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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
A discussion about the value, relevance, and long-term viability of network news shows has been going on for a while, and naturally it accelerated in the past couple of weeks, after CBS's unsinkable "60 Minutes" plowed into an iceberg. The sorry episode, in which the authenticity of documents used to buttress a story about the President's National Guard service three decades ago was called into question, enjoyed only a brief life as a flap--when it looked as though CBS had the goods to back its story and the attacks were anti-big-media gun spray from the trigger-happy right--before becoming a scandal when, last week, it came to light that CBS could not authenticate the documents after all. When Tom Brokaw announced, in 2002, that he would retire after this year's Presidential election, the Internet heated up on the subject "Whither the network news?" With cable news rocking around the clock, and with the Internet providing instant news--or corrections of the news--often faster than even cable could broadcast it, was there a place anymore for a late-in-the-day, twenty-two-minute news show? This time, the Internet--blogs in particular, many of which are part-time enterprises, written and compiled by guys sitting at home waiting to pounce on the mainstream (excuse me, elite) media--played a more important and more...
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