Stanley Bing, the nom de guerre of CBS News chief flack Gil Schwartz, wrote another one of his throwaway books recently, Executricks: Or How to Retire While You're Still Working, and got himself booked on Wednesday's The Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson to promote it. Ferguson asked Bing how, exactly, he had time to write the book while still holding down an executive gig at CBS, to which he responded: "I practice some of the tricks in the book." Those who might think he's just kidding around would be sorely mistaken.

Schwartz, who's held down the job one way or another since 1994, has made a name for himself by effectively standing by during the Dan Rather Memogate scandal while then-president of CBS News Andrew Heyward & Co. got pummeled by the business press; letting the infamous "slimmed down Katie Couric" Watch magazine scandal go down; allowing the press to assault Couric as she struggled through her her Evening News tenure without so much as an acknowledgment that things were going from bad to worse; and, when Couric's big November 2006 election day — one of her first major news events — day finally did arrive, Schwartz was trying to drown out her headline-worthy press with, you guessed it, a media blitz for his own book.