THIS IS CNN: Don Lemon goes berserker on Kaitlan Collins

I feel somewhat vindicated that my nearly lifelong stereotypical image of on-camera local TV people has some truth to it.

 

ExHack: The finale.

 

More than some.

 

We really back to doing this shit, huh?

 

At the Tampa CBS station Rich Fields, a meteorologist who formerly was the announcer on The Price Is Right, tried a happy talk line that went horribly wrong and is no longer with the station

https://www.ftvlive.com/sqsp-test/2022/11/20/why-would-you-say-that?format=amp

 

CNN putting Kaitlan Collins on at 9 p.m. for a tryout seems more like they're just trying to irritate the hell out of Lemon than anything else. Making him announce each day that Kaitlan is off today doing ...a primetime show. I find most of the cable news hours indistinguishable and the hosts add or detract little from the content.

 

Collins isn't ready. Saw her the other night. Limp.

 

To be fair, that began long ago, and it started with men.

The purpose-built bright-eyed square-jawed baritone idiot was coming online just as I was starting in the mid-70s.* Part of the first wave of Action News/Eyewitness News makeovers from Magid.

I worked with what turned out to be the last generation of 1940s/1950s radio journalists who'd been moved to television. Many of them had begun in newspapers. and were still reporters in the truest sense. But they were not stylish and they were not physically attractive. They were balding overweight men in their 50s who wore harvest gold short-sleeve dress shirts and loud neckties and read from their notebooks on-camera without looking up.

As they aged out they were replaced by the first generation of great looking, well-tailored broadcast knuckleheads.

(*It was enough of a trope/cliche by 1987 that we get the movie 'Broadcast News.')

(Additional historical aside: in the 1940s and 1950s the earliest television news anchors were often local actors or radio performers with no news experience at all. eg, Ted Baxter)

 

This could be fun...or an absolute disaster.
Gayle King and Charles Barkley to host new prime-time show together

 

I long ago concluded that I have no use for “current events” shows hosted by people who don’t pay attention to current events.

Hard pass.

 

Does this get Gayle into next season’s Capital One commercials?

 

I don’t have an opinion about Gayle’s journalism, but she might break me in a three-day weekend.