When Paris Hilton was recently released from jail, or when she went back to jail after being released the first time, one only needed to turn on the television to confirm that the Fourth Estate, long on life support, is now near death. Case in point: The Project for Excellence in Journalism found that Fox News dedicated a mere 6 percent of its daytime programming hours in Q1 2007 to coverage of the war in ... Read More

Note to executives doing less-than-scrupulous things during their 'down time': Let the recent situation with Wellpoint SFO David Colby serve as a warning to you. Should your personal life start to impede on your professional life, your company may have no choice but to let you go. As far as I can tell (and granted, I wasn't in the internal meetings held among Colby and senior management) Wellpoint’s senior managers had no other choice but to ... Read More

As a North Carolina judge suspended Mike Nifong, the disgraced prosecutor whose actions veritably define prosecutorial excess, I can't help but think of another story--a story as tainted with elements of racism, sexism, and elitism as the Duke lacrosse scandal. But the story I’m thinking of has ended on a radically different, and an even more profoundly disturbing note. You may remember hearing about Lamar Owens, the African-American Naval Academy quarterback who was accused of raping a ... Read More

Allen Weiss, President and CEO of NCH HealthCare System recently wrote a guest column in the Naples Daily News responding to an editorial that had been critical of the pay that he and other NCH executives received. The guest column itself is interesting, but even more interesting is the litany of comments his op-ed piece generated (scroll down past the article to read them). As of the time I'm writing this post, no representative of ... Read More

Another day, another headline about executive compensation. This time it's DaimlerChrysler AG's ex-CEO Juergen Schrempp who, according to reports, will make $134 million from the sale of Chrysler Group to Cerberus Capital Management--this, after some critics argue that he was at the helm of the Chrysler deal from start to finish that ultimately lost $12.6 billion for investors. With numbers like these, no matter how you feel about a particular executive or the job they have ... Read More

This week's XM satellite radio outage is interesting in a number of ways. XM chief execs have a vested interest in remaining squeaky clean prior to their proposed merger with satellite radio competitors Sirius. They have the advantage of observing how RIM poorly handled BlackBerry outage in two countries and to learn from that. The discounts they’ve offered customers for the outage is generous. Critically now, they must fully appreciate the real take-away: that XM ... Read More