Q Toon: The Sun Will Come Out, Ed Murrow

I had to draw this week's cartoon Sunday night, without knowing what the CBS Evening News set behind Tony Dokoupil took was going to look like, or what clothing choices he was going to make. But I did have this mission statement from the successor to Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Katie Couric, Scott Pelley, Norah O'Donnell, John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois:

“On too many stories, the press has missed the story,” he said. “And it’s not just us. It’s all of legacy media. Because we’ve taken into account the perspective of advocates, and not the average American. Or, we put too much weight in the analysis of academics, or elites, and not enough on you.”

It seems to be the consensus of media consultant types that news viewers are fed up with what people who know what they are talking about have to say about news events. Rather, viewers want to hear what Average Joe Schmoes think. The local NBC affiliate where I live has been promoting itself with the same promise to eschew expertise in favor of whatever some random person who just heard about something five seconds ago has to say about it.

Dokoupil moved to the evening news anchor post from CBS's morning news program, where he had shared hosting duties with Gayle King and retired football player Nate Burleson. As Katie Couric could have told him, the switch from soft and happy morning news to the let's-get-serious evening desk is gonna be greeted with a lot of wariness and skepticism.

Swinging into your corn flakes, from CBS Mornings promo

So how's it going at Dokoupil's new job? He started his evening anchor stint two days ahead of time on Saturday to interview Pete Hegseth, who identifies as Secretary of War, about the U.S. military strike on Venezuela and kidnapping of President & Mrs. Nicolás Maduro. He lobbed a bunch of softball questions at Hegseth, allowing him to repeat his assigned talking points over and over unchallenged.

Although I'm still waiting to hear someone ask anyone from the Lawless Trump Regime why, if Congress was kept in the dark over our Venezuelan adventure out of concern that there might be a leak, Pete "Open Signal" Hegseth was included in the planning.

(Trump, by the way, has told reporters that oil company executives were kept informed of our invasion before and after the fact. I suspect that could have had something to do with the $436,000 bet somebody won on the Polymarket on-line gambling site by predicting that Maduro would be ousted by January 31. Or maybe that was just some Average Joe Schmoe included in Secy. Hegseth's group chat by mistake.)

Getting back to Dokoupil, there have been one or two technical glitches this week. But more importantly, viewers are waiting to see whether he will participate in Paramount's Bari Weisswashing of Trump regime news coverage by the network.

His leading off a segment on the fifth anniversary of Trump's attempted January 6 coup (the one at the U.S. Capitol, not the one in Venezuela) with cowardly both-sidesism and following up with weird cuddling up to Secretary of State Marco Rubio the other day are not exactly encouraging.

Good night, and good luck.

Toon: Coming to CBS Late Nights!

CBS announced yesterday that Late Night with (and without) Stephen Colbert will be cancelled as of May next year — supposedly for “purely financial” reasons.

Well, yeah. The Tiffany Network can't afford to shell out $16 million every time the petty dictator currently in the White House gets his fragile ego chipped.

CBS's parent company, Paramount Global wants to sell itself out to Skydance Media, which will require FCC approval under Trump's transactional regime. It has already sold itself out to Trump, surrendering to his nuisance lawsuit, a complaint that editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris somehow damaged the Marquis of Mar-a-Lago.

Ah, well. Kowtowing to Republicans offended by left-leaning satire ain't nothing new to CBS.

"Why, That Nut Was Trying to Water My Desert" by Bill Sanders in Milwaukee Journal, April 9, 1969

Qtoon: Sense and Censorability

(click here to view)

Paul Berge Q Syndicate •Sep 5, 2012 EditorialCartoonists.com

The fall TV programs are almost here, and a few of them have One Million Panties in a bunch.

"Partners" is a CBS program by the creators of "Will & Grace" which is essentially about the creators of "Will & Grace" except that they are architects instead of TV show writers. Or else it's a retread of "Will & Grace" in which Will is named Joe and he's straight, and Grace is named Louis and he's Jack. Or something like that. We'll see in a couple of weeks.

And NBC is introducing "The New Normal," which centers on a gay couple, the surrogate mother of their child-to-be, her opinionated grandmother, and her precocious and presumably adorable daughter. As NBC's promo page for the series puts it, "These days, families come in all forms - single dads, double moms, sperm donors, egg donors, one-night-stand donors... It's 2012 and anything goes."

Management at NBC's Salt Lake City affiliate, however, have decided that it's not 2012 and some things still don't go. They're not going to show "The New Normal." KSL management issued a statement that, "For our brand, this program simply feels inappropriate on several dimensions, especially during family viewing time." The local CW station has stepped in to show it on Saturday nights after all the good Mormons have gone to sleep.

Meanwhile, ABC is continuing the Emmy-winning "Modern Family" and spring replacement series "Happy Endings," which is "Friends" except that there's a gay guy and a black guy so you can tell the difference. And "Glee" continues on Fox, Ellen DeGeneres continues in syndication, and Andy Cohen continues in charge of Bravo.

Management at KSL aside, the reaction from the upright citizens' brigades to this smattering of TV comedies has been, frankly, far less than impressive. It could be that they're saving their energy in favor of establishing a moral monopoly on government this November. At present, if they complain about "Happy Endings," all they accomplish is calling attention to a series few people had heard of before, and possibly making a hit out of it. Take over the government, and they can have the FCC issue a fine for every episode of every program with a non-traditional family or out-of-wedlock hook-up.

It's 2013 and everything stops.

This week's Q Syndicate cartoon

This week, we take time out from the national obsession with Afghanistan, financial collapse, Tiger Woods and the Salahis to address a truly important issue: did you see American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert on the American Music Awards?

And if you didn't see it live, why are the powers that be at Dick Clark productions, CBS, etc., determined to make sure that you don't see it now?