Malkiel

No Breaking News Here: Katie Couric Likely to Leave CBS

It would be a bright future for America if we could have multiple left-leaning socialists in the media, but--alas!--there aren't any to be found today. Couric is about as apolitical as it gets, her problem is that her strange disconnected persona is the opposite of the authoritative gravitas that viewers expect from a news anchor.

The Radio and Recording Industries' Unnecessary Roughness

Your suggestion would seem good except for one problem: for reasons unclear and unexplained, stations owned by the Clearchannel media monopolists are more or less boycotting new music in favor of "oldies" formats. Nobody can convince me that this is what the public is looking for: either there's an unseen economic penalty to playing new music, or Clearchannel is working from some agenda. In either event, it will take more than your suggestion to get them to start playing new music again on their stations...

Note to Radio Companies: It's About Innovating More, Not Sucking Less

I can see you're a bright lad full of great ideas, but the radio industry is so bad right now that they just need to get back to their best marketing strategy of the last 90 years, which is to play "top 40" music playlists. Radio was long ago exempted from most royalties on their playlists because they were deemed as offering "free advertising" for the product, so they need to cash in on that advantage. We have entire markets today where not one station is playing current popular music so that music lovers can know what product to buy; instead the airwaves are a wasteland of "best hits of the 40's/50's/60's/70's/an... but today". We also need to recognize that media consolidation has put most of America's radio stations in the hands of Clearchannel, a Republican outfit that seems intent on reconstructing radio as a right-wing political outlet along the lines of Murdoch's News Corp. rather than as a for-profit business...

CBS's Moonves Sees Bleak Future For TV News

Rubbish. You make it obvious you're some kind of right-winger looking for a chance to bash Rather: move on. All Rather was saying, without being too specific, is that Couric doesn't have the right gravitas or intellectual bent to manage the program. Your analysis about network news is totally off base: network news is losing market share because it can't get affiliate time on Cable networks. It's losing share to Cable-specific news networks like CNN and MSNBC and, unfortunately, FOX, not to web news pages. Remember that cable has full penetration into all American households while internet connectivity still has a big chunk to go.

And Les Moonves, like Roger Ailes, is one of those guys who has done his share of damage to American television by dumbing down or replacing important stuff rather than try to make it as good as it can be. Serious and high-quality news reporting is part of meeting the obligation to the public implied by the First Amendment and is obviously critical for sustaining public political discourse; there's a higher obligation to find a formula that makes quality accessible to the people rather than turn it into infotainment hoping for chance viewing...