Who Are the 10 Most Powerful Figures in TV News?

TV often reduces a three-dimensional world to two dimensions for one-dimensional minds.

If there’s anything more shallow than American television, it’s journalism about American television, as demonstrated by the latest TV Week “TV News’ 10 Most Powerful” rankings.

Here are the rankings alongside Newsprism’s commentary:

1. Steve Capus, President, NBC News   Good choice. NBC leads the evening news and morning news ratings, and MSNBC is strong in cable news and stronger online.

2. Roger Ailes, Chairman and CEO, Fox News   Another good choice. FoxNews’ Ailes has done more than anyone to even the ideological playing field in American broadcast journalism, proof positive that personality and beauty trump news judgment.

3. David Weston, President, ABC News   Only if managing to come in second or third place in a field of four broadcast networks is considered “powerful.”

4. Tim Russert, Senior VP, NBC News Washington bureau; editor/moderator, “Meet the Press”   Good choice. The best of the influential Sunday morning hosts, also a strong contributor on MSNBC.

5. Jim Walton, President, CNN Worldwide, and Jon Klein, President, CNN/US   Okay, IF you can combine two people, and IF you can compare CNN’s audience share to FoxNews’, and IF you can disregard the laws of mathematics, THEN, good choice. Otherwise, CNN competes with MSNBC for second place in the cable news ratings well behind FoxNews, and all three together don’t add up to one broadcast news show’s ratings.

6. Keith Olbermann, host, “Countdown with Keith Olbermann”   Worst…Choice…in the World! Olbermann is highly entertaining, and his verbal skills are the best in the business, but his show draws fewer than a million viewers each night. If this were the 10 most powerful liberals in TV news…well, he still wouldn’t belong.

7. Bill O’Reilly, host, “The O’Reilly Factor”   By far the top dog in cable news personalities, O’Reilly draws nearly three times the viewers as Olbermann. TV Week describes Olbermann’s 900,000 viewers as “about a million” and O’Reilly’s 2,900,000 as “more than two million.”  Sounds like they’re turning a 3:1 ratio into a 2:1 ratio. Despite the voodoo math, O’Reilly belongs at best at number 10.

8. Sean McManus, President, CBS News   Only if managing to come in third or fourth place in a field of four broadcast networks is considered “powerful.”

9. NS Bienstock, Talent Agency   Are you kidding? Maximizing the salaries of on-air talent makes you “powerful”?

10. Amy Pohler, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, Comics   Okay, IF you can combine three people, and IF you consider late-night news satire as TV news, and IF you can disregard the meanings of words AND the laws of mathematics, THEN good choice. Otherwise, you might as well name the list, “Our Most Favoritest Liberal News Satire Hosts!” (Colbert did win a Peabody Award for his brilliant mocking of personality-based news shows like “The O’Reilly Factor,” but that makes him exceptionally talented, not top-ten powerful.)

Missing from the list are notables including Chris Matthews and Brian Williams of NBC/MSNBC; Brit Hume and Sean Hannity of FoxNews; and from the world of news satire, Ben Karlin, the former executive producer largely responsible for the success of both “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report.”

Of all the “Top Ten”-type kudos attention-starved media types give each other, Newsprism ranks TV Week’s “TV News’ 10 Most Powerful” near the very bottom, just beneath Time magazine’s “Top 10 New TV Series” (like CBS’s mind-numbing reality show ”Kid Nation”) and slightly above gametrailers.com’s “Top 10 Video Game Weapons” (the chainsaw is a perennial favorite.)

Also in the running:  yesbutnobutyes.com’s “Top 10 Female Streakers” (WARNING: Not Safe for Work) and urinal.net’s “Top 10 Most Fascinating Urinals” (check out these art-urinals, which are particularly lovely.)

Newsprism

Bush Administration Going Down in History—and Down and Down and Down

If journalists write the first draft of history, historians write the final one. Judging by two polls of historians conducted by the History News Network, one four years ago and the other last month, Bush has gone from bad to worse—and maybe, to worst.

In 2004, 415 historians were surveyed on Bush’s legacy. 81% believed the Bush administration would be judged a failure compared to 19% who believed it would be judged a success. 12% went so far as to say Bush would go down as the worst president in American history.

In 2008, 109 historians were surveyed. 98% believed the Bush years would be judged a failure compared to less than 2% who believed they would be judged a success. A staggering 61% said Bush would go down as the worst president in history.

The dismal evaluations of Bush aren’t confined to the History News Network, either. Eminent Princeton historian Sean Wilentz wrote in Rolling Stone two years ago that

George W. Bush’s presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace…. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.

Wilentz is joined by presidential historian Douglas Brinkley of Tulane University, who in December, 2006, wrote in the Washington Post that

it’s safe to bet that Bush will be forever handcuffed to the bottom rungs of the presidential ladder. The reason: Iraq … which is an unmitigated disaster.

Many will dismiss the nearly unanimously negative judgment of Bush as evidence of the liberal leanings of historians.

While the field does in fact harbor a preponderance of liberals, historians as a group are notoriously cautious and circumspect, waiting for the historical record before pronouncing judgment. In addition, nowhere near 98% of histrians are liberal, meaning that the vast majority of moderate and conservative historians agree with their liberal colleagues.

Besides, as the most historically grounded conservative commentator, Pat Buchanan, notes, George Bush is anything but a conservative (see here, here, here, here, and here.)

Here’s a sample of the historians’ evaluations of Mr. Bush:

Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s goodwill.

With his unprovoked and disastrous war of aggression in Iraq and his monstrous deficits, Bush has set this country on a course that will take decades to correct. When future historians look back to identify the moment at which the United States began to lose its position of world leadership, they will point—rightly—to the Bush presidency.

…the paranoia of Nixon, the ethics of Harding and the good sense of Herbert Hoover…. God willing, this will go down as the nadir of American politics.

His domestic policies have had the cumulative effect of shoring up a semi-permanent aristocracy of capital that dwarfs the aristocracy of land against which the founding fathers rebelled; of encouraging a mindless retreat from science and rationalism; and of crippling the nation’s economic base.

George Bush has combined mediocrity with malevolent policies and has thus seriously damaged the welfare and standing of the United States…

His administration has been the most reckless, dangerous, irresponsible, mendacious, arrogant, self-righteous, incompetent, and deeply corrupt one in all of American history.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the United States enjoyed enormous support around the world. President Bush squandered that goodwill by taking the country into an unnecessary war of choice and misleading the American people to gain support for that war. And he failed utterly to have a plan to deal with Iraq after the invasion…. Mr. Bush inherited a sizable budget surplus and a thriving economy…. Bush transformed the surplus into a massive deficit. The tax cuts and other policies accelerated the concentration of wealth and income among the very richest Americans. These policies combined with unwavering opposition to necessary government regulations have produced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Then there is the incredible shrinking dollar, the appointment of incompetent cronies, the totally inexcusable failure to react properly to the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, the blatant disregard for the Constitution—and on and on.

James Buchanan, Millard Fillmore, move over. Your failures appear to have been misoverestimated.

Newsprism