A Federal Trade Commission staff report today delivered at the start of a two-day workshop looking into whether food marketing is responsible for the increase in childhood obesity in the U.S. suggested the amount of food advertising children see on TV has decreased substantially since 1977.

About 350 food company executives, government officials, consumer advocates and academics packed a meeting room at the Federal Trade Commission's offices yesterday to discuss a wide range of issues on marketing food to children. One topic not up for discussion was the idea of government regulation.

For a few years now, primetime has been awash in crime. In addition to "CSI," "Law & Order" and all their progeny, there are series that revive old investigations, trace vanishing people and mentally grasp clues out of the ether. Not a single one of them came away with an Emmy nomination for best drama Thursday.

While anecdotal evidence suggests that men are more likely to monopolize the remote, a new study suggests that women are in the driver's seat when it comes to using a digital video recorder. In a national survey of 1,000 DVR users divided equally by sex, 48 percent of married women say the decision to purchase a DVR was their own, while 55 percent of the wives claim they understood how to interface with their unit's myriad features better than their husbands.

Former Ogilvy & Mather executive Thomas Early was sentenced to 14 months in jail and ordered to pay a $10,000 fine for scheming to overbill the government on a national anti-drug campaign.

As the president and top creative of Fallon Worldwide's New York office announced their departure, the agency has simultaneously announced they will not be replaced and that the office will be closed.

Telephone and cable TV companies are slashing broadband prices and boosting connection speeds as the two monopoly-prone industries prepare to lock horns on multiple fronts. Comcast Corp. fired the latest shot in the battle this week by announcing plans to boost the speed of its entry-level cable broadband service to 6 megabits per second - as much as four times faster than a typical DSL connection over a phone line.

Magazines made slim gains in ad pages for the first half of the year, rising 1.8%, to 114,345.6, compared with the same period last year, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.

Six months into its extensive rebranding campaign, MTV2 is celebrating the rewards it has reaped with its new look and feel with a pair of "advertainment/entertisement" spots that wed the network's hipster image with young-skewing ad partner Sprite.

"Desperate Housewives," a dark satire about suburbia that became an instant television hit in its debut season, was among top nominees announced Thursday for the 57th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards. The ABC series, competing in the comedy category, received 15 nominations, sharing status as series front-runner with the rowdy NBC sitcom "Will & Grace," which also got 15 bids.