From his remarks Wednesday at the Media Conference:
As recently stated by Dan Rather - who was, of course, forced out of his anchor job after angering the White House - television news has been "dumbed down and tarted up."
Me thinks he doth protest too much. It wasn't just the White House that was angry at Dan. There were a whole lot of regular Americans that were angry at him.
Dan lost his position and the Network lost its credibility because they attempted to influence a federal election using fraudulent documents.
Documents that they had been told were lacking in provenance. Documents that contained anachronisms that indicated the documents were much less than the three decades old claimed. Documents that Dan Rather and CBS went out of their way to do the most superficial job of authenticating. And now he has the audacity to say that no one proved them inauthentic.
As for the Network News being run by the Entertainment wing of the network, he can thank Mike Wallace's ambush journalism and Ted Turner's creation of the 24 hour news channel for that. If you want to sell advertising, you have to have people watching your show and there aren't that many people who want to see the news readers read the comics. So if it bleeds, it leads. And that's the way it is (even if they have to tart something up like "Opening Al Capone's Secret Vault").
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