Reprinted from January 30'th piece in London's
Financial Times newspaper by media critic
Tyler Brule, who said that Colleen should
be one of the "dream" anchors on US network
television.
Watching Jennings report from Baghdad,
I couldn't help but think that ABC should make the first
move and return World News Tonight to the successful three-city
formula it used in the early 1980s, with Jennings based
in London, Frank Reynolds reading the news from Washington
and Max Robinson sitting in Chicago. Perhaps it would
now make more sense to do it from New York, Los Angeles
and London but it would be a shame to see CBS beat ABC
at its own game.
The greater challenge is who should
replace all the veterans? Recently installed Brian Williams
at NBC still looks a bit overwhelmed by the whole thing,
Peter looks a tad lonely in the rather spare ABC studio
and stand-in John Roberts hardly seems up for the job
of replacing Rather. For some reason all of the US networks
bought into an idea in the early 1990s that advances in
both medicine and plastic surgery would allow their star
newsreaders to live forever and they would not have to
concern themselves with grooming a line of successors.
Sadly for network executives, medical technology hasn't
moved as quickly as they anticipated and there are few
obvious contenders ready to make the move from field to
anchor desk.
If ABC fails to switch back to a multi-city format first,
Moonves should drop the Couric and Stewart idea and build
a dream team with CBC's Peter Mansbridge anchoring from
New York, CNN's Colleen McEdwards sitting in Los Angeles
and CNN's Christiane Amanpour live from various international
hot-spots.
