CNN: Total Fluke, Not Cereal Killing

When a nutritionist showed up on a “New You Resolution” segment on Cable News Network’s American Morning recently — holding a box of Total cornflakes she used to bread some catfish filets — CNN was hit with accusations of running a product-placement ad during a morning-news show.

After all, CNN had announced a joint marketing deal with Total in January that would give the cereal brand “on-air billboards, promotional tune-in spots, on-air advertising and online integration.” General Mills Inc. also agreed to market American Morning on Total boxes.

After the Feb. 3 segment aired, a CNN viewer wrote a letter to The New York Times, which ran a story on the segment.

CNN insisted the use of a box of Total in a segment sponsored by Total was pure coincidence.

But a source at CNN rival Fox News Channel told The Wire last week that a media buyer representing General Mills approached Fox News last year, offering it the same integrated marketing deal it later cut with CNN. Fox rejected an offer to produce health segments for its Fox and Friends morning show that would include Total product placements, the source said.

“To say [product placement] wasn’t part of the deal is ludicrous. That was the deal,” the Fox News source said.

CNN officials stuck to their guns, denying anything fishy about breading catfish with Total. “The script that had been vetted used generic cornflakes, but a guest unexpectedly brought in the Total box,” Turner Broadcasting Sales Inc. spokesman Sal Petruzzi said. “The appearance was in no way meant to be a product placement.”

Wacky Wednesday

If Washington, D.C., were a stock, it would be a classically cyclical one, with long stretches of inactivity punctuated by spasms of frenetic action.

Things on Capitol Hill were moving at their regular pace, with lawmakers doing very little early in an election year. All that changed after Janet Jax and her indecent Super Bowl costume revelation.

Last Wednesday morning, all five members of the Federal Communications Commission testified before a Senate committee and then a House subcommittee about their outrage at CBS for allowing Janet and Justin to do their version of the Horny Hustle on national primetime TV.

The regulators were up there all day — so long that FCC Chairman Michael Powell had to delay the next day’s commission meeting by 90 minutes. “We were tired. We couldn’t get up this morning,” Powell said in explaining the delay.

Making Wednesday even wackier was a decision by Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) to go forward with a cable competition hearing at the same time.

Meanwhile, many of the reporters covering the hearings actually had to be somewhere else — Philadelphia, venue for the court case over the FCC’s new media-ownership rules.

All this after a minor news item in that day’s morning paper about Comcast bidding to buy Disney.

Norwegian Jackpot?

If Comcast Corp. eventually takes over The Walt Disney Co., the new company may have to negotiate with an enterprising man from Norway if it wants to build a new Web site touting the combined brand.

According to Network Solutions, Norway resident Karl Eliassen registered the domain names comcastdisney.com and disneycomcast.com on Feb. 11 — the day Comcast announced its bold takeover bid.

Eliassen told a Wire correspondent last week that he bought the domain names after hearing about Comcast’s merger proposal on CNN. Eliassen, who said he runs a small multimedia studio, said he hasn’t heard from anyone at Comcast or Disney about the sites. But he admits he’d like to cash in by selling the domains to Comcast. “I would be lying if I said anything else.”

Contributors: Tom Umstead, Ted Hearn.