D-Day at CBS News
On the evening of Monday, Feb. 1, Katie Couric, anchor of the CBS Evening News, was wearing red. For the next half-hour, she tore through the headlines. There were allegations of bigotry among the federal air marshals in the U.S., an American church group accused of trafficking children in Haiti, faulty gas pedals in Toyotas, a suicide bombing in Baghdad, a massacre in Mexico and a bodybuilder in Latvia with a rippled back like a map of Switzerland. “Thank you for watching,” said Ms. Couric, at the end of the broadcast. “I’ll see you here tomorrow.”
Many of Ms. Couric’s viewers would return the following night. Much of Ms. Couric’s staff would not.
It had been a rough day at CBS News. Four and a half years earlier, CBS chief Les Moonves had joked in The New York Times Magazine about bombing the news division. And now, among the seasoned veterans of the newsroom, there was a sense that the detonation had finally gone off. Earlier that morning, CBS News executives and bureau chiefs, led by senior vice president Linda Mason, told their employees that 2009 had been a disastrous year in the ad market. They had no cable operation to buoy the sinking revenues. It’s not you, was the message, it’s us. Dozens of employees—including staff members in D.C., San Francisco, Miami, London, Los Angeles and Moscow—were being let go. The changes were effective immediately. There would be no buyouts. According to one longtime staff member, the network had long ago negotiated away most of the severance clauses in staff members’ contracts.
>>READ FELIX GILLETTE'S STORY ON BAD RATINGS AT CBS EVENING NEWS
Word of the layoffs had first surfaced the previous Friday afternoon in the L.A. Times. Over the weekend, CBS staffers vacillated between acceptance of the situation and cautious optimism. Maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as reported? After all, the company was already lean. Where would top brass find 100 or so people to let go? Perhaps there was some stash of employees hidden on the digital side, some long-forgotten deal between, say, 60 Minutes and Yahoo, that would provide some bodies to lessen the blow?
But in the end, the cuts were surprisingly deep. By Monday afternoon, staffers from Washington to L.A. were sputtering in disbelief as they heard of top producers on the chopping block—particularly Mark Katkov and Jill Rosenbaum in D.C. and Roberta Hollander and Barbara Pierce in L.A. These were seasoned veterans, part of the old school known back in the Dan Rather days as “the Hard Corps.” Over the years, they had somehow managed to outlive every big buzz saw to cut through the newsroom. They knew how to get more from less. Each thought of himself as worth five producers at ABC News. Their theme song was Merle Haggard’s “Holding Things Together.” It was hard to imagine what the already third-place morning and evening news operations would look like without them.
The most disturbing news of the day for many observers was that Larry Doyle would no longer be working for CBS News.
Mr. Doyle, according to CBS News legend, joined the organization some 40 years ago, when then D.C. bureau chief Bill Small found him working as a porter at a Washington hotel. Mr. Small promptly made Mr. Doyle the bureau’s go-to “dogrobber”—the guy you sent into nasty situations to stare down snarling subjects and get the job done. From there, Mr. Doyle gradually worked his way up the news ladder, eventually becoming the network’s top war producer, churning out great television from every hellhole on the planet—including Baghdad, where he served as the network’s bureau chief during the early years of the ongoing war.
Reached the afternoon of Tuesday, Feb. 2, Dan Rather recounted various stories of Mr. Doyle’s heroism in the field, including his impressive management of gun-toting teenagers in Somalia. “He’s one of the all-time greats,” said Mr. Rather. “He’s the soul of the place.”
“This is a guy,” he added, “whom Ed Murrow would have been glad to have as his producer.”
For the time being, no on-air reporters or anchors have been asked to leave. But according to multiple sources, the network did inform a handful of veteran correspondents, including Randall Pinkston in New York, Sandra Hughes in L.A. and Sheila MacVicar in London, that they were being reassigned from prominent network jobs to reporting for CBS Newspath.
Historically, the Newspath—a news-gathering service that provides coverage for local CBS stations—was a stepping stone for young correspondents on their way from regional station jobs to the big time at the network. Going from network to Newspath is generally seen as a major demotion. Some sources speculated that the move was made as a passive-aggressive attempt to chase off salary-heavy talent. It had the appearance, as one source put it, of “a slower form of death.”
On Tuesday, CBS staffers were still on guard. Word had it that executives from the news division were still on the move, meeting with staffers at bureaus around the country, bringing more bad tidings.
Reporting on the death of CBS News is an age-old discipline among TV writers. Books have been written on the subject. (See, Boyer, Peter; 1988; Who Killed CBS?) But as the names of the laid-off began to circulate, it looked less like the end of days and more like the end of an era. The final vestiges of the pre–Katie Couric regime were finally leaving the network. “It’s like we’re Lehman Brothers,” said one longtime staff member, “and the JPMorgan guys are finishing moving in.”
More from Felix Gillette:
What Is Going on With the Ratings at CBS Evening News?
ABC's Broadcast Operations and Engineering Division Makes Significant Cuts in New York
Appeals Court Rules in Favor of CBS--Tosses Out Dan Rather's $70 Million Suit in Its Entirety
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D-Day
Seeing people lose a job/career/livelihood is sad in every isntance. But those "top producers" who were let go that you credit with shaping CBS evening and morning news have not been regularly producing for either broadcast for many years. It's doubtful that even they thought of themselves as worth 5 producers at ABC, certainly nobody else did. Their loss, while sad personally, will not be noticed on the evening broadcast. Many talented producers in NY and DC are left, keeping our nose to the grindstone, knowing we have to work harder, as there are fewer of us, to keep the product strong. PS: relying on discredited dan for his opinion of anything is silly.
D-Day
After all that hard work, your turn will come some day. And good luck with that "product."
Katie Curse
When CBS put Katie(smiling faces...they lie)Couric as their News Anchor... it told me everything I needed to know about their news network! My memory is very.. very... long... and I remember when Katie interviewed George W Bush, after a primary vote(which he had won) and she could not have been a more ruder person is she tried! She let GW Bush know how much she DID NOT approve of him! She showed she was a Left-Leaning DemWit by demeaning him the whole time! She did not show that SMILE at all towards GW Bush!
The only time I ever watch Katie is in "CLIPS" of the mess-ups or attacks she does. If you expect Americans who are Republicans to watch your news network... get rid of the Left Leaning Whore!
WE DON'T PAY PEOPLE TO LIE TO US, SPUTUM!
Welcome to the real world of competition, left-wing establishment media! Think of all those years you got away with your lying media monopoly. Now you have been exposed as pushers of the secular-socialist agenda, and you wonder why people don't tune in? Try reporting facts and then come back and we'll talk, if you're still around. VERITAS!!!
Network news that tried to take down a President
For a network news organization that colluded in it's attempt to take down a President on the eve of the election, just deserts. And for the poster posting under the subject: Katie Curse, I remember the interview of George HW Bush, GW's father, in which she also smiled away while asking about the then controversial tobacco issue, when in fact she or her news organization had agreed not to get into the topic because of time constraints (probably) in dealing with the topic, meanwhile she sandbagged the President on the topic which caught him off guard while she smiled away...
Good luck with that presidential commission, danny boy! While Fox news racks up profitable quarter after quarter, Gannett racks up a profitable quarter, advertising spending slowly returns selectively to some news organizations, the realignment of news organizations, the trimming of fat, the trimming of liberal attack dogs, the trimming of in-your-face journalism, the trimming of demonizing corporations, republicans and middle American way of life continues.
As with the invention of the printing press, as with the invention of the radio, as with the invention of television, news is once again being forced to reinvent itself. Evolve or perish. Extinction is the process in which groups of organizations (liberal news) die out. If the incorporation rate is less than the dissolution rate over time, extinction results. Extinction is a natural result of competition and performance. News organizations go extinct when they are unable to adapt to changes in the environment or compete effectively with other news organizations. Well over 99 per cent of the news organizations that have ever existed have gone extinct.
Let them go on the way they want.
Lets not get all upset over saving them. Let them go their own way.
I have NEVER seen couric and don't intend to start now. I spent too much time when my two daughters were in grade/high school teaching them that there is a difference in what opinion, propaganda and truth are, so in that way CBS was useful as it always wavered beteween opinion and propaganda. But as a news organization you all should know not to ever trust them. They are not worth saving.
hire illegal aliens for less money, obama would have no problem
They can work for 20k a year, probably do more news people wanna hear and it would get rid of all the vitriolic liberals who spew total bias in news.
Who watches CBS anymore? or even reads the NY times, bawstin globe? didnt the globe pick coakly winning b y a landslide. back to couric, this is funny how it is okay by obama for libs to make huge paychecks, but not people in corporate america
i gave up watching abc, nbc, cbs, a long time ago. its fox for me... an ex 20 year democrat.
liberal media
Watching these comments sure makes me understand why people throughout the world now consider Americans as dangerous fundamentalists. A nation that believes Fox is fair and unbiased is a threat to the freedom of the rest of the globe. What happened to the great ideals of freedom of speech outlined the US constitution - hijacked by the same type of people as those who inerpret the Koran for their own evil ends.
D-DAY
I HAVE A SICK FASCINATION WITH THE SAFETY PIN HOLDING HER BRA...
steamboat
CBS: If you want to survive, it's simple ! Ditch your libs and their bias, and go to fair and balanced. More and more couch potato lemmings are waking up and see you for what you really are.
Good night, good luck, & goodbye
CBS cuts
Or as Obama would say "hard corpse".
Could not happen to a better
Could not happen to a better network....
liberal media poster doesn't get it
People "throughout the world" is a mighty big leap. Even generalizing to Europeans doesn't work. La France, La France, La France will always be jealous of the U.S. because they believe they are a superpower and are offended/jealous that the U.S. and U.S.S.R./Russia were/are considered the superpowers. Germany still believes it is the master race. Italy, Spain, and several other European countries are either fully committed to or torn between communism/socialism and facism/facist beliefs. Further east, you have many countries that believe they will conquer western countries and impose or return them and the rest of the world to the radical Islam they practice.
As for "a nation that believes Fox is fair and unbiased is a threat to the freedom of the rest of the globe" I believe you have it reversed to begin with. The vast majority of Fox News watchers believe that the rest of the world should be free, should have a free form of government, something the left doesn't believe, one example being their applause when Chavez was elected dictator of Venezuela.
And the "liberal media" poster is doing the same thing, using the same tactic that the dailykos, myDD, Democratic Underground and other left of sanity posters do. They are lumping together Fox News reporting with Fox News commentary to de-legitimize the number one news network in the U.S. Number one in nearly every (or perhaps every) time slot throughout each 24 hour day.
Fox News reporters report their stories in a fair and balanced manner, just as their slogan says, and just as the left hate. Fox News commentators otoh, are generally right wing commentators, with some notable left wingers thrown in to stir things up and to continue winning the ratings war, a brilliant move by the powers that be at Fox. The same can't be said at other cable news networks and other broadcast networks. CBS, ABC, NBC have continuously woven in their left wing beliefs into their news stories, along with their left wing commentary when they dared to show their left wing biases so blatently to the American public. The same with MSNBC, CNN and similar cable news operations. In print, we have the left wing doing to the Wall Street Journal what they do to Fox News. While Wall Street journal reporters self-identify themselves as liberals during surveys of reporters, while the journalism reviewers rate the Wall Street Journal reporters as left of center, the left wing calls the Wall Street Journal reporters right wing. In actuality, the Wall Street Journal editorial board is right wing, the reporters are left wing. New York Times is as left wing as you can get. The Washington Post is left wing through and through, as well as the NY Daily News, Newsday, USAA Today, Reuters, UPI, AFP and others.
And no, identifying so many news organizations as left wing isn't a rant from the right side. The proof is in the surveys taken from both news organization rank and file and college/university professors rank and file. For the news organization surveys, the employees self-identify as left wing consistently, survey after survey, at 89% (the low iirc) to low to mid 90's %. Imagine, this is a survey where you would think that at least a few would hide their ideology, or would see a problem if everyone around them admitted to being left wing. Apparently, this isn't a problem for them. 89% plus self-identifying as left wing.
liberal media poster doesn't get it
Sorry for the double post