CBS Gets an F-

It goes without saying (but I will anyway): Yesterday's bridge collapse in Minneapolis is a huge story, and will be for weeks. "What went wrong?" will be the question that will probably never be answered, yet perpetually asked.

So yesterday, after the 6:00 local shows wrapped their wall-to-wall coverage of the collapse, it was the Networks' turn to take over. Now, the bridge collapsed around 4:00 PT. World News, Evening News, and Nightly all air from 6:30-7:00 for the east coast, or 3:30-4 for those slow in math (and I know you're out there). Here's a bit of inside baseball, "making the band" info about how the networks do their evening news shows. Generally, the show is live in all aspects for the east coast, like most things on TV. But the west coast feed (3 hours later) is usually different than the live version. After the live broadcast, Charlie, Katie, or Brian go back, re-shoot/update/edit/fix things from the live show. So by the time we see it here in L.A., the "West Coast Edition" (as Nightly calls it) is about as live as The Tonight Show.

There's two obvious reasons to reshooting the show:

1. Making the anchors look better by eliminating flubs and screw ups; and more importantly,
   
2. Being NEW (because the NEWS is supposed to be NEW) in case something happens between 4:00 and 6:30 Pacific Time.
   

Get to point right? Yesterday, while ABC and NBC went live with their respective anchors to cover the bridge collapse, CBS did not. For whatever reason, CBS and Katie Couric went with their canned East Coast feed, and had nothing on the bridge until about 6:45, with a live VOSOT.

There may be an excuse, and I really hope there is. Otherwise, the Evening News producers need to be fired, or flogged. Either will do.

Bad job, Katie.