The Breakfast Meeting: Lobbying Romney to Pick Ryan, and Seeking an Olympic Afterglow

By NOAM COHEN

Mitt Romney's selection of Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin over the weekend to be his running mate is being credited with shoring up Mr. Romney's conservative bona fides - something his campaign would have known because conservative publications had been telling him through editorials that he should pick Mr. Ryan to shore up his conservative bona fides. The Weekly Standard and The Wall Street Journal both wrote editorials promoting Mr. Ryan for the Republican ticket: The Journal's editorial on Thursday (Why Not Paul Ryan?) and The Weekly Standard's editorial dated Monday but online earlier (Go for the Gold, Mitt!). Perhaps this is the reason, Michael Barbaro writes, that Mr. Romney's camp was eager to announce the day he made the decision, Aug. 1: “Mr. Romney is sensitive to the perception that he acts at the behest of the party's right wing. Now, he is making the case that he had settled on Mr. Ryan well before a chorus o f conservatives told him to.”

• Dylan Byers, writing in Politico, notes that this is the second consecutive example of Bill Kristol (an earlier backer of Sarah Palin) successfully making the case for a vice-presidential nominee via the magazine he edits, The Weekly Standard. Mr. Byers reached out to the campaign for comment. “Bill Kristol?” Andrea Saul, the Romney campaign press secretary, asked in response to Politico's request for comment. She declined to say anything more.
• The reviews were in immediately, including from Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corporation own The Journal, and who once owned The Weekly Standard. He took to Twitter to write: “Thank God! Now we might have a real election on the great issues of the day. Paul Ryan almost perfect choice.”

The London Olympics were a boon to NBC, drawing a bigger audience than it had predicted, never mind the online objections to coverage that focused on taped packages of the big events. But the network is still waiting for results - namely whether promotion of new fall series during the Games will help them become successful, Bill Carter writes. The network's track record would leave little reason for hope, with a litany of shows in previous years that were screened before the huge audience watching the Games and then quickly disappeared, including “LAX,” “Father of the Pride” and “Crusoe.” Minimally, the network believes the Games will give a shot in the arm to its news programs.

MundoFox, a new Spanish-language network, began airing on Monday in 50 cities in the United States, including Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami and New York, Tanzina Vega reports. (By the end of the year it will reach nearly 80 percent of Latino audiences in the country.) The network, which is a partnership between Fox International Channels, owned by the News Corporation, and RCN Television in Colombia, is a $50 million effort to compete with the dominant pla yers Univision and Telemundo. Executives compare the effort to Fox's beginnings, 25 years ago, when it had to carve an offbeat identity different than the big three networks. The prime-time programming will be more American-style, she writes, infusing more action, quick wit and on-location shoots into scripted shows.

The recent efforts by the newsweeklies Time and Newsweek to reach the public with attention-grabbing covers - the latest being Newsweek's image of a woman waiting eagerly for a dangling piece of asparagus - speak to magazines' steep uphill challenge. Newsstand sales and advertising are down, and it is hard to see how magazines can return to their dominant role in the culture, David Carr writes in his Media Equation column.

The fatal shooting by police officers of a man brandishing a knife in Times Square on Saturday afternoon sent crowds scrambling for cover (or for their cellphones and cameras), Patrick McGeehan writes. On the City Room blog, Michae l Schwirtz and Aaron Edwards cataloged some of the photos and videos taken by bystanders, as well as the online debate about how the police responded. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg agreed with his police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, on Sunday, saying the officers “probably acted in responsible ways” in trying to stop “somebody who must have been mentally deranged.”