New News Is Bad News

CBS has come up with a fantastic idea for its evening news show: a segment called "Free Speech."

Giving free speech on a 30-minute news show is one of the brightest ideas the network has come up with.

They promised us the Katie Couric show would be different.

I was very interested in how it would be different. And then, in the middle of the show, there it was. The first person to exercise his free speech was Morgan Spurlock, who made the film "Super Size Me," making fun of McDonald's. No one had ever taken on the fast-food restaurant before.

The second "Free Speech" featured speaker was Rush Limbaugh. So we were first given a "liberal" voice and then a "conservative" one.

"CBS Evening News" has only 30 minutes (including commercials) to tell us what is happening in the world, and it was very courageous in giving so much time to ideology on both sides of the fence.

Where do you go after super-sized French fries and someone who reveals how he feels about Democrats?

Everyone knows America needs a free-speech feature twice a week to remind us of what a great country we live in.

In the first week Couric gave us both Limbaugh and an exclusive with President Bush. He had said the same thing a hundred times before, mostly at Republican fundraisers. But it was only the 20th time he said it on television.

As you may know, the CBS programming executives are called "suits." Their ideas have less to do with news than with ratings. It isn't what the news is but how many people watch it that separates the good suits from the bad suits. CBS ranked third in the ratings among the network evening news shows.

The suits decided to pay Katie Couric $15 million a year. This would show people CBS has more money to burn.

I am not blaming Couric for the new news that CBS believes the public should have. The suits have so much invested in her that they're calling the shots.

As I watched the other night, I visualized the face of Walter Cronkite. Would he feature a picture of Suri Cruise, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes's baby?

Walter would throw it in the trash can and he would tell the suits, "That's not the way it is."

Thirty minutes is not a long time to tell the people that they are all going to hell in a handbasket.

What the CBS suits will tell you is they are going for a different audience than the other shows -- young viewers with the most money in their pockets are dying to see a photograph of Suri Cruise, not one of Baghdad.

The danger of all this is that the other networks will start playing catch-up. When it comes to news, you want the sponsor to decide what news should be shown with his product.

We're not there yet, but Katie Couric has given NBC and ABC something to worry about -- and us, too.

2006Tribune Media Services