Politics
Jane Pauley Assures Nation Everything Is Fine While Showing B-Roll Of Geese
By Mor Michael, . BSN Network. Satire.
CBS Sunday Morning, the Emmy-winning broadcast that has been describing autumn to Americans since before most of its viewers had their current prescriptions, aired its September 13th edition this week to an audience estimated at seven million people who had not yet located the remote.
The broadcast, hosted by Jane Pauley, opened with forty-five seconds of Canada geese walking near a pond, underscored by a jazz flute arrangement that has not been updated since the Clinton administration. No geese were identified by name. No context was provided. The geese simply walked, and the nation exhaled.
'We felt this week called for something grounding,' said a CBS spokesperson in a statement that did not specify what this week had called for grounding from, or whether the geese had been consulted. 'Jane brings a warmth to the broadcast that is genuinely irreplaceable.'
Jane Pauley, for her part, delivered the toss to the first segment the way a pediatrician delivers news about a minor ear infection: with total authority, complete calm, and the implicit promise that you will be having soup later.
The first segment, running eleven minutes and forty seconds, profiled a Vermont ceramicist who makes mugs that take four months to dry. The ceramicist described her process as 'a conversation with time.' Pauley nodded. The camera held on a mug. The nation did not change the channel.
Actor Jeff Bridges, reached for comment by a producer who later described the call as 'the most pleasant twelve minutes of my professional life,' said the show represents 'something we've maybe forgotten how to do, which is just be somewhere without needing it to become something else.' Bridges was reportedly sitting on a porch when he said this. There is no evidence he has ever not been sitting on a porch.
The second segment examined a small-town library in Ohio that has the same librarian it has had since 1987. The librarian, Margaret, said she liked the quiet. The segment ran nine minutes. There were no graphics. Margaret straightened a book twice. The show won an Emmy.
A third segment on the life cycle of monarch butterflies included drone footage, a professor from a university no one has heard of saying the word 'remarkable' four times, and a closing shot of a single butterfly landing on a child's outstretched hand that was so aggressively peaceful it briefly made a viewer in Scottsdale feel guilty about owning a leaf blower.
Critics, to the extent that anyone has ever critically engaged with CBS Sunday Morning without immediately falling asleep in a hammock, note that the show's central editorial position, that everything is fine and there is a craftsperson somewhere who proves it, has remained consistent across five decades, two pandemics, and an indeterminate number of geese.
The broadcast concluded, as it always does, with a silent nature sequence: three minutes of a field in morning light, no music, no narration, no news.
It airs again next Sunday. The geese will be different geese. You will not be able to tell.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/this-week-on-sunday-morning-sept-13-2026/