Ted Koppel offers a long and bitter reflection on the sad state of television news, and you read and read in hopes of a telling insight, only to finally bump into his diagnosis of the problem: deregulation, the drive for “profits” and “capitalism” generally. Late in the piece he assures us that his call for re-regulation shouldn’t mean regimentation: “television news should not become a sort of intellectual broccoli to be jammed down our viewers’ unwilling throats.” Hmmm. It sounds to me that his view of a “free press” is that Koppel should be free to tell us what to think but we should not be free not to listen or to listen to something else.
Why is news so bad? (wait for it) Capitalism!
