What’s worse for a big-time network newsman: Being stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time by accident or being stuck in such a place on orders from your network?
Seven years ago, CNN anchor Aaron Brown took a public and professional beating when he continued to play in the Bob Hope Celebrity Golf Classic after the crash of the Columbia Space Shuttle. At the same time, other vacationing network anchors, including NBC’s Tom Brokaw, immediately returned to appear on-air from their news studios.
Brown later claimed that he immediately tried to leave the golf tournament, but CNN provided him no emergency assistance to do so, and had made it clear to him that it could well cover that story without him.
Still, damage was done, so much so that seven years later, Brown is still immediately attached to that tale. But what of NBC News anchors who, for two-plus weeks every two years, and for the last 22 years, have been sent far, far away from their studios and news nerve centers so that they can join the on-site sales force for NBC’s exclusive Olympics coverage?
Did the slick geniuses at NBC stop to consider how absurd and sad it looked and sounded — and could only look and sound — for NBC News anchor Brian Williams, last week, to be reporting on a major U.S. military offensive against the Taliban while standing outside, wearing an NBC ski jacket, in Vancouver, British Columbia, site of NBC’s exclusive coverage of the 2010 Olympic Games? Or does the sell supersede all, including dignity and credibility?
But during these Olympics Williams and NBC News look no more pathetic than NBC did in during the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympics when Brokaw — in his own NBC ski jacket — anchored the news for two-plus weeks while standing on the side of a snow-covered hill in Utah. On site to bang NBC’s Olympic drums, layers of winter clothing could not hide such transparency.
But if Brokaw and NBC hadn’t learned their lessons at the start of the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta, they never would. In July of ’96, Brokaw had already been dispatched from New York to Atlanta to serve as a salesman on NBC’s Olympic coverage when TWA Flight 800, New York to Paris, exploded shortly after takeoff from JFK Airport. All 230 aboard were killed.
And Brokaw reported this calamity from his NBC Olympic sales trip to Atlanta.
Two days after that disaster, Brokaw, on air from Atlanta, pointed to that night’s Olympic Opening Ceremonies (on NBC!) to make this sickening connection:
“The explosion of Flight 800 was a tragic and unexpected prelude to the Games. So tonight the Opening Ceremonies take on a richer meaning of healing and celebration to temper the anxiety and despair.”
Good grief.
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Newspeak of the Week: CNBC’s financial commentator/analyst Maria Bartiromo spoke of “economically sensitive stocks.” Hmmm.
Those hoping that she’d also provide the names of a few stocks that aren’t economically sensitive have to wait for another time.
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By now we know that the biggest story on local newscasts has become the arrival of winter weather during, of all crazy times, winter. Doesn’t matter if two inches or two feet of snow is expected, the “sky is falling!” hysteria is the same.
Logically, then, this summer, when summer weather is forecast, our local newscasts will provide “three-state team coverage” of 85-degrees and sunny days.
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A recent installment of “Detroit SWAT,” one of the real-deal police teams followed in A&E’s SWAT series, ended with one of the officers with his wife and young daughter in a local park.
To prove how well he had instilled his daughter with safety precautions, he asked her what she should say if a stranger offers her candy.
“Thank you,” she said.