Day By Day© by Chris Muir.

Friday, January 14, 2005

Can this network be saved?

Van Gordon Sauter, CBS's former president, gets off to a rousing start in this LA Times Op-Ed about his former employer:

What's the big problem at CBS News? Well, for one thing, it has no credibility. And no audience, no morale, no long-term emblematic anchorperson and no cohesive management structure. Outside of those annoyances, it shouldn't be that hard to fix.
And it just keeps getting better. He decries the station's unrelenting liberalism ("The unremitting liberal orientation finally became too much for me. I still check in, but less and less frequently. I increasingly drift to NBC News and Fox and MSNBC"); identifies the viewers' distrust of the station ("A large swath of the society doesn't trust the news media"); and points out that it is being marginalized ("There are now true alternatives to the major network news programs"). He holds out hope that Les Moonves can save the situation, but I actually think that, sometimes, you just need to start fresh. Unless Moonves fires everyone, I don't see how he is going to get his minions to change an entrenched behavior that emanates from New York and Hollywood, and that is part of a self-rewarding cycle, in which these Blue City denizens reinforce each other's prejudices.