Cook County Judge Tosses Ex-NBC Reporter's Libel Suit Against CBS

In a nine-page ruling last week in Jacobson v. CBS Broadcasting, Inc. (Case No. 2008-L-007331), Cook County Circuit Court Judge Jeffrey Lawrence threw out a five-year-old defamation suit brought by a former Chicago NBC tv reporter against  her rival CBS affiliate.

Radio talk show host Amy Jacobson sued CBS for $1 million in 2008, roughly a year after the station aired footage of a bathing suit-clad Jacobson at a pool party hosted by Craig Stebic, whom police purportedly have identified as a "person of interest" in the April 2007, disappearance of his wife Lisa, though no charges have been brought against him, according to an article in The Chicago Tribune. The Tribune article reported that Judge Lawrence ruled against Jacobson for not proving the CBS story contained false statements about her. Judge Lawrence further held some of the alleged offensive content constituted First Amendment-protected statements of opinion. NBC fired Jacobson soon after the CBS story aired.

Jacobson plans to appeal the adverse decision, according to the Tribune article, contending she was not a public figure when the CBS footage was broadcast.

                                                                           

From CNN to AJA: Soledad O'Brien Joins Al Jazeera America

 Al Jazeera America ("AJA") has added some star power to its August Prime-Time launch (see "TUOL" post 6/12/13) with the hiring of CNN and NBC veteran Soledad O'Brien, The Wrap reported yesterday.

O'Brien will be special correspondent for the America Tonight current affairs magazine program and also will produce documentaries through her Starfish Media Group production company for the Qatari government-funded news network.  O'Brien formerly anchored Weekend Today for NBC News before moving over to CNN where she co-anchored American Morning and later, Starting Point (see "TUOL" post 2/20/13).

                                                                                 

Cooked Peacock: NBC Sinks to 5th in Key Viewer Group

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For the first time since tv ratings sweeps history, NBC sank to fifth place among viewers in the 18- to 49-year-old demographic group that advertisers crave, Deadline Hollywood (www.Deadline.com) reported.

 NBC "second season" shows such as 1600 Penn and Do No Harm landed with a thud in their debuts (the latter has since been cancelled for doing so much harm) and rival network CBS got a massive ratings boost from the Super Bowl, but that doesn't lessen the blow of finishing behind the fourth-place Spanish-speaking network, Univision.

Watch for some tweaking in the Peacock Network's ad campaign: "More viewers are watching NBC than the Emergency Broadcast Signal!"

Font Bureau Sues NBC: Network Not Its Type

As if NBC didn't have enough problems, what with poor prime time ratings, occasional flare-ups of Celebrity Apprentice, and its best franchise down to its last option--"Law & Order: Traffic Division"--along comes The Font Bureau with a $2 million trademark and copyright infringement suit over the network's alleged misuse of registered typefaces to promote The Jay Leno Show, Saturday Night Live, and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

The Font Bureau, a national typographic design firm whose typefaces have been featured among clients such as Apple, Microsoft, and The New York Times, alleges that NBC paid only for a license to install on a single computer certain of its registered typefaces, but purportedly wrongly copied the limited fonts on numerous other computers and employed typefaces for which it allegedly had not obtained licenses from the design firm. Some of the protected typefaces allegedly purloined by NBC include Interstate, Antenna, and the wonderfully named Bureau Grotesque, whose use should be confined to government publications.

The case in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York is The Font Bureau v. NBC Universal, Inc. & CNBC, Inc. (Case No. 09-04286). NBC could be forced to scrap its marketing materials for its programming if it is found to have infringed on the trademarks & copyrights registered by The Font Bureau, which may prompt a swift out-of-court resolution of the dispute.

"TUOL" agrees that NBC has a problem with the writing on The Jay Leno Show and Saturday Night Live, but wouldn't necessarily have attributed it to the fonts.