by arthur Weinreb, associate Editor,
November 16, 2004
Fans of the show were outraged at having missed the ending of the program and made their views known to CBS. CBS responded by firing the producer.
Now, many TV watchers object to anything from acts of terrorism to high profile assassinations or depression-era stock market crashes interrupting their favourite program. However, the viewers in this case did have a point. There were only minutes to go in the show and CBS, like other networks did could have left the announcement until the program finished at 11 o’clock and the news was scheduled to come on. after all it appeared for a time that arafat might have being going for the world record in lingering deaths that is currently held by Spain’s Generalissimo Francisco Franco. although said to be alive, at the time of his announced death arafat’s funeral had already been scheduled to take place on the following Friday in Cairo. There was little doubt that he was either already dead or being kept alive on life support. The announcement of his death could have waited for a few minutes to allow viewers to see the end of the program.
There was also an indication that the producer did not do what she was supposed to have done and gotten permission from a superior to interrupt regular programming before breaking in to announce the obvious.
CBS atoned for their sins by firing the producer and rerunning the entire CSI episode two days later. They may very well have been right to axe the "senior producer" given the fact that she apparently did not follow proper procedures.
But CBS’s action’s on this occasion stands in stark contrast to how they treated their star, Dan Rather. They seemed to see nothing particularly wrong with Rather bringing forth a forged document concerning George Bush’s National Guard service and refusing to acknowledge that it "might" have been forged, even as evidence was building up that it could not have been genuine. The network refused to take action against Rather even when Rather announced that it really didn’t matter whether or not the document was a forgery as long as the information that it contained was true (the fact that the information could only be proven true by the forged document seemed to escape the Dan). In their rush to take George W. Bush down, accuracy in reporting didn’t matter.
There is a moral to all this: you can present false and forged documents as fact; just don’t interrupt a popular program to do it.