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Each week we invite someone from outside PE to weigh in with their thoughts about CBS News and the media at large. This week, we turned to Ankush Khardori, who writes about media and politics for The Huffington Post, its media adjunct Eat The Press and his personal blog, Penguins on the Equator. He is a recent graduate of Columbia Law School and currently works as an attorney in New York City. Below, Khardori suggests some ways in which CBS News can break some traditional broadcasting molds. As always, the opinions expressed and factual assertions made in “Outside Voices” are those of the author, not ours, and we seek a wide variety of voices.

There was a time before "CSI" -- hard to recall, I realize, but try hard. In the 1990s, CBS's primetime lineup was in the lurch: Notable offerings included the inexplicable prairie throwback, "Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman," and the delightfully crazy "Diagnosis Murder." CBS seemed to revel in its reputation as the "geezer network," and things were not looking up when Les Moonves came to the network in 1995. It was then -- with CBS's ratings in the dumps and, it seemed, nothing to lose -- that the network began to move out of its comfort zone. In 2000, "Survivor" arrived out of nowhere and changed network TV as we know it. Later that year, "CSI" brought the crime procedural into the twenty-first century, and today it seems that every other show is either a spin-off or transparently (if successfully) mimicking its style. Neither of these successes was predicted.

There is a lesson in the recent history of CBS Primetime for CBS News: Failures -- stretches of failures, even -- have significant upsides. When networks (or divisions) are on top, they stagnate (think "CSI," " CSI:Miami," and "CSI:NY"), and viewers inevitably lose interest when the old, good thing dies (think "Must See TV") or something new comes along. As with CBS primetime in 2000, that something new frequently comes from a competitor that is at the back of the pack but has shown the will to experiment -- to take risks, to shake things up, to throw things against the wall and see what sticks. Desperation, oddly, is very often the best catalyst for innovation.

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Writing on the Huffington Post, law student Ankush Khardori offers a criticism of the number stories about golfers on "60 Minutes" this season. (There have been three – on Tiger Woods, Michelle Wie and John Daly.) "Now, individually, all of these pieces may have been justifiable by their potential news value, but CBS happens to have a unique interest in seeing these athletes get prime publicity -- the network is one of several that airs PGA events. That fact renders the relatively high number of golfer profiles in recent weeks somewhat suspect, particularly since 60 Minutes is supposed to be a news show, and although they run fluffy, largely news-less profiles all the time, obliquely promoting sports events on their own network should still be beneath them."

Khardori concludes:

Amidst these lingering questions, it's hard not to recall that, last October, then-President of CBS News Andrew Heyward was replaced by Sean McManus, who had been the head of CBS Sports since 1996. McManus, however, in a somewhat strange move, was to keep his job at the helm of CBS Sports while also running CBS News. Is it possible that the two divisions have become linked in a much more significant, tangible way? Surely there's a line between legitimate cross-promotion and a more peculiar and distasteful form of news-as-sportscast. Has it been crossed by one of the most venerable news shows to have ever existed?

I asked "60 Minutes" executive producer Jeff Fager to respond. He first addressed the claim that "60 Minutes" had done too many stories about golfers this season.

"The criticism is correct," he said. "We shouldn't have done three golfers this year. It's unfortunate it worked out that way. We were committed to one, and then another came up that became irresistible, and then Tiger Woods became a possibility." He noted that the show had been trying to get the Woods story "for 10 years."

He also said, however, that McManus' arrival at the news division had nothing to do with this season's focus on golfers. "To suggest this has something to do with Sean McManus coming from sports is absurd," said Fager. "He's hoping for us to do good, interesting stories. He's focused on news. He's not pushing sports on us."

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