If your favorite TV show or radio program airs weekdays at 2 PM, the FCC has an important message for you. In order to test its new emergency alert system, the FCC has announced it is shutting down all communications on television and radio to test out its new Emergency Alert System on Wednesday, November 9th. While the system has been tested in various states previously, this will be the first all-inclusive, national test.

MTV co-founder Tom Freston has an unusually optimistic view of Afghanistan. “People assume that when the U.S. leaves, the Taliban will just resume control, but Afghanistan has become a different place,” he told New York Times‘ David Carr. Freston, who spent 17 years at the helm of MTV Networks, eight or so months as president at [...]

Ben Shapiro, a conservative author/radio host based in California, has written a new book called Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV. The book is getting a lot of attention for Shapiro’s criticisms of the children’s program Sesame Street.

The rift between Cablevision and News Corp continues as the latter has now pulled the plug on the local New York Fox affiliates, Fox 5 and My9, which it owns. They are now also threatening to pull several other channels under their power, though the larger channels like Fox News are as yet unaffected. If they don’t settle today, however, subscribers will miss the first game of baseball’s National League Championship Series.

Every year, a crack team of curmudgeons gets together at the Washington Post to point out ten extremely important and/or useful things in American culture to erase from memory, never to be seen again. Last year, they suggested we forget about television, the Vice Presidency, and one of the Nobel prizes that actually matters. As those efforts were so resoundingly successful last year, they’re back with an even longer list for 2010, raining on the parade of internet memes, lawns (?), and, sadly, the cable news pundits we all know and love.

A generation removed from the Ronald Reagan era, it is often difficult to remember that the roots of America’s most beloved conservative were in Hollywood. The Atlantic has uncovered a poignant reminder of that: an episode of the 1950s program General Electric Theater starring Reagan and a pre-megastardom James Dean.

To commemorate the first anniversary of the signing on Obama’s stimulus bill, DNC chair and former Virginia governor Tim Kaine made more television appearances in one 24-hour cycle than it felt like he had during the entirety of his tenure before today. After waiting for so long, what did Kaine bring to the table at Fox and Friends, Morning Joe, and American Morning? The gameplan for victory Rachel Maddow gave him the night before.

The Daily Beast took a stab at one of the harder sciences of the media world last night, publishing a list of the top 25 most influential right-wing journalists in America. It is a pretty comprehensive list, with all the usual suspects making appearances, and both conservative and libertarian columnists taken into consideration. “What unites them all, broadly,” writes columnist Tunku Varadarajan, “is their influence on the public debate, and their place on the political spectrum—which is somewhere to the right of center.”

TextsFromLastNight is a blog whose sole purpose is to provide entertainment through a slew of embarrassing, vulgar, and oftentimes hilarious visitor-submitted text messages “from last night.” Last Thursday, it was revealed that Fox is teaming up with Adam Sandler’s production company to bring texting to the small screen. Great?

Cable news ratings, August 27, 2009: Check out the highlights, and see the full ratings below:

• For the 2nd night in a row, FNC’s Glenn Beck had the top-rated show on cable news in the A25-54 demographic. Bill O’Reilly had the most total viewers. It was a bigger than usual night for CNN as well.