David Kronke was appointed Mayor of Television after a bloodless coup in 2000. Since then, he has improved infrastructure, championed greater educational opportunities and fought for reforms that have utterly erased corruption and incompetence from the television industry. Since Mr. Kronke has ascended to power, Television is a far better place. Evergreens: Rosie, Katie, Bingo
NBC’s new head, Ben Silverman, is reportedly saying he’ll do “anything” to land Rosie O’Donnell for either a daytime gig or a prime-time game show. Here’s hoping O’Donnell will be very creative in determining what that “anything” that Silverman will have to do will be: a hit on Elisabeth Hasselbeck, perhaps?
*
New Yorker media analyst Ken Auletta will chat with CBS COO Les Moonves in a public forum Tuesday in New York, and another media analyst, Jon Friedman, has done Auletta’s heavy lifting for him. He has created a list of questions to grill Moonves over the Katie Couric situation.
Friedman says he has been accused by one CBS executive of being “obsessed” with Couric’s struggles in the evening news anchor’s chair. (Friedman responds, “For the record, I’m not,” though I haven’t seen anyone else write about it as much as he has.)
Anyway, here are some of the questions he’d like to see Moonves answer:
* What can you do to improve the evening-news show?
* What specifically has gone wrong with Katie Couric's "CBS Evening News?"
* Is her job safe -- and for how long? Any thoughts of asking her to move, for instance, to "The Early Show?"
* What would have to happen for you to consider replacing Couric?
* If Couric-related debacles like the infamous Photoshopping snafu and the plagiarism scandal weren't her fault, how much responsibility should we assign to you, CBS news chief Sean McManus and the corporation?
* Considering the higher ratings consistently enjoyed by Charles Gibson and Brian Williams, Couric's two old-school counterparts, do you now regret thinking that CBS needed to blow up the traditional evening-news format?
* What has surprised you about this story? For instance, did you expect America to react so indifferently or the media to give her such a hard time?
* Why can't CBS do better against "Today" and "Good Morning America?"
*
Last week, “National Bingo Night” managed a mere 5 million viewers, and I detect faint whiffs of potential scandal surrounding it. Somewhere out there on the Internets, someone who actually watched the show complained about the cards the viewer had downloaded. (Those playing at home can win cash.)
Well, people lose at Bingo all the time, but the whiner may have a point: The show is taped ahead of time, so ABC knows what the winning numbers are, so who’s to say they don’t tamper with their cards to limit the number of winners? Forget “fleeting expletives:” This is the sort of bad-faith not-serving-the-public’s-best-interest thing that the FCC should be crawling all over. (If only just to get Bingo off TV once and for all – after all, we all know cribbage is a much more TV-friendly game.)