Forums dot lukpac.org

Producer who broke into 'CSI: NY' fired
Interruption prompted viewer complaints

Monday, November 15, 2004 Posted: 12:56 PM EST (1756 GMT)

NEW YORK (AP) -- CBS News has fired the producer responsible for breaking into "CSI: NY" last week for a special report on Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's death, a CBS executive said Monday, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The news report came during the last five minutes of the forensics mystery last Wednesday, prompting viewer complaints and leading CBS to repeat the show Friday.

The producer responsible ignored network policy to contact a senior executive before interrupting a regularly scheduled program for a news report, the source said.

Also, with Arafat reportedly near death for several days, CBS News had left explicit instructions for how to deal with that event: run a news "crawl" at the bottom of the screen and direct viewers to the next newscast for more information.

That's how CBS's competitors at ABC and NBC handled the news. The interruption came five minutes before local newscasts in eastern and central time zones.

CBS issued an apology to viewers the next day, blaming the "overly aggressive" producer for the interruption.

I don't know if getting fired was right or not, but I'd agree breaking in was a bit stupid. It certainly was no surprise, and with the evening news 5 minutes away, a "crawl" would have been fine IMO.

Agreed, a crawl would have made perfect sense.

I just found the whole firing-and-groveling thing a bit much. "We're sorry we interrupted your precious cookie-cutter crime drama with something of real importance! We fired somebody! Please go back to your apathetic lives!"

Remember that amazing hockey game from the '92 Olympics (I think it was a medal round) that went into multiple sudden-death overtimes and finally a shoot-out? God, I was on the edge of my seat. It had been going for something like four hours, everyone was exhausted. Finally, one team missed their shot in the shoot-out and the other team could win it if they got theirs. The shooter starting heading for the goal, lined up his shot...

and we got a commercial. Then another. And another. *Five solid minutes* of commercials. I was throwing things and calling the station (the lines were jammed). Finally, we got "The Rick Pitino Show," a crummy pre-taped local interview show with the then-coach of the UK Wildcats. Aaaaaaaaah!

It made the front page of the paper the next day, with the head of the station having been drug out of the UK game to deal with the avalanche of irate viewers. I don't know if anyone got fired for that, but they damn well should have.

Oh, and the shot they broke away from turned out to be the winning shot. Twenty seconds later and it wouldn't have mattered. Dumbasses.

Ryan