CBS-TV stumbles, breaks both legs, and is run over by a bus (WAS Re: SupremeCourt decision)

[mwaters@mail.wesleyan.edu (Martin J. Waters)]

>jibguy wrote:
>It's also funny to watch Dan Rather speak without a teleprompter.
<snip>

        Sad to watch, I would say. I was flipping between the three
networks, CNN, Fox news and MSNBC, and CBS was pitiful. Once again, Rather
came on initially going in the wrong direction as to what the decision
meant, suggesting it was not a total win for Bush, that Gore had something
left. He grabbed onto the remanding to the Fla. court part of it, from the
first AP bulletin, and jumped to conclusions -- before anyone had read the
full decision and figured out that the 5-4 part of it meant it was over.
And everything he said involved fumbling and mumbling.

        The other networks all were much better at just basically reading
the decision on the air until eventually they figured out what it said, and
only then they started saying what they thought it meant. NBC was
especially good, with two guys standing side-by-side outside the court
(good move). And they were the first ones I saw on the air to actually have
copies of the decision in their hands. They were already doing their
readings aloud when the CBS guy (Schieffer?), standing outside the court,
was saying on the air he was still waiting for "our people" to bring a copy
out of the building to him.

        The NBC guys took turns reading ahead and then reading sections on
the air. They gradually started to comment on what it seemed to say. They
knew the old trick of reading the dissenting opinions to quickly get
succinct descriptions of the "bad" thing (according to the dissenter) that
the majority had done.

        Meanwhile, on CBS, Rather looked "small," lost, stumbling around.
Well into the hour, he was doing a bad job of reading quotes from the
decision that he said had come from Reuters or the AP. Maybe CBS never got
its copy. And, everything that was done around Rather made it all look
worse. Everything was wrong, right down to the camera shot was too far up
above him and the camera shot was not close enough in on him. The others
were switching at a fast pace between many reporters and others. CBS just
looked sleepy and slow. At one point CBS had some unknown talking-head law
professor speaking in the same monotone as Rather, blabbing on and saying
nothing as far as I could discern. I punched back to it 10 minutes later,
and the same guy was either on again or still on. CBS seemed to be bringing
fewer of its "people" on. Maybe they were still trying to find a copy of
the decision. The slow pace left Rather on the air much more to show off
his bad performance. The entire CBS operation looked like everyone working
on it needed a couple vitamin pills and a jumbo coffee with extra caffeine.
And I'm being kind <g>.

        Is anyone else old enough to remember when CBS was the best? :)