The Glory Days

"The glory days of TV news are over, and the media landscape has been dramatically changed."

So says Katie Couric, in a piece on Haaretz.com, There's only one Katie Couric - and now she's in Israel.

You think it might have anything to do with this?

During a CBS interview on Tuesday, John McCain made a stone cold error on a subject about which he claims expert knowledge: the 'surge' strategy in Iraq. In an interview with anchor Katie Couric, the Arizona Republican said, inaccurately, that the surge strategy was responsible for the much-touted 'Anbar Awakening,' in which Sunni sheiks turned against Al Qaeda, helping in turn to reduce violence in the country.

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Yet McCain's error was not seen by any CBS Evening News viewers. As MSNBC's Keith Olbermann noted (video below), "CBS curiously, to say the least, left it on the edit room floor. It aired Katie Couric's question, but in response, it aired part of McCain's answer to the other question instead." (Ironically, this edit came on the same day that McCain's campaign released a video mocking the media's "love affair" with Obama.)

McCain Gets History Of The Surge Wrong, CBS Doesn't Air Footage.

As Matthew Yglesias of The Atlantic notes, McCain's Mixed-Up Timeline (Foreign Policy):

Sometimes things have to end up on the cutting room floor in television, but it seems to me that if you show video of a question being asked, you ought to cut to the interviewee answering that question not just show some other film. Certainly when you've got a candidate who's made the idea that he's super-knowledgeable about national security policy misstating the basic facts of the issue that seems noteworthy.

And when you ignore those basic rules, you lose your credibility, which causes the end of the glory days for the media.