The Front Page: December 21, 2007

By Randee Dawn

It must be the end of the year. Even if I hadn't looked at a calendar, I'd now know, because ... the prognosticators have emerged from hiding. How do I know? Because today we break out the goofy art and feature "Forecast '08: Who knows what the industry will look like next year? We do." And then I had to wince just a little bit, as the first subhead reads that Katie Couric will be out of a job in 2008. Like Corey Padnos before me, and Chris Crocker before him, I have to ask: Can't we all just leave Katie alone? I didn't watch CBS News before she got there, and I'm not watching it now, but that has nothing to do with Katie.

It's because I work late. (Hi, boss!)

Anyway, my new hero Elizabeth Guider has made a suggestion in the whole Young FCC Exec Battles Cranky Congressmen To Give Media Conglomerates Christmas Presents saga: Maybe media consolidation doesn't suck, after all. Maybe there is no connection between "the ever-increasing trivialization or tabloidization of TV news ... to the consolidation of the media into so few hands."

And, maybe there is a fat man who'll be coming down my chimney on the 25th.

The point is, sure: Go ahead and study it before letting the horses out of the barn. But I don't think I'll be swayed the other direction even if it turns out there's no qualitative or quantitative evidence to the contrary. Point: Back in the day the FCC killed common carriage in terms of broadcasting and gave licenses to companies to broadcast on the condition that part of their broadcasting would be in the public interest. Thus were invented the news departments, so the networks could go crazy and broadcast whatever else they liked during the day, and still point to the public interest element. Then came consolidation and ... Point two: Someone decided, somewhere, that news bureaus may have a ton of awards and the respect of the nation but they also now had to be profitable. And while that may have equaled more resources to the departments, it also meant that if you don't show a profit in your news bureau, you start canning folks. Shrink it. Get rid of foreign bureaus. Make shorter pieces that say less. Do as little investigative journalism as you can. Along the way, there's less time, space and respect to investigate the corporations that have taken over the media industry. And slowly, everything becomes All Lindsay Lohan All The Time.

Once that happened, the FCC should have been querying the networks and saying: Where's your news? Show me the real news, or lose your license.

Instead, we get a very young man trying to give more of it away. In whose public interest is that?

And by the way, translate common carriage rights to the new millennium, and you end up with the attempt to tier the Internet. As the WGA has been pointing out (Day 47, by the way), fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice ....   

Well, that was a soapbox. I'll find something light and amusing. Or maybe not so amusing: It's superb, superb news that, as Steven Zeitchik reports, "The Daily Show's" Jon Stewart and the titular Stephen of "The Colbert Report" are coming back to the airwaves. It's not so great news that they're coming without writers, though. Noted Comedy Central in a statement yesterday: "'The Daily Show With Jon Stewart' and 'The Colbert Report' will resume production on Jan. 7 with both shows returning to air that night without their respective writing staffs. The Jan. 7 return follows a scheduled two-week, end-of-year hiatus that was previously built into the shows' production calendars.  We continue to hold out hope for a swift resolution to the current stalemate that will enable the shows to be complete again."

One of those statements that doesn't really say much, except "we're back!" I mean, Stewart and Colbert are funny. But being funny five days a week for a half hour? That's a tough one. But I did think that since both often interview authors -- a rarity elsewhere in talk showdom -- that this could be great for non-WGA scribes who have a book to push. All authors, all the time! Norman Mailer on Dick Cavett! (There's an irony in here somewhere.)

In any case, as Stewart and Colbert noted together in a statement, "We would like to return to work with our writers. If we cannot, we would like to express our ambivalence, but without our writers we are unable to express something as nuanced as ambivalence."

Happy Holidays!

(The Front Page returns on January 2, 2008.)