Catching up of Platter of Poltics

So I know I haven’t posted in a while and I’m sorry, I know I suck. Don’t worry its not because I didn’t have anything to say its because I have been fairly busy. In three weekends I have been to Canada, New York, and then Baltimore. So I haven’t been falling behind. So instead of my usual long post about something – it’s going to work more like a buffet. I’ll go reverse, starting with the most recent first and work back.

--Getting Paid for Nothing or Why I hate the Giant Hamburger--

So our station gets a call from the CBS Morning Show and they are looking for a freelance producer. They want a producer to head out to Oswego (about 40 minutes Northwest of Syracuse), for an interview with the family of a hiker who died while climbing Mount Everest.

Two brothers Mike and Chris O’Brien lost their mother and sister to a hereditary disease and were climbing the mountain to try to raise money and awareness of the disease.

So after much debate I volunteer for the job. I find out I will be getting paid the flat rate for freelancers $350 a day. Then I find out they want me to leave Tuesday night – to produce the Wednesday morning segment. So they are going to put me up in a hotel, and I was going to make 700 bucks for a few hours of work. Head out Tuesday night meet and greet the family, then around four am I would have to produce a look live package for The Morning Show and also Good Morning America. Sweet – double the contacts and still less then 24 hours of work. So I go into produce my own six pm news. Then I come out and I have a message from The Morning show. I find out the family of the dead hiker, which I worked to set up, had been talking to all afternoon just a day after finding out about Mike’s death had been bumped.

For what you ask? The Pope? A cure for cancer? Nope! A 15-pound hamburger. A Pennsylvania restaurant has created something called the ‘Beer Barrel Belly Buster,’ a burger comes with 10.5 pounds of ground beef, 25 slices of cheese, a head of lettuce, three tomatoes, two onions, 1 1/2 cups each of mayonnaise, relish, ketchup, mustard and banana peppers - and a bun. It costs $30. http://www.canada.com/news/story.html?id=b2903108-051d-488b-8f6d-3a7942508fea

That’s right a great story about two brothers working to raise money for a disease that took their sister and mothers life bumped for a giant Hamburger.

The good news – I still scammed my way to one day’s freelance pay – for 350 dollars in my pocket – but ill count that once I got it in my hand.

--- Prime Time and The President ---

So last Thursday night the President in his infinite wisdom holds his major speech on Social Security. What’s on CBS at Thursday night at 8? Survivor! So what a dilemma, do we dump the number one reality TV show Survivor for the President or do we skip the show and continue to show our obvious political bias? There were plenty of rumors that this was the President’s revenge for Rathergate. The ego on us… but every other network is going to carry the speech – so after first saying we wouldn’t take the speech CBS flip flopped and decided to carry the speech and push survivor back to nine.

Now this is my opinion. But here’s how I feel. Last time I checked CBS is a network – which includes news, but there is no news in our title. It’s not like CNN, which has News right in their abbreviation. I feel much like no one watches local news for sports no one watches local news for national events. If someone wants to know why they were backed up in traffic on their way home they switch on local news, if they want to find out what the president is doing they can watch CNN or MSNBC. At 8 o’clock people want primetime shows, not news. On the sinking ship of CBS why are we playing games with our best shows? The decision to show the speech was to pretend we are an unbiased news organization, which is a legitimate cause and I must say showing a speech is way easier then actually changing the way CBS does news.