Posted on 04/10/2008 1:04:49 PM PDT by slackattack19
The problem with CBS and Katie Couric is not that the show isn't working. CBS Evening News is a mother on life support and Katie was just stillborn. She never had a chance. Ever since CBS lied about the Bush National Guard story, it has as much credibility as, well....a major news network that makes up news. Small disconnect in that strategy but overcomeable with time except for the fact that CBS, ABC, and NBC are running out of time.
All three of the major networks have been losing evening news viewers for the past 10 years in a major way. Part of it is because of other mediums like the internet and other news/entertainment formats that are much more real time and accurate and don't have the political bias that is so blatantly obvious all the while pretending not to be blatantly obvious or biased. The evening news is a throwback to when we all worked at the great River Rouge plant in Detroit or at Ittman No. 3 in the West Virginia coal mines.
(Excerpt) Read more at theuncommonsenseblog.com ...
My dad, 66, still HAS to tune into the nightly news. When he’s over my house, we get into royal arguments over what’s being spoonfed to him. I pick it apart and still insists on believing the canned news stories because that’s how he grew up.
That's life, Perky One.
Good article but I disagree with that last sentence. Everything has 'bias'. I don't expect FreeRepublic to be non-biased. In fact I'm attracted here precisely because of a certain point-of-view (call it bias if you will).
He's right about the Networks pretending to be non-biased. I think that they teach objectivity with a nod and a wink at J-school.
It takes a blogger to hit the truth with more energy than the MSM “pundits”. Good article.
We will reach a day where all news delivery is admittedly biased, and everybody will know what those biases are. The only ones with no credibility will be the ones who claim to be unbiased.
No, it's CBS and the death of Fair and Balanced Truth.
During Vietnam the Networks were the only source of news, so they could claim the Tet Offensive was a great defeat for the U.S., when in reality the Viet Cong suffered their worst defeats during Tet.
CBS and the rest of the MSM are continuing to operate in a 'business as usual' mode of masquarading their opinions and biases as fact, but now there is the internet and a thousand ways to get the whole story, and they can't handle us getting the TRUTH.
Exactly. At one time (1937-54) NBC had its own SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA. Because a radio network took it for granted that its function was to present comedy, drama, news, dance music, country music, jazz, and Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Nobody expects Animal Planet or The Game Show Network to present news, or symphony orchestras. That era is OVER.
Note that the Fox Network has NEVER put on a nightly national news program. The sooner the three Art Deco-era dinosaur networks stop pretending to be in the news business, the better.
I believe that’s how it used to be. A typical city would have (at least) two newspapers. One was the Democrat paper and one was the Republican paper. Neither pretended to be unbiased. Smart citizens bought both and tried to make up their own minds.
It was amazing that the networks seem to have had no clue that the evening news was a dying dinosaur among MSM dinosaurs.
Katie was doomed from the beginning, regardless of her personal traits. She also was totally ignorant, thinking that a listening tour and some sort of format change would change the historical trajectory and, basically, revive the 8-track tape in a cd—and soon to be totally digital—world.
IOW, the evening news isn’t just yesterday’s format, it’s SEVERAL formats back in the evolution of news delivery. The only people who watch it are those who have “always” watched it-—and they are leaving this Earth slowly but surely.
Today’s families’ days simply are organized much, much differently. Do ANY of the people at CBS, who don’t have to for their jobs, go home and watch the evening news for the purpose of getting the news? Of course not. So why did they think many of the rest of us did?
I think we’re already there, Grid.
The author would appear more authoritative were he to know that the plural of “medium” is “media”.
Read a newspaper account about the Civil War. Usually the author leaves no doubt where he is coming from - for or against. The way it was explained to me was that when the newspaper industry began to consolidate (ie. William Hearst starts buying up newspapers all over the place) one of the mechanisms was to sell the fact that new management was 'objective'. Objectivity became a Holy Writ. That way nobody would get too upset over the fact that they were losing the opinion to which they'd grown accustomed. Food for thought.
Sounds good to me.
Maybe it is time for her on-air followup colonoscopy.
That will save the network.
What I can't stomach is ideological reporting that flies the flag of "objectivity".
The problem today with a format like Katie's and a network like CBS is that nobody believes the faux soft talk, the furrowed brow of concern, or the in depth interviews with people of no depth. By the time Katie comes on in the evening we already know what her stories are going to be, we've read the corollary pieces and seen the supporting information and the evening news is like a bad book on tape summary.
Pretty good synopsis. With increasing regularity, I find myself annoyed with TV news because they're so far behind the curve. It's still worth watching the "breaking news" live stuff (mostly to catch details before the agenda driven re-writes begin), but the "canned" stuff seems very stale to me.
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