Lateline to go? Both Fairfax and News Corp have more on the ABC cuts this morning. The Australian‘s media section reports ABC brass are considering axing Lateline “under an organisational restructure”, while the Smage stops short of naming the late-night news show but does warn a “high-profile news TV program” may not return next year due to “government budget cuts”. The Australian’s report also focuses on an internally commissioned consulting report being given to the board soon, which reportedly recommends slightly less drastic cuts than the government-commissioned Lewis Review. Earlier, Crikey reported Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull was facing resistance from the broader cabinet to a 4% cut, so now a cut of 10% of the ABC’s budget is being contemplated. — Myriam Robin

Howard exclusive doesn’t net Seven a win. Sunday Night’s exclusive interview with former prime minister John Howard was a bit like watching a ghost (Banquo?). We’ve all moved on, who cares what a former PM thinks? He had his chance at the time in a long reign. Viewers decided that the musings of Lazarus were not sufficiently interesting to drag themselves away from 60 Minutes, or The Code on ABC 1. In metro markets at 8pm, 60 Minutes, with 1.211 million viewers, easily beat Sunday Night, which had 1.058 million. Nationally, 60 Minutes, with 1.848 million, was easily more popular than Sunday Night. In regional markets 60 Minutes had 632,000 to SN’s 621,000. It was a rare head-to-head clash between the two programs and Nine did better. — Read more in Glenn Dyer’s TV ratings (below).

They said what on TV? Here’s a toy you might want to play around with for an hour or two — “Bookworm: Movies”.

Film and TV can be pretty good indicators of exactly what’s capturing the imagination of society, and by looking at some trends in dialogue it’s pretty amazing what you can uncover. Bookworm, established by Benjamin Schmidt, a professor in history at Northeastern University in Massachusetts, allows you to search the frequency that words have shown up in film and television over the past 100 years. It uses subtitles from 87,000 films and TV shows, and allows you to customise everything you search for, right down to the TV show a word appears in. So you can even go so far as to see how often Bart shouted his catch phrase “Ay, caramba!” over the 25 years of The Simpsons.

Turns out it was a favourite of the writers right at the start, and made a big comeback in 2013.

Or you can see exactly how much “terrorism” has been on the minds of TV and film writers.

It peaked at 2004, but it seems Hollywood is starting to move on.

Or just for fun, we decided to see how often “crikey” has shown up …

We’d be surprised if any of these mentions related to us, but you can see a clear spike when we launched back in 2000 (perhaps we just have Steve Irwin to thank?). — Read more at Crikey’s Daily Review.