Katie Couric- Remember "The Heidi Game"?

Katie Couric and CBS News who made Michael Jackson their lead story on the CBS Evening News for most of 11 days since her death pulled a major blunder on Tuesday. The network switched from the not yet completed Jackson memorial to Couric and her talking heads and then to commercial while Jackson's body was removed from the Staples Center and a final prayer was read.

No doubt CBS wanted to score ratings points and advertising dollars with this event. But lacked enough respect for coverage of the event to wait until it was over before throwing it back to the local affiliates.

The "Heidi Game" was a November 17, 1968 broadcast by NBC of an American Football League Game between the New York Jets and Oakland Raiders. With 65 seconds left in the game and New York leading 33-29, NBC decided to terminate the broadcast in the eastern and central time zones as to not interfere with their regular evening programming of the movie, Heidi, which was scheduled to start at 7 p.m. EST. Of course Oakland scored 14 points in 65 seconds to win the game.

CBS once again demonstrated today that, as CEO Arthur Jensen said to his UBS network news anchor Howard Beale, "The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale."

The last time CBS covered a funeral live?

September 6, 1997 when Diana, Princess of Wales funeral was held in London.

In a November 1997 an American Journalism Review article by Jacqueline E. Sharkey noted this of the Princess Diana coverage, "... despite the high ratings and circulation figures for stories about Diana, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll of more than 2,000 people in mid-September showed 56 percent of respondents thought there had been too much coverage of Princess Diana's death."

Well, as broadcast journalist and former co-anchor of NBC News Overnight Linda Ellerbee use to say, "And so it goes."


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