Maggie Shnayerson

inothernews:

CBS News to Air Tribute to Walter Cronkite on Sunday Evening

In one respect, this makes sense: Sunday evenings have a higher viewership than Friday or Saturday evenings.  But, still. Something, ANYTHING tonight would have been the right thing to do.

Fact: Regardless of your stance on Katie Couric, she’s just now been illustrating, while speaking to CNN’s John King, exactly how much we’ve lost since Cronkite and Murrow had the care of the public’s airwaves. Emphases all hers.

“Apparently, before the era of teleprompters, John, he would write a few notes on file cards, just glance at them, know what the story was, and speak extemporaneously to the audience. You can’t find many anchors who are really capable of pulling that off in this day and age.”

Sigh.

“I was talking to Douglas Brinkley, John, earlier today, and he’s writing a biography about Walter—the University of Texas is a repository of all his papers—and apparently he was a packrat. [Brinkley] has boxes and boxes, and he has the reporter’s notebooks from when [Cronkite] was in Vietnam.”

Well Christ, Katie, whatever do you do with your reporter’s notebooks? Oh. Dear me. Sorry, I can see why such a habit might bewilder.

Forgive my mislaid bitterness—it’s really all meant for Don Hewitt, Katie. [Via inothernews]

I kept telling Senator Jon Kyl through my special television set where I can speak directly to and/or yell at the folks inside that if he didn’t cut to the chase and just straight up ask his goddammed question in plain English already, the little patience I had resolved to pre-allot to Sonia Sotomayor’s next questioner, Senator Chuck Schumer, was going to be exhausted before he even began. But did he listen to me?

So Senator Schumer’s eyebrows are super fun to watch when you don’t have to listen to the rest of his face at the same time.

Please smack the two kids CNN just interviewed in TImes Square. The first (“Patrick works at the Times Square TKTS booth,”) for declaring himself personally frightened by the successive and entirely predictable deaths of Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and now Michael Jackson. Also for realizing too late that bemoaning the loss of (hand over heart no less) “Such a great man, that I grew up with,” might be misinterpreted by the national audience. Second guy for being a journalist willing to give an interview to another journalist about a subject upon which he is in no particular way qualified to speak, apart from happening to belong to the age cohort the correspondent was looking for. Oh, and managing to get both “y’know” and “like” in during his 14 seconds on a major network.

First benefit of being an unemployed blournalist that I’ve come across in the 26 months I’ve been such? I’m not one of the eight IT guys in this train car on conference calls, not ONE of whom seems to know a synonym for “functionality.”

Then again, I have to listen to them. For free. So maybe not so much a benefit as an opportunity to perform justifiable homicide?

I would pay $50,000 for a cell phone jammer. Twice that for a good ice pick.