Friday, April 12, 2002

What's wrong with local TV news?
Well, how long do you have? I could fill this page with what I think is wrong. Fortunately, Andrew Fisher has already figured it out.

Fisher is the president of Cox Television, a company we know pretty well here in Atlanta. (The most-watched station in town, WSB-TV 2, is a Cox station. And Cox Radio owns WSB-AM (#1 according to Arbitron) and WSB-FM, as well as outright ownership or programming control of sister stations WFOX, WJZF, WCNN, 95.5 The Beat, Kiss 104.4... And Cox Newspapers owns our only daily newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Yeah, we know Cox here.)

Anyway, surely Mr Fisher would know. So imagine my surprise to learn that the problem with TV news is... newspapers:

To much applause from a large, sympathetic audience, Fisher blamed "a combination of navel gazing and newspaper reporters who secretly wish they were working in television" for the presumption that local TV news isn't what it used to be.

Fred Young, senior vice president for news at Hearst-Argyle Television (a cousin of the Hearst-owned Seattle P-I), picked up Fisher's dagger and gave it a sharp twist.

"We need to quit being paranoid about the critics and what they write about us," Young declared. "With all due respect, many of these are the same people who waste columns day after day on whether Barbara and Diane get along, on whether Tom is coming home from vacation and on whatshername's facelift."

But, but local TV news wastes valuable broadcast time on all those same things, Mr Young. So by your own logic I should ignore you, too?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What’s wrong with local TV is the scandalous people like Andrew Fisher. I heard that he had an affair at the infamous Mayflower Hotel in Washington DC with a government employee spending taxpayers’ money. Andy Fisher, as the President of Cox Television, should have known that a public figure cannot get away with having an ongoing S&M affair. The affair is detailed in divorce documents filed in Superior Court in Fulton County, Georgia (C.A. 2006CV124068) by his wife, Robin Fisher’s attorneys’ showing communications of a sexually sadomasochistic nature. The scandal doesn’t stop there, as James Cox Kennedy, the CEO of Cox Enterprises has filed a motion in court to quash a subpoena for his testimony on the allegations against Andrew Fisher. I guess we know what is wrong with local TV.

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