Part of the CBS deal requires the CBS has a “bias monitor” that stops criticism of Trump on CBS. Great.
How is this not a blatant First Amendment violation?
It totally is. But how will anyone do anything about it?
Upthread I quoted a New York Times article on the FCC approval of the merger.
Brendan Carr, the chairman of the F.C.C., said in a statement that the agency had approved the deal after receiving assurances from Skydance that the new company would be committed to unbiased journalism and would not establish programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion.
Don’t watch CBS or Paramount. Don’t buy anything from any entity who advertises on CBS or Paramount.
As the OP, I will confirm that this is the precise reason I placed the thread in this forum.
The FCC has broad authority to apply standards to licensees and fine them for violations but rarely does so. Broadcasters generally self-regulate (what networks refer to as “Standards & Practices”) on seemly absurd standards of ‘decency’ and ‘appropriate language’, albeit as much or more to not offend advertisers as to comply with the FCC.
Not everyone agrees with your assessment:
Stranger
Dave Letterman was a rude jackass to his guests.
I started watching Letterman when he had his morning show. He really wasn’t. At all. In multiple decades he had a couple of on air kerfuffles with people that deserved it but that was a rare occasion. Carson was a generally shitty person.
Now you did it; you’re going to have all the Trekkies clutching their tribbles and crying, “But what did we do?”
Sounds like your kind of guy.
Stranger
The biggest things I can remember from Late Night was him going after Richard Simmons with a fire extinguisher while Simmons was in a turkey suit and the whole thing with Joaquin Phoenix. And even then I’m not convinced the Simmons thing wasn’t staged. The Phoenix thing definitely was.
I am aware of a solution that allows fans to enjoy Star Trek while still hurting the CBS/Paramount bottom line. Not that I am advocating for such a thing. But if I were inclined to feel bad about embracing such a solution before, I certainly wouldn’t feel bad about it now.
Right. Letterman was in on it. Just like he was with Andy Kaufman. He wasn’t informed by Crispin Glover that he was going to play his character from Ruben and Ed and act bizarre. Can’t blame Letterman for not being happy with that.
Dave weighs in on the whole shit show:
Letterman famously refused to talk to his writers, who had to use the head writer as an intermediary. They were also all male and not terribly diverse. The Emma Thompson/Mindy Kaling movie Late Night used this as a framework for the plot.
He cut his girlfriend Merrill Markoe out of the show’s history, even though she was hugely influential in shaping the early years. He started dating future wife Regina Lasko while living with Markoe. He was living with Laskoe when he had a long-term affair with his personal assistant. He’s practically Trump, except that Trump doesn’t drink and Letterman was an alcoholic, who fortunately stopped before he got Late Night in 1982.
Still he was practically Richard Simmons when compared to Carson. Carson was intensely private and trusted only a tiny circle of friends. Understandable enough for someone in his position, but he cut most of them out when the show went off the air. He was also rough on his writers and had tremedous problems with womanizing and cheating and stayed an alcoholic well into his run. Garry Shandling’s The Larry Sanders Show essentially made Shandling a clone of Carson and turned Carson’s treatment of Ed McMahon into the Hank Kingsley character.
The new generation of late night are reputed to be much, much nicer than those two. As George Burns said, “The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that you’ve got it made.”
Is it true that Carson wouldn’t let guests talk to him during commercials?
I’m not sure if it was Carson who did this or not, but I do recall at least one talk-show host who did not interact with the guests during commercial breaks because he wanted to maintain the spontaneity of the interview and not missing getting any of the interaction with the guest on camera.
Really?
Letterman did certainly engage in some objectionable personal behavior (making an on-screen ‘apology’ of sorts in 2009) but it isn’t as if he refused to acknowledge Markoe’s contributions (which would be pretty difficult since she won several Emmy’s as head writer) or that she didn’t go onto a pretty successful writing career (by any standard) subsequently.
Letterman was clearly an inspiration for The Larry Sanders Show to the point of acknowledging that the show was pretty much his experience without exaggeration of being a talk show host and the manner of Shandling’s awkward portrayal clearly hews closer to Letterman than Carson even if Jeffrey Tambor’s sidekick was a spot-on rendition of the tribulations of Ed McMahon minus being perpetually intoxicated.
That was definitely Carson. He also disliked talking with most guests before the show. (He’d make a brief check-in at their dressing room but avoided ever going into the green room.) The only exceptions were for old friends like Betty White, and even then he became increasingly reclusive and near the end of his tenure employing guest hosts or running frequent reruns for the majority of the time. Frankly, it’s kind of shocking in modern terms that NBC let him get away with this but before the early ‘Nineties there just wasn’t any real competition as nobody wanted to go up against ‘Carson’ even if it was just as often Joan Rivers or Jay Leno hosting.
Stranger
What do you mean by this? I’ve long known that Markoe was the show’s first head writer and an important influence on it, and I thought Dave has always acknowledged this.
From what I’ve seen of both of them, Letterman has been far more self-deprecating and willing to acknowledge his own faults.
I’m putting together memories from Markoe’s side of things, which possibly is not the same as Letterman’s. She said over the years that she felt unrecognized for her work - although she’s always had a core cult - which presumably wouldn’t be true if Letterman praised her more often. She was completely estranged from Letterman after their split in 1987; the number of times she’s seen him except for her own promotion of books, is countable on one hand.
She wrote a piece titled “Bobby” in her book Cool, Calm & Contentious. “Bobby” is obviously about Letterman. As his fame grew after she left him, his ubiquity everywhere in American culture and her life in Hollywood left a wound that kept being opened. He was never able to make amends, it seems. And he was always a very strange person. She had good memories of their early years together, but later was crushed when she realized that during the years she thought they were working things out, he was dating another girl.
Maybe that’s why, during Letterman’s PA scandal, her only comment was "As you can imagine, this has been a very emotional moment for me because Dave promised me many times that I was the only woman he would ever cheat on.” A great joke from a great joke writer. If he was being roasted. Otherwise, very revealing.