XM Satellite Radio Holdings announced an 11-year, $650 million deal with Major League Baseball. With this move, XM picks up the gauntlet tossed down by Sirius Satellite Radio on Oct. 6. That's when Sirius announced a five-year, $500 million deal with blue-talking shock jock Howard Stern, who'll vamoose from his current digs at Viacom's Infinity Broadcasting.

Under mounting political, legal and financial pressure, Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. yesterday backed away from its plan to carry a film attacking John F. Kerry's Vietnam War record, saying it would air only portions of the movie in an hour-long special scheduled for Friday.

The Sinclair Broadcast Group, facing increasing pressure from shareholders and advertisers over its plans to broadcast a documentary critical of John Kerry's antiwar activities more than 30 years ago, said yesterday it would not show the film in its entirety.

The documentary that Sinclair Broadcast Group has instructed 40 of its television stations to feature in a broadcast on Friday night makes some of the most serious accusations against Senator John Kerry of the campaign. The accusations include that he single-handedly prolonged the Vietnam War, worsened the torture of prisoners of war and ultimately caused countless, needless deaths with his antiwar activism 30 years ago.

There is nothing more painful than watching a comedian turn self-righteous. Unless of course, the comedian is lashing out at smug and self-serving television-news personalities. Jon Stewart could not resist a last dig at CNN's "Crossfire" during his monologue on Comedy Central on Monday night . "They said I wasn't being funny," the star of "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" said, rolling his eyes expressively. "And I said to them: 'I know that. But tomorrow I will go back to being funny," Mr. Stewart said, adding that their show would still be bad, although he used a more vulgar …

Magazine Publishers of America (MPA) and its member companies have united to launch an unprecedented three-year initiative to boost awareness in the advertising community about the effectiveness of consumer magazines, it was announced recently by Nina Link, President and CEO of MPA. It marks the first time that the magazine industry has worked together on a large-scale, multi-year marketing effort. The initiative's goal is to reassert the strength of magazines' role in marketing plans based on recent studies into readers' and advertisers' behavior. Fallon New York has been hired as the agency for an account valued at more than $40 …

Can David Pecker, publisher of the National Enquirer and Star, turn his company into a glossy-magazine Bigfoot?

Change is necessary to overcome several threats to direct marketing, Don Logan, chairman of Time Warner's media and communications group, stressed in his keynote session yesterday at the Direct Marketing Association's 87th Annual Conference and Exhibition here.

A keychain gadget allows people to turn off most televisions, whose flashing images and background drone inventor Mitch Altman compares to second-hand smoke.

The issue of advertising prescription drugs directly to consumers is at the heart of a lawsuit filed yesterday against the pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca by a coalition of consumer activists representing labor, retired workers and the elderly.