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Stone Phillips out at NBC News

I understand about wanting to refocus the revenue on more reporting and versitile personalities, but they put Stone in that hole. I'm sure he'd be more versitle if they let him. He's synonimous with Dateline, and it will suffer because he's not on, just like 20/20 did when it lost Hugh Downes.

And, for the record, Lester Holt completely sucks. That was a really bad move for weekends.
 
Gets the boot after contract expires in June.Don't know about the rest of this board but i'm getting dam tired of chris hansen and these child sexual predators programs.Hell i'm beginning to wonder if he's "getting off" doing these shows.maybe stone could replace katie on the CBS evening news...
 
It appears to me that NBC is thinning out some high-priced on-air staff. Maybe GE wants to sell the network and is in the process of making the bottom-line look better.
 
60 Minutes is a profit center for CBS.
Dateline is a cheap way to fill time; so is 20/20 lately.
People watch these shows for the stories, not the personalities (who are shown briefly). So, why not keep costs down?
Back when 60 Minutes meant Harry Reasoner and Mike Wallace, and later Morley Safer, star power meant something. Now the brand name carries the show. If Katie on the Evening News is CBS' Snow White, the gang on 60 Minutes these days is The Seven Dwarfs.
The old guard at 60 Minutes had reporting credentials. All Dateline ever had was pretty faces and name recognition, and one pretty face is as good as another. Stone is an ex-jock, maybe he can get a sports gig. He can talk on camera, which puts him ahead of most of the ex-jocks on TV.
 
FloydB said:
And, for the record, Lester Holt completely sucks. That was a really bad move for weekends.

I disagree. Lester ROCKS! Siegenthaler was a total phony -- a Brian Williams-lite, $400 haircut guy who talked unnaturally loud. Lester is a real person and a solid anchor.
 
I agree that the softer news like predetors sells cheaper. That is the attraction itself.

The news is going back to the early 1900s, when we saw many newspapers and they were all competing with tabloid and "yellow journalism." I don't think it's nothing new.

People are just outpricing themselves. As I said before actors want way too much. Seinfeld may be worth 1 million an episode but if he's not there someone else has to be number one by default. And if they can get good numbers for the difference between show cost, they can still sell their ad revenue. So it makes sense from a pure commercialist standpoint.

Since the mid 80s, (to me) journalists have stopped asking any hard hitting questions. I think it's sad when I sit at home and can ask better questions than journalism majors hosting the news.
 
Mark said:
Since the mid 80s, (to me) journalists have stopped asking any hard hitting questions. I think it's sad when I sit at home and can ask better questions than journalism majors hosting the news.

Stone has an AB in Philosophy from Yale. He played football for the Bulldogs and was a member of one of those Secret Societies. He did not study journalism and was not on the staff of the Yale Daily News.

To paraphrase Alan Swann, who said "I'm not an actor, I'm a movie star."
Stone isn't a journalist, he's a TV personality (more specifically, what the Brits call "a newsreader").
When you see people like Stone supposedly doing an interview either:
Someone else did the interview and Stone is edited in later, or
Someone else did the "pre-interview" and gave Stone questions to ask (reaction shots edited in later).
 
Dateline has been scaled back in the last few years. Remember when there was Dateline had editions on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday?

And yes Dateline has always used "TV Personalities". As much as I like Maria Shriver and Jane Pauley both ladies aren't who I typically think of as being hard-core objective journalists.
 
Hi everyone:
formeraa said:
FloydB said:
And, for the record, Lester Holt completely sucks. That was a really bad move for weekends.

I disagree. Lester ROCKS! Siegenthaler was a total phony -- a Brian Williams-lite, $400 haircut guy who talked unnaturally loud. Lester is a real person and a solid anchor.
Keith Olbermann could also do weekends if need be too even though he has his own show on cable. That said, I never imagined Chris Matthews being a good anchor though. He just doesn't have the voice for it (He's too much like Tim Russert in that respect).

Bottom line is this. NBC is LOADED with male figures who can anchor the news. They don't however have too many female figures capable of doing it though (The closest they had was Katie Couric and look where she ended up).

Just my opinion :D

Cheers :D
 
Pat Cook said:
Bottom line is this. NBC is LOADED with male figures who can anchor the news. They don't however have too many female figures capable of doing it though (The closest they had was Katie Couric and look where she ended up).

I think the past several months have demonstrated Kate is not capable of doing news, certainly not at the network level. If any kind of "sexism" is at work, it's the kind that has network executives hire cute and perky, instead of substantial and credible. Even Babawa, competent as she is in other areas, was not right to anchor. The jury is still out on pretty boy Brian Williams (somebody needs to make him stop all those idiotic gestures).
 
Al Johnson said:
I think the past several months have demonstrated Kate is not capable of doing news, certainly not at the network level. If any kind of "sexism" is at work, it's the kind that has network executives hire cute and perky, instead of substantial and credible. Even Babawa, competent as she is in other areas, was not right to anchor. The jury is still out on pretty boy Brian Williams (somebody needs to make him stop all those idiotic gestures).

Hiring, as you put it, 'cute and perky,' has been going on not only at the networks but local TV for years.

I find it somewhat ironic that this topic came out the same week that CBS aired an hour long program about Walter Cronkite. Cronkite was not cute and perky, but he understood news having started his career with the Associated Press covering World War II and later at CBS where he "earned" his reputation as being a trusted source for news.

One poster hit the target when writing that if people at home watching a news report can ask tougher questions than the reporter doing the interview, and then something is wrong with that reporter.

The problem, as I see it on both the local and national level, is that the entertainment factor has melted in with news resulting in what passes for journalism today.
 
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