I shouldn’t be surprised at the overwhelming amount of coverage that so many alleged keepers of the flames of journalism and democracy have been paying to literally anything that happens of late that involves CBS, especially its news division. I would like to think they are at least informed enough by their own metrics to know that the mere mention of anything that puts blame squarely on the inflated cankles of the farter-in-chief benefits their traction and perhaps even their sellable inventory. I am, of course, making the assumption that they actually have any experience whatsoever to be able to make such a point. The internet and social media has democratized that process to allow just about any schmuck with the ability to hit send the chance to do so–myself included.
But I still do get surprised–and frankly, a little more than just merely POd–when the supposed smoking guns are little more than water pistols that relative naivete and an overwhelming desire to seem smart enough to justify a high price tag for “independent journalism” are creating. Yesterday we pointed out how STATUS’ Oliver Darcy took the lead on taking CBS NEWS to task for attempting to spin a narrative of supposed rebound for its floundering evening newscast by employing a tactic that an awful lot of less experienced journalists blindly bought into hook, like and sinker. In the process, I also noted that Darcy’s price point for his entrepreneurial ways was dramatically higher than most of his “competitors”‘–after all, he’s got a CNN pedigree. And then I proceeded to point out in this case he didn’t quite demonstrate such a value proposition.
Well, to my surprise for a change I wasn’t quite the lone wolf in such chiding, as the far more prolific and esteemed Matthew Keys of THE DESK.net was decent enough to amplify my musing with this addendum:
Oliver makes it seem as if CBS invented a novel technique to exclude a low-performing episode of the Evening News from the weekly average viewership count, when, in fact, all networks have done this for years. ABC and NBC regularly do this on days when they feel their own flagship news programs will see low viewership. Even ESPN’s “SportsCenter” does this. I’m glad you called attention to the practice — and the “smoking gun” that wasn’t.
I genuinely appreciate when folks with far more significant followings and actual incomes from this sort of endeavor take note of these musings–it certainly gives me a renewed sense of pride and a little justification that I’m not always just pissing in the wind. And I even appreciated it with Keys also rightfully took me to task for not being aware enough that detailed information he had apparently already provided on the track record that the lady we have dubbed the Bari-um Enema has already established on her network’s most-viewed entity 60 MINUTES.
This was Keys’ most recent post. This was his measured response to my attempt to find fault with it. I still have a few minor qualms with his findings, including the degree to which non-linear and time-shifted viewing may be making the impact of lead-ins and enhanced live competition somewhat less significant than they once were, Short answer: it’s nowhere near what a scripted drama will see, but it’s something more than the zero it used to be when I had more regular access to such detailed “delta” data. But I learned something, because I for one am never too old to do so. And that may be because I was once not too young or inexperienced to even get the chance to try.
It’s the concept of inexperience that had CDSers reignited in consternation this weeek when news broke of Weiss’ choice to turn around the seemingly sinking ship her reign has created to date at the venerable newsmagazine, which NCS’ Michael P. Hill covered to his news professional subscribers with more than merely a little indication of having his knickers in a uproar:
CBS News has replaced the veteran television producer at the top of its flagship “60 Minutes” program with someone with no TV news experience. Nick Bilton, who has worked on documentary and writing projects and served as a technology columnist for The New York Times, will lead the program moving forward… He replaces Tanya Simon, who had spent 25 years of her career with the newsmagazine. Simon is the daughter of the late CBS News reporter Bob Simon and was the first woman to be named executive producer of “60 Minutes.” Like Bilton, Weiss, too, had no television news experience when the new owners of Paramount named her to her current role. She also had little experience with hard journalism. Most of her resume was filled with work on commentary, analysis, reviews and opinion content.
That move was accompanied by quite a bit of scorched earth reaction from those who were replaced. A couple of them were covered yesterday by, among others, THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER’s Alex Weprin:
Cecilia Vega, the veteran TV news correspondent who was fired from 60 Minutes on Thursday, said in a fiery statement, “I very much fear what comes next” for the long-running newsmagazine.. In her statement, Vega said that “in recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories,” though she did not go into detail about what that entailed. “Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions…”Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven,” she continued. “It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy.”…Weiss terminated Vega and fellow 60 correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi(.)
In yet another Weprin piece authored the same day, Alfonsi did her own best impression of General MacArthur:
Over the weekend, my contract with CBS News expired, drawing to a close nearly twenty years with the network, including more than a decade at 60 Minutes,” Alfonsi wrote in a statement. “Following an intense editorial dispute over our CECOT story, repeated attempts by my representation to establish a path forward were met with absolute silence from network executives. The message could not be clearer: my time at 60 Minutes is apparently over.” “In the coming days, network leadership may attempt to hide behind corporate euphemisms like ‘modernization’ and ‘restructuring’ to explain away my departure. Don’t be misled. This was not a routine corporate transition; it was a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting, and it sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom.”
Look, I’m honestly well beyond the point of trying to defend or debate what constitutes accuracy or capitulation. I strongly believe that particular ship sailed more than a century ago when William Randolph Hearst amplified a war to help him sell newspapers. As for Vega and Alfonsi–well, let’s just say that neither has supplied evidence that their particular contributions drove those 10-million-plus viewerships of recent past, nor have they supplied any conclusive evidence that Weiss’ management is THE reason why those levels are in the rearview mirror. For that matter, Tanya Simon’s track record isn’t all that compelling of late, either. A change, as it always in when goals aren’t met, can always be justified. And until any one of us actually sees exactly what and how Nick Bilton plans to cover he’s if nothing else deserving of at least that much benefit of the doubt.
Weiss has earned more than a measure of her own doubt and questioning with the experiences she’s foisted upon employers since her ascension–her Nielsen results to date and the thorough sh-tshow that resulted when no one in her employ found the time or had the prescience to secure Tony Doukopil the proper passport credentials to follow his competitors into mainland China to anchor recent coverage of the Trump-Xi summit. Bilton might yet prove to be a tad more competent and capable than she. Clearly it’s an awfully low bar.
Prejudging people because they haven’t attempted to do a job before should not be immediately disqualify them from least being given a shot at it. That truth came screaming back into my frontal lobes when I saw the Instagram post of a one-time colleague of mine who is hard at work on a book he’s writing about his life experiences as a media executive that he’s been nice enough to include me in on. Jeff Stern, who has spent nearly as long as I have in various sales and management positions in broadcast television and more recently politics, is reaching out with the help of those with actual publishing experience to folks he felt could contribute to his unique narrative. Yesterday he spent some time with our one-time mutual boss Michael Lambert in getting his thoughts memorialized. And it reminded me that all of us were once pretty inexperienced, too.
Lambert was one of the youngest presidents of distribution for both Viacom and Twentieth (Century FOX) television before going on to a storied entrepreneurial career that included station ownership and stewardship of Village Roadshow. The fact he was so young was undoubtedly the reason he entrusted people like me to be part of that journey when we were hardly the most seasoned people available for him to rely upon. Indeed, I became the youngest department vice president in the history of 20th Century Fox Television when I was handed the title weeks after my 27th birthday. I’m forever grateful to Lambert for such an honor–one that will never be eclipsed if for no other reason than thanks to Disney the division essentially no longer exists. Stern wasn’t the most experienced sales executive on the market himself when Lambert plucked him from the obscurity of the company’s fledgling Dallas owned-and-operated station to help reshape a staff that had been largely complacent and somewhat lazy selling reruns of M*A*S*H and local rights to theatrical movies at a time when the studio’s track record with them was generally awful and nearly bankrupted it in the process. As Stern’s upcoming book will chronicle, we were able to give the company a legitimate presence in first-run syndication with the OG A CURRENT AFFAIR and a few more modest successes such as THE $100,000 PYRAMID and the resuscitated TV version of 9 TO 5.
Seeing Lambert regale Stern with those stories with the hindsight of truly successful careers that ensued brought my own memories flooding back in droves yesterday. And reinforced my own current frustration with those who seem to think experience alone should justify sustained presence. I’m downright arrogant and fiercely determined to continue to find some sort of role and relevance in their constricting and complicated media landscape–but I’m only gonna get that if I continue to learn and evolve from those who are open to making use of my industrial knowledge and sharing their more recent skill sets in concert. So few seem to be capable of doing so these days. And they want to know why their track records look like the ones that Keys details?
Maybe 60 MINUTES and CBS NEWS hadn’t quite reached their particular nadirs just yet. But they haven’t seen their best days in a while, either. Time–and yes, Nielsen–will determine if Nick Bilton is the next Michael Lambert, Jeff Stern–or, I guess, even Steve Leblang. Let alone the next Matthew Keys. Let’s at least wait until he’s had the chance to create his own narrative before we bury him, huh?
Until next time…