Chris Marrou

The SUN IS NOT RISING FOR CBS NEWS Many years ago when your mother was a little girl and political correctness didn’t rule the Earth, a recently-hired news director in Dallas held a lunchtime staff meeting. Not only were employees required to come, a free burger-and-fries lunch was provided. Free food has always been an attraction for news types. At noon, everyone gathered around the station’s conference table. Hamburgers appeared in paper sacks and were unwrapped. People bit into them, then stopped and started spitting out the meal. The hamburger patties had not been cooked. Confused and irked, they all looked up at their new boss, who was waiting for the reaction. “That’s right,” the news director said. “And trust me, there’s going to be a lot more raw ass around here before I’m through.” It’s too bad CBS News boss Bari Weiss couldn’t have done something like that when she was new on the job. It would have saved her a lot of trouble. This week the new executive producer for 60 Minutes, a guy named Nick Bilton, fired correspondent Scott Pelley. Pelley had given one of those faux truth-to-power speeches to staff members during Bilton’s staff meeting about how new management was kowtowing to that evil Donald Trump and he wasn’t going to tolerate it. Now he doesn’t have to. Once when I went to my father’s house for a (cooked) barbecue dinner, we sat in his backyard as the sun lowered. A small lizard appeared on a fence near us, paused and raised his head, inflating a reddish sac under his jaw. “Look at that,” my father said. ”He still thinks he’s a dinosaur.” And so does almost everyone at CBS News, including Scott Pelley. Sixty, fifty, even forty years ago, CBS News was in a class of its own. Other news operations trembled at their appearance. 60 Minutes was the highest-rated show on television. Corporate and political moguls lived in fear of an ambush interview by Mike Wallace or Harry Reasoner; celebrities hoped for interviews from Morley Safer or Leslie Stahl. But those times are gone, gone as certainly as 16-millimeter film. This week Scott Pelley opened his mouth and expected a roar to emerge that would send new executives into their offices to hide for months. What came out was a squeak. Pelley, who thought he was carved into CBS’s Mount Rushmore, discovered he was just part of the rubble below. His departure from CBS will elicit neither eulogies nor encomiums. Pelley was named anchor of the CBS Evening News about ten years ago, which he thought made him Walter Cronkite; instead he was just another car on CBS’s choo-choo train to journalistic oblivion, Ratings declined even as he spoke each evening. After a couple of years, he was replaced by a female, then two guys, then Tony Dokoupil. The anchor chair at the fabled newscast has become an ejection seat. Unless he’s hit by a meteor next week, Scott Pelley won’t be in any textbooks on broadcast journalism, even as a footnote. For him and his CBS pals, mediocrity was a career goal. They had to look up to see average. The New York Times quoted him today: “I have been in combat in Afghanistan,” Mr. Pelley said. “I have been in combat in Iraq. I have been in the war zone in Ukraine multiple times, risking my life and the happiness of my family because of my devotion to the broadcast.” Nobody cares where you’ve been or how your family felt, Scott. That’s part of the job. It’s like a surgeon griping about how much blood she’s seen. For 60 Minutes or the Evening News to improve, Pelley’s departure should have been part of a mass firing, with CBS handing out moving boxes like favors at an eighth-birthday party. I admire Bari Weiss for her effort to turn things around from Upper East Side liberal condescension to straight-talking unbiased coverage of what’s actually happening in this country, but I wonder if it can be accomplished. If it’s going to be, there needs to be a whole lot more raw ass at CBS.

CMarrou's tweet photo. The SUN IS NOT RISING FOR CBS NEWS

Many years ago when your mother was a little girl and political correctness didn’t rule the Earth, a recently-hired news director in Dallas held a lunchtime staff meeting. Not only were employees required to come, a free burger-and-fries lunch was provided. Free food has always been an attraction for news types.

At noon, everyone gathered around the station’s conference table. Hamburgers appeared in paper sacks and were unwrapped. People bit into them, then stopped and started spitting out the meal. The hamburger patties had not been cooked. Confused and irked, they all looked up at their new boss, who was waiting for the reaction.

“That’s right,” the news director said. “And trust me, there’s going to be a lot more raw ass around here before I’m through.”

It’s too bad CBS News boss Bari Weiss couldn’t have done something like that when she was new on the job. It would have saved her a lot of trouble.

This week the new executive producer for 60 Minutes, a guy named Nick Bilton, fired correspondent Scott Pelley. Pelley had given one of those faux truth-to-power speeches to staff members during Bilton’s staff meeting about how new management was kowtowing to that evil Donald Trump and he wasn’t going to tolerate it.

Now he doesn’t have to.

Once when I went to my father’s house for a (cooked) barbecue dinner, we sat in his backyard as the sun lowered. A small lizard appeared on a fence near us, paused and raised his head, inflating a reddish sac under his jaw.

“Look at that,” my father said. ”He still thinks he’s a dinosaur.”

And so does almost everyone at CBS News, including Scott Pelley. Sixty, fifty, even forty years ago, CBS News was in a class of its own. Other news operations trembled at their appearance. 60 Minutes was the highest-rated show on television. Corporate and political moguls lived in fear of an ambush interview by Mike Wallace or Harry Reasoner; celebrities hoped for interviews from Morley Safer or Leslie Stahl. But those times are gone, gone as certainly as 16-millimeter film.

This week Scott Pelley opened his mouth and expected a roar to emerge that would send new executives into their offices to hide for months. What came out was a squeak. Pelley, who thought he was carved into CBS’s Mount Rushmore, discovered he was just part of the rubble below. His departure from CBS will elicit neither eulogies nor encomiums.

Pelley was named anchor of the CBS Evening News about ten years ago, which he thought made him Walter Cronkite; instead he was just another car on CBS’s choo-choo train to journalistic oblivion, Ratings declined even as he spoke each evening. After a couple of years, he was replaced by a female, then two guys, then Tony Dokoupil. The anchor chair at the fabled newscast has become an ejection seat.

Unless he’s hit by a meteor next week, Scott Pelley won’t be in any textbooks on broadcast journalism, even as a footnote. For him and his CBS pals, mediocrity was a career goal. They had to look up to see average. The New York Times quoted him today:

“I have been in combat in Afghanistan,” Mr. Pelley said. “I have been in combat in Iraq. I have been in the war zone in Ukraine multiple times, risking my life and the happiness of my family because of my devotion to the broadcast.”

Nobody cares where you’ve been or how your family felt, Scott. That’s part of the job. It’s like a surgeon griping about how much blood she’s seen. For 60 Minutes or the Evening News to improve, Pelley’s departure should have been part of a mass firing, with CBS handing out moving boxes like favors at an eighth-birthday party. I admire Bari Weiss for her effort to turn things around from Upper East Side liberal condescension to straight-talking unbiased coverage of what’s actually happening in this country, but I wonder if it can be accomplished.

If it’s going to be, there needs to be a whole lot more raw ass at CBS.

148

Chris Marrou

@CMarrou

about 17 hours ago

@mikemoviez You’re right, but I do remember From Russia with Love as having the damndest fight scene in a train compartment…

Chris Marrou

@CMarrou

about 20 hours ago

@SonjaHHarris Pond Spring Tesla in Austin. Picked it up at the gigafactory.

Chris Marrou

@CMarrou

8 days ago

After owning almost every make of car over 53 years, I bought a Tesla the other day and immediately made every other car seem like a Pierce Arrow. It drives itself perfectly and has an instant Grok hookup. Driving it home last Friday I left Grok on to answer questions about the car’s operation. When I got out of the car I heard Grok speak in a woman’s voice. When I got back in I asked what it had said. “Oh,” it said, “I was just saying how nice it is to hear birds singing in the afternoon.” There were birds singing and I had noticed them, but artificial intelligence?

Chris Marrou

@CMarrou

2 days ago

Name a Right That Can't Be Infringed, except, you know... I wasn’t much of a fan of Twitter until Elon Musk bought it. His plans to make it an actual free-speech outlet encouraged me greatly. Now I just wish he’d apply the Second Amendment to it as well. Okay, I don’t mean we all get free guns. I’m referring to something that seemed pretty harmless at the time but has grown to be an irritant. It’s the pseudo-poll question that limits your responses. “Name a song with rain in the title but not Purple Rain” is one I saw earlier today. It’s effectively saying “give me an answer I want but not that answer.” A few days ago one said “Name your favorite Clint Eastwood movie but not…” and here comes a list of half-a-dozen of Clint’s popular movies. So you’re asking my opinion about an issue but not allowing my opinion if you don’t like it. I understand this is probably done for a reason having to do with payouts from X’s advertising. Somehow saying “this but not this” must boost responses and word counts and get people closer to getting their eighty-three cent check from https://t.co/ROji8DfGuT. But it’s not an actual poll of anything if you restrict the answers. And what does this have to do with the Second Amendment? It’s about that last few words, the ones that say our right to keep and bear arms “shall not be infringed.” Governments always want to nibble away at our rights. In the case of the Second Amendment, it’s mostly out of jealousy—whoever is the best-armed runs the show, so any regime would want its soldiers to have more firepower than its citizens, and that’s exactly why the Founders but that final phrase in there. We get guns and you can’t infringe it. But governments can’t stand it. In most places, like poor Canada, people have no rights at all. In Canada Mace is illegal. Here it’s sold in drugstores. Even here, politicians try all the time. No high-capacity magazines, no automatic weapons, no “assault rifles.” “You don’t need that to go hunting,” they say, as if the Founders of our nation were really concerned about our right to participate in a sport. Maybe they should have thrown tennis and golf in there as things not to be infringed, too. As the Amendment right after the first one. Sure. If we have the right to keep and bear arms, we have the right to keep and bear arms, and not to keep certain arms and bear them in a certain way. That’s why “shall not be infringed” is in there, yet states try to infringe the hell out of it every chance they get. “You mean just plain people should be allowed to have nuclear weapons?” This is a trick question asked by liberals. The answer is, you think the countries that currently have nuclear weapons are run by rational people? North Korea? Pakistan? In addition, who do you think is in charge of our nukes? It’s just plain American citizens, yet somehow they manage to avoid blowing up the planet every day. A cousin of mine spent a couple of years on a nuclear sub yet he never tried to blow up Beijing or even Boston. But back to X/Twitter. Name me a movie that has “wind” in the title, but not “Gone with the Wind,” “Inherit the Wind,” or “The Wind and the Lion.” What’s the point if you won’t allow half the possible answers? What’s the point of the Second Amendment if you only allow single-shot muskets? It’s as if California or New York asked all their citizens to name an amendment from the Bill of Rights that’s often been infringed, but you can’t say the Second. I mean look how well they’ve done on the Third. Hardly anyone has to put up soldiers in their homes, and that’s as good as the Second, isn’t it?

CMarrou's tweet photo. Name a Right That Can't Be Infringed, except, you know...

I wasn’t much of a fan of Twitter until Elon Musk bought it. His plans to make it an actual free-speech outlet encouraged me greatly. Now I just wish he’d apply the Second Amendment to it as well.

Okay, I don’t mean we all get free guns. I’m referring to something that seemed pretty harmless at the time but has grown to be an irritant. It’s the pseudo-poll question that limits your responses. “Name a song with rain in the title but not Purple Rain” is one I saw earlier today. It’s effectively saying “give me an answer I want but not that answer.” A few days ago one said “Name your favorite Clint Eastwood movie but not…” and here comes a list of half-a-dozen of Clint’s popular movies.

So you’re asking my opinion about an issue but not allowing my opinion if you don’t like it.

I understand this is probably done for a reason having to do with payouts from X’s advertising. Somehow saying “this but not this” must boost responses and word counts and get people closer to getting their eighty-three cent check from https://t.co/ROji8DfGuT.

But it’s not an actual poll of anything if you restrict the answers.

And what does this have to do with the Second Amendment? It’s about that last few words, the ones that say our right to keep and bear arms “shall not be infringed.”

Governments always want to nibble away at our rights. In the case of the Second Amendment, it’s mostly out of jealousy—whoever is the best-armed runs the show, so any regime would want its soldiers to have more firepower than its citizens, and that’s exactly why the Founders but that final phrase in there. We get guns and you can’t infringe it.

But governments can’t stand it. In most places, like poor Canada, people have no rights at all. In Canada Mace is illegal. Here it’s sold in drugstores. Even here, politicians try all the time. No high-capacity magazines, no automatic weapons, no “assault rifles.”

“You don’t need that to go hunting,” they say, as if the Founders of our nation were really concerned about our right to participate in a sport. Maybe they should have thrown tennis and golf in there as things not to be infringed, too. As the Amendment right after the first one. Sure.

If we have the right to keep and bear arms, we have the right to keep and bear arms, and not to keep certain arms and bear them in a certain way. That’s why “shall not be infringed” is in there, yet states try to infringe the hell out of it every chance they get.

“You mean just plain people should be allowed to have nuclear weapons?” This is a trick question asked by liberals. The answer is, you think the countries that currently have nuclear weapons are run by rational people? North Korea? Pakistan? In addition, who do you think is in charge of our nukes? It’s just plain American citizens, yet somehow they manage to avoid blowing up the planet every day. A cousin of mine spent a couple of years on a nuclear sub yet he never tried to blow up Beijing or even Boston.

But back to X/Twitter. Name me a movie that has “wind” in the title, but not “Gone with the Wind,” “Inherit the Wind,” or “The Wind and the Lion.” What’s the point if you won’t allow half the possible answers? What’s the point of the Second Amendment if you only allow single-shot muskets?

It’s as if California or New York asked all their citizens to name an amendment from the Bill of Rights that’s often been infringed, but you can’t say the Second. I mean look how well they’ve done on the Third. Hardly anyone has to put up soldiers in their homes, and that’s as good as the Second, isn’t it?

Chris Marrou

@CMarrou

3 days ago

@NoDMsPerfavore Chevy Vega

Chris Marrou

@CMarrou

3 days ago

@ThatEricAlper Static.

Chris Marrou

@CMarrou

4 days ago

Report: Five killed, dozens injured when bus driven by illegal alien smashes into slow traffic in Maryland. He got a license from New York despite not speaking or reading English.

CMarrou's tweet photo. Report: Five killed, dozens injured when bus driven by illegal alien smashes into slow traffic in Maryland. He got a license from New York despite not speaking or reading English. https://t.co/MbLp0dgtxZ

Chris Marrou

@CMarrou

4 days ago

@FFT1776 Who’s Bret Michaels?

Chris Marrou

@CMarrou

4 days ago

@HawkEmDownChris Good ol’ Yogi Berra, as Dizzy Dean used to say.

Chris Marrou

@CMarrou

4 days ago

@FactsAboutTexas Needs to be the Presidio de Pressure Washer.

Chris Marrou

@CMarrou

4 days ago

Bet he’d like this one back…

Chalkboard

@ChalkboardHQ

4 days ago

THE SPURS ARE COOKED 😳 OKC is 4-0 all time in Game 7s at home. The last time they hosted a Game 7 it was to win the 2025 NBA Championship against the Pacers. Will history repeat itself tonight? 👀