| With ABC losing viewers at every turn, I see a Peter Jennings slowly sinking into... obscurity.
I think this is a healthy development. It is certainly more honest than what we have now. I think it is inevitable, for business reasons, that one of the broadcast networks will move to position itself much farther to the right. Fox News has uncovered the fact that there is a huge market for this. The issue is whether one of the current leaders will grab the position before Murdoch himself does... the Fox broadcast network now scores higher than ABC in the entertainment ratings, so they are not an idle threat. The obvious candidate for re-positioning is CBS, which is last in the news ratings anyway, and whose anchor increasingly resembles Methuselah. It's time for an overhaul there, and no matter how distasteful it might be to the left-leaning CBS News team, the "suits" will be making the decision... not them. Everybody sees this coming, and it is not unreasonable for ABC to explicitly position itself as the left-leaning network. Someone will occupy that position, and it is likely to be just as lucrative as the segment on the right. The big loser may well be whoever moves last to take off the mask. |
I think the existence and the success of Fox News presages a more honest era in American journalism in which all these smarmy liberals who deny their obvious bias finally take off the masks. We will see something more like what they have in Europe, where news outlets explicitly lean to the left or the right, and nobody tries to hide it.