CBS News Overhaul

The New York Times reported today that, in efforts to gain an advantage in the evening news market after the departure of Dan Rather, CBS will switch to much more of an ensemble feel in it's evening news program, having multiple anchors with a less authoritative style. They even listed Jon Stewart as possibly having a role in the evening news.

While this is a much needed change from an evening news style that has increasingly grown stale over the years, there are many pitfalls CBSNews can fall into, especially after the controversy it endured over the past year. CBSNews has to realize that, while their mistakes were certainly unacceptible, the harsh criticism they faced was, in many ways, artificial, since it was such an easy target from the conservative media and other rival media outlets. It runs the dangerous risk of overcompensating for the liberal media claims and switching to overly conservative commentary. While that commentary would be at most half-hearted, it would perpetuate a dangerous trend in American media that CBS has resisted, that is driving outlets like the New York Times and the New Republic into the ground. But by not firing Andrew Heyward, president of CBSNews, CBS President Leslie Moonves has already taken a step in the right direction that the aformentioned publications didn't have the guts to do, especially with a much higher-profile scandal.

On the other side of the coin, however, CBSNews also has to make sure some of the fundamental problems that have existed in recent years don't remain, or even get worse. Unlike most of such claims, CBS News is, in fact, much more openly leftist than it should be as a major American source of news. Regardless of the fact that it is the weakest of major networks news, and regardless of the unfair ignorance of all Rather has accomplished due to the events of the past year, CBSNews has to make sure it does a better job of covering all sides of the issue at hand, and increase its awareness of its effect on the public. In that respect, the possible role of Jon Stewart is a double-sided coin. While Stewart has transcended the comedy world and has become an invaluable media commentator, he doesn't have the discipline of a serious newscaster. While his role in breaking up Crossfire and shrinking the level of tolerance of media hackery is one of the most important developments in television news of the past year, anyone who watches The Daily Show realizes how easily Stewart can lose respect for an interviewee after trying to take them seriously, especially if it's a right wing interviewee. While that works brilliantly on Comedy Central, it would be disastrous for the Evening News.

Another landmine CBSNews has to avoid is the potential for a Network-like change in its approach to news. It has stated it wants to reenergize the evening news, which, although necessary, could easily allow the frivolous. This is a more likely transformation than becoming right-wing, especially since it has stated that it's evening news overhaul is intended to compete with other evening news programs. There are more paths of disaster CBS can take here than can be mentioned--it could switch to a local news format, increase entertainment news and decrease world news, use ridiculous commentary, increase human interest stories, or even satirize what other networks are reporting. While Moonves and Heyward are smart enough to know what their doing and what their market is, it must nonetheless be tempting to try to attract a younger audience than the 18-49 market that dominates evening news audiences. While Jon Stewart is by no means the worse they can do, they have to make sure that, whether or not they hire Stewart, that The Daily Show stays on Comedy Central and the Evening News stays on CBS.

The flyer from tonight's festival, in which a movie I helped create premiered

Introduction

Welcome, all to the first entry of Tynan's Anger. Created out of the quagmire of the arts world of a college student intermittently tied to Chicago and New York, this is a place to comment on film, music, theater, museums, dance, or whatever else catches my fancy. In addition, it's a source to vent on the arts world I know, whether it's on the University of Chicago campus, the off-off Broadway theater scene, or the NEA or Mel Gibson, if it's related to my arts experience, it's on this blog.

Let me give some background. I am a member of the Class of 2008 at the University of Chicago, originally hailing from Morningside Heights in New York City. Although I am probably majoring in the sciences, like many U of C students I have an equally prevalent background in sciences and liberal arts. I have acted for ten years, written plays for five years, and written arts criticism for three years. Furthermore, the beginning of this blog coincides with a landmark in my arts experience, as my first film has premiered tonight as part of the Winter Film & Video Festival for Fire Escape Films, the University of Chicago's student filmmaking group. I am active in University Theater, and I am a columnist for the Voices Section of the Chicago Maroon. Although perhaps academia is in store for me in the future, I have dreams of a Frank Rich-like career in arts criticism and commentary.

And as for the title of this blog? Kenneth Tynan was a theater critic for The Observer in the 50's and 60's. I read his review of Look Back in Anger, John Osborne's revolutionary Angry Young Man play in 1956, about three years ago. Without it, I doubt I would have pursued arts criticism, much less dedicate a blog to it. Here it is, in all it's glory:

'They are scum', was Mr Maugham's famous verdict on the class of State-aided university students to which Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim belongs; and since Mr Maugham seldom says anything controversial or uncertain of wise acceptance, his opinion must clearly be that of many. Those who share it had better stay well away from John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (Royal Court) which is all scum and a mile wide.

Its hero, a provincial graduate who runs a sweet-stall, has already been summed-up in print as 'a young pup' and it is not hard to see why. What with his flair for introspection, his gift for ribald parody, his excoriating candour, his contempt for 'phoneyness', his weakness for soliloquy and his desperate conviction that the time is out of joint, Jimmy Porter is the completest young pup in our literature since Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. His wife, whose Anglo-Indian parents resent him, is persuaded by an actress friend to leave him; Jimmy's prompt response is to go to bed with the actress. Mr Osborne's picture of a certain kind of modern marriage is hilariously accurate; he shows us two attractive young animals engaged in competitive martyrdom, each with its teeth sunk deep in the other's neck, and each reluctant to break the clinch for fear of bleeding to death.

The fact that he writes with charity has led many critics into the trap of supposing that Mr Osborne's sympathies are wholly with Jimmy. Nothing could be more false. Jimmy is simply and abundantly alive; that rarest of dramatic phenomena, the act of original creation, has taken place; and those who carp were better silent. Is Jimmy's anger justified? Why doesn't he do something? These questions might be relevant if the character had failed to come to life in the presence of such evident and blazing vitality. I marvel at the pedantry that could ask them. There will be time enough to debate Mr Osborne's moral position when he has written a few more plays. In the present one he certainly goes off the deep end, but I cannot regard this as a vice in a theatre that seldom ventures more than a toe into the water.

Look Back in Anger presents post-war youth as it really is, with special emphasis on the non-U intelligentisia who live in bed-sitters and divide the Sunday papers into two groups, 'posh' and 'wet'. To have done this at all would be a signal achievement; to have done it in a first play is a minor miracle. All the qualities are there, qualities one had despaired of ever seeing on the stage - the drift towards anarchy, the instinctive leftishness, the automatic rejection of 'official' attitudes, the surrealist sense of humour (Jimmy describes a pansy friend as 'a female Emily Bronte'), the casual promiscuity, the sense of lacking a crusade worth fighting for and, underlying all these, the determination that no one who does shall go unmourned.

One cannot imagine Jimmy Porter listening with a straight face to speeches about our inalienable right to flog Cypriot schoolboys. You could never mobilise him and his kind into a lynching mob, since the art he lives for, jazz, was invented by Negroes; and if you gave him a razor, he would no nothing with it but shave. The Porters of our time deplore the tyranny of 'good taste' and refuse to accept 'emotional' as a term of abuse; they are classless, and they are also leaderless. Mr Osborne is their first spokesman in the London theatre. He has been lucky in his sponsors (the English Stage Company), his director (Tony Richardson), and his interpreters: Mary Ure, Helena Hughes and Alan Bates give fresh and unforced performances, and in the taxing central role Kenneth Haigh never puts a foot wrong.

That the play needs changes I do not deny; it is 20 minutes too long, and not even Mr Haigh's bravura could blind me to the painful whimsey of the final reconciliation scene. I agree that Look Back in Anger is likely to remain a minority taste. What matters, however, is the size of the minority. I estimate it as roughly 6,733,000, which is the number of people in this country between the ages of 20 and 30. And this figure will doubtless be swelled by refugees from other age-groups who are curious to know precisely what the contemporary young pup is thinking and feeling. I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger. It is the best young play of its decade.