Poor Cory Booker. It turns out that it’s easier to rescue old ladies from burning buildings than to step into the 2012 election without, well, stepping in it. Booker, the Democratic mayor of Newark, N.J., appeared on Sunday’s “Meet the Press” on NBC to act as a surrogate for President Obama’s reelection campaign. And he did a perfectly serviceable job. Asked about the allegations that Obama is anti-business, he said that “over 90% of Americans have seen tax cuts under this president,” which is absolutely true. Asked about the auto bailout, he said that Mitt Romney “would have let the auto industry fail,” which is mostly true. And asked about tax reform, he said “the president’s put forth a bipartisan plan,” which is not, as far as I know, actually true, but certainly makes Obama sound good. Read full article > >

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What Romney should have learned at Bain

Respondents to an AP-CNBC poll say.

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Few Facebook Users Click Ads

NEW YORK — Fox will plant four comedies on Tuesday’s schedule, including one originally developed by NBC for its star Mindy Kaling. Her new show, “The Mindy Project,” will immediately follow “New Girl” — Fox’s most promising launch from last fall. Read full article > >

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TV Column: Fox picks fall trifecta: Britney Spears, Demi Lovato and Mindy Kaling

The father who came to our family-medicine clinic with his young daughter seemed concerned. The girl, he said, had become a voracious consumer of books. But not in a good way. “She eats them,” he explained, describing how she tore away the pages, one by one, and put them in her mouth, munching and chewing on them. Read full article > >

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Pica, the compulsion to eat dirt and other oddities, is found in many cultures

NBC renews ‘Parenthood’ as well.

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‘30 Rock’ Lands Final Season

Dick Wolf’s back, and NBC’s still got him. NBC has renewed “Law & Order: SVU” for a 14th season because the show averaged nearly 8 million viewers. These days, that’s a good crowd for NBC because “L&O: SVU” is the network’s sixth-most-watched show — behind only Sunday football, “Harry’s Law,” “Smash” and two nights of “The Voice” — and because it averages more 18-to-49-year-olds (who are the currency of NBC’s ad sales) than “Community,” “30 Rock,” “Parks and Recreation,” “Awake,” “Grimm,” “Are You There, Chelsea?” and “Fashion Star.” Read full article > >

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‘Law & Order: SVU’ to return for 14th season, thanks to ratings

Dick Wolf’s back, and NBC’s still got him. NBC has renewed “Law & Order: SVU” for a 14th season because the show averaged nearly 8 million viewers. These days, that’s a good crowd for NBC because “L&O: SVU” is the network’s sixth-most-watched show — behind only Sunday football, “Harry’s Law,” “Smash” and two nights of “The Voice” — and because it averages more 18-to-49-year-olds (who are the currency of NBC’s ad sales) than “Community,” “30 Rock,” “Parks and Recreation,” “Awake,” “Grimm,” “Are You There, Chelsea?” and “Fashion Star.” Read full article > >

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‘Law & Order: SVU’ to return for 14th season, thanks to ratings

New comedies in which Anne Heche thinks she’s channeling God, and Matthew Perry believes he can save the Holy Grail of broadcast TV, are among NBC’s early pickups for next season. Although the broadcast networks aren’t set to unveil their plans for the 2012-13 TV season to advertisers until next week, NBC has been quietly staffing some new series it wants to launch out of the London Summer Olympics, whose closing ceremonies are scheduled for Aug. 12. Read full article > >

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NBC games the system with its summer TV roster

Education Secretary Arne Duncan became the third member of the Obama administration to come out in favor of same-sex marriage. “ Yes, I do ,” he said when asked if he thought same-sex couples should be allowed to marry. That was all he said. No song-and-dance. No equivocation. Just a straightforward answer. How refreshing. Read full article > >

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Jonathan Capehart: Obama should repeat after Arne Duncan: ‘Yes, I do’ on gay marriage

On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the vice president appeared to go beyond President Obama’s views on the issue.

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The Caucus: Biden ‘Comfortable’ With Gay Marriage

Congress moved one step closer Wednesday to overhauling the cash-strapped U.S. Postal Service by approving sweeping reforms to rebalance the mail agency’s finances and help cut the size of its delivery network. Read full article > >

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Senate approves changes for the U.S. Postal Service

Newspapers run corrections all the time, but a mistake on television news, like NBC’s misleading editing of an audio clip by George Zimmerman, is often followed by silence.

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The Media Equation: TV News Corrects Itself, Just Not on the Air

Excluding the impact from the sale of NBC Universal, General Electric’s quarterly revenue also rose 4 percent, as the company increasingly returned to its industrial roots.

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G.E. Profit Beats Expectations

IT DOESN’T ADD up. Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, inadvertently added some detail Sunday night to his promise to lower individual income tax rates by 20 percent across the board. Overheard by reporters as he spoke to a group of donors, Mr. Romney gave for the first time a glimpse of how — or so he claims — he would accomplish this rate-lowering without losing revenue. “I’m going to probably eliminate, for high-income people, the second-home mortgage deduction,” Mr. Romney said. Deductions for state and local income and property taxes could be on the chopping block as well. “By virtue of doing that, we’ll get the same tax revenue, but we’ll have lower rates,” he explained. Read full article > >

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Editorial Board: Romney’s inadequate ideas to pay for tax cuts

The numbers are finally in: Matt Lauer and gang beat Katie Couric by 187,000 viewers last week, according to final ratings from Nielsen. The Couric-hosted “Good Morning America” attracted an average of just fewer than 5 million viewers — the show’s biggest audience in four weeks. But the size of “Today’s” crowd went up more: Only 119,000 viewers separated the NBC show and ABC’s trailing “GMA” the previous week. Read full article > >

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For all its running, ‘Good Morning America’ falls further behind