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Wednesday, February 18, 2009
2/20: Whatever happened to… Bobbie Battista?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Remember Bobbie Battista, a mainstay of CNN Headline News back in the 1980s and ’90s?
She’s now doing mock news reports for the Onion. She said she taped four of them. The first one debuted this month.
Battista left CNN in 2002 and ran a PR firm for five years. She worked on a talk show for a startup news operation for a few months, hoping it would be like CNN in 1980. Didn’t work. She laid low in 2008 but has been working recently on a content development company with a bunch of other former female TV execs.
She did the Onion as a lark. “I haven’t been in news since CNN,” she said, so why not?
Here’s a hilarious sample, touting a fake drug that helps people who are chronically chipper. Warning: there are a couple of curse words in this report for those of you who don’t like that sort of thing:
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2/18: Clark Howard has prostate cancer, caught early
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
WSB-AM and HLN host Clark Howard has early-stage prostate cancer.
He told me he’s set to announce it today on his radio show at 2:30 p.m.
Given what doctors had warned him leading up to the diagnosis two-plus weeks ago, he said he wasn’t surprised. And since the doctors detected it so early, his chance of full recovery, he said, is almost 100%.
After extensive research (you wouldn’t expect anything less from Clark), he plans to have laparoscopic surgery, though he has yet to set a date. Howard said when he does the surgery, he will be out two weeks to recover.
Howard, who is 53 years old, said he was on his annual trip with his employees, this year to China, when his wife Lane called him with the news. “There was no shock, no fear,” he said. “This isn’t what’s going to kill me. It’s probably going to be something like driving down 285 will kill me.” (He also used to ride a scooter around town but his wife forced him to sell it.)
He plans to encourage male listeners to get checked. “Guys don’t go to the doctor,” he said. “That’s a big mistake. What kills guys are silent killers. We don’t do the basics we should like go for physicals and checkups.” Women generally “are more used to being poked around. Guys are really wimps about this stuff.”
Howard notes that in Europe, doctors often go into “watchful waiting” for early detection cancer patients, checking every 90 days. But only 9 percent of patients in the United States take that option, he said. Here, people would rather get the surgery over with pronto.
The well-reknowned cheapskate is such an upbeat, amiable guy, when he has told colleagues and friends about it, they sometimes don’t believe him. “Everybody reacts in their own way,” he said, based on their own experiences. “If they had a family member die of a brutal cancer, it’s doom and gloom. If they had a family member have a minor cancer, they’re cool.”
UPDATE: He repeated much of this on the air to listeners of more than 200 radio stations nationwide at 2:30 p.m. today. He noted that doctors noted an elevated PSA reading more than two years ago and had him checked every 90 days, plus a biopsy ever six months. The fourth biopsy recently showed some trouble. “It’s not a walk in the park, but it’s not that big a deal,” he said.
