Cable Channel

Last year, 8.8 million viewers saw NBC's coverage of the Preakness. That's the kind of big-tent mass audience that makes the race one of Baltimore's showcase events. And that doesn't count the hundreds of thousands who will watch pre- and post-race coverage on the NBC Sports Network cable channel. But how Baltimore is seen by all those eyeballs largely depends on how NBC Sports chooses to cover the race and related events starting Saturday at 2:30 p.m on NBC Sports Network. NBC's network coverage of the race starts at 4:30 p.m. and runs until 6:30 p.m., with a closing half hour from 6:30 to 7 on NBC Sports Network.

The decision wasn't in a league with the infamous one NBC made in 1968 to cut away from the ending of an incredible AFC football game to show a rerun of the film "Heidi," but some Baltimore area viewers were feeling a "Heidi Bowl" kind of pain Sunday night when WJZ (Channel 13) left a extra inning Orioles game to carry the top-rated newsmagazine "60 Minutes. " "Epic" might be too strong a word for what was going on in Boston, but it was pretty great. The Orioles, after winning a 13-inning game Friday against the Red Sox and a regular 9-inning game Saturday, were locked in a duel with the Sox that had depleted both bull pens.

Everyone who has ever tuned into a cable channel has heard the names Natalee Holloway and Laci Peterson. Show hosts like Nancy Grace have used their TV pulpits to chronicle the disappearance of such white, female victims night after night. But what about black victims like Yasmin Acree or missing sisters Diamond and Tiondra Bradley? That's one of the questions raised by a new docu-series, "Find Our Missing," hosted by S. Epatha Merkerson and produced by TV One, the African-American-themed cable channel based in Silver Spring.

Talk about a Friday afternoon dump: Keith Olbermann and his $50-million, five-year contract dumped by Al Gore's audience-challenged Current TV after less than a year on-air. There is no shortage of meat for analysts to chew on these bones, and that is going to make for a tasty couple of days of media dish as Olbermann's enemies tear into whatever hide the one-time relatively powerful cable TV anchor has left. For his part, Olbermann was on Twitter Friday threatening to sue. "I'd like to apologize to my viewers and my staff for the failure of Current TV. Editorially, Countdown had never been better," Olbermann tweeted.

WETA, a major producer of public television programs, will be going into the cable television business this spring with a new channel devoted to public affairs.The Washington home of such shows as "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" announced yesterday that it is teaming with Gannett's Freedom Forum to create the Forum Network, a 24-hour regional channel featuring news and public affairs programs.The pairing of a public television station with a private foundation to create a cable channel is unprecedented but indicative of the new kinds of arrangements being made by PBS operations these days.

A new cable television channel offering environmental news and entertainment has selected Howard County for its national headquarters.Eric McLamb, an Ellicott City resident who is founder and chief executive officer of the ECOlogy Channel, said he and his partners chose Howard over Atlanta and other areas because of its proximity to Washington and the many environmental organizations and regulatory agencies there.Executives of the channel plan to air their first broadcast in December. But they face an uphill climb to get big cable system operators such as Comcast and TCI to offer their 24-hour programming to subscribers, industry analysts say."

In the latest fight between the warring political agendas of the Baltimore City Council president and the housing commissioner, last evening's council meeting was not broadcast on the city's cable channel.In a missive delivered by a mayoral aide moments before videotaping would have begun, Lawrence A. Bell III, the council president, was told that the meeting would not be aired on Channel 44 because of "technical difficulties.""I was assured by the mayor [Friday] that the show would get on the air," Bell told council members.

Comcast Corp. may have lost the fight to acquire a giant programming company when it withdrew its offer for the Walt Disney Co., but it has apparently not lost its appetite for entertainment programming. Comcast, the nation's largest cable operator, is in talks with potential partners to create a digital cable channel for children, according to people close to the discussions. Those potential partners include the Public Broadcasting Service, Sesame Workshop and HIT Entertainment of Britain, according to one of the people, who added that any deal was a month to six weeks away.

WASHINGTON -- Question: If a speech is made in Washington and C-SPAN isn't there to cover it, does it make a noise?This time of year it's hard to say. With Election Day drawing near, the whole city is talking politics, and C-SPAN seems determined to broadcast every last syllable."

HBO has set premiere dates for its two big-ticket political projects filmed in Maryland last year. "Game Change," the made-for-TV movie starring Ed Harris as John McCain and Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin, will premiere March 10, according to Stuart Levine in the Hollywood trade publication Variety . "VEEP," the half-hour political satire that finished filming its first season in December in the Baltimore area, will debut April 22....

Here's a first-look at the HBO satire, "VEEP," starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and it's a winner. The series from Armando Iannucci ("In The Loop") was filmed in Baltimore last year and debuts April 22 on the premium cable channel. I'm working on a magazine story about the series. It includes a set visit and interviews with Iannucci, Louis-Dreyfus, executive producer Frank Rich and others. This trailer makes me feel like my sense during the set visit -- that this was a smart, savvy and special TV series -- was right.

Conservative analyst Pat Buchanan Thursday night confirmed what some in the worlds of politics and cable TV believed to be true for months: He hadn't just been suspended by MSNBC in the wake of his latest controversial book, he was through and would never be back on the cable channel again. “My days as a political analyst at MSNBC have come to an end,” Buchanan wrote Thursday in a post at The American Conservative. “After 10 enjoyable years, I am departing, after an incessant clamor from the left that to permit me continued access to the microphones of MSNBC would be an outrage against decency, and dangerous.” Buchanan had been suspended since shortly after the October publication of his book, “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?

Everyone who has ever tuned into a cable channel has heard the names Natalee Holloway and Laci Peterson. Show hosts like Nancy Grace have used their TV pulpits to chronicle the disappearance of such white, female victims night after night. But what about black victims like Yasmin Acree or missing sisters Diamond and Tiondra Bradley? That's one of the questions raised by a new docu-series, "Find Our Missing," hosted by S. Epatha Merkerson and produced by TV One, the African-American-themed cable channel based in Silver Spring.

TV One will launch a series tonight that addresses the issue of missing Black Americans. S. Epatha Merkerson, Emmy-Award-winner and longtime member of the NBC's "Law & Order" cast, will host the 10-part reality series from the Silver-Spring-based cable channel. Here's the release from TV One: As the centerpiece of an effort to draw attention to and help find missing Black Americans, whose stories are largely ignored in national media coverage of missing persons, TV One will premiere Find Our Missing, a 10-episode, one-hour docu-drama series Wednesday, January 18 at 10 PM ET.   Hosted by Emmy and Golden Globe Award-winning actress S. Epatha Merkerson, who for 16 years portrayed Police Lieutenant Anita Van Buren on NBC's Law & Order, Find Our Missing is designed to put names and faces to people of color who have disappeared without a trace.

I have a million other things to write about, and about 500,000 of them have been rightfully ordered up by editors. Despite that, and a growing momentum this Friday night in Baltimore that nothing matters in the world except the Ravens playoff game Sunday, I am going to take a minute here to talk about a correction CNBC posted today in connection with a report that linked GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney to President Barack Obama's auto...

HBO has set premiere dates for its two big-ticket political projects filmed in Maryland last year. "Game Change," the made-for-TV movie starring Ed Harris as John McCain and Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin, will premiere March 10, according to Stuart Levine in the Hollywood trade publication Variety . "VEEP," the half-hour political satire that finished filming its first season in December in the Baltimore area, will debut April 22....

ABC announced plans yesterday to launch an all-news cable channel to compete with CNN starting in 1997, a move industry analysts say is a sign that the future of television news lies in 24-hour programming on cable.With yesterday's announcement, ABC becomes the third network planning an all-day cable news broadcast. Fox announced a similar plan last week, as did NBC in January. An NBC spokesman said yesterday that details of their plan will be released early next year.Money is the reason networks are going into the 24-hour cable news business.

It might be hard to imagine that anyone is more psyched-up for Thursday night's matchup between the Ravens and 49ers than Baltimore and San Francisco fans. But there is. The team at NFL Network, which is cablecasting the game from Baltimore's M&T Bank Stadium at 8 p.m. Thanksgiving day, is sky high. Executives and announcers at the league-owned cable channel see the match-up between two division-leading teams coached by brothers as one of the biggest contests and most compelling story lines in its six seasons of telecasting games in prime time.

This year, I gave up reporting cable news ratings every month. The numbers and spin tell us about the horse race to some extent. But what they mainly do is distract us from the important moral and cultural stories of the way these channels are warping our view of the world with their ideological and show biz priorities rather than any genuine commitment to news and information. But there are ratings, and then, there are ratings. And the October numbers that just came out offer a sobering snapshot of just how badly CNN's misadventures in programming are going -- even as they cheapen their news brand identity to try and find larger audiences.