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I’m gonna be a dick today, because that’s a personal choice. It’s the middle of June and the COVID-19 vaccine is available (and free!) to anyone in the United States over the age of 12. This is a miracle. If you’re fully vaccinated like I am, you can throw parties now. You can travel. You can eat out. You don’t have to quarantine at home, counting toilet paper rolls and making hatch marks on your bedroom wall and wondering when you’ll be free of this bloody pandemic. It’s over for you. You won. You could even celebrate by going to...

Conference preview: Q-and-A with Andrew Heyward, former president of CBS News. Is the evening news more important than ever now? Oct.24, 2006 Copyright © 2006 PRSA. All rights reserved. The following interview appears in the fall issue of The Strategist. By John Elsasser One could be forgiven for thinking Andrew Heyward’s career was as carefully planned as, well, one of the evening news broadcasts he had overseen during parts of his nearly 30-year career. Heyward, former president of CBS News, however, never planned on a career in the news business. Rather, his journey into journalism evolved from a temporary post...

NEW YORK - CBS on Wednesday appointed its top sports executive, Sean McManus, to replace Andrew Heyward as head of a news division still searching for Dan Rather's replacement and seeking to rebound from last year's discredited report on President Bush's military service. McManus, 50, follows in the path of the late Roone Arledge at ABC as an executive who took over a network news division while still running sports. Heyward will leave two months shy of his 10th anniversary running the legendary news division, a distant third in the ratings in both the morning and evening yet still the...

NEW YORK - CBS said Wednesday it is cancelling the Wednesday edition of "60 Minutes," insisting the decision was made because of poor ratings and not last fall's ill-fated story about President Bush's military service Dan Rather, the newsmagazine's lead correspondent, will contribute stories to the Sunday edition of "60 Minutes," said CBS Chairman Leslie Moonves. "This was a ratings call, not a content call," Moonves said Wednesday. The newsmagazine spinoff was where Rather reported last September that Bush skirted some duty while in the Texas Air National Guard and a commander felt pressure to sugarcoat an evaluation of him....

After an independent investigation concluded that much of a "60 Minutes Wednesday" segment on President Bush's service record was wrong, incomplete and unfair, four veteran CBS News executives found themselves shown the door to West 57th Street. Yet the real surprise to many observers — both inside and outside the Eye Network — was that anchor Dan Rather and longtime CBS News President Andrew Heyward weren't also asked to leave. Rather, 73, already had volunteered to step down from the anchor chair in March, though he'll continue to do reports for the network. But media watchers say Heyward, a Hastings-on-Hudson...

At CBS News the long awaited "memogate" report is in and four people are out of a job. Is this one of the biggest scandals ever to hit American journalism? Did the report go far enough? And what about the recommendations made by the independent panel investigating the "60 Minutes Wednesday" story about President Bush's National Guard service? Our panelists will weigh in on those questions and much more! Then, in our "Quick Takes on the Media" segment: • What was the real reason for the massive media coverage of the South Asian tsunami? • Should a reaction to a...

On Monday, Jan. 10, CNN’s new president, Jonathan Klein, was sitting in his fourth-floor office in the Time Warner Center recalling an adage a former boss gave him about journalistic principles in TV news.Jon," he recalled him saying, "we’re not going to do just anything to win."The former boss was CBS News president Andrew Heyward, whose news organization was at that moment on the verge of being flogged from West 57th Street to Television City for looking as though it would do just anything to win.Nevertheless, "that stuck with me," said Mr. Klein. "I’d never heard that before. It defines...

Excerpt from CBS press release: ----------------- This brings us to two senior figures at CBS News whose performance is discussed in some depth in the Panel's report. Based on the findings of that report, we believe the following is appropriate: The Panel found that Dan Rather was pushed to the limit in the week before the September 8th broadcast. He was finishing up the anchoring job at the 2004 Republican Convention and was covering Hurricane Frances in Florida. He asked the right questions initially, but then made the same errors of credulity and over-enthusiasm that beset many of his colleagues...

Let the fence-mending begin. According to a Broadcasting & Cable source in Washington, D.C., CBS News president Andrew Heyward, along with Washington bureau chief Janet Leissner, recently met with White House communications director Dan Bartlett, in part to repair chilly relations with the Bush administration.CBS News’ popularity at the White House—never high to begin with—plunged further in the wake of Dan Rather’s discredited 60 Minutes story on George Bush’s National Guard service.An incentive for making nice is the impending report from the two-member panel investigating CBS's use of now-infamous documents for the 60 Minutes piece.Heyward was “working overtime to convince Bartlett that neither...

Last night on his Sunday radio show, Matt Drudge told listeners that Dan Rather's resignation announcement came after the "independent" commission investigating Memogate delivered an in-progress report on the matter to the top guns at CBS: "I was told that last Monday the preliminary report on the Rather document matter was given to management at CBS. This is before the Rather announcement, and I've got immaculate sources at CBS. So it must not be good. CBS News President Andrew Heyward is now in the bullseye. They can't let too many people go, they don't have that many left." So far,...

For some veterans of CBS News, the departure of Dan Rather from the network's evening newscast represents a kind of coda on a long, sad song of decline from greatness. The news organization that did the most to define broadcast news from the early days of radio through the golden age of television in the 1950's and 1960's has gone through a marked falloff in the last 15 years, probably suffering more than any other network from the shrinking of resources that matched its shrinking audiences. But the notion that Mr. Rather's decision to give up his anchor job is...

Guys, we need to keep the pressure on C-B.S. affiliates. It's working (see the article below), and it may determine the fate of Dan Rather and Mary Mapes. Media fear '60' fallout Tue Sep 21, 6:21 PM ET Pamela McClintock, STAFF Frustration and ire gripped CBS News on Tuesday, with staffers and the main "60 Minutes" newsmag trying to distance themselves from the scandal that has embroiled the spinoff edition of the show. Across the country, CBS affiliates continued to be bombarded with mail from viewers expressing their outrage over Dan Rather in particular and the journalistic debacle in general....

Last week, as the furor over Dan Rather's National Guard memos grew more and more intense, media critic Ken Auletta, appearing on PBS, criticized Fox News Channel for having "treated this story as if it were Watergate. It's not Watergate." Actually, in many respects, it is indeed broadcast journalism's Watergate.... There are two serious problems with this entire episode, beyond the obvious blow to CBS News' credibility. One is Rather's defensive — even accusatory — reaction to any and all questions about the documents' legitimacy.... First, they refused to consider any questions whatsoever — even from respected news organizations —...