It's Not Exactly Hardwood Hardball But ...

With all the conspiracy theories and suspicions circulating around the media these days, it's kind of nice to encounter something that's a little counter-intuitive to all that. Of course outside of the theory that every story reported by mainstream news organizations is vetted through some secret council of Ivory Tower liberal elites, one of the most often heard complaints about the press is that it's just too beholden to its own business interests.

True, there are a lot of reasons for one to think that news is used to push product and protect the bottom line (is what happened in the latest episode of "Survivor" really news? No, but that doesn't stop the "Early Show" from participating in a little cross-promoting synergy). But let's give credit where credit is due once in awhile, in this instance to the CBS "Evening News."

These are things which are widely known: CBS is a network comprised of several divisions, news, entertainment, sports, digital media. The president of the CBS News division is also president of CBS Sports, which, it so happens, owns the rights to broadcast the NCAA basketball tournament that started this afternoon. This tournament spawns a lot of office pools every year, which is believed to cut down on productivity to some degree.

You could sort of see, if CBS News were that consumed with keeping the network's image pristine, why they may not want to pay a lot of attention to a story about how CBS hurts the nation's productivity. Not the greatest promotion in the world, at least image-wise. But, like just about every other news outlet in the country, the "Evening News" did the story. Not only did they do it but correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi went so far as to describe a way for office workers to watch the games at work and avoid being caught (whether that's promotion or a "gotcha" I'll leave to your judgment).

Here's a portion of her script:

Alfonsi: Casual fans wagering $2.5 billion in bets. Much of it, illegal. How competitive is it?

Mr. Joe Lunardi (Saint Joseph's University): A VP of a Fortune 500 company invited me to fly to the Final Four and address his co-workers.

Alfonsi: Joe Lunardi is a bracketologist. He sifts through thousands of pages of stats.

Mr. Lunardi: Look at teams who do well away from home. Teams that get a lot of home cooking don't often like the visiting meals they get in NCAA play.

Alfonsi: To pick a winner, sometimes.

Mr. Lunardi: I've won tournament pools many times, and once I literally finished behind a cocker spaniel.

Alfionsi: Still, 12 million have turned to his Web site for guidance, and many of them will be monitoring the games online from work. CBS has even created a bust button so you don't get busted. It turns the game into a spread sheet in a second.