TV Newser’s Alex Weprin reported on Thursday morning that Emmy-winning producer Joe Halderman, the man who attempted to blackmail David Letterman in 2009, has been hired as a producer for Discovery ID’s On The Case With Paula Zahn. Scott Weinberger, Executive Producer of On the Case, confirmed the hire in a statement

TV Newser reports today that, for the first time since the 2001-2002 season, nightly newscast viewership is up for all three major networks; ABC, CBS, and NBC gaining a combined 637,000 total viewers in the 2010-11 season. With news breaking fast and furious on 24hour cable news networks and the internet, viewers have recently trended [...]

Bill O’Reilly‘s war on “gangsta rap” has been on hold for several years now, possibly due to the fact that “gangsta rap” as a genre has been barely hobbling along since about 2002. But O’Reilly has since found a new target in the world of hip-hop, and no, it’s not Common: rapper Lupe Fiasco is scheduled to appear on The Factor next week.

Director Andrew Rossi‘s upcoming film Page One: Inside The New York Times (opening June 17th in New York, and nationally July 1) documents a year in the life of the Gray Lady, but also sets the table for what may either be the print media’s suffocation within, or emergence from, the chrysalis of the brave new media world. Rossi spoke with Mediaite about his film, its de facto star (Times Media reporter David Carr), and what it all means for journalism.

ABC is deploying former Bush strategist and political commentator Matthew Dowd to moderate their Sunday political program This Week this Sunday, which is currently rotating hosts on a weekly basis. With Jake Tapper, Barbara Walters, and Terry Moran among past rotating hosts, Dowd will be the first moderator since Stephanopoulos himself to have a background outside of objective journalism.

On Thursday night, Fox News reported that the “Obama administration” had taken its “first concrete step” in treating Fox News Channel like it’s not a real news organization, excluding them from a press event. Through our own reporting, Mediaite has learned that Fox News’ report of this incident was, at best, incomplete and self-serving, and serves as a neat encapsulation of what Robert Gibbs told us the first time we asked him if the White House was “bullying” Fox News.

We reported earlier that when Fox News was banned from a round-robin interview with Obama administration “Pay Czar” Kenneth Feinberg, the bureau chiefs of the other major networks banded together to thwart the White House.

Now, Mediaite has learned exclusively that the Treasury Department, who set up the interviews, denies the story.