How would you fix a prob­lem in TV News? Say, the Couric Even­ing News? Before you send in your run­ning order and per­son­nel tweaks, your graph­ics ideas and story sug­ges­tions remem­ber you are a journ­al­ist not a net­work boss. This is how bosses think (my ital­ics):

Karmazin, the former chief of CBS (CBS), was asked for his thoughts on how to fix the once legendary but now flag­ging CBS Even­ing News. “What would I do with the CBS Even­ing News? I chal­lenged every­body when I was there. I said, ‘Let’s elim­in­ate it.’ You know, I mean who cares?” he says. “The issue was that that became imprac­tical because if you’re a net­work, you’ve got to have a news organization.”

His real answer is no less pro­voc­at­ive. “What I would have done, I tried to do, and that was buy CNN,” he says. “Time Warner (TWX) should own Cable­vi­sion (CVC). And if, in fact, they were to buy Cable­vi­sion, they would have needed some money. And I don’t think CNN is a core asset for Time Warner. CNN could have been a cheap way of doing the even­ing news. I would say cer­tainly one of my biggest dis­ap­point­ments was not being able to buy CNN.”

Karmazin was strok­ing a white Per­sian cat as he spoke…