MTV Movie & TV Awards ditches live event due to strike

NEW YORK – The first big live awards show to air during the current screenwriters’ strike has retreated to a pre-taped event as the MTV Movie & TV Awards tries to chart a celebratory course through a turbulent Hollywood. The Sunday show already had lost its host, Drew Barrymore, who dropped out in solidarity with … Read more

Newton Minow, ex-FCC chief who dubbed TV ‘wasteland,’ dies

CHICAGO – Newton N. Minow, who as Federal Communications Commission chief in the early 1960s famously proclaimed that network television was a “vast wasteland,” died Saturday. He was 97. Minow, who received a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, died Saturday at home, surrounded by loved ones, said his daughter, Nell Minow. “He wanted to … Read more

Oprah tells class of 2023 to follow ‘still, small voice’

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Oprah Winfrey delighted graduates at her alma mater Tennessee State University on Saturday, telling the story of how she fell one credit short of graduating as she launched the media career that would make her a household name. Giving the commencement address at the historically Black university, Winfrey recalled that she was … Read more

Botticelli’s Venus is an ‘influencer’ and Italy is not happy

ROME – The Italian tourism ministry thought it had a sure-fire way to bring travelers into the country: turning a 15th century art icon into a 21st century “virtual influencer.” The digital rendition of Venus, goddess of love, based on Sandro Botticelli’s Renaissance masterpiece “Birth of Venus,” can be seen noshing on pizza and snapping … Read more

Russia jails artists amid crackdown on dissent

TALLINN – A Russian court on Friday ordered pretrial detention for a theater director and a playwright facing charges of justifying terrorism, the latest move in a relentless crackdown on dissent in Russia that spiked to unprecedented levels since the start of the war in Ukraine. The Zamoskvoretsky District Court in Moscow jailed Zhenya Berkovich, … Read more