Ted Koppel has a thoughtful column in the NY Times today, with a great title: "And Now, a Word for Our Demographic."

Excerpt:

When the Federal Communications Commission was still perceived to have teeth ... network owners nurtured their news divisions, encouraged them to tackle serious issues, cultivated them as shields to be brandished before Congressional committees whenever questions were raised about the quality of entertainment programs and the vast sums earned by those programs...

The goal for the traditional broadcast networks now is to identify those segments of the audience considered most desirable by the advertising community and then to cater to them. Most television news programs are therefore designed to satisfy the perceived appetites of our audiences...

Indeed, in television news these days, the programs are being shaped to attract, most particularly, 18-to-34-year-old viewers. They, in turn, are presumed to be partly brain-dead -- though not so insensible as to be unmoved by the blandishments of sponsors...

No television news executive is likely to acknowledge indifference to major events overseas or in our nation's capital, but he may, on occasion, concede that the viewers don't care, and therein lies the essential malignancy.

Ted is basically saying that the TV news business is attempting to sell ice to Eskimos -- oh, we mean Inuits.

Which means that crushing the ice, or shaving the ice, or flavoring the ice, or otherwise screwing around with the ice will not necessarily make the ice something that Inuits want to buy.

What they really want is the fur coat of entertainment programming. And as long as news decisions are dictated by dollars, we'll inevitably see "news" programming evolve into just another form of entertainment.

Technorati tags: Ted Koppel, Journalism, Media