The death of Mike Wallace

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Mike Wallace died this past weekend.  Andy Rooney (of the unruly eyebrows) died last November.

 

 

The old CBS brigade is beginning to fade away.

 

 

A few of the ancients are still alive.  Charles Osgood (age 79) still anchors “CBS Sunday Morning.”  Morley Safer (age 80) is still around, I think.  Bob Schieffer  (age 75) still hosts “Face the Nation,” also on Sunday mornings; he’s wonderful, but he seems to be getting a big weaker over the past few years.  The wonderful Bill Geist (a mere baby at age 66) is still going strong. 

 

 

But still!

 

 

CBS – journalistically, anyway – is an octogenarian’s network.  Look at the list above!  They’re old!  There are a few younger correspondents – the lamentable Steve Hartman, for example, with his mournful insincere face – but they’re the exception.  (And Steve Hartman, let’s face it, is just a feeble Charles Kuralt wannabe.)

 

 

Listen, don’t get me wrong.  I don’t mind old.  I’m getting there myself.  I’m fifty-four going on fifty-five, with sciatica and kidney stones.  I understand the demographic, and the concerns.

 

 

But even I become impatient with CBS’s news division when they explain the “Internet” to me as if it’s a strange new concept, or “Whole Foods,” or “Cyndi Lauper.”

 

 

I’ve said before that CBS is the geezer network.

 

 

I thought I was exaggerating.

 

 

I was wrong.

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Growing old with CBS

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All the reporters and correspondents on “CBS Sunday Morning” speak with the ponderous gravity of Captain Kangaroo reading “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel” aloud. Why? I ask myself. Well, maybe:

 

 

• It's early, and they assume we're not quite awake yet, so they have to speak distinctly.

• Their viewership is, hmm, a little on the elderly side, and we older folks don't hear so well anymore, so they have to speak distinctly.

• They think we're a bunch of idiots, so they have to speak distinctly.

  
  

 

I lean toward a combination of explanation #2 and explanation #3.

 

This is interesting, because CBS poses as Hipsterville during the week. You have funny-young-people sitcoms like “How I Met Your Mother” and “The Big Bang Theory,” and shoot-shoot law-enforcement stuff like the various incarnations of “CSI” and “NCIS,” and weepy dramas like “The Good Wife.” (I do not speak of “Two and a Half Men,” for obvious reasons; we used to think it was a family sitcom, and now we've discovered it was reality television all along.)

 

 

But it's mostly toothless, isn't it? The sitcoms are harmless, like cartoons. The cop shows are all good guy / bad guy stuff, like old Westerns. “Good Wife” is tough-working-girl stuff, like “Kitty Foyle.”

 

Put them all together, and what have I just described?

 

A day at the movies in 1940.

 

 

The geriatric hesitancy of “CBS Sunday Morning” is mirrored by “60 Minutes.” Their stories are narrated with strange intensity, and difficult concepts like “Internet” and “Facebook” and “cellphone” are carefully explained to us, so that we won’t be frightened and spit our dentures across the room.

 

 

Let us not even speak of Andy Rooney, the last surviving cave dweller. (“I like soup. Soup comes in cans now. I don't understand the cans. Cans are hard to open.”)

 

 

So: CBS has become the geezer network.

 

 

But guess what?  I'm a geezer myself.  Why do you think I was watching "CBS Sunday Morning" in the first place?

 

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