Donaldson: Network News is ‘Dead’

ABC’s Sam “The Man” Donaldson ginned up some Kontroversy with a capital K yesterday, when on a panel at the National Association of Broadcasters’ convention yesterday, he told breakfast goers that his employer and their Big Four competitors are going the way of the dodo bird–if they’re not already there: “I think [network news is] dead. Sorry.”

“God forbid, if someone shot the President, which network would you turn to? It will be cable, the Internet–something other than General Hospital being interrupted,” he said.

Other panelists, Jeff Greenfield and Charles Osgood, were more circumspect, with Greenfield thinking that it was at least dying a slooooooowwwwww death, as if that’ll make Andrew Heyward, David Westin, and Neal Shapiro feel any better….

(Over the op-ed page of the NYT, Don Hewitt of ’60 Minutes’ fame, who also was executive producer of the first 30-minute network newscast in 1960, offers his own vision for a new news style: lots of “audacious” commentary.)

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