CBS News has two programs that still aspire to quality, Sunday Morning and 60 Minutes. Neither, in my opinion, is quite as good as it was at its pinnacle, but each continues to be profitable while maintaining quality and respectability.

If I were to give any advice to my fellow high school alumnus, Les Moonves, I'd recommend he hold a seance. Raise the spirits of Don Hewitt, Robert Shad Northshield and Charles Kuralt, and hold a otherworldly brainstorming session.

In fact, while they're at it, get some tapes of what NBC News did on radio in the 1970's. Back then, they launched the News and Information Service, which turned the normal network program clock on its head, putting the local affiliate stations in first position and backfilling the rest of the hour with national news, sports and features.

I'd like to see the first ten minutes of each half hour provided by each local affiliate, concentrating on local news weather and traffic, and then fill the other 20 minutes with long form features and news interviews. But with quality as the goal, not fluff.

The CBS brain trust needs to ask themselves why it is that the broadcasting service with the largest audience and most consistent growth in recent years has been ... NPR. Might it be that viewers and listeners are just fed up with being fed crap? Maybe it's time for CBS to take a good hard look in their rearview mirror.

I am a relatively young person and I love CBS Sunday Morning News because at 9 o'clock in the morning it is hard to find a program that complements a quiet weekend morning as well as this show. Its scenes from nature segment at the end of the program got me hooked and has me trying to wake up early on Sunday Mornings to try to catch it.

I am surprised this show is on CBS as its tone and presentation style make it seem more attuned to being on PBS.

Neil,
You went to school with Les Moonves? What an interesting profile that would be: The guru in adolescence: CSI: Cafeteria; Survivor Calculus; When WIll I Meet Your Mother. . .
Returning to the matter at hand, I agree -- many viewers "are just fed up with being fed crap." And looking for the alternative gets all the harder. I learned today that Tom Brokaw has another hour-long news special scheduled. The last was on CNBC, which seemed an odd place to showcase the work of a man who brought millions of viewers to "NBC Nightly News" for years.
But this next one, "Tom Brokaw Presents Bridging the Divide," is described this way in the AP story:
"Roughly timed to the half-century anniversary of the beginning of the U.S. civil rights movement, the special tells stories of people actively fighting bias they encountered in their own lives. Subjects include a woman who had both legs amputated and became a scholar, track athlete and model and is a role model for the disabled, and a single mother whose 11-year-old son committed suicide after being bullied.
"Brokaw said the 'stressed state' of the nation due to economic woes and a lack of confidence in the future is the kind of thing that breeds intolerance."
Sounds serious and worth watching, right? Well, unless you happen to stumble across USA at 7 p.m. on a Friday night (12/10), you'll miss it totally. Why isn't this scheduled for the NBC schedule? Well, there's a "Minute to Win It' in the prime-time schedule that night, and we all know how important that is.
Will Brokaw's next news special land on Syfy? Probably.

Yes indeed, Mr. Moonves and I went to the same high school on Long Island in the mid-60's. I was a sophomore while he was a senior, so we overlapped for that year, and also likely overlapped for a year in junior high a few years prior to that. Admittedly, I didn't know him at the time, though it's possible we crossed paths working on a school play that year (the details of which have long ago faded from memory).

(For whatever it's worth, that same high school has also produced Steve Buscemi of Boardwalk Empire and Fred Armisen of SNL, in addition to others I can't recall at the moment.)

I didn't know about the Brokaw special, but given your description, it's sad that NBC feels the need to dis their former flagship anchor in this way. A better solution would have been to hold the program a few weeks and air it in the interregnum between Christmas and New Years Day on the main network. And actually promote it beforehand as something worthy of a viewer's time and attention. If nothing else, it might bring some desperately needed polish to NBC's mostly-pathetic weekday schedule.

Minute to Win It, you say? Bah, humbug!