RIP Charles Osgood

[wicked]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arch...he-road/8d436694-3487-4f05-8d48-0ef76ff23f83/

 

[swingline]

Maybe it would have worked if you just walked, starved yourself and slept in a tent. Did you ever think about that? :D

A tent is awful fancy. Just cover up with leaves and snuggle up to a family of possums.*

 

[swingline]

* Not George Joneses.

 

[maumann]

Maybe it would have worked if you just walked, starved yourself and slept in a tent. Did you ever think about that? :D

"Don't you even think of dying while on the clock! Think of all the paperwork. And that autopsy's coming out of your per diem!"

 

[Shelbyville Manhattan]

Such things can arise from the people you least expect.

Of all the people I’d have on the dual families Bingo card, Charles Kuralt was not one. I’m amazed with how he pulled it off, even back then.

 

[Liut]

It's Osgood who died, not Kuralt.

 

[User 149557]

Seems like I remember seeing one of Kuralt’s motorhomes at the Ford Museum.

 

[Azrael]

Seems like I remember seeing one of Kuralt’s motorhomes at the Ford Museum.

https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-collections/artifact/233612/

 

[Slacker]

Before Kuralt settled into folksy middle age status,
he did quite a lot of reporting from Vietnam, I believe.

Morley Safer did, too. I was a huge Morley fan. I would watch anything and everything he did.

 

[Slacker]

It's Osgood who died, not Kuralt.

RIP Morley Safer!

 

[Mr._Graybeard]

Morley Safer did, too. I was a huge Morley fan. I would watch anything and everything he did.

Safer liked to give the camera this look, like, "I know what I'm saying is surreal, but bear with me."

There's a reason why CBS was called The Tiffany Network -- the talent was unparalleled. Osgood was perhaps the last of that group. I'm not sure if Rather belongs in their numbers.

Murrow set the standard, IMO. Even into the '60s the network was doing primetime journalism like "Harvest of Shame." I remember the network presenting "The National Driver's Test" in 1965. It was real information, presented on a corporate TV network.

I should add that the stuff CBS put on the air back then pointed me in the direction of journalism.

 

[Typist Clerk]

Bill Paley put up with Murrow, who ruffled feathers brilliantly, because he was a legend, and with CBS News because it scored brownie points with the FCC (same with news departments of the other networks). The 60s and 70s found that news operations could make money, which Paley really liked – the move to 30-minute network evening news, the increasing importance of the morning shows, led by Today, and finally 60 Minutes, in 1968, which by the mid-1970s was a hit. "Harvest of Shame" was the first installment of "CBS Reports." Murrow narrated it – after CBS cancelled he and Fred Friendly's innovative "See It Now."

I remember "The National Driver's Test." I was 9 or so and watched it carefully. I don't think I passed. CBS also came up with "Town Meeting of the World" thanks to satellite TV. It was a wonder. Live pictures from Paris!

 

[Shropshire Slasher]

Murrow died so young. In an alternate world he would've put down the heaters and lived long into the 1990s, still working.

 

[DanOregon]

When is the last time 60 Minutes made waves? Seems now their biggest "gets" are former administration officials selling a tell-all book. They used to break stories. Or at least make national issues out of stories.

 

[swingline]

Not as many cracker filling stations charging northerners for “repairs” that weren’t needed these days. RIP Mike Wallace.

 

[Liut]

Peter Boyer's excellent book on CBS News tells the story of WCBS-AM's foray from music to all-news. Osgood left ABC radio to join that operation.
Westinghouse's WINS (Give us twenty minutes, and we'll give you the World) beat WCBS to all-news and William Paley didn't want that to happen in Chicago. As a result, WBBM's switchover was rushed and resulted in the hiring of Van Gordon Sauter, who had been a newspaperman in New Bedford, Mass., Chicago and Detroit. For those of you who know the history, Sauter obviously went on to a rather dubious career in CBS management.

A tidbit I ran across in The New York Times from Osgood's service in the army:
He briefly broadcast to an audience of one. After President Dwight D. Eisenhower had a heart attack in 1955, Mr. Osgood was recruited to be the president’s personal disc jockey. “I was put into a studio with a stack of records that had all been chosen as his favorites,” he said in 2016, “and I spent most of the day playing records for Eisenhower.”

 

[Liut]

Before Kuralt settled into folksy middle age status, he did quite a lot of reporting from Vietnam, I believe.

Kuralt, Safer, John Laurence, Dan Rather, Richard Threlkeld, Bruce Morton, Charles Collingwood ...

 

[playthrough]

Safer liked to give the camera this look, like, "I know what I'm saying is surreal, but bear with me."

There's a reason why CBS was called The Tiffany Network -- the talent was unparalleled. Osgood was perhaps the last of that group. I'm not sure if Rather belongs in their numbers.

Murrow set the standard, IMO. Even into the '60s the network was doing primetime journalism like "Harvest of Shame." I remember the network presenting "The National Driver's Test" in 1965. It was real information, presented on a corporate TV network.

I should add that the stuff CBS put on the air back then pointed me in the direction of journalism.

I have always called it The Tiffany Network and was stunned to have to explain it once to a media colleague much older than me. Thought it was a universally known nickname.

 

[Liut]

I have always called it The Tiffany Network and was stunned to have to explain it once to a media colleague much older than me. Thought it was a universally known nickname.

Maybe that colleague only remembered Tiffany-like progamming such as the Hillbillies, Gomer and Green Acres.

 

[BTExpress]

If you have a cement pond, you're a Tiffany shopper.