CBS: The _C_ry _B_aby _S_ystem

I don't know about you, but if I had been working for a company for years, had made them the equivalent of a small nation's economy in profits and gotten little in the way of support for my trouble, given them plenty of notice before my departure and made them still more money before I left, only to have them sue me when my replacement fell flat on his face, I'd be more than a bit miffed.

When the rumors started flying that CBS might file suit against Howard Stern, part of me said, "there's no way! CBS wouldn't do something so patently stupid."

Then I remembered that it's America in 2006, the era of "poor l'il ol' me" litigation, and said to myself, "Of course they're going to sue."

What's astounding to me are the following things:

1) That CBS had ample opportunity to kick Stern off the air between the date he announced his departure and the date that he finally left. In fact, other CBS personalities were urging this, and while a guest on Stern's show, Donald Trump at one point expressed his own incredulity that Stern hadn't been fired. If Trump were in charge of CBS, he said, he'd have kicked Stern off the air that very day;

2) That CBS did suspend Stern at one point for talking about Sirius. But they continued to keep him on the air afterwards;

3) That CBS made millions upon millions of dollars on Stern and his show between the date of his announcement and his departure;

4) That it was CBS' own lack of support that led to Stern deciding to ultimately leave terrestrial radio.

We talked about some of those circumstances earlier on the blog - the issue of the heavy-hand of government driving Stern from the airwaves. Had CBS been willing to support Stern and defend itself against FCC overreaching, then he might have stayed.

It's fairly clear that this is a desperate move by CBS. Now, don't get me wrong: I'm a huge fan of the Junkies, and was always a bigger Don and Mike fan than a Howard Stern fan (I'll put it to you this way: in the mornings while Stern was on, I tended to flip from his show to NPR to Pacifica to the Junkies to TOP, etc. At night I keep it on Don & Mike, switching over to traffic on TOP during commercials.). But in the post-Stern CBS/Infinity era, apparently Stern's replacement's (David Lee Roth, Rover, and Adam Carolla [who I like on TV]) are sucking hind teat. Roth has got, literally, 1/10th of Stern's listeners.

It's funny, because it reminds me of the oft-lampooned-on-Don&Mike George Lopez made-for-tv movie character, "The Bum" from, I think it was called Naughty or Nice. Anyhow, "The Bum" is a DJ who starts losing his audience precipitously, and cannot believe that he lost half his audience in three days.

Roth, in reality, has managed to lose 90% of Stern's audience in the space of two months.

CBS is desperate, and desperate entities do desperate things. But the desperate acts of desperate people rarely work.

I'm looking for a link to the full 43-page complaint. If anyone finds one, please let me know.

But shame on you, CBS. You made a prodigious sum of money on Stern, didn't treat him right, he left, you didn't plan adequately for the post-Stern era, and now you're reaping the what you've sown.

You don't get another bite at the apple... unless you want to make a deal to give Stern back his best-of tapes...

- Andrew Langer