Customer Reviews

Prime Times, Bad Times

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It seems to be a common desire that once a person leaves a media organization, he or she wants to give a personal account of the "inside" view following the severing of the ties. That's the genre for this book. In February 1986 Joyce tendered his letter of resignation to Gene Jankowski. He begins his tale of the events leading up to that action by first describing the early years of the organization he left, CBS. "CBS News consistently measures itself by its past" he writes. He talks about the "glory days" of Edward R. Murrow and the "handful of young men" who created broadcast news from scratch, with no model to follow.
It is hard to comprehend how corporate decisions are made. Dan Rather inherited a prestigious news organization as far as ratings were concerned. While his performance has kept the network at or near the cellar the entire time he's been in the anchor slot, he seems arrogantly secure in his position. Joyce points out that both inside CBS and outside there was concern when Walter Cronkite announced he was stepping down, that Rather did not have the qualities necessary for the anchor slot. It was assumed Roger Mudd would be next in line to replace Cronkite. Subsequent ratings all these decades later showed Joyce's observation at the time was correct. Evidently the decision-makers at CBS have an agenda other than public preference.
There are other glimpses of the inner workings of CBS during the 1980s. For anyone still interested in CBS, perhaps better phrased, for anyone interested in corporate bureaucracy this book is full of examples of decisions that were not always the most logical.