Television Broadcasts

As many as 2 million people are expected to descend on the National Mall on Tuesday to witness the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama, but most of the country will experience the event on television. The broadcast and cable networks will begin coverage well before the start of the swearing-in ceremony, at 8:30 a.m. Pacific time. Reporting will begin at dawn in Washington and continue on most networks into the night. All times listed are PST.

If Barack Obama is going to bring the country out of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, he'll have to wait until at least Wednesday. The inauguration of the 44th U.S. president won't be a day of productivity for many businesses in Southern California and around the nation, but rather a day of celebration. And for one Los Angeles public relations firm, today will be a day of waffles.

Perhaps the most conspicuous people onstage during the Oscar telecast -- those graceful creatures once known as "trophy girls" -- are also the most forgettable, gliding around like sophisticated stage props. This year, though, Oscar telecast producers Laurence Mark and Bill Condon are going for something with more possibilities, deliberately casting experienced actors -- and one model -- as trophy presenters to bring a little more personality to the job.

America's recession "probably" will end this year if the government succeeds in bolstering the banking system, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said in a rare television interview aired Sunday. In carefully hedged remarks in a taped interview with CBS' "60 Minutes," Bernanke seemed to express a bit more optimism that this could be done.

Executives at several local television stations defended their coverage of the Station fire over the weekend after Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich and some viewers complained that the fire, despite evacuations and threats to homes, did not receive the continuous coverage given previous large blazes. Antonovich on Monday accused television news stations of being negligent in failing to provide comprehensive fire coverage. "There were a large number of evacuations taking place, people and animals were in danger, and people had no information of where to go," Antonovich said in an interview.

President Obama's speech to students next week may be a "teachable moment," as some educators see it, but it will not be a command performance. A combination of scheduling, academic priorities and sheer bandwidth will keep the president out of many Southern California classrooms when he goes on the air Tuesday. "We're an academic institution, and our responsibility is to cover specific content standards," said James Stratton, superintendent of schools for La Cañada Unified School District, where the school year got off to a late and rocky start because of the nearby wildfires.

At the Oscars, the spotlight, as always, is on the stars in their designer gowns and sleek suits. But this year, inside the industry, the high beams have been on Laurence Mark and Bill Condon, who have one of the least enviable jobs in showbiz: producing the Oscars. Like managing a baseball team, it's a job nearly everyone thinks he can do better than you.

Acknowledging that he hasn't persuaded the American public and Congress to support sweeping changes to healthcare, President Obama offered a humbling admission Sunday: His message is sometimes not "breaking through." "I think there have been times where I have said, 'I've got to step up my game in terms of talking to the American people about issues like healthcare,' " he said during an unprecedented spree of appearances on five Sunday television news shows. Asked if he had lost control of the healthcare debate at those times, the president said: "Well, not so much lost control, but where I've said to myself, somehow I'm not breaking through."

ESPN is expected to announce today that the Sept. 12 USC at Ohio State football game will have a limited showing in 3-D. The 3-D version will be available at the Galen Center in Los Angeles and the ESPN Zone at LA Live as well as at a single theater in Columbus, Ohio; Hartford, Conn. (for ESPN invitees) and Hurst, Texas. The Texas site, according to Anthony Bailey, ESPN's vice president for emerging technology, was chosen because ESPN would like to see how a 3-D broadcast would do in a place unaffiliated with either team playing.