“My bark is worse than my bite,” Ms. Williams said of her reputation for exceptionally blunt questions. “I feel as though I’m nice, and that I’m down to earth, and — people like me get taken advantage of. So by being tall and outgoing, people mistake that for being overpowering, overbearing, loud and being a bully. No, no I’m a flower.”

Sure, sure. The Times notes that not only did Williams get herself cussed out by Method Man (for revealing on-air that his wife had cancer), but also that Judge Greg Mathis has "taken her to task." Uh, that's a pretty polite way of describing it. Here's what Williams said about that incident in a 2003 interview:

"I was interviewing Judge Mathis and he called me the F-word and walked out of the studio and that's because I was getting under his skin with an issue very close to home, recalled Williams. "He came to New York to promote his new book and I mentioned to him an article that I had read. Mind you, Judge Mathis and I are friendly. He has been on my show to promote his show. So, when his book came out it was only natural for him to come on my show to promote his book. I mentioned an incident relating to he and an extra marital affair, the use of cocaine by him, marijuana by him, kinky sex, including three-way sex, and he had a fall out with this girl and she alleges that he became physically threatening toward her."...

"You know the saying 'Thou doth protest too much' I watched him show out and everybody was absolutely floored. He went into the other room and at the time I was shooting a pilot for an upcoming VH1 special and my husband was there. So, he stormed out and went to where my employees and my husband was and he was like 'You want some of this too!' It wasn't very judge like. He was more like a guilty defendant."

We'll be watching! Not really.

[NYT]

[Full speech available here]

Spoiler alert: the men took the prize with a stellar 5.9 ounce fillet. The shouty chef has managed to make this appointment television, and I salute him for it. I also salute him for telling short and mournful contestant Craig last week, "You come down to my kitchen with a ridiculous hat on like that again, I'll stick it on your head fucking sideways."

Stein says in his conclusion:

Watching money shows is largely a men's game. Men watch CNBC and the other business outlets more than women do. Someday it may change, and then maybe a magazine like Cosmopolitan will ask me to write a piece about money hunks. But for now, it's us pig men watching the money shows, in general, and we want to see women.

The first part of his statement is correct—men make up the majority of biz show viewers. The second part is partially correct—men like to see pretty women. But those facts together don't really explain anything.

Major sports broadcasting is dominated by ESPN, which is dominated by male personalities. Former professional athletes know that sports broadcasting is one of the sweetest gigs they can get when they retire, and they fill the ranks of the shows, from ESPN to the networks to smaller cable channels, from football to baseball to basketball to golf. Lots of sports shows and coverage of games trots out a token female—usually, yes, a beautiful woman called on to speak about the weather or chat with coaches at halftime or something equally irrelevant. There certainly are respected female sports broadcasters who have made their way through the ranks based on talent alone, but they are a decided minority. On the other hand, many of the most high profile male ex-athlete broadcasters are stone cold idiots.

I won't waste the space here arguing the point.

But as Stein also points out, that is not the case in business news. Fox Business and, to a lesser extent, CNBC are dominated not by crusty old retired male hedge fund managers, but by vivacious young attractive women. If it were simply a matter of broadcasters appealing to horny men like Ben Stein, there would be nothing but pretty women on both sports and business shows.

None of this implies that a network couldn't, if it wanted to, fill both its sports and business shows with an even mix of truly talented men and women. Rather, it implies that networks pander to what they perceive their audience wants.

The evidence points to one inescapable conclusion: Men take sports more seriously than they take business. Logical? No. True? Yes. American men would revolt if they felt that their sports broadcasters weren't sufficiently informed about the intricacies of the line stunt, the pick and roll, and the knuckle curve; but Wall Street men have no problem getting their business news—which could decide the fate of millions in investments—from women chosen primarily for their beauty.

Are there women on TV who are beautiful, intelligent, and well-informed about business? Yes. Maria Bartiromo comes to mind. But nobody can seriously argue that Fox combed the highest echelons of the finance community with only business acumen in mind to pick their broadcast team (you can scroll through here).

So, American man's warped perspective: Sports, important, Wall Street, whatever. At least as far as TV concerned. I'm glad that my own personal perspective is far more balanced, and if you don't pick Memphis in the tournament you are a fucking fool, so suck it Dick Vitale!

According to industry sources, Cooper's old deal was worth in the neighborhood of $2 million a year and his new payday is more than double that amount.

Exclusive: Anderson Cooper Signs New Multiyear Deal With CNN [B&C]

Using the same principles of automatically assembling news media from various net sources, the experimental "News at Seven" in development at Northwestern University intends to do away with anchors, producers, editors, controllers, and every other carbon-based lifeform involved in broadcast news. Ignore the silly trappings of the clip above — like the Lara Croft-esque anchorwoman, who actually stops her narrative to kill a zombie, so cute — and focus instead on the newsgathering result. Images and video are pulled to illustrate the wire story at hand, complete with a cut to blog reaction. For some reason, the anonymous blogger copy is read by an old black guy in an alley, surrounded by armies of cloned suit-men passing by imperturbably. Oooookay. Sometimes the content selections really could have used a human touch, such as the lead for the story on Anna Nicole Smith's son's death, illustrated with Smith gleefully bouncing onstage during an awards show. Might not be ready to replace Brian Williams just yet, but there seems little material difference between this and, say, Rocketboom.

News at Seven [Northwestern University via Reuters]