Remember back when I slammed Diane Sawyer for turning ABC News' World News Tonight into tabloid journalism and forcing Peter Jennings to spin in his grave? I now have some empirical evidence to back me up.
Back in February, Andrew Tyndall of The Tyndall Report published his minute count of all the top stories of 2013 and concluded that by far, ABC News covered less of the hard news than counterparts NBC and CBS. While Sawyer & Co. hedged their journalism bona fides by relying heavily on news topics that affect Americans on a daily basis, such as the weather and consumer issues, and also blanketing lurid stories that nevertheless do not affect the country as a whole, such as George Zimmerman and Ariel Castro, which I don't have much of a problem with, Tyndall added up it all up and saw that when it came to the big issues, the ones that are extremely important but very complex to report on and are not very sexy -- Syria, the budget, surveillance -- ABC News covered them the least. Just as I thought.
I love the first sentence of his Year in Review: "2013 marks the year when ABC World News finally rejected the mission of presenting a serious newscast." Couldn't have said it any better, or with the appropriate amount of disgust in my mouth, or the mouth of any respectable journalism major.
I for one am glad Sawyer is leaving. Hopefully ABC News will put the news back into ABC.
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