I suppose there are two periods of my father’s life. Before unemployment. And afterwards. Continue reading
Why I will never be a Conservative
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Tag Archives: CBS News
Frank Rich sees the future…
NYT columnist Frank Rich, who must lack a tiny bit of self-irony, takes aim at the ‘bloviators’ covering the Obama campaign. But in the course of his musings a little internet-inspired doubt creeps in. :
Journalists are still Americans — even if much of our audience doubts that — and in this time of grave uncertainty about our nation’s future we may simply be as discombobulated as everyone else.
We, too, are made anxious and fearful by hard economic times and the prospect of wrenching change. YouTube, the medium that has transformed our culture and politics, didn’t exist four years ago. Continue reading
TV News: faking it in the good old days
I stumbled upon this TV news “fakery” classic from the early 1960s, which comes care of CBS veteran Daniel Schorr’s memoir, Clearing The Air. Schorr is lunching his boss, CBS chief, Bill Paley. Continue reading
My tiny part in Charlie Wilson’s War
And I mean barely discernible. Towards the end of Charlie Wilson’s War, Texan congressman Wilson (played by Tom Hanks) having helped finance the covert war in Afghanistan looks up at a TV screen and sees Dan Rather introduce a piece that begins with the final column of Red Army tanks crossing the Friendship bridge back into the old Soviet Union.
There is a brief upsot and the voice of CBS News correspondent Barry Petersen comes through, narrating their departure. Watching it took me instantly back to February, 1989.
I took in Petersen’s piece as a very junior CBS staffer, track and rushes. I remembered the shots and the script. Barry always did an on-camera countdown into his pieces to camera: “In — uh — three — uh — two — uh — one…”
But what I most remember from those day of multiple telexes to arrange satellite paths, microwave hops to earth stations, and unreliable landlines, is the sheer number of people involved in co-ordinating the whole process. Staggering.
The eternal brain drain…
Alan Mutter’s Brain Drain post, is a reminder of how political many old media organizations are:
young net natives, for the most part, rank too low in the organizations that employ them to be invited to the pivotal discussions determining the strategic initiatives that could help their employers sustain their franchises.…Members of the wired generation say the process, bureaucracy and caution common to most media companies steals spontaneity and edginess away from ideas that could be appealing to their peers.
It was ever thus. At the start of the 1990s, when CBS News used to travel in high style, I wrote a naïve memo suggesting that with Hi-8 cameras (remember them?) and low-cost airline fares we could revolutionise newsgathering — expand it and cut costs. The memo went down like the proverbial bag of cold sick with fellow staffers who — probably rightly — saw me as an irritating little irk.
Instead, CBS News carried on doing what it did, while I learned not to write stupid memos, and instead concentrated on finding someone to let me go to more dangerous and interesting places.
Eventually, in my early 30s, I got a chance at Channel 5 to do some of the radical things that could have been done in my early 20s. But by that time the money was disappearing from television news faster than viewers…
Bored by Burma
The BBC Editors blog has this comment from Anthony, after a post by Steve Herrmann explaining the moral and logistical complexities of online coverage from Burma:
Although I’m rather appalled at myself for thinking this — I find the current wave of Burma coverage very dull and uninteresting.In particular — absent the nice juicy massacre the media seem to be poised for — it doesn’t deserve to be top of news bulletins across the BBC for the umpteenth day running.
Days and days of something not quite happening is not news.
When a presidential announcement about the invasion of Panama interrupted The Bold and the Beautiful, a tough female colleague of mine on the CBS News foreign desk took a call from a complaining viewer.
“Ma’am,” — she said, “if you don’t think that’s more important than some crappy soap opera, you don’t deserve to watch television.”
Those were the days.
Still, though I hate to concede it, at least Anthony is being honest. Most viewers just flip.