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Question: will Anthony Weiner take over Eliot Spitzer’s slot on CNN’s In the Arena and will Alan Berger, the agent who handled Katie Couric’s new deal with ABC, be able to sell syndication rights for her new show to one of Silvio Berlusconi’s television stations? And what about a Spitzer/Weiner report modeled on NBC’s old Huntley/Brinkley or PBS’s Macneil/Lehrer News Hour? If they bring on Dr. Ruth Westheimer as executive producer, there is no doubt that Spitzer/Weiner could provide the first real competition for two HBO warhorses, “Real Sex” and “Taxicab Confessions.” With Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Arnold Schwarzenegger dominating the news in the way that Pamela Anderson once did with her famed Tommy Lee honeymoon tape, there will be a need for seasoned commentators to handle the flood of impropriety generated by office holders on the international, national and state levels. For some of us it seems like only yesterday that Bill Clinton was asking Monica Lewinsky to light his cigar (or was it the other way around?), but impeachment proceedings now seem quaint compared to a two-time presidential candidate possibly on his way to jail for allegedly using campaign funds to cover up his affair. It wouldn’t be surprising to hear that Huma Abedin was covering the Edwards debacle for Al Jazeera.
You begin to feel sorry for the news folks at NBC when you read about their misfortunes in Monday’s Times piece, “For Couric, ABC’s PitchProved Best” (NYT, 6/6/11). According to the Times, NBC head honcho Steve Burke and news president Steve Capus were meeting Couric and her agent Alan Berger “to bring their one-time news star…back into the network fold.” It should have been perfect timing: Couric was four months away from the end of her unhappy CBS contract and looking to reinvent herself with an afternoon syndicated program “…while also maintaining a continuing role in a network news division….” But in the end, the negotiations unfolded like a Greek tragedy, with the protagonists blinded not by fate, but by the tens of millions at stake in annual syndication sales. Apparently, the two NBC execs were pretty flummoxed even before Couric arrived for the meeting at the St. Regis Hotel. Why? They’d run into Al Gore, who’d shown up “to announce the hiring of Keith Olbermann for his cable channel, Current TV.” Olbermann, famous and infamous at MSNBC, had had his own bitter-sweet parting with NBC. The Current TV team chatting up a former NBC castoff in the very next room created a vibe that an NBC executive quoted by the Times described as “awkward.” Neither a PowerPoint presentation nor a welcome-home-Katie video seduced Couric, and she ended up signing with ABC, “…which was not even a serious contender….” Yes, there had been rumors that Jeff Zucker, the former NBC exec and rival of Burke who was part of Couric’s team, was the fly in ointment, but reading the Times story, one starts to mourn dear old NBC, once the home of the venerable Cosby Show, and once the Harvard to CBS’s Yale when it came to the now oxymoronic concept of high-quality network news.
