If that sounds a tad lyrical, well, consider that Capus, a would-be musician since his days at William Tennent High School, still plucks his Rickenbacker electric bass during boring conference calls at NBC.
Capus hit a sour note with viewers April 18 when NBC aired portions of the self-made videotape of Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho. Capus was accused of being insensitive to the victims' families.
Seven days before that crisis, there was the Imus debacle.
After meeting with distraught African American staffers, Capus canceled Imus' MSNBC simulcast because of the DJ's racist on-air comments. Critics raked Capus for sacrificing the First Amendment.
News executives are meant to be heard, not seen, but Capus, NBC president since '05, resolutely defended his judgments on NBC, MSNBC, CNN and even, last Tuesday, with Oprah Winfrey Herself.
"Go figure," he says. ". . . I'm a guy from Warminster who landed in a good job. I never thought it would propel me into the guest seat of Oprah."
Technically, Capus was in the studio audience. Anchor Brian Williams, mind-melded with his boss since they worked together at Philadelphia's WCAU in the late '80s, sat with Winfrey.
To Williams, Oprah meant reaching a different audience.
"It was bothering us that some people didn't seem to understand what we do for a living," he says. "We can't always use public opinion as a barometer of whether to do a story."
When Cho's package arrived at NBC April 18, Capus and his staff debated for some seven hours about what to air from the 25 minutes of raw video, 43 photos and 23 pages of ramblings.
By that evening, NBC had decided to show a few snippets - immediately picked up by virtually every news outlet on the planet.
By 11, after thousands of irate e-mails, Capus ordered NBC to cut back on the video. Others followed suit; ABC and Fox News Channel dropped it altogether.
