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CBS was the first network newscast to spot The King's Speech as the season's movie with big buzz. Colin Firth, who plays the stuttering King George VI, sat down with @katiecouric last month for an online one-on-one to go with the anchor's Evening News package. The other two networks avoided the celebrity route, filing features about the speech impediment instead, first NBC's Lee Cowan, now ABC's Sharyn Alfonsi. No matter: whether it is about glamour or about stammer, that's not news; that's publicity-and-promotion.
In a whirligig of cross-promotion, CBS had Richard Schlesinger file the latest in its demographically-pandering Senior Moment series (previous entries had been Jon LaPook on Alzheimer's Disease and Anthony Mason on Social Security), produced in collaboration with USA Today. Schlesinger used his feature to publicize Nora Ephron's latest book, I Remember Nothing, which is about divorce, which is the topic of the new vertical that Ephron has launched at Huffington Post. So what is the news that Schlesinger has to tell us? Babyboomers are the divorcingest generation in American history--except that our cohort's divorce rate is not peaking now but already peaked back in 1979. That's not news; that's history.
NBC relied on ITN, its British newsgathering partner, to cover the storm-tossed Royal Caribbean cruise liner Brilliance of the Seas. John Ray was in safe harbor in Malta to cover the buffeted passengers that ABC's Linsey Davis had told us about Monday. Ray called the shipboard protests "something close to mutiny." So NBC fills its limited newshole with a pair of stories about tourists disgruntled by weather: Kerry Sanders on the cold in Orlando and ITN's Ray on high seas in the Mediterranean. That's not news; that's complaining.
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