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April 28, 2008
CBS Confirms Its Business Model
When CBS bought the billboard company, International Outdoor Advertising, last week, it confirmed that it was in the advertising delivery business and that its mission was to try to maximize profits for its shareholders. CBS thus distanced itself even further from the values of the CBS of Paley, Stanton, and Edward R. Murrow – a proud old CBS – in which serving the public good was a mission, or at least a consideration.
This purchase occurred in the same week as the publication of former CBS newsman Roger Mudd’s well-reviewed book, The Place To Be: Washington, CBS, and the Glory Days of Television News. On the last page of the book, Mudd writes about the CBS News Washington Bureau: “We had no doubts about how good we were; we had no doubts about our values; we had no doubts that our mission was to cover the news without flattering or tricking the viewer. Most of us thought ourselves chosen. It was if we had been lifted up by a journalistic deity and dropped in the middle of the Washington bureau to serve our country by doing God’s work.”
In the glory days of CBS News Mudd appeared three times a day from the steps of the Capital reporting on the Senate filibuster debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Today CBS is more about sugary fluff like whether Katie Couric will stick around for the inauguration and “The Big Bang” than about nourishing news and entertainment.
It’s ironic and telling that CBS is buying International Outdoor Advertising (IOA), a company that has no content except for advertising – a goal CBS and the other television networks obviously embrace as they steadily increase the number of commercials and crowd out content. It’s a vicious cycle: More commercials drive away viewers, which lowers ratings, which necessitates putting in more commercials to maintain profit levels, which drives away viewers, and so on until death do us part. Also, IOA is strong outside of the US and is moving to digital billboards – giant TV sets in other words.
Therefore, what CBS is doing is taking TV out of the living room and onto the streets of the world and putting nothing but commercial messages on the big screens. So if we get sick of the sugary fluff on TV at home and try to escape it by going outside, we are accosted by huge TV sets showing nothing but commercials. Heads they win, tails you lose. The move is perfect Orwellian doublethink by CBS CEO Les Moonves, who got a 29 percent raise for driving the stock down almost 40 percent and who believes “news is entertainment,” who probably believes that “war is peace,” and who is more than likely laughing up his cuff linked sleeves at Mudd’s notion of a journalistic deity dropping him and other newspeople in the middle of the Washington bureau to serve their country by doing God’s work.
God’s work, as everyone knows, is to make a profit by delivering advertising to the world.
Posted by Charles Warner at April 28, 2008 11:00 AM
Comments
Media Curmudgeon ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.mediacurmudgeon.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at April 28, 2008 05:52 PM writes:
I'm not against advertising per se, just too much of it -- all advertising, all the time.
I'm willing to enter into the bargain of being exposed to a reasonable amount of advertising in return for content I'm interested in, e.g. The New York Times website. I even enjoyed the Apple anti-Vista ads that ran two weeks ago on the site.
However, I prefer the NPR local station model (for me, WNYC) in which I hear a limited number of underwriting ads and donate a couple of hundred dollars a year during their fund-raising drives.
I'd donate that to the NY Times.com if it were a non-profit, which it is on its way to becoming.
Media Curmudgeon at April 28, 2008 05:44 PM writes:
Peter Amacher writes:
"I enjoyed this piece, as I do many of yours.
Advertising is one of the industries, along with finance, that have been growing at a 5% to 8% pace since the '50's, with dubious contribution to the general welfare. All industries, as you know,
have only briefly grown more than 3%.
Finance is now about 15% to 20% of GDP, advertising, I would guess is less than 2%. You would probably argue that advertising has done more harm to the general welfare than finance, and I wouldn't disagree. Both advertisers and financiers would obviously argue that their industries are essential to our prosperity, which is only partially true.
Every man, woman and tiny baby pays $500 -$800 per year for advertising, about $6,000 per year for finance. Hard to get the money out of those tiny babies."
Media Curmudgeon at April 28, 2008 04:21 PM writes:
Mr. B writes:
"The times are a changing. The IOA purchase is also interesting in the fact that Midtown is now connected via a wireless broadband net powered by routers on top of CBS owned billboards. Fire up your laptop in this zone and stay connected wirelessly from block to block as you are served a CBS Interactive custom homepage with paid ads. I guess it's time to go global
Bruce Braun at April 28, 2008 12:27 PM writes:
Last Saturday was the anniversary of Edward R. Murrow's birthday. He would have turned 100. The "Father" of CBS News, and along with Paley and Stanton, made CBS the "Tiffany's" of broadcasting. How did CBS News mark the occassion? Ed was given less than 90 seconds at the end of the weekend wasteland of the CBS Evening News Saturday night broadcast. The weekend anchor bunny "Kelly" dutifuly read her TelePrompTer script that sounded like they copied it from Wikipedia. If you go to the CBS News website, today, there is no mention of Murrow unless you dig down into the CBS Evening News page...well, you have to go hunting to find anything about Murrow. Kelly and her current co-workers do not have any role models or standard bearers of professionalism such as Murrow. Today, their standard bearers are Geraldo, Pat O'Brian, Mary Hart, Dr. Phil and Oprah. Professional training as working journalists takes a back seat to physical appearance, long legs in short skirts with CFM pumps and experience doing stories about celebrities going into rehab and paparazzi crotch shots of drunken celebutards. TMZ has become the new standard. Moonves is the personification of everything that is bad about television and news today. Les even pimps out his own trophy wife so they can collect two paychecks from Redstone. How long would the GM of one of the CBS owned TV stations be around if he was banging one of his station's female news anchors or reporters, while still being married? Those rules don't apply to Les and he has no sense of setting moral or ethical standards. Remember how he handled Imus? How much did that cost CBS because he bungled the matter? Moonves, really does understand his boss: "Show Me The Money". Forget any standards of morality, ethics or professionalism. Next corporate purchase for CBS: those annoying elevator TV monitors with commercials. Les gets the concept of an elevator pitch. He's turned CBS into nothing more than an elevator pitch.
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