Alec Baldwin swapped the Emmy Awards for a night out at a Tony Bennett concert after organisers decided to cut the actor's controversial joke about phone hacking from the telecast's opening sequence.
The 30 Rock funnyman was due to appear in a pre-recorded scene at the start of the Sunday night prize-giving and had shot a clip in which he joked about the recent snooping scandal at now-defunct British tabloid the News of the World.
The segment was broadcast ahead of the awards ceremony on the Fox network - a subsidiary of the NewsCorp company which also owned the News of the World - but Baldwin's joke had been cut out.
The actor was seething over the edit - and he ended up snubbing the awards in favour of Tony Bennett's 85th birthday gig in New York.
In a series of posts on his Twitter.com page, Baldwin wrote, "I did a short Emmy pretape a few days ago. Now they tell me NewsCorp may cut the funniest line..." before later adding, "Fox did kill my NewsCorp hacking joke. Which sucks bc (because) I think it would have made them look better. A little... I understand NewsCorp killing that joke... If I were enmeshed in a scandal where I hacked phones of families of innocent crime victims purely 4 (for) profit, I'd want that 2 (sic) go away, 2 (sic)."
WENN.com