Reluare joi, 25 iulie 1996

REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK;A TV News Marriage That Might Have Been

Date: 26 July 1996

By Bill Carter

Bill Carter

Television couples don't get much odder than this: CBS News and Fox Broadcasting. But those two entities held serious high-level discussions about the possibility of becoming partners in an all-news cable channel. The discussions, which executives from both networks confirmed in interviews here, took place several months ago, soon after the Fox chairman, Rupert Murdoch, announced his intention to start an all-news cable channel to challenge both CNN and MSNBC, the collaboration between NBC and the Microsoft Corporation.

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Primary Colors' Author Resigns As Commentator at CBS News

Date: 26 July 1996

By Lawrie Mifflin

Lawrie Mifflin

CBS News yesterday accepted the resignation of Joe Klein, the political journalist and Newsweek magazine columnist who has been under fire for lying to preserve his anonymity as the author of the novel "Primary Colors." Mr. Klein had been a consultant to CBS News and contributed occasional commentaries for four years.

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POLITICS: THE MEDIA;Artist as Pool Reporter: The Reviews Are Mixed

Date: 25 July 1996

By Robin Pogrebin

Robin Pogrebin

Newsweek yesterday found itself explaining how it was that a performance artist, Anna Deavere Smith, wound up representing the news weekly on Air Force One. Ms. Smith had been given Newsweek credentials to cover the two major political parties' conventions as a guest writer for the magazine, writing one, primarily impressionistic, piece about each event.

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Fox TV Turns to Sports Unit for a Top Executive

Date: 25 July 1996

By Lawrie Mifflin

Lawrie Mifflin

David Hill, the hard-driving president of Fox Sports, has been promoted to president and chief operating officer of Fox Television, the division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation that encompasses Fox's television operations. Yesterday's appointment was not a surprise given the praise that Mr. Hill has won from Mr. Murdoch for creating a Fox Sports division virtually from nothing. Mr. Hill began in December 1993 a few days after Fox outbid CBS and agreed to pay $5.8 billion for the rights to National Football League's National Football Conference games for four years. Since then, Fox added National Hockey League and Major League Baseball games to its roster.

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ATLANTA DAY 7;To Foreign Press, Games Are an Olympian Blunder

Date: 26 July 1996

By Celestine Bohlen

Celestine Bohlen

From warm Cokes to overheated American chauvinism, from snarled traffic to computer mix-ups, the foreign press has jumped all over the Olympic Games in Atlanta this week, slamming the organizers for an event that headline writers around the world have already summed up as "chaotic." Foul-ups on the subway system, buses that have been late or become lost, computers that attributed the wrong weights, the wrong nationalities and undeserved victories to athletes, inadequate housing far away from good cooking facilities -- these are among the complaints that began to surface in the world press last weekend, and have continued since.

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NEWS SUMMARY

Date: 26 July 1996

International A2-12

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News Summary

Date: 25 July 1996

International A3-14

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COMPANY NEWS;SHARES OF FRITZ FALL MORE THAN 55% ON NEWS OF LOSS

Date: 25 July 1996

Bloomberg Business News

Bloomberg News

The shares of the Fritz Companies lost more than half their value yesterday after the company reported a fourth-quarter loss. Fritz, the nation's largest customs broker, also restated third-quarter earnings. It attributed the problems in part to its dismissal of 200 more workers than expected after last year's $210 million acquisition of the Intertrans Corporation. The company said it would take charges totaling $14.6 million to cover employee severance and the integration of the Intertrans accounts with its own. Fritz's shares fell $15.25, to $12.25, in Nasdaq trading of about 15 million shares.

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No News From Alpha Centauri (Yet)

Date: 26 July 1996

By Ken Croswell

Ken Croswell

I have never been abducted by an alien spaceship. This is a shame, because as an astronomer I could ask aliens pretty good questions -- about their home star, its planets and the secrets of crossing vast distances between stars. Interest in extraterrestrial life has revived yet again, but our obsession with aliens is nothing new, of course. In the old days, though, the aliens didn't have to travel far. They were thought to be right on the planets of our solar system. William Herschel, the great English astronomer who discovered Uranus in 1781, even thought that intelligent beings lived on the moon and the sun.

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COMPANY NEWS;DEMAND FOR SATURNS EXCEEDS PRODUCTION

Date: 26 July 1996

AP

Saturn could sell about 50,000 more cars a year if it could produce them, the president of the General Motors Corporation's small-car unit said yesterday. While Don Hudler said Saturn continued to make improvements to increase production at its Spring Hill, Tenn., plant, he gave no indication when or if G.M. would foot the bill to expand the plant or build another. An additional 50,000 cars sold would generate more than $600 million in annual revenue. Mr. Hudler also said Saturn was studying a possible expansion of its three-model lineup. His comments came as Saturn showed off its redesigned coupe, the 1997 SC1 and SC2, to Detroit's automotive press. The company sold 285,674 cars last year, about the same as 1994, which amounted to a 10 percent share of the combined small-car and sport coupe segments. The company said sales are up about 4 percent so far this year.

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