Category Archives: Media

A Triumphant Return To TV: Fiona Forbes and Michael Eckford

Media, Vancouver


MICHAEL-ECKFORD-FIONA-FORBES

Mike and Fiona: ‘Happy Together’

By far, the single most frequent Google search bringing visitors to VanRamblings concerns longtime Urban Rush, and recently deposed CITY-TV Breakfast Television, hosts Fiona Forbes and Michael Eckford.
In a Vancouver Province e-entertainment news story published today, columnist Dana Gee reports that “Fiona Forbes and Michael Eckford have agreed to terms with Shaw TV and will return in October to host Urban Rush, a show they last helmed almost two years ago.”

“It’s great. I won’t have to get up in the middle of the night,” says Forbes, referring to the 19 months the pair spent on Citytv’s BreakfastTelevision. “When we met with our old bosses (at Shaw) and they made us an offer, Mike and I left the meeting and looked at each other and immediately high-fived. We really are excited about this.”


Forbes and Eckford will replace current UR hosts Erin Cebula and Russell Porter, whose contract expires July 16th.
The new Urban Rush will remain a one-hour talk show, and will be broadcast from the almost completed Shaw Tower in Coal Harbour, affording viewers a background vista (and here) of Vancouver’s magnificent harbourfront.

An Editor’s Hollywood Ties Pay Off
Carter Strikes Deals With People Vanity Fair Covers

Media

GRAYDONGATE

Graydongate continues to unfold with new, and more bizarre, revelations made available over the course of each passing hour.
David Carr and Sharon Waxman, at the New York Times, were first out of the gate with confirmation that “Graydon Carter, editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, had received a $100,000 payment from Universal Studios in 2003 for suggesting years earlier that the book A Beautiful Mind be made into a film.”
Close on their heels, Claudia Eller, Michael Cieply and Josh Getlin, at the Los Angeles Times, rushed to press with the allegation that Carter “and three former colleagues shared a $1-million advance from the book division of Miramax Films for the rights to publish an anthology of material from the now-defunct Spy magazine, of which Carter was a co-founder and editor.”
Hollywood pundit David Poland weighs in on the controversy, suggesting that Vanity Fair “is not in the business of selling journalism,” and that as we see “Graydon Carter playing kiss-kiss with movie industry people” there’s no real conflict because “Graydon can’t be bought.”
As for VanRamblings, we’re in complete accord with veteran editor Ed Kosner, who writes: “You don’t do any business on the side with people you’re covering. You don’t pitch projects to people your magazine is covering.” Not enough that Carter is a highly paid ($1.5 million U.S.) editor of a prestigious publication, he feels he has to go out and seek to supplement his income by selling favours to the movie executives, directors, stars and publicists that his magazine covers?
Talk about cynical. Talk about avarice. In addition to being a story about conflict of interest, Graydongate is a story about greed. Where’s this story going? Only time will tell. But, Poland aside, it’s not looking good for Carter.

Vanity Fair: Last Days of the Empire for Beleaguered Editor?

Media

GRAYDON-CARTER

According to L.A. Weekly’s Nikke Fink, both the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times are working on major stories about whether Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter is using his close ties to Hollywood to benefit financially. A source close to the action told Defamer that the investigations are likely to turn up some serious dirt, and it’s “last days of the Roman Empire” time for Graydon Carter’s ‘freewheeling’ Vanity Fair.

Horror Show: Nightmarish Images Emerge From Iraq
Soldiers Armed With Digital Cameras Bring The Warm Home

Media, Politics, Web & Tech

NICK-BERG-FAMILY

On Tuesday, Michael Berg, center, hugs his daughter, Sara, as his son David stands
nearby, after learning the details of the killing in Iraq of his other son, Nick.



Farhad Manjoo, writing for Salon (free day pass available) theorizes as to why 26-year-old freelance contractor Nick Berg did not become a media story until video of his horrible decapitation was played on an Arab website.
From a government which has, for years, held sway with the American press, when spin control from the White House, since 9/11, has all but guaranteed favourable press for the Bush administration across the United States, times have certainly changed. The brutal realities of war have been brought home in a new and horrendous way, as digital age ‘travelogue’ pictures and videos are transmitted back home from the war front, sent by e-mail, or posted on websites.
And the senior ranks of the Bush administration reels with each new revelation.

“The video of Berg’s beheading that so dominated the news on Tuesday is just the latest example of how gruesome digital images are forcing us, and forcing the government, to confront the awful reality of war,” writes Manjoo.

We were never supposed to see the pictures that are now pouring out of Iraq. If the U.S. government had its way, ‘embedded journalists’ would have reported only on what the American administration wanted us to see and read. There would be no pictures of dead soldiers returning, of Iraqi prisoner abuse, or of Canadian and American civilians held at the mercy of the shadowy enemy.
That amateurs — American soldiers employing new technology — have emerged as the journalists who have created the iconic images of the Iraq war represents a watershed change in the way we receive news, and a shattering and revolutionary new way of documenting the world around us.