CBS: Show Us Your Moonves!

Romenesko has snippets from a NYT article about Les Moonves and his plans to “break the mold” of the CBS News division in attempt to “enlarge” and “bring down the median age” of its audience. (Read: More than a dozen, not dead.) What caught our attention:

“‘The news anchor Andrew wants to use is not surprising,’’ Moonves had told me, referring to John Roberts, the chief White House correspondent for CBS and one of Heyward’s leading choices (not the hot, gay one). ‘‘That’s bothering me. On the one hand, we could have a newscast like ‘The Big Breakfast’ in England, where women give the news in lingerie. Or there’s ‘Naked News,’ which is on cable in England. I saw a clip of it. It’s a woman giving the news as she’s getting undressed. And then, on the other hand, you could have two boring people behind a desk. Our newscast has to be somewhere in between.’’

This sounds a lot like having John Roberts give the news from behind a desk while undressing from lingerie over breakfast, which could make us lose our lunch.

Excerpts from Lynn Hirschberg’s Sept. 4 New York Times Magazine piece (“Giving Them What They Want”) on CBS chairman Les Moonves [Poynter]