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"When Brokaw, Jennings and Rather retire," former NBC correspondent Ken Bode told the Washington Post, "it is a perfect time for these corporations to decide their newscasts are no longer worth it. Unless something dramatic happens, inevitably, the network newscasts are gone."
As for "Nightline," although it survived the Letterman fiasco, it's likely to be chased out of its network slot to a smaller cable news venue.
I'm among those who have anguished over the gradual decline of serious TV news in favor of fluffy features and entertainment. I have lamented the increasing concentration of electronic media in a few global giants that value profits --- and hence entertainment programming --- over everything else. I have resented the erosion of the networks' understanding that their use of the public's airwaves requires, in return, some minimal service to the public interest in the form of news programs that contribute to an informed citizenry.
And yet, I couldn't muster any outrage over Disney/ABC's contemptuous treatment of "Nightline." I was amused, rather than upset, by Chris "Spitball" Matthews' dismissal of Koppel as "irrelevant" (talk about a sauce pan calling a kettle black). I realized that I could remember many of Letterman's "Top Tens" and "stupid pet tricks," but I couldn't remember the last time I watched "Nightline."
Eventually it dawned on me that my media values hadn't changed, but my information gathering habits had. Time was --- well into the 1980's --- when I read three newspapers a day for current information (local, regional, and national) and several weekly and monthly magazines for context and depth on important issues.
I relied on network evening news for a brief summary of what mainstream elite eyes and ears had seen and heard during the day, and what those in power thought and intended to do about it. They were sometimes wrong, and often pursuing their own agendas, but it was useful to have a snapshot of why and how the bigshots might change my life --- or the world --- the next day.
Today my reading habits remain about the same, but my TV viewing has changed dramatically. Now, I can find out what the powerbrokers think anytime, day or night, on cable news channels. I haven't watched the network news in years, yet I'm better informed than ever.
The decline of network news is symptomatic of the broadcast networks' slide from dominance of our media universe. This is both good and bad.
It's good that we no longer have just three, virtually interchangeable, elite gatekeepers of news and information for the majority of Americans. Fox News isn't "fair and balanced," except to conservatives wearing ideological blinders, but it does present a different slant to daily events, and that's healthy.
The proliferation of cable news channels, as well as Internet news and opinion sites, suggest that serious news will always have a home. It just won't, in the future, be delivered by mega-bucks celebrity anchors.
The negative side of this trend is that Americans no longer have a common electronic hearth around which we gather at 6:30 PM each night. We don't even have Seinfeld to provide a shared vocabulary for jokes at the water cooler.
This, I think is what's behind the anxiety over the demise of network news. I do think we need to come up with new ways to communicate the shared experiences that bind us together as Americans and citizens of the world.
But the news shouldn't serve this function.
If we have a common destiny, we must discover it in the course of arguing the meaning of daily events. That is better accomplished in today's media environment with its diverse, albeit fragmented, sources of news and opinion. Network news is dead; long live the news.
© 2002, GENERATOR 21.
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