This is, in a sense, a catch-up newsletter. I’ve heard many nice comments about my first two newsletters on Roone Arledge and television news as well as one persistent criticism: Why didn’t I quote Arledge more, give him his fair say. A couple of people
Unlike non-electronic media, television has no simple way of determining the number of viewers who watch a particular show. There are no tickets to count, coupons to clip or unsold magazines to return. And yet the industry’s raison d’etre is not to deliver a show
Like a Raggedy Ann with glitter in her hair, the workaday world of television syndication has a bright new look. Until recently the business of distributing television programs on a station by station basis has been the poor country cousin of network television, accepting its
Every once in a while something comes along that encapsulates the banality of so much network television like one of those tinfoil snow scenes set in a paperweight. It seems to me that just such an incident occurred when novelist Dan Wakefield quit the show
Last spring when Fred Pierce, announcing Arledge’s appointment as head of ABC News as well as ABC Sports, remarked that “both departments require instant transmission of current events with uncompromising integrity,” there was a fair amount of tittering in the network’s newsroom along with the
