Bad News at Black Rock: The Sell-Out of CBS News

by Peter McCabe

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0877959072
• ISBN13: 9780877959076
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: William Morrow & Company
• Length: 302 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Last Days Of "CBS Morning News"

Before "The Early Show" CBS launched a number of morning programs to compete with NBC's "Today" and ABC's "Good Morning America". Of them, none lasted longer or fell harder than "CBS Morning News". Peter McCabe, a producer there in its last days, explains what it was like watching the ship go down in 1986. Published in 1987, "Bad News At Black Rock" may cover events dating back a quarter-century, but it is a worthwhile read for media buffs and entertaining for anyone else. McCabe's background as a feature writer comes in handy as he spends a lot of time focusing on the day-to-day life in "the fishbowl", a large room where producers and bookers traded gossip and compared battle scars, worrying if one of the other shows might book a prize guest first. "It was amazing at times to see a group of men and women with years of accumulated journalistic experience among them fretting because 'Today' had featured the girl scout who sold the most cookies, while we had not", he writes. McCabe describes several of the personalities in colorful detail, including recognizable ones like Bill Kurtis and Phyllis George (co-anchors of the show when McCabe came aboard, and the foci of much machination). Head producer Jon Katz is a particularly colorful character as painted here, alternately wise and pig-headed as he embodies television's best and worst excesses. McCabe is warned early on about the danger of thinking he is going to change anything, and to his credit he doesn't seem a crusader. He's more an amused observer who understands the program and just wishes it was less sizzle and more steak. Watching George, a former beauty queen, fussing over her hair and make-up while ignoring the notes for her next interview, makes him cringe: "If there was one thing Phyllis did not need to worry about, it was how she looked." McCabe's book is very much of its time, the mid-1980s, with references to events then quite huge but largely forgotten today. The book is dated in other ways. It was okay back then to introduce females by calling them "attractive", as McCabe does, without being labeled sexist. I actually enjoyed this sort of political incorrectness. The 1980s feel very long ago all of a sudden, but this book brings back some of what made them fun. The only real drawback is when McCabe broadens his focus to take on CBS News as a whole. The news division was having problems, but McCabe was an outsider to all but one small part. McCabe even quotes excessively from the movie "Network" to make his points. It is only when McCabe focuses on his comrades at "Morning News" that the book makes its strongest impressions. The news business has changed a lot since the 1980s, but I'm sure there are many in and out of media who will enjoy reading about what it was like working a constant battery of 12-hour days in a place of such myopic misery and, in the end, still managing to resent the people responsible for shutting the place down.