I just had a flashback to 1976...

The young lady whom I was dating at the time hailed from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and had worked as a desk clerk in a hotel in the city. There was a Jim Smith Society Convention booked for a weekend. The Jim Smith Society, which was started in Pennsylvania, has a membership, obviously, entirely of Jim Smiths. CBS decided that they wanted to cover it for one of those little ditties which they used to do even in the old days at the end of the network news.

Now obviously, the hoteliers were not idiots: they knew that everyone registering would be a Jim Smith or James Smith so they of course asked for the street address as part of the reservation so that they could distinguish the individuals. Well, the CBS producer wanted to show that the staff was confused and befuddled by one registrant after another attempting to get a room key and give credit card information, and the staff explained that it had already been taken care of: that there would be no confusion. That was unacceptable to the producer so they got my then girlfriend to have reaction shots as each of the individuals came up to the counter and when asked their name, replied, "Jim Smith". They went along with the ruse, but she, who was and is a very bright individual, was appalled at having to do so. From what she said, CBS ran the piece with the usual dopey predictable humor at how a bureaucracy just can't get it right.

So when CNN was faking the SCUD missile landings near their outpost during the Gulf War, I wasn't surprised at all. As far as Brian Williams goes or Bill O'Reilly for that matter, they're just fakers and pretenders. Of course, I'm old enough to remember that Bob Schieffer who is considered the Dean of CBS now, was just a young man in the deep shadow of Cronkite, Collingswood, Sevareid, Whitaker (sports), and the others who made that network what it was. Schieffer unfortunately is not what we had hoped he would be in his 'venerated years'. But what can you do?