The Breakfast Meeting: More 47 Percent Fallout and a Diller-Rudin E-Book Venture

September 19, 2012, 9:51 am

By THE EDITORS

The now-infamous 47 percent video â€" secretly taped at a Mitt Romney donor event in May â€" is still reverberating in media circles as well as political ones.

Mother Jones, which posted the full version of the video Tuesday, enjoyed one of its best days online, according to Clara Jeffery, one of the magazine's co-editors. James Carter IV, the unemployed researcher who helped bring the video to light, received a congratulatory note from his grandfather, the former president Jimmy Carter. (Earlier, Ben Smith at BuzzFeed chronicled the video's long strange trip to Mother Jones.)

President Obama had a public opportunity to respond to the video during his appearance on “Late Show” with David Letterm an, saying that Mr. Romney “was writing off a big chunk of the country.” As Bill Carter reports, the host also managed a reference to Clint Eastwood's performance at the Republican National Convention and “got an immediate laugh by noting the empty spot next to the president and asking: ‘Is there anything you want to say to the empty chair?'”

Barry Diller, the chief of IAC/InterActiveCorp, and Scott Rudin, the Broadway and Hollywood impresario, are getting into the e-book business. The pair have teamed up with Frances Coady, a publishing industry veteran, to invest in The Atavist, the Brooklyn-based electronic book publisher. The new venture, called Brightline, will look to eventually publish physical books as well.

Apple, which has aggressively gone after its rivals in commercials like “1984” and its series of “Mac vs. PC” ads, is now on the receiving end. Samsung, which recently lost a billion dollar patent case to Apple, has been taking direc t aim at the new iPhone in a series of print ads, including one with the headline “It doesn't take a genius.” On the blog Gizmodo, Apple fans immediately began retaliating with their own parodies based on the Samsung ads, one with the headline “Don't settle for cheap plastic.”

The magazine Closer, which recently published topless photos of Kate Middleton, has been ordered by a French court to stop all distribution of the pictures and to hand over the originals to the royal family.

Also in France, the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has published cartoons mocking the prophet Muhammad, setting off another wave of protests in the Middle East. In New York ads calling Islamic jihad “savage,” will soon appear in subways after a federal court ruled that the transit authority could not refuse the ads, which were purchased by the American Freedom Defense Initiative, a pro-Israeli group.

NBC's hit show “The Voice” will add Usher and Shakira as stand- in judges while two of the show's biggest stars, Christina Aguilera and Cee Lo Green, take one season off to record and tour.

And Steve Sabol, for years the creative force behind NFL Films, the revered and much satirized chronicler of the football league, has died at the age of 69.