“I’M MAD AS HELL AND NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE”
That line is from the 1976 excellent film “Network” of course. Written by the great Paddy Chayefsky. The line was delivered by Peter Finch who played slightly nuts anchorman Howard Beale. Finch by the way won the Oscar for his performance. I always expected one day Dan Rather would blurt that line out on his CBS Evening News. I always thought Rather himself was slightly nuts, “What’s the frequency Kenneth,” “Courage” etc; In the end it was the George Bush military record debacle that did him in. CBS replaces him with another fossil Bob Schiffer. So much for the precious 18 to 49 audience.
Dan’s gone, Ted Kopple called it quits, Tom Brokaw is fishing and Peter Jennings sad to say will most likely just fade away. As Sam Donaldson put it at a broadcast convention recently network news is dead. Those that sit in the esteemed anchor j\chair have the biggest egos in television. They believe that the entire nation is waiting to hear what they have to say. With cable news channels up the wazoo, who needs them? I’ve said this for years in fact I haven’t watched a network newscast in years.
If you want to know how big those anchorman egos are, here are a couple of examples. NBC would send a live truck and a crew into Time’s Square every evening so it could shoot the giant screen at 1 Times Square, (that’s the building where the New Years Eve ball drops) for a two second shot of Brokaw signing off. When you ride north on the West Side Highway every network has a huge billboard for their star anchors. By no coincidence all of these anchors would pass them on their ride home to fashionable Westchester estates or Connecticut.
Those newscast still make a lot of money for the networks and that is the main reason they won’t fade into history anytime soon, sad to say. Also, nobody has any idea how to replace them.
In the early days of TBS long before CNN, Ted Turners idea was to run re-runs of Andy Griffith and The Beverly Hillbillies instead of wasting a ton of money doing news. It worked.
When CNN first started one of it’s selling points was, “The news is the star, not the people reporting it.” Well, that hasn’t worked. Now CNN is trying to make stars out of their people, just like Fox News has done. Good luck!
If you get the chance pick up “Network” it is a great film and it is amazing how Chayefsky predicted what television would become. Remember this picture was done way before there were five hundred channels. Peter Finch received his Academy Award posthumously, his wife accepted for him. Useless trivia.
Back to CNN. I see their old bag in residence Judy Woodruff is calling it quits. Ya! Like it was her decision. Maybe nobody is watching “Inside Politics.”
GO SEE THIS MOVIE:
“Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.” Usually the word Documentary scares people off, especially if you have to fork over ten bucks for a ticket. This one is worth it. I knew of Enron but did know the details. This will clear it up and will leave you thinking how much of this stuff may still be going on and who out there hasn’t gotten caught. The men who put Kenneth Lay and Jeffery Skilling were like the leaders of a religious cult. Think of the Wizard in “The Wizard of Oz,” don’t look behind the curtain. The entire empire was built on smoke and mirrors and they fiddled while Enron burned.. Congratulations to Alex Gibeny the filmmaker who brought this story to the big screen in a most entertaining way.
Hey! I’m in a bad mood and I’m not going to take it anymore.