It was a big day on Monday (May 1st) over at ABC, as television host Kelly Ripa finally announced whom her new co-host for Live with Kelly is.
About a year ago, controversy ensued when Kelly was left feeling blindsided as her former co-host Michael Strahan exited from Live! and joined the panel of Good Morning America. Since Michael’s sudden departure, Kelly and the crew over at her daily morning show have been trying a suitable person to take over co-hosting duties with Ripa. Early on, tabloids reported that the show’s network, ABC, was seriously considering hiring on Anderson Cooper or Jerry O’Connell. However, on Monday, it was revealed that they went in another direction when enlisting a partner-in-crime for Kelly.
On Monday morning, after much anticipation, Kelly announced that former American Idol host Ryan Seacrest would be permanently joining the show. While Ryan wasn’t necessarily on the radar of potential co-hosts, it is not surprising that he managed to land the gig. Not only does Ryan have ample experience in hosting TV shows, he also has a notable following on social media, as well as plenty of experience working behind the scenes of TV productions (currently Ryan produces several shows for E!).
While sharing the exciting news of Ryan’s addition to the Live family, Kelly told the audience, “Today, the next story of the Live story is about to be written. Today is a very good day. I would like to thank all of the men and women who sat next to me co-hosting with me this past year. It’s not a big enough word, but they took time out of their busy schedules and took time away from their day jobs to hang out with me in the morning – part of what makes this show so special is that through helping us out, we all became family. They are a part of the Live family forever.”
In order to fulfill the obligations related to his new TV gig, Ryan will be relocating to New York City from the west coast, where he currently resides.
While Secrest’s announcement may have come as a surprise for viewers, it wasn’t for ABC insiders who are saying that the president of the network Ben Sherwood pushed this choice on Ripa. He wanted someone to be in her stature so she would be put on equal footing, sources said. After Strahan’s departure, word has been that Kelly wanted someone that she could have more influence with.
“Kelly made the mistake of being too picky,” our ABC source said. “ABC was tired of waiting, so they made the call for her, and it’s someone that she won’t be able to boss around.”
As anyone who has worked with Ryan Seacrest knows, he can hold his own.
The Kardashians just can’t seem to catch a break these days when it comes to their security. Just a few months after Kim was held at gunpoint and Kendall was robbed of over a million dollars worth of jewelry, Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner encountered her own security-related troubles.
According to media outlet TMZ, a fired security guard whom once worked for the gated community in which Kris resides, broke into the star’s gated community for the third time. Sources within local law enforcement revealed to the outlet that the security guard, Joshua Jacobs, broke the arm of the security gate, allowing him to potentially gain access to Kris’s Hidden Hills home.
Fortunately, Jacobs only made it to the front of Kris’s home when the star’s current security team tracked him down and detained him. Subsequently, local police took Jacobs in to the nearby police station. Reports claim that Jacobs was holding a sign-in sheet that was being used by the gated community’s security team when he was detained. Therefore, the police are looking at charging him with theft in addition to trespassing.
Carol Burnett typically spends her mornings doing crossword puzzles with her husband, but the comedy legend could return to a full-time work schedule if the pilot she recently shot for ABC becomes a regular series.
In “Household Name,” produced by Amy Poehler, Burnett plays an eccentric, aging movie star who arranged to continue living in her old mansion even though the home’s new owners, a young family, have already moved in.
Burnett says Poehler would play her daughter in future episodes.
“I’m looking forward to actually locking eyeballs with Amy because I know her and we’re friends,” Burnett said in a recent interview. “So I’m looking forward to the show in which, as I say, we’ll be able to lock eyeballs and get in the sandbox together.”
The actresses are appearing at a luncheon in Beverly Hills, California, on Wednesday to benefit the Children’s Institute. ABC is expected to announce its slate of new shows later this month.
Burnett also continues to appear onstage in live Q&A sessions around the country, and she’s developing a screenplay by her late daughter, Carrie Hamilton, into a movie with CBS Films.
President Trump’s campaign is criticizing CNN for refusing to air an advertisement touting the president’s achievements during his first 100 days in office, saying the network doesn’t want it because the ad “doesn’t fit their narrative.”
CNN said it requested that the campaign remove a portion that referred to the mainstream media as fake news.
Said CNN: “The mainstream media is not fake news, and therefore the ad is false and per policy will be accepted only if that graphic is deleted. Per our policy, it will be accepted only if the graphic is deleted. Those are the facts.”
The Trump campaign said the ad, which says “America has rarely seen such success,” is running on Fox News Channel and the Fox Business Network.
The Trump ad includes a photo split of MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos and CBS News’ Scott Pelley with ominous red overlay text of “FAKE NEWS” on the anchor’s faces.
“It is absolutely shameful to see the media blocking the positive message that President Trump is trying to share with the country. It’s clear that CNN is trying to silence our voice and censor our free speech because it doesn’t fit their narrative,” said Michael Glassner, Trump campaign executive director, in a statement that the president also promoted to his 22 million Facebook followers.
After his inauguration, Trump and his supporters have co-opted the phrase “fake news” — a term that gained usage last fall over the proliferation of demonstrably fake posts circulating on social media — as a way to discredit investigative journalists covering his administration.
CNN has been one of the broadcast outlets singled out multiple times by the President for its reporting on the scandals and missteps of his first 100 days in office, including fact-checking his unsubstantiated claims in onscreen chyrons.
Jeff Zucker, worldwide president at the network, has cast the “fake news” conversation and the cable news landscape in a stark light.
“Certainly in primetime and in the morning, Fox is state-run TV and is extolling the line out of the White House. MSNBC has become the opposition. And, I think, CNN is seeking the truth,” Zucker told The New Yorker‘s editor David Remnick during a recent podcast.
“I think it’s an unfortunate phrase,” Zucker said of the use of “fake news” as a weaponized political term by the Trump camp. He added: “I think we should all try to avoid it.”
As of Jan. 19, Trump was a declared presidential candidate 2020.
Megyn Kelly is getting off to a great start at NBC. She will travel to Russia next month to moderate a session with President Vladimir Putin at a key international conference.
Sources say Kelly, who officially started at NBC on Monday, will moderate the session interviewing Putin as part of the Russian leader’s annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum that takes place June 1-3.
Insiders say, “This is a great way for Megyn to get an inside track and land the big one-on-one interview with President Putin.”
It was revealed last month that NBC News chief Andy Lack had traveled to Russia to lay the groundwork for a Putin interview.
At the time, sources speculated on whether the interview would go to former Fox News anchor Kelly to launch her at NBC, or other big NBC News names like Matt Lauer would try to pull rank. Now it seems Kelly is on track for the “big Putin get.”
Kelly is hosting two shows for NBC — a Sunday night news magazine show, which starts in June, and a 9 a.m. “inspirational talk” show, which will start in the fall.
An NBC News spokesperson said, “Megyn Kelly of NBC News will moderate the plenary session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on stage with Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin. The conversation will cover a wide range of global political and economic topics, including international trade agreements, cyber-security and the impact of rising military tensions. The annual conference will take place from June 1 to 3, 2017. The exact time and date of the plenary session will be announced in the coming weeks.”
Showtime also has a big four-part Putin interview coming up. Filmmaker Oliver Stone interviews the Russian leader in “The Putin Interviews,” which will be screened over four consecutive nights starting June 12.
The dramatic split between Khloé Kardashian and longtime stylist Monica Rose may be about to get nasty media outlets are hearing.
As has been tirelessly reported, Kardashian — as well as her sisters Kendall and Kylie Jenner and model Gigi Hadid — have suddenly parted ways with superstylist Rose under “mysterious circumstances.”
Now it’s been learned Kardashian’s furious and wants to sue Rose over the sudden schism — but Rose says she can prove she’s done nothing but a great job for Kardashian.
The whole affair, which began several weeks ago, is causing heartache for everyone concerned.
“The Kardashians/Jenners are upset because [Rose] was like family to them,” said a source.
It seems that Rose — who’s been working with the family since becoming friends with Kim Kardashian in 2007 — is still working with other big-name clients including Chrissy Teigen, Chanel Iman, Cara Delevingne and Kaia Gerber.
Janet Jackson has confirmed a rumored split with her husband and says she plans to resume the world tour she called off more than a year ago during her pregnancy with her son.
Jackson says in a video posted on Twitter that she has separated from husband Wissam Al Mana. She says, “We are in court, and the rest is in God’s hands.”
The couple’s son was born in January.
The 50-year-old singer has also announced a return to the road on Sept. 7, 18 months after postponing her “Unbreakable” tour. She didn’t say where the performance will take place.
Jackson is also changing the name of the tour to “State of the World.”
The composer of the opening guitar riff for Eminem‘s “Lose Yourself” says the soundtrack of a New Zealand political ad is a “blatant rip-off.”
Jeff Bass told the High Court in Wellington on Tuesday that the song titled “Eminem Esque” that was used by the ruling National Party during its 2014 election campaign sounds like “Lose Yourself Lite.”
But, he added, “It doesn’t taste so good, though.”
Eminem’s music publishers Eight Mile Style sued the National Party over its use of the song. The judge-only copyright infringement case started Monday and is expected to last about six days.
The party has previously said it purchased the soundtrack for its TV ad from an Australian-based music supplier and doesn’t believe it has infringed anyone’s copyright.
Bass, who lives near Detroit and traveled to New Zealand to testify, picked up an acoustic guitar and strummed the famous riff that opens the Oscar-winning 2002 song in front of eight lawyers and a judge in the courtroom.
He said he wrote the song with Eminem and Luis Resto over 18 months.
“I picked up a guitar and started playing that opening guitar chord,” he said. “At that time, I didn’t know if it was a song or not.”
He said Eminem, aka Marshall Mathers III, put together a drum track but then they got stuck.
“It took him a number of months to author the perfect lyrics that were just right for the beat,” Bass said.
He said they finished as Eminem completed work on his film “8 Mile.”
“It really developed in a little studio we had set up in his trailer,” Bass said. He said Resto replaced some of the guitar elements with keyboards in order to remove some of the rock feel of the song without losing the hip hop tone.
Defense lawyers argue the musical composition of the song isn’t particularly original. One of them asked Bass if he considered the soundtrack Eminem Esque to be musically inferior.
“Being that it’s a blatant rip-off, yes,” Bass responded.
The lawyer asked if it was weaker because it was different. “It doesn’t feel like ‘Lose Yourself”’? the lawyer asked.
“It doesn’t feel like me playing ‘Lose Yourself,’” Bass said.
The lawyer asked Bass if he’d agree that the Led Zeppelin song “Kashmir” has a similar chord pattern.
“No. None whatsoever,” Bass responded.
Judge Helen Cull asked Bass if the guitar strum he’d performed in the courtroom was common.
Bass said that while he’d heard those chords played before, he’d never heard them in that particular rhythm. He said that by putting an accent on the third beat it was as if he was playing guitar and drums at the same time.
“The intention was to create a tense, hypnotic feeling,” Bass said. “It starts playing, and never goes away. Along with that drum beat, it actually will hypnotize you, where you are feeling that something’s going to happen.”
Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner’s divorce has now seen removal men show up at their shared home to haul their belongings to a new address.
Actor Affleck — who has been married to Garner for 12 years — is thought to have moved out of the family home, after she filed for divorce in mid-April, citing irreconcilable differences.
Affleck was on site supervising the move, and it looks to have been his stuff that was being taken to another location.
He and Garner have been separated for two years, but both remained in the family home with their three kids Violet, 11, Seraphina, 8, and Samuel, 5.
Now TMZ claims Affleck, who was sleeping in the family guesthouse all this time, is now seeing someone else and is “ready to move on.”
The “Batman v Superman” star is going to have to be patient about his divorce as the amount of property he and Garner own together will make it a slow process, as well as the fact they did not sign prenuptial agreements.
The divorce news follows the revelation that Affleck, 44, has been secretly battling an alcohol addiction in rehab.
He thanked his “co-parent” Garner, 45, in a confessional Facebook post a month before the divorce was announced.
Garner, who got together with Affleck after they co-starred in “Daredevil,” spent Easter with him, and the whole family attended a church ceremony.
Affleck and Garner’s divorce is expected to be finalized in around six months’ time.
Cheryl and Liam Payne have named their baby Bear.
They decided on the unusual name after spending a week getting to know the tot.
Five-week-old Bear will also take his One Direction star dad’s surname.
Last night a source revealed: “Cheryl and Liam wanted to get to know their baby before deciding on a name. They spent over a week getting to know him first before deciding. They wanted to get to know him before they decided on the name. They didn’t have the name Bear before the birth. But they’d been thinking of a name since meeting him, and they just felt it suited him. They love their little baby Bear Payne and are truly over the moon and loving being parents for the first time together.”
Cheryl, 33, has made only one public comment about their baby, three days after giving birth to the 7 lb. 9 oz. tot.
She said, “Liam and I became parents to an incredibly beautiful, healthy baby boy looking like a dream. Although he still doesn’t have a name he is already stealing hearts. We are all madly in love and overwhelmingly happy with our little arrival.”
The former “X Factor” judge and Girls Aloud star gave birth at London’s Chelsea and Westminster Hospital and Payne didn’t leave Cheryl’s side throughout the birth.
Payne, 23, broke his silence three days after the birth, on U.K. Mother’s Day, saying he felt “very blessed” by the arrival of their first child.
He said: “My close friends and family know there are very few times when I’m left speechless … wow! It’s a moment that I will never forget for the rest of my life and my favorite memory I have so far. I’m completely in awe of his incredible mother, and how she has been the whole way through this, she’s really made my dreams come true. I feel very blessed.”
The couple first met in 2009 when a young wannabe pop star Payne auditioned for her on “The X Factor.”
He then went onto mega-stardom thanks to his time in One Direction.
Their romance began the previous December after the “X Factor” judge divorced her second husband Jean-Bernard Fernandez-Versini, 36.