Monday, June 06, 2005

Time For Anothe Panel on Blogger Ethics

Seriously. We're out of control:

AS the first lady of California, Maria Shriver serves as a busy unpaid adviser to her husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger. And in between writing her fifth book, raising four children and making public appearances, she is apparently serving NBC in a similar capacity.

Maria Shriver, wife of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, was an NBC reporter.
She reluctantly left her job at the network - where she worked as a reporter for "Dateline" - after her husband was elected, but she was recently drafted to help NBC's "Today" show decide whom to have on the air. At least, that's the story according to Laurence Leamer, the author of "Fantastic: The Life of Arnold Schwarzenegger," who was in negotiations for an appearance on both the "Today" show and "Dateline" to promote the book, which comes out tomorrow.

Things seemed to be going well until a series of e-mail messages in March between John Murphy, head of publicity at St. Martin's Press, which is publishing the biography of Mr. Schwarzenegger, and Andrea Smith, a producer at "Today" in charge of authors. In that exchange, it became apparent that before "Today" would officially book Mr. Leamer, he needed to first obtain Ms. Shriver's blessing. Ms. Smith said as much in an e-mail message she sent to Mr. Murphy on March 8, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times: "Anyway, you can ask Maria to call me so I can just make sure she is O.K. with us doing the Leamer book."