CBS Chairman Leslie Moonves is thinking about a brand-new format for the CBS Evening News, after Dan Rather's departure. So reports the New York Times this morning. One possibility - two or three or several anchors.
(That news came not from CBS's top news executive, but his boss, who reports to his boss, who is responsible to his board and investors, which is to say, Wall Street.)
This, from the network that explained its decision last fall to shelve (read, censor) a story critical of Bush policy on Iraq by saying it didn't want to influence the election!!!
Two reminders that the networks own their news operations. That the degree of autonomy granted their news divisions - never huge - is these days impossible to discern with the naked eye. And that news remains a somewhat foreign element in the body of TV, whose purpose is the creation of big audiences, which audiences are to be exposed to advertisers' messages.