Shane has reservations about Sauther motives

I recently blogged about an article by, Van Gordon Sauther, an ex-president of CBS’s news division, where Sauther stated that CBS’ news had become so liberal that he stopped watching it.

Shane emailed and said:

Well I have never known too many ex-employees to give their former employer a good review. :)

Well that may be true, particularly with laid-off employees. This is a good reason to interpret ex-employees’ scorn with due skepticism. But in this case you don’t have to take Sauther’s word for it; you can check most of his assertions yourself.

Sauther said: CBS news has “it has no credibility”. I could defend that assertion.

Sauther said: CBS news has “no audience”. Well, that’s not strictly true but I think everybody understood him to mean that CBS news has a tiny audience and I believe most observers would more or less agree with that assessment. I sure do.

Sauther said: CBS news has “no morale”. Well I’m not in a position to know anything firsthand but I accept this assertion as true. I reason that being employed by an industry laughingstock would sure reduce my self-regard. CBS’ worker bees should be glum, if only because they’re probably looking at another round of layoffs.

Sauther said: CBS news has “no long-term emblematic anchorperson”. Another true assertion, at least for now.

Now most of these assertions are either obviously true or at least seem very plausible to me. The most interesting assertions Sauther made was:

A large swath of the society doesn't trust the news media. And for many, it's even stronger than that: They abhor the media and perceive it as an escalating threat to the society.

Now that statement might be debatable to certain people but not to me. Why? Because I agree that broadcast news is an escalating threat to America. Most news broadcasters, FoxNEWS aside, have actively endeavored to undermine the political support for our war in Iraq. CBS news attempted to change the outcome of the 2004 election by attacking the Bush campaign by running a false story late enough during in the campaign that so as to make it unanswerable. (I could go on but it is unnecessary and I might run out of electronic ink. )

Anyway, Sauther’s statement was my primary reason for blogging about his article in the first place.

Getting back to Shane's email, I still haven’t fully answered his point that Sauther might be just disgruntled. OK, fair enough. There are a number of factors that lead me to think that his article isn’t about settling a score over being fired twenty some years ago.

First of all, the jobs of all corporate officers in broadcast news divisions are always on thin ice anyway. Sauther himself said that he lost his job due to a management shake-up. As the president of CBS’ news division I expect that Sauther did his fair share of hiring and firing. Maybe he even presided over a layoff, who knows?

I think that the perspective gained from being a high level officer would tend to moderate any sense that his firing was unfairness or whatnot. Anyway, Sauther lost his job something like twenty years ago and I guess I accept his statement that he “great affection for CBS News” at face value, although I could be wrong for doing that.

This all makes me recall something I read years ago. In one part of her funny book, And So It Goes, which describes her adventures in broadcasting, journalist Linda Ellerbee examines both the scorn network management has for their typical viewer and management level job insecurity:

… one of the central precepts of television news. We who work in television believe we are smarter that the people who watch television. Television news producers often turn down certain stories because, they say, the stories are too complicated or too dull to mean anything to the plumber in Albuquerque.

[…]

Imagine, if you will, the arrogance of some producer who is too scared to ride the subway after dark, too lazy to start a fire in his fireplace without a fake self-starting log, too ignorant to change a tire and too confused to do his own tax return making fun of the plumber in Albuquerque just because he's a plumber in Albuquerque and he watches the television news. How can they ignore the fact that the plumber in Albuquerque, unlike most television news producers, at least has steady work?[emphasis mine—johnh]

Here Ellerbee strengthens my point that Sauther knew--or at least should have known that he could abruptly lose his job and for little reason.

Update:

Shane quickly sets me straight with this email:

I never said I DISAGREED with them though! ;-)

OK, so noted. I enjoyed writing my post all the same.