The Breakfast Meeting: Politics Bores the Networks, and Harry Tempts British Papers

By NOAM COHEN

Confident that the presidential election this year lacks the drama of 2008, ABC, CBS and NBC are cutting back coverage of the conventions, Jeremy W. Peters reports. This means, among other things, that the first night of the four-night Republican National Convention will be skipped entirely by the networks, including a speech by Ann Romney, Mitt Romney's wife. The other three nights will get an hour each. (The Democratic convention is only three nights long, but NBC will offer two of its three hours of coverage on the final night so it can carry an N.F.L. football game earlier in the week.)

• Brian Williams, the NBC anchor, said that “people have had it up to here” with political news, and added: “I'd love more coverage of the conventions. I also live in the real world.”

• Menacing plans for the Republican convention in Tampa, Fla., was a storm brewing in the Caribbean, Tropical Storm Isaac, The Tampa Bay Times reported. According to some models Isaac could reach Tampa by Monday, the start of the convention; other models show it breaking up over the mountains of Cuba and the Dominican Republic.

Photographs showing a naked Prince Harry in a Las Vegas hotel suite with a naked woman, or women, published by the Hollywood Web site TMZ were confirmed as genuine by palace officials in London, John F. Burns reported. While the two candid photographs - presumably taken by cellphones during a game of strip billiards - have been flashed around the world, they have been kept out of British publications, and off British Web sites, after royal aides asked Britain's newspaper watchdog, the Press Complaints Commission, to warn British newspapers not to publish them. The Telegraph reported: “Today their warning appeared to have worked, with no British newspapers publishing the images despite them being freely available on the Internet.”

• To some, including the CN N host Piers Morgan who is a former British tabloid editor, this restraint was a sign of less-than-fully-free press. His post to Twitter: “Oh, the irony of every single media outlet in the world now running Prince Harry photos â€" EXCEPT the ‘naughty' British tabloids. #shackled”
• Of course, even at the “shackled” British Web sites, the images were merely a click away.

The conservative documentary “2016: Obama's America” is the top movie for advance ticket sales, according to online ticketing service Fandango, The Hollywood Reporter writes. The movie, codirected by Dinesh D'Souza and based on his book that argues that President Obama pursues his father's left-leaning, “anticolonial” ideals, will expand to 1,075 theaters on Friday. Last weekend, The Hollywood Reporter noted, the film grossed an impressive $1.2 million in only 169 theaters.

The British betting house Ladbrokes has set its odds for the Nobel Prize in Literature, with Ha ruki Murakami topping the list at 10/1 odds. The listing of the odds was flagged in a Twitter message by Publishers Weekly, and are given respect â€" last year the Swedish poet and eventual prize winner, Tomas Transtromer, was considered the second favorite. (The biggest payout is for the writers at 100/1 odds, including Jonathan Franzen.)