With David Westin having suddenly bailed on ABC News, the Daily Beast has raised the formidable challenges facing whoever becomes his successor:

In his 13 years at the network, Westin, a lawyer, has fought against the inextricable decline of the broadcast television news business. When he took over for the legendary Roone Arledge in 1997, he inherited an organization filled with stars—Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel, Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Charles Gibson—and lucrative, top-rated news broadcasts, including World News Tonight and Nightline.

Now, on the eve of his departure, ABC News is a very different place. The ratings are mostly down, the stars are mostly gone, the foreign bureaus are mostly closed, and the advertising dollars that once poured in have slowed to a geriatric limp. Since Disney isn’t exactly running a charity, something finally had to go, and this February, it did: Westin announced ABC News would cut 25 percent of its work force, or roughly 400 jobs.

But if the news division is ever going to turn out healthy profits again, it will need a lot of work. Whoever takes over for Westin must have news judgment, business sense, and also a certain je ne sais quoi—literally, since no one seems to have any clue how to rescue the foundering broadcast TV news business. There are, of course, all the usual suspects: internal candidates who’ve worked their way up through the ranks; rising stars at other networks. But given the obstacles the next president of ABC News must face, the usual suspects may not be good enough.

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JournoList hit number two from the Daily Caller gives us this far-from-shocking revelation: JournoListers hate Fox News.  Highlights below.  The Daily Caller has also published a handful of excerpts from the JournoList, many of which have been redacted.

One major takeaway from the JournoList so far is that it seems to include admittedly liberal/left opinion writers along with supposedly unbiased journalists and professors.  Incredibly, the left blogosphere has and will continue to use this fact to defend anti-right plotting amongst the JournoListers since many of those on the list make a living giving their opinions.  This is an attempt to excuse those opinion writers for attempting to corrupt unbiased reporters and educators; it’s also an attempt to excuse unbiased reporters and educators who indulge these corrupting influences.  Besides, when you have people like White House correspondent for TIME Michael Scherer contributing to the DIE FOX DIE! discussion, it’s remarkable anyone is still attempting to defend the JournoList.

Though the fact that this even needs to be explained is upsetting, it’s yet another reminder that journalism is long dead and now it needs to be replaced.

The very existence of Fox News, meanwhile, sends Journolisters into paroxysms of rage. When Howell Raines charged that the network had a conservative bias, the members of Journolist discussed whether the federal government should shut the channel down.

“I am genuinely scared” of Fox, wrote Guardian columnist Daniel Davies, because it “shows you that a genuinely shameless and unethical media organisation *cannot* be controlled by any form of peer pressure or self-regulation, and nor can it be successfully cold-shouldered or ostracised. In order to have even a semblance of control, you need a tough legal framework.” Davies, a Brit, frequently argued the United States needed stricter libel laws. (more…)

In Sunset Boulevard you couldn’t help but sympathize with Norma Desmond. She made nostalgia, senility and decrepitude slightly pitiable, but also charming.

The New York Times, its stock value in the cellar while squirming under the thumb of a foreign robber baron, makes the same thing shabby, malodorous and pathetic, especially as recently dramatized by its former senior editor, the embittered Howell Raines, wheezing piteously against his former competition. “Ed Koch once told me he could not have been elected mayor of New York without the boosterism of the New York Post,” writes Raines in his Washington Post piece.

Raines implies that boosterism for a New York mayoral candidate is hideously tacky.  A truly world–class paper’s boosterism should be employed (apparently) to help Stalinists set up their killing fields and gulags. To wit: (more…)

Failed former New York Times editor and “self-hating Southerner” Howell Raines — whose dubious journalistic legacy includes the Jayson Blair, Rick Bragg, and the Martha Burk fiascoes — has lurched out of the fly-fishing shadows with this bizarre op-ed piece, apropos of apparently nothing, in the Washington Post.

Why, the carefully crafted lede alone demonstrates why Raines was held in such high regard among the journalistic community during his brief, unhappy tenure in the seat formerly occupied by Clifton Daniel:

One question has tugged at my professional conscience throughout the year-long congressional debate over health-care reform, and it has nothing to do with the public option, portability or medical malpractice. It is this: Why haven’t America’s old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration — a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?

As Humpty Dumpty might have said: talk about a portmanteau! (more…)