Television Hosts

Glenn Beck wants to become . . . a community organizer. The voluble Fox News television host says he hopes to transform his personal celebrity into political action and has begun to assemble a movement to "change America's course." Beck announced his intentions at a weekend rally at a retirement community outside Orlando, Fla., where he was promoting his new book, "Arguing With Idiots." He continued outlining his ideas during his radio and TV shows Monday. "America, we cannot wait for a leader anymore," Beck said.

Negotiations over Conan O'Brien's departure from NBC stalled Tuesday over the "Tonight Show" host's demands that NBC compensate staff members who will lose their jobs when the show goes off the air. The issue was one of several slowing the negotiations, which were expected to have been finalized earlier in the week. "The Tonight Show" employs about 190 people, including 60 to 70 who followed O'Brien to Los Angeles from New York last year when he switched jobs. NBC paid to relocate 40 to 50 of those staffers, said a person close to show.

Fox News host Glenn Beck used his popular show Monday to attack the background of Van Jones, a White House environmental advisor and co-founder of an African American political advocacy group that organized an advertising boycott of his program. Beck did not address the boycott spearheaded by Color of Change to protest the talk show host's remark last month that he believes President Obama is "a racist." Instead, he spent a large share of his program suggesting that Jones, who co-founded Color of Change in 2005, is a radical.

Television network executives looking for new talent are accustomed to getting pleas from agents urging them to check out their clients. But in the last few weeks, MSNBC has experienced a different kind of onslaught: a flood of unsolicited endorsements from fans of liberal radio hosts touting them as the network's next potential big star. The grass-roots campaigns were triggered by the news that the cable channel is contemplating creating a new show for its 7 p.m.

A lovely teenager named Courtney Chou Lee wore the crown and rode down Colorado Boulevard. But for many people who watched at home Thursday, the real queen of the 120th Rose Parade was the 65-year-old with the brilliant red hair and the relentless smile who described the pageant from high above the parade route.

After days of being portrayed as the bad guy, Jay Leno came out swinging on his show Monday and provided a detailed chronology of NBC's bumbling behind-the-scenes maneuvers that sparked the talk-show host tug-of-war engulfing the network. In an unusual departure from his typical banter, Leno described how NBC several years ago concocted a plan to push him out while he was still No. 1. He said he was skeptical that NBC's solution of a prime-time show would work. It "didn't seem like a good idea at the time," he said, though he ultimately went along.

Like many Mexican American kids growing up in L.A. in the '90s, singer Yolanda Perez idolized the local narco-corrido king Chalino Sanchez. She was about to turn 9 in 1992 when Sanchez was kidnapped and executed after a concert in Sinaloa, like a character out of one of his folk ballads about drug dealers and their exploits. Today, Perez refuses to record narco-corridos, a style regarded as a path to stardom in Mexican country music.

David Letterman has milked plenty of sex scandals for laughs. But it remains to be seen whether the CBS comic's admission Thursday that he had sexual liaisons with female employees while he was involved with his now-wife, the mother of his 5-year-old son, will fade away with a few late-night punch lines. Although Letterman focused on his role as the victim of a would-be extortionist who demanded $2 million to keep the details of his affairs secret, the episode sparked impassioned discussion Friday about sex in the workplace and hypocrisy.

Gary Collins, an actor who was the longtime host of the syndicated TV show “Hour Magazine” and a former master of ceremonies for the Miss America Pageant, died early Saturday in Biloxi, Miss. He was 74. Collins died of natural causes soon after arriving at Biloxi Regional Medical Center, Harrison County Coroner Gary Hargrove told the Associated Press. In 2011 Collins moved to Mississippi, the home state of his wife, Mary Ann Mobley, an actress and Miss America 1959. He had been arrested and fined last year for leaving a Biloxi restaurant without paying his dinner tab; in 2007 and 2009 he was convicted in separate DUI cases in California.

Television game show host Ray Combs was able to move his toes and flex his hands Wednesday, two days after he was temporarily paralyzed in a traffic collision on the Ventura Freeway, his agent reported. Combs, 38, host of "The New Family Feud" for six years, suffered a swollen spinal disk in the accident, which doctors believed caused the paralysis, said Irv Schwartz, Comb's agent. His condition was upgraded from serious to fair at St. Joseph's Medical Center in Burbank, Schwartz said.