DealBook: Liberty Media Seeks Full Ownership of Sirius XM

Big Executive Moves Within Hispanic Media

In a statement, Fusion announced that it had appointed Isaac Lee, the president of Univision News, as its chief executive. He will be in charge of programming and business development for the network, which is expected to make its debut Oct. 28, and replaces Beau Ferrari, the executive vice president of operations for Univision Networks who had been serving as the interim president of Fusion.

“Isaac is one of the most creative executives I know,” Randy Falco, the president and chief executive of Univision Communications, said in a statement. “His innovation and commitment makes him the right person in this expanded role.”

Ben Sherwood, the president of ABC News, said Mr. Lee’s “deep understanding of content that is relevant to Latinos and millennials will be critical as we bring together diverse cultures, voices and viewpoints to serve this influential and growing audience in the months and years ahead.”

Speculation about who would lead the network intensified after Cesar Conde, the president of Univision’s networks division since 2009, announced last month that he was leaving to become an executive vice president at NBCUniversal, the parent company of Telemundo, a rival Spanish-language network to Univison.

Telemundo had its own executive shake-up on Friday after Joe Uva, the chairman of Hispanic enterprises and content at NBCUniversal, sent an internal e-mail to staff announcing that Emilio Romano, the president of Telemundo, was stepping down. In the e-mail, Mr. Uva, who had been the president and chief executive at Univision from 2007 to 2011, thanked Mr. Romano for his contributions to Telemundo.

“His focus on positioning Telemundo to take share from Univision, and Mun2 to better resonate with the rapidly growing millennial population has established a foundation for growth,” Mr. Uva wrote, referring to the bilingual cable channel. “As a result, he has been instrumental in elevating the perception of Telemundo in the marketplace. Most recently, he has been a good partner to me.”

Mr. Uva, who has held his current position at NBCUniversal since April, said that he expected to begin the search for a replacement at Telemundo immediately and that he would be spending more time at the network’s Florida headquarters in the coming weeks.

Mr. Romano’s tenure ends exactly two years after he was named president of Telemundo. In 2011, Mr. Romano, a former chief executive for Grupo Mexicana de Aviación, the Mexican airline carrier, succeeded Don Browne. Mr. Romano declined to comment.

The Media Equation: Campaign Journalism in the Age of Twitter

For modern political reporters, the end of the day never arrives. There is no single narrative, only whatever is going on in the moment, often of little consequence, but always something that can be blogged, tweeted or filmed and turned into content.

In a study he did while at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard last spring, Peter Hamby, a political reporter at CNN, writes about the extent to which reporters in the bubble — on the bus, on the plane, at the rope line — have become “one giant, tweeting blob.”

Mr. Hamby is not some old geezer pining for the good old days. At 32, he is deeply immersed in the digital frontier of modern journalism — with a somewhat provocative presence on Twitter — and would never argue for going back to the good old days, which he and others say weren’t all that good anyway.

But there are implications to the new world, some of which go beyond the hermetic confines of the campaign media bubble. Because of the relentlessness of the schedule, the limited access and the multiplatform demands, many of the boys and girls on the bus are in fact boys and girls. And the bus they ride is Twitter.

According to Mr. Hamby, Mitt Romney’s campaign never came to terms with the new dynamic. Instead, his organization responded with a defensive crouch that fenced off the candidate from the very people he needed to reach.

“With Instagram and Twitter-primed iPhones, an ever more youthful press corps, and a journalistic reward structure in Washington that often prizes speed and scoops over context, campaigns are increasingly fearful of the reporters who cover them,” he writes in the report. (And sometimes the threat doesn’t come from the credentialed press — the “47 percent” video that nearly tipped over the Romney campaign was shot by someone who was on the catering staff at a fund-raiser.)

Zeke Miller, the very talented reporter for BuzzFeed (now of Time) was 2 years old when Bill Clinton was first elected president, and 22 when he was tasked with covering Mr. Romney.

“I never thought that age and talent were mutually exclusive, and Zeke did a great job,” Mr. Hamby said in a phone call from South Carolina where he was doing some reporting for the 2016 presidential campaign (speaking of things that are out of control) as the governors and potential candidates Scott Walker, Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal wheeled through. “But campaign reporters are incentivized for speed and feeding the beast,” he said.

The reporters and editors Mr. Hamby spoke to for his 95-page report said that the Romney campaign’s decision to fence off its candidate and to staff its press effort with equally young people was a grievous tactical error. Because the staff on the bus or plane would not really confirm or deny anything, that left many idle hands that created much mischief. In an attempt to exercise total control over the message, the campaign lost all control in bits and pieces, so when things went wrong, as they did during Mr. Romney’s European visit, they went very, very wrong.

In his report, Mr. Hamby wrote that the growing role of so-called embeds, or television reporters attached to the campaign, had infuriated the Romney staff. Previously restricted to support roles for broadcast and cable news networks, the young journalists were suddenly weaponized by Twitter, their own blogs and video posts. In his report, Mr. Hamby calls the embeds “anthropomorphic satellite trucks.”

“If I had to pick three words to characterize the embeds, it would be young, inexperienced and angry,” an unnamed Romney adviser told Mr. Hamby.

Maggie Haberman, senior political reporter for Politico, told me, echoing remarks she had made to Mr. Hamby, that “the Romney campaign had a natural mistrust of the press, in part because he had seen his father savaged in the press decades ago.” She continued, “Beyond the mistrust, there was an outright hostility. They simply did not deal with reporters, and sometimes it was nasty, and I think they paid a price.”

And they often did so at a very high velocity. The death of the hallowed political reporter Jack Germond a few weeks ago served as a vivid reminder that the hallowed day story — a totemic representation of How It Was — has given way to a mosaic of posts on Twitter and blogs that form a running, constantly updated feed.

According to the report, the Obama campaign did a much better job of adapting to those realities than the Republican opponent. Rather than just waiting to see what bad tidings Twitter might bring, the campaign was often in the thick of things.

“A negative story or provocative Web video could fly from the desk of an Obama staffer to BuzzFeed and onto Twitter in a matter of minutes, generating precious clicks and shares along the way,” Mr. Hamby wrote in the report.

David Axelrod spent a fair amount of time as a senior adviser to the Obama campaign watching things blow up on Twitter and pushing back and promoting agendas there as well.

E-mail:carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @carr2n

For News From Syrian Battleground, a Reliance on Social Media

Western journalists are struggling to cover what the world has so far seen largely through YouTube. But while some television news crews have been filing reports from Damascus, the dangers of reporters being killed or kidnapped there — as well as visa problems — have kept most journalists outside the country’s borders and heightened the need for third-party images.

“The difficulty of getting into Syria, the shrunken foreign correspondent corps, and the audience gains for social media make it likely this story will be consumed differently by the American public than tensions or conflicts in past years,” said Ann Marie Lipinski, the curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

The Committee to Protect Journalists calls Syria the deadliest country in the world for reporters. Last year, 28 journalists working there were killed, and 18 have died so far this year, according to the group, a nonprofit based in New York.

Among the few television outlets broadcasting from Damascus are CBS News, the BBC and ITN, a British news provider. A CNN correspondent, Fred Pleitgen, had been reporting from Damascus, but his visa expired this week and he was relocated to Beirut, Lebanon, a spokeswoman for the network said.

The Wall Street Journal has a reporter in Damascus, and Reuters and The Associated Press both said that they had journalists inside Syria.

For many news organizations, though, Beirut or Syria’s borders are the closest they can safely get. Richard Engel, an NBC News correspondent who was held hostage for five days last year in Syria, traveled inside the country earlier this week, but most recently reported from the Turkish-Syrian border.

Reporters from The Washington Post and The New York Times are in Beirut, and this week ABC News reopened its bureau there after two decades.

“It’s risky being in Damascus in the best of times, and when you’ve got U.S. missiles raining down on the city, it adds to the sense of risk,” said Jon Williams, ABC News’s managing editor for international news.

For networks without a Syrian correspondent, partnerships with other organizations supply some video. ABC works with the BBC, for example, and NBC with ITN. But the networks also rely on YouTube and other third-party sources, which have yielded some of the most vivid and disturbing video of the conflict, but has also brought a host of verification problems.

This week, CNN broadcast a film showing what purported to be evidence of mass graves, and said that it came from “an independent filmer who is absolutely trustworthy.” CBS News uses a team of Arabic-speaking employees in London to review third-party videos, according to Christopher Isham, its Washington bureau chief.

ABC News, Reuters and other outlets use Storyful, a company that scours social sites and verifies videos through tests like comparing street scenes to maps and checking an uploader’s affiliated accounts. The New York Times has also worked with Storyful in the past. David Clinch, Storyful’s executive editor, said it first learned of a possible chemical attack last week from videos, and alerted its clients within an hour of the incident.

“This content is often the only content available,” Mr. Clinch wrote in an e-mail, “because news organizations either can’t get to the scene of suspected chemical attacks, don’t have anyone in Syria (some do but most don’t) or their staff cannot go out from Damascus.”

For those still within Syria, the challenge has simply been to stay safe. Mr. Isham said that CBS went to “extreme lengths” to protect its staff there, although he did not elaborate.

“Anytime you go into a combat zone, your folks are at risk,” he said. “You want to reduce that risk as much as possible.”

The Media Equation: Time Warner and CBS, Fighting for Themselves

It’s a significant inconvenience for viewers, but it is not the only irritation in the by-now-familiar rumbles between the companies that own the pipes and the companies that make the programming that goes into those pipes.

While it may be disappointing that some of us will miss a rerun of “Dexter” on Showtime, which is owned by CBS, or the network’s summer hit “Under the Dome,” what makes it worse is the suggestion by both sides that they are only trying to stick up for us. Blacked-out Time Warner Cable customers were confronted by the following propaganda on their screens:

“The outrageous demands from CBS, the owner of Showtime and TMC, has forced us to remove it from your lineup while we continue to negotiate for fair and reasonable terms.”

“Forced us ...” Really, Time Warner Cable? It seems more like the business negotiation you were having with one of your suppliers did not yield the desired result and you’ve chosen to turn up the heat.

Not to be outdone, a statement from CBS made sure everyone understood that the network was really doing the people’s work in responding to the news:

“CBS remains resolute in the pursuit of fair compensation for our programming and will use the full resources available to us to make sure that Time Warner Cable subscribers are aware of its shortsighted, anti-consumer strategy.”

There’s more where that came from — “disinformation,” “voodoo mathematics” and “wildly inflated percentages” — but you get the idea.

Here’s an idea for both parties: Leave us out of it.

We know that you are fighting over lucre, not our inalienable rights as cable consumers. Pretending that you are fighting on our behalf rather than in the interests of your shareholders and executives is infantilizing and unbecoming. CBS is coming off another record year, Time Warner Cable’s stock is storming along, and the fight over retransmission fees is about how the pie is sliced, nothing more.

We have all grown used to the respective parties turning programming on and off as the negotiating table requires, but your bombast is tired, your motives are transparent and it’s clear that the public dimensions of this business conflict are far down the list of priorities.

Writing in the comments section accompanying the news in The New York Times, one reader spoke for many of us:

“These games of chicken are depressingly common among cable companies and networks across the country — made all the more obnoxious by the marketing spin from both sides intended directed at customers they assume to be economic illiterates. They are nothing more than battles between media behemoths over who can stick their hands deeper into the pockets of the remaining viewers beholden to their dying business models.”So, as you were, guys. Continue to bash in each other’s heads all you want. Just don’t pretend this is a noble crusade for the consumer.

DealBook: SAC Prosecutor Hits the Media Trail

Bloomberg Media Recruits a New Chief From the Atlantic

On Monday, Bloomberg will announce that Mr. Smith, the president of Atlantic Media, will be named chief executive of the Bloomberg Media Group. He will report to Daniel L. Doctoroff, chief executive of Bloomberg. Andrew Lack, who managed the media division for five years, will become chairman.

After joining The Atlantic in 2007, Mr. Smith developed a reputation as an aggressive promoter of digital media who was able to reconfigure a 156-year-old magazine into a genuine multiplatform property.

In a letter to the staff about Mr. Smith’s departure, David Bradley, the owner of Atlantic Media, credited Mr. Smith with bringing the company to profitability for the first time under his ownership; doubling revenue; and creating a number of successful digital start-ups, including The Atlantic Wire and Quartz.

His quick results at the Atlantic Media Company drew the attention of executives at Bloomberg, who began talking to him at the end of last year.

“We know that every part of media is being disrupted by technology, and we need someone who understands that,” Mr. Doctoroff said. “Justin can drive things forward here because he has an incredibly digital sensibility with a unique understanding of the confluence of journalism and multiple platforms.”

The move will give Mr. Smith significant scale and a connection with Bloomberg’s lucrative terminal business, which produces revenue that allows the company to invest aggressively in media properties. The company has had success in moving from a linear television business to a more diverse model of video distribution, while the acquisition of Businessweek gave Bloomberg an editorial cachet it historically lacked.

Even with those successes, the media division has long been treated as a marketing amenity for subscribers to the terminal business. Despite its recent growth, the media division has struggled to gain a consumer base for its properties, which include television, print, radio, mobile, events and digital media.

The company was heavily criticized several months ago after revelations that some of its reporters had used the Bloomberg terminals to gain access to data about its users, prompting Eric T. Schneiderman, attorney general of New York, to begin looking into the practice, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The company’s assets — its success, its size and a hard-driving business culture — might make bringing about change difficult. But Mr. Smith said the fit was a natural one.

“If you look at the entrepreneurial roots of this company and its history of market disruption and innovation, I think it is the best positioned media company there is,” he said. The theory that large companies cannot innovate, he said, “has not been historically true at Bloomberg.” He added, “This is a company where you can take big risks with longer horizons.”

Before joining Atlantic Media, Mr. Smith opened the American edition of the British newsmagazine The Week in 2001. Before that, he was head of corporate strategy for The Economist in London, Hong Kong and New York. He also founded Breaking Media, a collection of Web sites that includes Above the Law, Dealbreaker and Fashionista.

Mr. Smith has no experience in the television business and said he would work closely with Mr. Lack in that area. He said he was interested in creating new products, including ones aimed at the global market, while bringing additional digital muscle to Bloomberg’s existing businesses.

Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, met Mr. Smith at one of Atlantic Media’s conferences and they became friends.

“How many people have really managed to be successful in digital media?” Mr. Schmidt said in a phone call. “Everyone has tried and few have been successful. Justin is one of them. He is moving very fast, but this is the next logical step. It’s a serious gain for Bloomberg.”

The Media Equation: VCR’s Past Is Guiding Television’s Future

First, an appeals court declined to rehear a case in which broadcasters sought to close down Aereo, a company that allows users to record and play back broadcast television over the Internet. And then last week, another appeals court declined to stop Dish Network, the satellite television company, from selling a service called Hopper, which lets viewers automatically skip ads.

The cases are far from settled, but the stakes could not be bigger. Broadcast television as we know it now stands on two legs: advertising and retransmission fees from cable providers. With Hopper skipping ads and Aereo allowing for distribution over the Internet without payment, profits might go dark.

But the legal cases also seem to defy a kind of common-sense logic: how can insurgents use programming created by someone else to their own ends without sharing revenue?

The answer could get very complicated, very fast, but let’s try to make it simple. The dawn of consumer-controlled television began with the clunky, whirring Sony Betamax in the 1970s. Networks and program providers didn’t like consumers making copies of their movies and TV shows, but a landmark Supreme Court case in 1984 held that taping and time-shifting on the part of viewers was “legitimate fair use.”

Everything we have seen since extends from that decision to let consumers into the driver’s seat. It helps to think of the digital video recorder as more of a capability than a device. Both Aereo, which uses antennas to record broadcast television, and Hopper, which records prime-time programming, can be considered DVRs in the cloud, and the cord going to each home happens to be very long (Aereo over the Internet) or comes via satellite signal (Dish).

In each instance, the courts have more or less held, the customers are doing the programming and recording, and as such, have the right to do so even if they are doing so remotely through a third party.

If a revolution is under way, it is happening in increments. The VCR in the corner gave way to the DVR on the set-top box, and now some of the recording lives in the cloud and is pulled down to a variety of devices, including televisions, tablets, computers and phones.

That new paradigm was affirmed in a more recent case that began in March 2006, when Cablevision announced that it would allow subscribers not only to record whatever they wanted, but to do so remotely on hard drives centrally maintained by the company. Despite the Betamax precedent, the television and movie industry promptly sued Cablevision, claiming that the cable company — not the consumer — was making the actual copy.

A district court in New York agreed, so Cablevision appealed to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 2007. Consumer control took a big leap forward the next year, when the court decided in favor of Cablevision, ruling that the people pushing the buttons were the ones making the copies and that the playback of those recordings was not a public performance that infringed on copyright.

“We are in a transition period, migrating toward a world where you are going to get the content you want without commercials,” said Jonathan Band, a lawyer and advocate for consumer choice. “But the truth of the matter is that you are still going to have to pay. The only thing really being argued is who gets the money.”

To his point, Fox has sued Dish, asserting that the Hopper ad-skipping service violates copyrights and breaches contracts, not to mention that the service takes direct aim at its business model.

CBS, NBC and ABC have also been pushing back in a variety of ways. Last Wednesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California denied an appeal from Fox over a federal judge’s decision last fall not to grant an injunction against the Hopper technology.

The judge writing the opinion, Sidney R. Thomas, held that the copies being made met the “fair use” standard set by the Betamax case. The opinion also pointed out that although Fox owned the copyright on the programs, it had no such claim on the commercials, so skipping them did not constitute infringement.

E-mail:carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @carr2n

Media Decoder: Outcry Against a Tooth Fairy Web Site

LOS ANGELES — The Real Tooth Fairies have encountered a pair of fangs.

The advocacy group Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood typically goes after the likes of Disney and McDonald’s, but its newest crusade centers on an unusually tiny company: TheRealToothFairies.com.

Aimed at girls 5 to 10 years old, the site sells themed merchandise (lost tooth organizer, $12.99) and offers games meant to promote kindness. For a fee, users can enter a role-playing world.

In a July 16 news release and Huffington Post column, the director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, Susan Linn, criticized the Web company for what she termed its “sexualized” fairies, whom she found to be “largely preoccupied with appearance, shopping, boyfriends — and leg hair!”

Ms. Linn argued that exploiting a childhood institution was particularly crass.

But what made her really angry was an investor video she discovered in the recesses of the Web.

Prepared by the start-up for nonpublic use, the video discusses revenue opportunities associated with lost teeth, emphasizing the number of baby teeth that girls lose annually, about 200 million. “And biology guarantees that will never stop,” a voice says.

TheRealToothFairies.com had YouTube remove the video, and hoped to move on. The site’s founder, Marilyn Bollinger, a North Carolina social worker and children’s book author, did not want to discuss the video when reached by telephone.

“Our focus is on the positive,” she said. “We have such a sweet, sweet brand. We hear from parents that we’re making a lot of happy memories.”

But moving on can be difficult in the Internet age.

Last week, Ms. Linn kept up the attack on Twitter and Facebook, nudging bloggers and the news media to pay attention. She noted, for instance, that a shorter version of the video appears on the investment site Gust.com.

Her campaign might seem akin to shooting a flea with a cannon. Ms. Linn conceded that it was unusual for her organization to go after a start-up, but she said that the site was focused on growth, and that the stature of the people involved with it required her to take the site seriously.

Ms. Bollinger’s husband, Howard, a former Hasbro executive who is the start-up’s chief financial officer, and Paul Yanover, a former Disney executive and now president of Fandango.com, appeared in the video.

A spokesman for Mr. Yanover said he only had a brief consulting role and no longer had anything to do with the site.

An Afghan Media Mogul, Pushing Boundaries

Around him, 4,000 Afghan fans were enjoying a break from the typical grind and violence of the nation’s daily life to swing flags and roar for their newly created teams. And in the rickety stands behind him, a clutch of well-groomed Afghan V.I.P.’s in traditional shalwar kameez clapped politely at Mr. Mohseni’s unlikely creation, a televised soccer final in a poor country still at war and in a location — a sports stadium — that only a decade and a half ago could as likely have been the bloody scene of a Taliban public execution as a soccer championship.

“Isn’t it fun?” said Mr. Mohseni, 47, a smooth, always-on-the-go networker with curly black hair and stylish brown-rimmed glasses.

He gesticulated with his BlackBerry as, 100 yards away, his TV cameras swiveled to follow the winning team parading before the crowd.

“It is normal,” he added.

Mr. Mohseni has brought a modicum of normalcy to Afghanistan. His new commercial soccer league is part of a broader Afghan media empire — the holding company is called the Moby Group — that he and his family have built after their return to Kabul from Australia in 2002. As a private company, Moby does not state its earnings publicly, but people familiar with its performance say it is likely to post revenue of more than $60 million in its current fiscal year.

In a country where the Taliban once banned television, where a television set costs about one-fourth of an average Afghan’s annual income and where the electricity supply is uneven, Mr. Mohseni has built a business in the bubble of security and prosperity afforded by the international presence in the country. He has done this with the start-up help of United States government money and with a cash injection last year from News Corporation, led by his friend Rupert Murdoch, with whom he shares an Australian background, a love of gossip and an obvious industriousness.

Now, like his native country, Mr. Mohseni stands on the cusp of the next phase of development. In the coming year, Afghanistan is facing both the withdrawal of most international troops and a tense political transition after presidential elections. Outside the stadium, beyond the police guards poised on nearby towers, the reality is that Afghanistan remains a poor, turbulent, chaotic nation that, some fear, may plunge into something even worse as its army confronts the Taliban alone without international support, as outside aid money dwindles and as warlords jostle for supremacy.

The coming years could leave Mr. Mohseni and his family empire perilously vulnerable to the Taliban and other political groups with whom he has clashed over the past decade. Moby employees have already endured death threats and detentions because of their breaking of conservative taboos like showing women on television and their criticisms of the government and insurgent groups.

Any return of the Taliban to power or the rise of a more conservative government — or even just an unpredictable breakdown in security — could make life painfully uncomfortable for those, like Mr. Mohseni, who are associated with pro-Western development. Their accomplishments, their wealth, even their lives could be at risk.

As the involvement of the United States winds down, the big question is what the American legacy will be. A flourishing independent media industry is an important pillar of the American strategy for rebuilding the country, and Moby has become an important part of that media landscape. But after creating three of the most-watched television channels in the country, two radio networks, a production company, an advertising agency, a music label, a mobile phone broadcast service and a magazine, Mr. Mohseni is focused on expanding beyond Afghanistan.

His company employs about 1,000 people, most of them in Kabul, but it will soon have about 20 offices in six countries. Its headquarters is in Dubai, and its strategy is to continue to grow in Afghanistan but to diversify into other countries in the region — like Iran, Iraq and Libya. He explains the new direction as a natural progression: to set up operations in large, underserved and often under-stress countries with the potential to grow.

“The business model now is a diversified media group that is active around the region,” he said in a recent phone conversation. “The strategy is to go into high-risk countries with growth of 20 to 30 percent. It is like a portfolio of junk bonds.”

Media Decoder: Weinstein Company Loses Appeal to Use Movie Title ‘The Butler’

Eliot Spitzer promises to spend plenty on the race for New York City comptroller without revealing where it comes from.

Mark Kozelek shares a song about his mom, who cleaned his ears, dropped him off at rehab and helped him buy a Les Paul.

Media Decoder: Weinstein Company Loses Appeal to Use Movie Title ‘The Butler’

Eliot Spitzer promises to spend plenty on the race for New York City comptroller without revealing where it comes from.

Mark Kozelek shares a song about his mom, who cleaned his ears, dropped him off at rehab and helped him buy a Les Paul.

E-Discovery and Social Media: Recap From TLI Litigation Summit, Part II

In September, The Legal Intelligencer hosted its first annual Litigation Summit in Philadelphia. This blog covers some of the information provided by Peter L. Mansmann, CEO of Precise Inc., who spoke about e-discovery challenges, solutions and trends. He was joined by Erin C. Burns of Roda Nast, Tara Gill Nalencz of Rawle & Henderson and Stuart Clair of Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney. During the program, I shared some of this information via Twitter with followers of the program?s hashtag. Here are some of the key points.

Disruptions: Social Media Images Form a New Language Online

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Media Decoder: The Other Snowden Drama: Impugning the Messenger

As a pure story, it’s tough to beat the Snowden saga. Man of intrigue? Roger. Crusading reporter? Check. A powerful government in hot pursuit? Yessir. Unclear agendas by foreign countries? Most certainly.

And as Edward J. Snowden made his way across the globe with a disintegrating passport and newly emerged allies, Twitter was there, serving up a new kind of chase coverage, with breathless updates from hovering digital observers speculating about the fleeing leaker’s next move. All day Sunday, it was like watching a spy movie unfold in pixels, except it was all very real and no one knows how it ends.

Almost lost in the international drama was a journalistic one in which Glenn Greenwald, the columnist from The Guardian, found himself in the gunsights on a Sunday morning talk show. The episode was part of a continuing story about the role of the press in conveying secrets to the public.

If you add up the pulling of news organization phone records (The Associated Press), the tracking of individual reporters (Fox News), and the effort by the current administration to go after sources (seven instances and counting in which a government official has been criminally charged with leaking classified information to the news media), suggesting that there is a war on the press is less hyperbole than simple math.

For the time being, it is us (the press) versus them (federal officials), which is part of the reason David Gregory ended up taking a lot of incoming fire for suggesting on NBC's “Meet the Press” on Sunday that Glenn Greenwald may have committed crimes, not journalism, when he published leaks by Mr. Snowden.

“To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?” he said in the interview.

Mr. Greenwald responded assertively.

“I think it’s pretty extraordinary that anybody who would call themselves a journalist would publicly muse about whether or not other journalists should be charged with felonies,” Mr. Greenwald responded.

“The assumption in your question, David, is completely without evidence — the idea that I’ve ‘aided and abetted’ him in any way.”

Mr. Gregory may have thought he was just being provocative, but if you tease apart his inquiry, it suggests there might be something criminal in reporting out important information from a controversial source.

In using the term “aided and abetted,” Mr. Gregory adopted the nomenclature of Representative Peter T. King, a Republican of New York who has argued that Mr. Greenwald should be arrested, lately on Fox News.

Writing in The Washington Post, Erik Wemple expressed deep skepticism about Mr. Gregory’s assumptions.

“The entire question of Greenwald’s ‘aiding and abetting,’ furthermore, collapses when considering what it would entail,” he wrote. “Snowden was a contractor for the National Security Agency. Over his years of work in intelligence, he developed an exquisite understanding of the government’s eavesdropping activities. Plus, he had passcodes and access privileges that came with his position.”

Mr. Gregory’s position on the show was that as a journalist raising questions he was “not actually embracing any particular point of view.”

“There’s a question about his role in this,” he said, referring to Mr. Greenwald. “The Guardian’s role in all of this. It is actually part of the debate; rather than going after the questioner, he could take on the issues. And he had an opportunity to do that here on ‘Meet the Press.'?”

The press is frequently accused of giving itself a pass, but the present moment would seem like a good time for a bit of solidarity. The current administration’s desire for control of information is not a new phenomenon, but at this juncture, there is a clear need for a countervailing force in favor of openness.

There will be, as Ben Smith pointed out on BuzzFeed, an attempt to depict the sources of information as rogues and traitors, a process that will accelerate now that WikiLeaks has begun assisting Mr. Snowden. “Snowden is what used to be known as a source,” Mr. Smith wrote. “And reporters don’t, and shouldn’t, spend too much time thinking about the moral status of their sources.”

Politicians would like to conflate the actions of reporters and their sources, but the law draws a very clear and bright line between the two in an effort to protect speech and enable transparency. Mr. Greenwald may have a point of view and his approach to journalism is through the prism of activism, but he functioned as a journalist and deserves the protections that go with the job.

Media Decoder: Hollywood’s Passion for Guns Remains Undimmed

As the blockbuster film season unfolds, every major studio has firearms of one sort or another in its marketing arsenal. At Sony Pictures Entertainment, Channing Tatum clutches a sidearm the size of Wyatt Earp’s as he walks Jamie Foxx to safety on the poster for “White House Down.”

At Paramount Pictures, Brad Pitt, zombie hunter, has an even bigger piece of personal artillery slung across his back in the promotional art for “World War Z.”

Johnny Depp packs a pistol in his pants on the poster for Disney’s “The Lone Ranger.” Melissa McCarthy grips what appears to be a full-blown grenade launcher in the advertisements for 20th Century Fox’s “The Heat.”

The glowing handguns on the art for Universal’s “R.I.P.D.” have a preternatural look; but what really gets your attention are those chillingly real guns being flashed by Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg, standing back to back, on the poster for the same studio’s “2 Guns.”

Warner Brothers, whose “The Dark Knight Rises” was playing in Aurora during last July’s shootings, has been soft-pedaling weaponry on its posters lately (unless you count the robots and helicopters pounding each other in the ads for “Pacific Rim”).

Still, Ken Jeong had some hot handgun moments in the red-band trailer for “The Hangover Part III.”

After the discussion of gun violence and pop culture at a January meeting between Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and a number of entertainment executives, the Motion Picture Association of America, an industry trade group, bolstered its ratings system with a campaign to remind parents of the content advisories that accompany a movie’s letter rating.

But don’t look for any move to change the movies, or the high-caliber images used to sell them. “We believe our role is to help parents be informed of a film’s content, not to dictate the content in any way,” Kate Bedingfield, an M.P.A.A. spokeswoman, said in an e-mail last week.

MICHAEL CIEPLY

E-Discovery and Social Media: Recap From TLI Litigation Summit, Part II

In September, The Legal Intelligencer hosted its first annual Litigation Summit in Philadelphia. This blog covers some of the information provided by Peter L. Mansmann, CEO of Precise Inc., who spoke about e-discovery challenges, solutions and trends. He was joined by Erin C. Burns of Roda Nast, Tara Gill Nalencz of Rawle & Henderson and Stuart Clair of Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney. During the program, I shared some of this information via Twitter with followers of the program?s hashtag. Here are some of the key points.

Media Decoder: Apple Is Said to Be Pressing to Complete Deals for Internet Radio

After months of stalled negotiations over its planned Internet radio service, Apple is pushing to complete licensing deals with music companies so it can reveal the service as early as next week, according to people briefed on the talks.

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Apple’s service, a Pandora-like feature that would tailor streams of music to each user’s taste, has been planned since at least last summer. But Apple has made little progress with record labels and music publishers, which have been seeking higher royalty rates and guaranteed minimum payments, according to these people, who spoke anonymously about the private talks.

While it is still at odds with some music companies over deal terms, Apple is said to be eager to get the licenses in time to unveil the service — nicknamed iRadio by the technology press — at its annual developers conference, which begins June 10 in San Francisco.

Apple has signed a deal with the Universal Music Group for its recorded music rights, but not for music publishing — the part of the business that deals with songwriting. Over the weekend, Apple also signed a deal with the Warner Music Group for both rights. It is still in talks with Sony Music Entertainment and Sony’s separate publishing arm, Sony/ATV, whose songwriters include Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga.

Representatives for Apple and the music companies declined to comment.

Apple’s Internet radio feature is expected to be free and supported by advertising, and would represent a relatively late arrival by the company into what has become a fast-growing — if low-margin — sector of the music business. Pandora has more than 70 million regular users, the vast majority of whom do not pay, and similar features have been introduced by Google, Spotify and the radio company Clear Channel Communications.

The licensing fees paid by Pandora have been a sore spot for music companies, which see promise in Apple’s service, particularly since it can be linked to sales through Apple’s iTunes store, but want higher rates. Publishers, for instance, are paid about 4 percent of Pandora’s revenue, but want as much as 10 percent from Apple.

Apple is said to be negotiating directly with the music groups because it wants more extensive licensing terms.

Media Decoder: Defying Naysayers, ‘Gatsby’ Proves a Box-Office Winner

LOS ANGELES — “If history is any indication,” a Forbes report read on May 3, “ ‘The Great Gatsby’ will bomb rather hard.” BoxOffice.com at one point projected very soft opening-weekend sales of about $24 million. Early on, several studios were so worried about the movie’s multiplex prospects that they passed on making it.

Oops.

“The Great Gatsby,” directed by Baz Luhrmann, has become the latest example of the Hollywood machinery getting audience interest wrong. “Gatsby,” adapted from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel and starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role, is now expected to take in at least $330 million worldwide.

With that kind of box-office success, the movie should be able to generate $200 million or so more from ancillary sources like DVD sales and reruns on cable channels, studio executives said.

Profitability is another matter, affected by unknown factors, including how compensation for Mr. DiCaprio and Mr. Luhrmann was structured. The movie was also expensive to make; executives who worked on “The Great Gatsby” contend it cost about $105 million after heftier-than-normal rebates from filming in Australia. Global marketing costs, after factoring in partnerships, ran $90 million. (Some insiders say those costs were substantially higher.)

Is it surprising that “The Great Gatsby” has succeeded? Apparently not to a lot of movie fans. Who would bet against Mr. DiCaprio in a flashy retelling of one of literature’s best-known stories?

A lot of people did. Village Roadshow, a film financier and production company, showed interest early on, agreeing to collaborate with Sony. But Sony, which had a flop with “How Do You Know” around the time “The Great Gatsby” was getting under way, decided it was too risky.

Members of Mr. Luhrmann’s management team said he then approached other studios but got one no after another: too expensive; mainstream audiences would not be interested; his last movie, “Australia,” was a disappointment.

Warner, with Village Roadshow, finally said yes, but only after Warner’s president of production, Greg Silverman, became an avid supporter of the project.

So, with the money now rolling in, is Mr. Luhrmann’s camp saying “told you so”? In true Hollywood fashion, it is gloating in private while trying — successfully, apparently — to get the word of its vindication out there.

Media Decoder: Equestria Girls, a My Little Pony Offshoot, in Its Movie Debut

The ponies, a Hasbro staple for 30 years, have experienced a resurgence of popularity lately, thanks in part to the TV series “My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.” Hoping to build on that interest, Hasbro recently revealed plans for brand extension called Equestria Girls.

The new property will get the red-carpet treatment when it premieres as a full-length animated feature at the Los Angeles Film Festival in June. The movie, created by Hasbro Studios, the company’s production division, will then be released in more than 200 theaters nationwide; its trailer will start appearing in theaters on Wednesday.

“We are responding to the desire by our fans to experience the brand in more ways,” said John A. Frascotti, Hasbro’s chief marketing officer. “They imagined themselves as which pony they would be or which pony they identified with the most.”

So Hasbro created Equestria Girls, a parallel world in which the My Little Pony characters were reconceived as teenage girls in high school. To maintain continuity, Hasbro retained the same creative talent, animation style and message of friendship.

“Our goal is to stay true to who those characters are,” said Meghan McCarthy, the head writer for the movie, adding that the high school setting allowed for new storytelling possibilities. “It’s new but still an extension of our mythology.”

The movie — titled “My Little Pony: Equestria Girls” — will be released on DVD later in the United States and other markets worldwide, followed by a television debut on the Hub network in the fall.

“It is a major strategic initiative for us,” Mr. Frascotti said, one that will feature toys, apparel, publishing and accessories. Multimedia components include an interactive Web site, content on YouTube and a partnership with Stardoll.com, a fashion Web site for girls.

Hasbro does not break out revenue for My Little Pony, but in its earnings statement in April, the company said its girls’ category rose 23 percent in the first quarter compared with the same period last year, growth that was helped in part by the My Little Pony brand.

Equestria Girls offers an opportunity to build on that growth, said Michael Vogel, vice president for development at Hasbro Studios. “This is a bold new direction,” he said.