“Weird” being the polit­i­cal buzz­word of the moment,  here’s my weird con­nec­tion of the week: adults with the mind­set of small chil­dren in the mon­ey busi­ness, and those with only mon­ey on their minds in the news business.

The New York Times report­ed that Mon­day “was the worst day for U.S. stocks in near­ly two years”
Part of it was due to “…a weak­er-than-expect­ed U.S. jobs report.”
So if some­thing isn’t hor­ri­ble (which in the case of job num­bers it wasn’t), but doesn’t meet your expec­ta­tions, it turns into what one invest­ment advis­er called a “…‘sell now, ask ques­tions lat­er’ kind of day.”
What’s the devel­op­men­tal age require­ment for peo­ple whose busi­ness it is to, in essence, play every day with amounts of mon­ey unfath­omable to nor­mal adults? If a child throws a tantrum or weeps incon­solably because a present turns out to be oth­er than the antic­i­pat­ed one, respon­si­ble par­ents teach the lit­tle ingrate that life doesn’t always hand out what you want or expect. Maybe they even try the sim­plis­tic but use­ful adage: “If life hands you a lemon, make lemonade”.
One group who can’t seem to under­stand even that are the loath­some corpo­rate preda­tors gob­bling up any­thing that smells like prof­it to them, with­out check­ing whether it’s some­thing they can digest. That’s the busi­ness ver­sion of fish and cetaceans unable to tell the dif­fer­ence between plas­tic bags and edibles.
The dif­fer­ence is that the sea crea­tures mis­takes are often fatal, while the cor­po­rate glut­tons sim­ply spit stuff out and prey on.

                                SADLY…

The changes at CBS News, which “… come as CBS par­ent Para­mount Glob­al unveiled plans to trim $500 mil­lion in costs…” are being spurred by that mentality.
One is con­strained to ask whether the  “trims” will the expense of news gath­er­ing in the form of job cuts (most, if his­to­ry is any­thing to go by), and how many of those will be at upper man­age­ment lev­el? No prize if you guessed  “yes” and “few, if any”.
CBS News Pres­i­dent Kathy McMa­hon did lit­tle to dis­pel that.
Instead, her announce­ment  of  the per­son­nel and for­mat changes includ­ed…”Norah’s super­pow­er… cap­ture the cul­tur­al zeit­geist… we remain com­mit­ted to its mis­sion”…and “lever­ag­ing the Super Desk to con­nect our teams”… all of which are more pop-cul­ture-cor­po­rate clich­es than the way news peo­ple speak.
How much bet­ter to have promised sol­id report­ing using prop­er gram­mar in well-craft­ed and nar­rat­ed scripts, and a com­mit­ment to real news.
On the grasp-at-straws bright side: “At least for CBS, and at least for now, the days of tap­ping indus­try giants like Katie Couric…to take over the anchor chair appear to be over.”
That’s good to hear, since all CBS News got for her $15-mil­lion a year salary was sag­ging morale in the field and rat­ings that sank faster than the Titanic.
By choice and maybe because of my tem­pera­ment, I was always an “out­sider” when it came to under­stand­ing or car­ing about cor­po­rate lev­el maneuvering.
But I do know enough about news to recog­nise when a “new idea” to boost the rat­ings is lit­tle more than nev­er-mind-the-con­tents-check-the-new-rap­ping, espe­cial­ly when it includes show­cas­ing cor­re­spon­dents in live chats with ancho­ra at the expense of video, television’s great­est power .
And if that sounds like a grumpy ex-TV cor­re­spon­dent bemoan­ing change, here’s the view of Sam Roberts, a for­mer CBS News for­eign edi­tor I had the plea­sure of work­ing under:
“Has there been a suc­cess­ful 2‑anchor net­work evening news pro­gram since Hunt­ley-Brink­ley? I can’t remem­ber any. CBS tried with Con­nie Chung and Dan Rather. That did­n’t last long. ABC tried three anchors way back. That did­n’t work either. Every­one seems to look back at the “Good Old Days” and wish we had anoth­er Wal­ter Cronkite to watch every night. Sor­ry folks, but there isn’t any­one like him on the air now and I doubt that there ever will be again.. With Wal­ter (my boss for 14 years) the news came first, sec­ond, third, fourth and what­ev­er. Live cov­er­age rules now.) In Cronkite’s days we hard­ly ever did any­thing live. Every report, every word, every frame of film was care­ful­ly edit­ed. Accu­ra­cy and thor­ough report­ing were the goals. You can’t do that with live reporting.”
Nor  can you do it by par­ing news staff to the bone in order to increase profit.
If you real­ly believe in news, where’s the log­ic in “sav­ing mon­ey” by elim­i­nat­ing the peo­ple who craft the prod­uct you’re selling?
It’s the equiv­a­lent of an auto man­u­fac­tur­er leav­ing out the trans­mis­sion to cut pro­duc­tion costs and increase prof­its, or putting child men­tal­i­ties in charge of mon­ey and mon­ey grub­bers in charge of news.
In “Fear and Loathing on the Cam­paign Trail ‘72” the late great gonzo jour­nal­ist Hunter Thomp­son coined the phrase: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro”.
If only.

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