In a knockdown, drag-out winner-take-all battle royale last Sunday on ABC's This Week, a struggle for the ages was televised on national network television. For the first time on television, a high-noon showdown of epic proportions between the most powerful voices in news was set to unfold.
A line, in the form of a conference room table, was drawn in the sand between two diametrically opposed forces that, with no doubt, personify the very ideological factions that make up our divided political climate.
Rarely in network history have names with such gravitas gathered around a single table to exchange empty talking points. Ailes, Huffington, Krugman, Will. The deft puppeteers were together under one roof and playing for keeps.
Or at least, this is the narrative that ABC and the rest of the punditocracy spent the week promoting. This unprecedented meeting between four titans of the industry made for good television, sure, but was there anything to gain from this exchange for anyone other than the four people seated around the table? It's doubtful.
With Ohio University alum Roger Ailes, you have the chairman and CEO of a number-one rated cable news program, right-leaning Fox News. Across the table sat Arianna Huffington, proprietor of the most linked-to blog on the Internet, the left-leaning The Huffington Post. In addition, you have two of the most influential columnists in the country on opposite ends of the political spectrum: George Will of the Washington Post and Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman of The New York Times, to the right and left respectively.
It has all the makings for ideological friction and contentious bantering, but none of the conditions necessary for any constructive debate. Unfortunately, this spectacle perpetrated by the producers at This Week is just the kind of back and forth gridlock that the media has become fascinated with over the past few decades.
I don't know what the This Week crew hoped to iron out in the 20 or so minutes allocated to the four diverging media personalities, but it naturally digressed into a platform for market share opportunism.
If the goal of the show were providing deeper analysis of the week's news, then it was a travesty. If the goal of the show were clearing the air of misinformation or innuendo in the news, it was still a travesty.
The only thing we laymen could glean from the exchange was a reiteration of partisan talking points from our masters of information.
Ailes, for one, managed to work in several of his networks catchphrases, calling Fox News fair and balanced and the most trusted name in news. Rather than discuss policy or report anything new, the conversation constantly turned back to the timeless and unwinnable argument of which news organization is the least biased.
What made this display particularly pathetic was how Barbara Walters completely forfeited control of the conversation to the opportunistic blabbering of Ailes, Huffington and Will. About the only question she managed to sneak in was on the subject of Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown's photo in Cosmopolitan decades ago.
I've written about Sunday morning talk shows in the past, and I can't emphasize enough what a wasteful ritual they really are. At best you have a few pundits or officials sensationalizing the week's events for their own advancement; at worst you have exactly what happened on the most recent episode of This Week.
The phenomenon of media celebrity has somehow qualified Arianna Huffington and Roger Ailes to be arbiters of truth. In reality, both are committed to pursuing the growth of their own brand. Ailes even unabashedly stated, I'm in the business of ratings
and we're winning.
This was probably the most informative statement of the entire program. Each of the parties involved was there to push an agenda, not to further your understanding of anything. In an industry dominated by ratings and hits, it serves you well to be skeptical of figures, such as Ailes and Huffington, who gain the most from your buying of the narrative that they are pushing.
Kevin Zieber is a junior studying journalism and columnist for The Post. Send your defenses of Bobcat Roger Ailes and belligerent hate mail to kz264207@ohiou.edu 4
Opinion
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