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Steve Lange arrived at KNBC as vice president for content just last January. Sources at the station today say he's leaving. Whether he was exactly fired or not will come out in the wash, as granny used to say. The LAT's Jim Rainey had fingered Lange as being behind the outlandish amount of content leveraging that Channel 4 has been doing. Lange is also associated with J2 Strategic Communications, a media training company that counts as associates other TV news folks, including former Channel 2 and E! personality Steve Kmetko and ex-reporter Terry Murphy.
* Times chases the story: The L.A. Times posted a blog entry at 2:49 p.m. — no acknowledgement that the paper was beaten on the news of course — saying Lange resigned to return to his production company. Rainey tweeted nearly three hours later that he would "have the full scoop" in tomorrow's media column.
Rainey column: "At the same time the station announced Lange's sudden departure, its management issued a statement conceding that it had not lived up to its 'journalistic standards' when it aired a faked-up news segment in February about new federal credit card rules."