Television News

It was a voice of anguish that pierced a nation. Israeli TV broadcast a father's heartbreak Friday night when a Palestinian doctor living in Gaza made a frantic phone call to a newscaster saying an Israeli tank had shelled his home, killing three of his daughters and injuring other family members. Izz el-Deen Aboul Aish, who speaks Hebrew, worked as a gynecologist in an Israeli hospital.

KTLA-TV Channel 5 is expanding its news operation and is adding more than eight hours of news programming each week, station officials announced Tuesday. The increase, which primarily affects early morning and midday newscasts, is part of a larger strategy begun this year to broaden the station's local news coverage. KTLA, which like the Los Angeles Times is owned by Tribune Co., began a 6:30 p.m. weekday newscast in January.

A voracious appetite for political news has prompted the broadcast television networks and their cable counterparts to gear up for extensive coverage of Super Tuesday, offering programming more typical of a presidential general election than a February primary day. "This dominates in ways that politics hasn't dominated since November of 2000, which was all politics all the time," said Phil Griffin, NBC News' senior vice president in charge of MSNBC.

When veteran Los Angeles news anchors Harold Greene and Ann Martin were felled by a round of jobs cuts last week, they were in good company. At least 160 employees at CBS Corp.-owned television stations in 13 cities were let go, including such seasoned broadcasters as prominent Chicago anchor Diann Burns, renowned Boston sportscaster Bob Lobel and longtime Minneapolis meteorologist Paul Douglas.

Former Times Television Critic Howard Rosenberg, a Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism in 1985, will be writing occasional commentaries about news on television and the Internet. -- It seems like a couple of centuries since His Holiness Pope Walter reigned as God's deputy on the airwaves. Even longer if you think about leave-'em-laughing funnyman Keith Olbermann.

Barack Obama's trip to Europe and the Middle East, seen as crucial to burnish his foreign policy bona fides, will play out before big audiences. All three television network anchors plan to interview the Democratic presidential candidate during the tour. Political analysts see the combined audience of 20 million as a potential boon to Obama, but also a bust if he makes any major missteps.

Fox News tough guy Sean Hannity assured us this week he would press Sarah Palin for real answers -- no going easy on the woman who could be the next vice president of the United States. "No topic," Hannity intoned, "is off limits." A couple of nights earlier, Fox's hard-talking lawyer, Greta Van Susteren, promised to take us to unknown places in her exclusive interview with Alaska's so-called First Dude, Todd Palin. "You will see this," Greta declared, "nowhere else!" No, you won't.

Television news reports about the war in Iraq and its repercussions took top honors Monday night at the 29th annual News and Documentary Emmy Awards. Among the pieces recognized was a "60 Minutes'" investigation into the claims by Curveball, an Iraqi defector who provided the bulk of the intelligence the U.S. used in alleging that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and a story on "NBC Nightly News" that exposed flaws in the body armor used by U.S. troops.

Thank you, Los Angeles Times, for hosting this commentary in a town hall format that will provide greater interaction with readers and allow my winning personality to come across -- provided it's not filtered by elitist editors. Now, let's have the first question that I will ignore and instead spew my own message. As a member of the elitist media yourself, how can you claim to have any credibility when it comes to commenting on coverage of the presidential election? Thank you for that.

For more than 40 years, news anchor Jerry Dunphy greeted his viewers with the words, "From the desert to the sea, to all of Southern California, a good evening." Longtime sportscaster Gil Stratton introduced his segments this way: "Time to call 'em as I see 'em." And veteran anchor George Putnam, a rival of Dunphy's, would sign off his newscasts by announcing, "And that's the up-to-the-minute news, up to the minute, that's all the news."