president ford

When former President Gerald Ford passed away late Tuesday night, both NBC and ABC broke into regular programming to report the news. CBS, however did not; instead they decided just to put a crawl at the bottom of the screen. If you were watching CBS at the time, when a Letterman rerun was running in the east and an NCIS rerun was running in the west, you might have wondered why they didn't break in to report something that was so important.

Others were wondering, too, and David Bauder of the AP got some reaction to it. CBS really didn't give a reason other than just state that they will fly Katie Couric in from an overseas vacation to anchor funeral coverage, and that they reported the news as soon as they saw it. In the article, Bauder cites a 2004 incident where a CBS News producer was fired for breaking into CSI:NY to report the death of Yassir Arafat rather than do the agreed-to crawl. Whether or not that was a factor in this decision is unclear. But the logical reaction would be that a former President would merit a break-in, don't you think?

[via Mediabistro]

The first thing I thought of this morning when I heard that former President Gerald Ford had died was this Saturday Night Live sketch from 1996. It features Dana Carvey as NBC newsanchor Tom Brokaw, taping a "Gerald Ford is dead" story ahead of time (which the networks and news outlets sometimes do). They cover all the bases, since they don't know how Ford will eventually die, including getting shot ("Gerald Ford shot dead today at the senseless age of 83"), suicide, mauled by wolves, and killed by zombies. They also do a take where Brokaw comes out of the closet, because that story combined with Ford dying would be a big ratings grabber.

If you haven't heard, Ford really did die last night, of natural causes, at age 93. Video after the jump.

[via Best Week Ever]