Word: cbs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...didn't know what I'd find at the L.B.J. library when I went there searching for scraps of my mother. She died as a somebody, or someone who had been a somebody, anyway--as the first network newswoman for CBS. To baby-boomer women it must seem absurd that I would describe her that way, but by the time I was old enough to pay attention, women correspondents were everywhere, and her career was in eclipse, with only a few more turns in front of the cameras. She was a veteran of two networks and PBS by then...
...years, Kathleen Finch was a producer at CBS News, the kind who kept a packed suitcase in her office and had her share of horror stories, like nearly being attacked during the riots after the Rodney King verdict. "It was nothing for me to rent a Learjet on my credit card," she says. So it was not surprising that her flair for drama caught the eye of Eric Ober when he was president of the network's news operation. But then Ober left CBS for the Food Network, and it was quite a shocker when he called Finch...
...week of general humiliation, there was some good news for the TV networks: They did accurately award Florida to the winner. The bad news: They also awarded it to the loser. Dan Rather assured viewers they could take CBS's election-night projections "to the bank"; then the networks had to make two costly withdrawals. It was, in the words of CBS and CNN election consultant Warren Mitofsky, "embarrassing as hell." Yet it also underscored TV's tremendous power, as the networks' blunders led to Al Gore's concession takeback. And as that wild night set up an acrimonious Florida...
...Some news veterans blame the blunders on competition. "Making the first call is all a question of network ego," says Martin Plissner, former executive political director of CBS News. "It's a question of whose is bigger." Another problem is noncompetition. Networks share VNS data and then hire analysts, who race to crunch the same numbers. Competing operations might have more incentive to avoid errors - or at least wouldn't multiply them...
...headset all evening, was calling a statistics professor in Texas for his analysis of how the numbers were running, and then yelling, "Get me Dowd!" to his secretary, whereupon Dowd would turn up from an adjacent office where he had been doing his own number crunching while checking the cbs website...