The decline and fall of TV network news. (Beat the Press).(Brief Article)

Television news has had a pretty rough 2002 so far.

The "Nightline" brush with death at the hands of Dave Letterman didn't exactly make me want to slap a "Save Ted Koppel's $8-Million-a-Year Job" bumper sticker on my car. Koppel can sometimes be very good, but so was the corner candy store of my youth, which the free market ripped up like Dorothy's house in The Wizard of Oz. The truth is, Koppel is overrated. His ratings dipped not so much because Americans lost interest in hard news but because Mr. Koppel grew tired of working hard to provide it. He now refuses to do more than three shows per week, and he has decided (in a business in perpetual competition with three live all-news networks) that he doesn't want to do his program live any more, taping most of the shows earlier in the day instead.

Still, Koppel's show is high art compared to the recently aired ABC News program "Rosie's Story: For the Sake of the Children." The two-hour ABC News Primetime Live special on O'Donnell's decision to reveal her lesbianism (a fact that even an antique, Soviet-issue gaydar could have picked up long since) will be hard to beat as the decade's most shameless journalistic puffball. Prostitution is almost too kind a word for this French-like surrender of the ABC News sharpies to O'Donnell's public relations campaign. Hookers at least earn money for their dirty work; this was mere sluttery.

O'Donnell insisted that she would not reveal her "open secret" unless the network agreed to do a lengthy and extremely sympathetic report on the plight of a homosexual couple in Florida trying to adopt a foster child. Most news organizations rightly refuse to allow interviewees to set conditions for an interview, let alone permit them to dictate the content of a major nationwide news special. Can anyone imagine that if Pat Robertson insisted ABC run a fawning profile of a pro-life Christian couple fighting to protect their daughter from an abortionist, ABC would say "You got it!"?

It is difficult to exaggerate the degree of dishonesty in "For the Sake of the Children." From its blithe suggestion that laws against gay adoption caused the current foster care problems to its cavalier smearing of opponents of gay adoption as antediluvian bigots, the show seemed dictated by a cabal of gay PR execs at ...