Rich Guys Club

Sitting in her office, which curls like a cat’s tail around a corner of the CBS newsroom, Katie Couric is doing her best to appear blasé, even though it’s a mere five days before Diane Sawyer is scheduled to ascend to the anchor chair at rival network ABC.

Couric and Sawyer have been trying to get together for lunch, she says. “I think we like each other a lot,” Couric says. True, she gamely participated in Sawyer’s Good Morning America going-away video, in which ABC’s chief investigative correspondent, Brian Ross, pretends to burst in on Couric — in this very office — making out with Sawyer’s husband, director Mike Nichols. Couric insists she isn’t taking their impending face-off too seriously. “I don’t know whether it’s that I’ve gotten older or more mature, but some of the brouhaha just seems so silly to me.”

Couric will always have the distinction of being the first female solo anchor in the history of network news. Of course, network news is by definition stories relayed via visuals, and the portraits on the walls of Couric’s office of trailblazing American women — Sally Ride, first in space; Wilma Rudolph, first to collect three Olympic golds in a single Games; Amelia Earhart, first to fly solo across the Atlantic — tell a story, too, elevating her own famous profile to a select pantheon.

Read More: – By Phoebe Eaton, HarpersBazaar

The Huffington Post

“So, I am getting into spanking her,” says the Orange County Republican. “I like spanking her. She goes, ‘I know you like spanking me.’ I said, ‘Yeah! Because you’re such a bad girl!’”

The lobbyists reportedly represent utility companies. Duvall is vice chairman of the Utilities and Commerce Committee. Bad assemblyman!

Local CBS affiliate KCAL9 had the scoop. Here’s a YouTube video of their segment:

KCAL9 identifies Duvall as a “family values” assemblyman. In a commendable effort to get a comment, the reporter literally runs after the assemblyman, yelling, “Audio tapes, sir! Very sexual audio tapes!”

WCBSTV.com

NEW YORK (CBS) When it came to broadcast journalism, Hewitt was a pioneer, helping create the blueprint for television news.

He led an illustrious career that began in 1948. That’s when he became director of the first CBS Evening News show. He directed many other programs, including Edward R. Murrow’s signature show, “See It Now.”

Hewitt took on producing duties as well, directing and producing the famous presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

“I felt like a referee at a fight,” Hewitt said in 2000. “I was giving them their last minute instructions before they went to their corners and came out swinging.”

Hewitt advised Nixon to use makeup, but he declined, losing the debate when he appeared tired and pale on television, and eventually losing the election.

A couple of years later, Hewitt became the first executive producer of the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. He’s credited with coining the term “anchorman” and creating the look that for decades defined how television news was presented. In fact, Hewitt’s most recent public appearance was in July, when he attended Cronkite’s memorial service in Manhattan.

But his greatest creation was no doubt “60 Minutes,” the show that changed the face of broadcast journalism.

“60 Minutes” was the first news program to become a top-ten television show. It regularly made headlines with stories ranging from hard-hitting investigative pieces to interviews with the famous and notorious. The show won every award in the book.

“Tell me a story,” Hewitt would demand. He had an instinct for knowing what the average American likes to watch and carefully scrutinized every script. The show remained on top for more than 30 years.

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Americans Threatened by Business?

Most recently, the Emmy nominations of 2008 showed that series which focus on corporate corruption win a disproportionate share of critical praise. “Damages” on FX won seven nominations (including Outstanding Drama Series) for its celebrated non-linear presentation of Glenn Close as a crusading attorney pursuing a class action lawsuit against a vicious CEO (Ted Danson) on behalf of his workers in season one, while season two focused on another “cutthroat case” against a greedy energy company. Another nominee for Outstanding Drama (and in fifteen other categories) was “Mad Men,” a dark, jaded, stylized look at the soulless manipulation and rampant, adulterous sexual exploitation in a New York advertising agency of the ‘60’s. “Dirty Sexy Money” (ABC, 2007-2009) won its own Emmy attention for its lurid portrayal of the fabulously wealthy, scandal-plagued Darling family, and made clear its cynical attitude toward the pursuit of profit in its very title. “Arrested Development” on Fox (2003-2006) received even more critical praise (including six Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe) for its off-kilter presentation of yet another deeply dysfunctional, criminally corrupt business family.

The television news departments affiliated with these same entertainment conglomerates powerfully and predictably reinforce the negative messages about the capitalist system. The Business and Media Institute sponsored a yearlong study of evening news programming on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Fox, monitoring the treatment of business issues between January 1 and December 31, 2006. Amazingly, in nearly two thirds (63%) of all business stories, business men or women never appeared to comment, even briefly. In those stories, a clear majority 57% (481 of 848) featured negative treatment of the commercial figures involved – employing terms like “corporate fat cats” or “crooks heading to the slammer.” The most popular attacks centered on monetary transgressions – unfair pricing, overly lavish CEO pay, or “obscene” corporate profits.

The bitterly negative portrayals of business ethics and accomplishment continue to bombard the public, unaccompanied by contrasting or countervailing visions of heroism or dynamism in the corporate world –a surprising imbalance considering that the source of all these entertainments remains one of the most ruthlessly competitive and globally consequential of all US enterprises.

BITING THE HAND THAT IS YOU

Why would Hollywood, dominated by a handful of shamelessly capitalistic conglomerates, regularly trash the free market system which allowed American media companies to conquer the globe? Why should movie directors, TV producers or Tinseltown stars, all of whom have benefited spectacularly from the business of entertainment, display such consistent negativity to the free market opportunities that made it all possible?

This isn’t merely an example of “biting the hand that feeds you.” In terms of the entertainment companies, it amounts to a case of biting the hand that is you.

According to Larry Ribstein, who teaches business law at the Illinois College of Law in Champaign, it’s not “business per se” that raises the objections of filmmakers, but the specific business people who control their projects. “Filmmakers’ main problem with capital being in control seems to be that the filmmakers are not.”

Every writer, director and actor in Hollywood cherishes stories about cruel, crude, exploitative treatment by lunk-headed executives and for many people in the creative community these encounters represent their only personal experience in the world of business. They naturally extrapolate recollections of these often unpleasant interactions toward a dim view of the free market system in general. As many entertainment insides will concede, the vicious, selfish caricatures of corporate bosses that turn up so frequently on TV and in films bear more than a passing resemblance to the studio or network honchos who may have cheated or disappointed by the projects’ principals in the past.

But if these business-bashing efforts amount to a form of revenge against the greed and ruthlessness of entertainment executives, why should those same executives grant regular approval to projects meant to attack them? Omnipotent corporate titans, in Hollywood and elsewhere, aren’t generally associated with a robust sense of humor about their own values and habits. The consistent investment in anti-capitalist diversions remains especially perplexing in light of the frequently disappointing box office returns for movies that demonize big corporations. Few movie-goers ever bought tickets (or rented the DVD) to see the propagandistic provocation “The Corporation,” for instance, while the big budget, high profile “The Manchurian Candidate” remake qualified as a major flop.

In part, the ugly view of the corporate system that emerges with such consistency from big corporations in Hollywood reflects the distinctively irrational and unpredictable nature of show business. As Academy Award-winning screenwriter William Goldman famously concluded, the operating assumption for the entire industry is “Nobody knows anything.” In other words, each studio’s superhighway of gleaming, high-powered can’t-miss hits is littered with the twisted wreckage of costly and heart-breaking bombs, while sloppy stinkers that deserve neither respect nor affection often startle their own creators by earning inexplicable millions. Unlike the widget manufacturing business, the entertainment assembly line uniquely lacks any objective criterion of excellence. If a company succeeds with its new line of widgets, it’s generally an indication of the worthiness or at least the predictable public appeal of the product. If, on the other hand, you turn out inferior or unreliable widgets you stand a real chance of going broke.

No such logic applies to the entertainment industry, where Dreamworks executive Jeffrey Katzenberg freely acknowledges that success or failure depends on the inscrutable, erratic “movie gods” as much as any reasonable calculation, craft or planning. Every actor or actress, no matter how accomplished, realizes at the deepest level that his or her popularity may owe as much to a winning smile or burning blue eyes or long, lovely legs as to painstakingly developed thespian skill. In fact, many multimillionaire performers understand that undiscovered but ambitious young people who earn their few bucks as waiters or parking attendants might easily compete with the best in the business if ever given a proper chance.

The rewards of Hollywood, in other words, flow to studio executives and to the creative community alike in a random, fickle and manifestly unfair manner, which leads pop culture powerhouses who’ve gained their primary business experience within the entertainment arena to assume that capitalism at large is similarly random, fickle and unfair. If leading celebrities condemn the entire economic system as unreasonable, exploitative, ridiculous and deceptive they do so because they’ve experienced these qualities directly in the industry in which they toil.

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