gone so mainstream that even your parents probably know what you're talking about. (more...)

video The results from the December 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll is in, and Rush Limbaugh wins again. The talk radio host was the top pick, by far, by respondents when asked who was the most influential conservative in America. Here's more on the results of that question, and others. (more...)

Andre Agassi's shocking (or book-selling!) confession that he abused crystal meth in the late '90s has been the primary promotional push for his upcoming autobiography, and like so many juicy gossip bits today, the info was first reported via Twitter. (Remember Obama's "Jackass"-gate?)

But the Agassi early report was not only surprising and disappointing for tennis fans -- it also caused a minor commotion for media outlets like CBS News, whose Katie Couric/Agassi 60 Minutes interview aired last night (two weeks after the news hit), and Time Inc., who planned to break the story with exclusive excerpts in People and Sports Illustrated. (more...)

developing Mediaite has learned more about what happened with the decision by the Treasury Department to exclude Fox News in a round-robin of pool interviews Thursday. But more importantly - there are more details emerging about the uproar over the initial decision, causing the Treasury Department to reverse their decision. (more...)

video Confession: I've teared from watching TV about three times in my entire life. All of those times I was watching E:60. It's true - the most consistently moving, compelling and uplifting stories on television are being reported on ESPN. (more...)

video There was another discussion of Glenn Beck and the Fox News vs. White House battle today on MSNBC's Morning Joe and disagreement on the set brought some new angles to the debate. Donny Deutsch talked about message - and the White House's mishandling of it. And Joe Scarborough brought up some unnamed liberals who went after the Bush administration. (more...)

Shortly after news of the Letterman scandal broke (you may recall that it was broken by intrepid reporter David Letterman), Nikki Finke theorized that CBS wouldn't investigate Letterman's "single man sex with staffers at his independent production company Worldwide Pants." CBS boss Les Moonves and his boss, Sumner Redstone, had both had adulterous affairs, she argued, and so they wouldn't be too keen on digging into Letterman. But as the New York Observer's Felix Gilette reports, CBS will be looking into the sex-and-extortion saga the way they know best: with a crack investigative reporter. (more...)

The New York Supreme Court appellate division has dismissed in full the $70 million lawsuit filed by Dan Rather against his former employer, CBS News, today. Rather's team called the decision "incorrect on a number of grounds," while a CBS News spokesperson said "it appears to be a total victory." Here's some of the lengthy ruling, and some background: (more...)

EXCLUSIVE Where do you go after you've just interviewed Glenn Beck? How about to the founder and funder of The Daily Beast. Mediaite has confirmed the next interview on Katie Couric's lengthy weekly web show "@katiecouric" will be with Barry Diller and Tina Brown. Besides Diller and Brown, coming up soon on the show will be interviews with Hugh Jackman and Al Gore. (more...)

In a New York Times story today about CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric, she and her bosses quiet critics about whether she'll be exiting her current role any time soon. "She says she will remain there until her contract expires in 2011," writes Brian Stelter. But the bigger story is her next show - an hour-long Web program, debuting tomorrow with the biggest media star of the moment: Glenn Beck. (more...)

video The Walter Cronkite memorial this morning was a moving, wide-ranging event which saw speakers like Pres. Barack Obama and Katie Couric. There were so many speeches, with so much information and stories in each, that it's tough to narrow it down to just a few choice quotes. But here's a glance at 10 of the key moments from the memorial today (in the order they were said): (more...)

For anyone whose political identity was formed during the poison years bracketed by Walter Cronkite's tenure as CBS evening anchor, the avuncular newsman was like the kindly, reassuring narrator of a political horror story. If, as CBS News president Sean McManus mourns, Cronkite's status "will never be duplicated again,” it's not only due to the modern fragmentation of the news audience -- it's also because, ideally, the country will never again go through such an extended trainwreck. The events reported by Cronkite during his 19 years as anchor -- a shorter tenure than his successor Dan Rather's, or Tom Brokaw's at NBC, but so much more influential -- are America's lasting scar tissue. (more...)

The way the world receives breaking news was obviously unheard of in Walter Cronkite's heyday. The voice of God role has been taken on by the voice of the collective, which is constantly informing us of the way it is. So it was that when I turned my Blackberry on as I was leaving a Friday night film I was inundated with tweets regarding Cronkite's passing, which I read in reverse order. The first one to come through was Brian Stelter's at 8:11pm. Before I was even able to get home and in front of a computer I had been swamped with news. Here's what it all looked like at a glance, in reverse chronological order starting at 8:11pm and ending around 11:30pm. (more...)

VIDEO Here is the special report from CBS this evening, anchored by Katie Couric this evening, one of Cronkite's successors in the anchor chair at CBS. (more...)

News reporters like to catch readers’ attention with a few zingy lines at the start of an article. Sometimes, these so-called “ledes” go horribly wrong. In Today’s Worst News Ledes, we highlight some of the biggest offenders:

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This is unbelievable. In last night's "NBC Nightly News," Pete Williams had a segment on the Holocaust Museum shooter, James von Brunn, and they presented a guy by the name of John de Nugent to attest to his pre-shooting mental state. Which John de Nugent, you ask? This one - the one who thinks that white men and women should "take back their honor"; the one who says that "When Jews attack and lie, I must be doing my job very well"; the one who thought he should be president and wrote this on his "John de Nugent for President" page: "You will notice my outreach to blacks, appealing to their self-interest. We don't need a race war with blacks triggered by the Jews who are stage-managing Obama and may yet murder him to start a race war." Oh. That John de Nugent. (more...)