Rich, "Nascar Nightly News" (NBC chairman: U.S. is "red state world")

[DeepModem Mom]

New York Times
The Nascar Nightly News: Anchorman Get Your Gun
By FRANK RICH

....There's a war on. TV remains by far the most prevalent source of news for Americans. We need honest information to help us navigate, not bunkum skewed to flatter one segment of the country, whatever that segment might be. Yet here's how Jeff Zucker, the NBC president, summed up the attributes of Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw's successor, to Peter Johnson of USA Today: "No one understands this Nascar nation more than Brian." Mr. Zucker was in sync with his boss, Bob Wright, the NBC Universal chairman, who described America as a "red state world" on the eve of Mr. Brokaw's retirement. Though it may come as news to those running NBC, we actually live in a red-and-blue-state country, in a world that increasingly hates all our states without regard to our provincial obsession with their hues. Nonetheless, Mr. Williams, who officially took over as anchor on Dec. 2, is seeking a very specific mandate. "The New York-Washington axis can be a journalist's worst enemy," he told Mr. Johnson, promising to spend his nights in the field in "Dayton and Toledo and Cincinnati and Denver and the middle of Kansas." (So much for San Francisco - or Baghdad.)

I don't mean to single out Mr. Williams, who is prone to making such statements while wearing suits that reek of "New York-Washington axis" money and affectation. But when he talks in a promotional interview of how he found the pulse of the nation in Cabela's, a popular hunting-and-fishing outfitter in Dundee, Mich., and boasts of owning both an air rifle and part interest in a dirt-track stock-car team, he is declaring himself the poster boy for a larger shift in our news culture. He is eager to hunt down an audience, not a story.

He's not an isolated case. You know red is de rigueur when ABC undertakes the lunatic task of trying to repackage the last surviving evening news anchor, the heretofore aggressively urbane Peter Jennings, as a sentimental populist. In a new spot for "World News Tonight," Mr. Jennings tells us that "this is a really hopeful nation, and I think there's a great beauty in that." This homily is not only factually inaccurate - most Americans continue to tell pollsters that the nation is on the wrong track - but is also accompanied by a tinkling music-box piano and a montage leaning on such Kodak tableaus as a fishing cove, a small-town front porch and a weather-beaten man driving a car with a flag decal. Mr. Jennings is a smart newsman, but his just-folks incarnation is about as persuasive as Teresa Heinz Kerry's chow-down photo op at Wendy's.

If the Nascarization of news were only about merchandising, it would be a source of laughter more than concern. But the insidious leak of the branding into the product itself has already begun. Last Sunday morning both NBC's "Meet the Press" and ABC's "This Week" had roundtable discussions about - what else? - the "moral values" fallout of the election. Each show assembled a bevy of religious and quasi-religious leaders and each included a liberal or two. But though much of the "values" debate centered on abortion and gay marriage, neither panel contained a woman, let alone an openly gay cleric. Allowing such ostentatiously blue interlopers into the "values" club might frighten the horses - or at least the hunting dogs....

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/05/arts/05rich.html

[Owlet]

1. NBC, CBS, ABC - Who cares?

The broadcast networks stopped airing real news some time ago, and a change in the nightly anchor doesn't strike me as particularly newsworthy, either. In the 22 minutes between pharmaceutical commercials, you typically get 2 minutes of headlines, 5 minutes of biased "analysis" with the rest devoted to basically magazine pieces. It wouldn't surprise me at all if, in the next few years, these networks dropped any pretense of journalism and devoted all of their air time to entertainment, which is what most of their audience prefers anyway.

[girl gone mad]

2. I'm going to sit back and laugh..

as uber-elite Jennings and Williams try to connect with the red state rednecks.

As if Rush and Ann Coulter weren't entertaining enough.

Here's hoping that CBS gives the desk to Leslie Stahl or someone less grating than those other two. Stahl is attractive enough that she could win over some "Nascar dads" without having to patronize them.

[DeepModem Mom]

3. See this post for Maureen Dowd on white male anchors:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x2776572

[bullimiami]

4. thinking people have either turned them off

or watch them with a healthy dose of skepticism.
at least half of us know the corporate media is a joke.

for me it is OFF and has been OFF.

For the 20 seconds I accidentaly got of MSNBC today I saw Lugar slandering Kofi Annan and spinning a couple thousand dollars a month that Annans son was getting into an international conspiricy.

What a fucking joke. Lugar is an enabler to the biggest criminal enterprise in the history of the world.

The truth.
The UN doesnt kowtow to King George. Annan had some negative things to say about him.
Rather than speak to the facts they resort, as usual, to slander.

[leftchick]

5. Nascar News = Nazi News....

It is this same sort of propaganda news that eventually took down a country. Hmmmm....

[Joy Anne]

6. NBC and UCC

And note the NBC refusal to accept money to run those divisive UCC ads about inclusivity.