In the aftermath of their high-profile failure to lure David Letterman, top executives at ABC are scrambling to repair the public-relations damage from the network’s proclaimed eagerness to throw "Nightline" overboard. But the nation’s TV viewers don’t need to read the current wave of commentaries about the debacle to know that feverish pursuit of unlimited profits by media conglomerates is rapidly causing "TV journalism" to become oxymoronic.
With its suffocating pretensions and frequent idiocies, television has always cried out for sardonic mockery. At times, beginning with Mad Magazine’s razor-sharp parodies a half-century ago, "the vast wasteland" has been appropriately skewered. But the day is fast approaching when satire of American TV will be impossible.
Already, it’s a daunting challenge to lampoon TV fare that often seems inadvertently self-satirical and oblivious to its own creepiness. (Geraldo Rivera, Larry King, Christopher Matthews…) Routine offerings on dozens of major channels are so over the top that any attempt at satire would be hard-pressed to keep pace with what passes for reality on television.
When Disney bought ABC in 1995, the incoming management swiftly pledged that entertainment values would not interfere with the news division’s journalistic efforts. While some cartoonists had fun picturing Mickey or Goofy in the anchor’s chair instead of Peter Jennings, media outlets were generally content to treat the acquisition as just a business story.
In a pattern that was to be repeated a few years later with coverage of the Viacom-CBS merger and the formation of AOL Time Warner, a lot of the reporting and punditry about Disney’s purchase of ABC focused on implications for market-share battles and profit outlooks for investors. The threats to journalism got scant attention.
At the time, media critic
