Unintended Consequences…Or, How To Deplete a Talent Bench in Five Easy Steps…

Today’s Weekend Today changes technically fall outside of my cable news domain. That said, there is tangential potential cable news impact here. Plus there are some stories that I just can’t sit on my hands for and this would be one of them because it ties together a bunch of loose ends that have been bouncing around the old noggin for a while. Thus expect this piece to go all over the place…

In case you missed it, the news…which isn’t news actually…is NBC announced the long ago leaked out news that Erica Hill would be joining Weekend Today. What was news, however, was the part about Jenna Wolfe getting demoted. Though NBC tried very hard to frame Wolfe’s new duties as of the “not a demotion” variety, she just went from anchoring a Sunday show to not anchoring any show and no amount of perfume is going to make that turd smell sweet.

On the whole NBC did something it needed to do years ago…it unified Weekend Today behind a single anchor team. No more of this Saturday/Sunday splitting the team that’s been going on since Campbell Brown left NBC for CNN. Brown left CNN over a year ago…Yeah…it’s been that long. Anyway, Weekend Today finally has the unified front it should have had four years ago. But it’s coming with a potentially heavier price tag than one would have expected.

NBC has frequently played up how deep and resilient its bench is. Well by going out and getting an outsider tossed on CBS’ scrapheap, demoting one of its own,  and nearly slamming the ceiling shut on a third person I’ll be discussing in a moment, NBC, by its actions, has created the appearance of casting a big “no confidence” vote in that bench. If there is that much of a bench anymore.

Slow Day So Here’s Some Red Meat For You

Slate Magazine’s  Amanda Marcotte (predictably) ridicules Bill O’Reilly and Jesse Watters..

Bill O’Reilly has been very concerned about the problem of degrading women lately. So concerned, in fact, that he worried out loud that Sandra Fluke had degraded women with her immodest suggestion that insurance benefits cover contraception. With Bill O’Reilly as a fierce protector of ladies, you can imagine that his show’s segment on single female voters last night was a chaste, respectful affair that represented the wide diversity of this important portion of the electorate: the never-married, the divorced, the widowed, the single mothers and the non-mothers, the cohabitating but unmarried, the young and the old, and, of course, women from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Just kidding! O’Reilly sent his producer Jesse Watters out on Halloween weekend to interview sexy young white women on the street, all of them in costume and ready to party, so that Watters could leer at their single lady voter breasts and condescendingly make “can you believe they have a right to vote?!” faces at the camera in response to the women’s selectively edited answers to his questions.

CNN Election Night Coverage Plans

Here are CNN’s election night plans…

CNN Mobilizes Team across the Country for ‘Election Night in America’

Two Dozen Reporters Deployed; First-Ever Election Night Broadcast from CNN’s State-of-the-Art Studio in Washington

CNN’s commitment to unbiased coverage this 2012 election season will culminate Tuesday, Nov. 6, Election Day, with the network’s top team of anchors in Washington and in the field, from reporters on the ground in the final battleground states and at candidate headquarters.

Anchors Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper from Washington, with Candy Crowley from Boston and Erin Burnett from the hotly contested state of Ohio, will lead ‘Election Night in America’ coverage beginning at 6 p.m. CNN’s coverage will be the network’s first-ever Election Day anchored from Washington, where more than 40 consecutive hours of live programming are planned from the newly constructed, state-of-the-art studio and control room. Kicking off Election Day coverage live from Washington beginning at 5 a.m. will be Early Start with John Berman and Zoraida Sambolin and Starting Point with Soledad O’Brien. A full programming schedule for Election Day and the days surrounding is outlined below.

National political reporter Jim Acosta will join Crowley in Boston at the Romney campaign headquarters, while White House correspondents Jessica Yellin, Dan Lothian and Brianna Keilar will be live from Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago. Chief national correspondent John King will be at the Magic Wall to provide analysis of CNN’s projections and explain closely contested races in county-by-county detail. Senior congressional correspondent Dana Bash will also join anchors in the studio to provide context as House and Senate races are projected. Correspondent Tom Foreman will appear live from the virtual studio in Washington to present a “Virtual Senate,” allowing viewers to visualize the balance of power in congress and to explain the consequences of a Democratic or Republican-controlled Senate. On hand throughout the evening and early morning hours to provide expert insight and analysis will be chief political analyst Gloria Borger and senior political analyst David Gergen.

Joining coverage on Election Day and through the early morning hours will be the following voices with perspectives across the political spectrum: Paul Begala, James Carville, Alex Castellanos, Ari Fleisher, Margaret Hoover, Van Jones, Roland Martin and Ana Navarro.

Reporter Deployments