• MarketWatch, Thursday, December 8, 2005 7 PM

MarketWatch media columnist Jon Friedman says the decision by ABC News executives to anoint Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff as co-anchors of the network's nightly newscast was a cop-out. He reminds his readers of the decidedly spotty success of other network co-anchor teams of the past. "In general, viewers in the U.S. haven't embraced the multiple-anchor format," Friedman says. "For most, the position appears to require a single soothing authority figure--probably because the most important news each day is almost always bad. Maybe it is confusing, even disorienting, to pay attention to more than one person at a time." Friedman has no particular problem with either Vargas or Woodroff; it's the "format" to which he objects. Anyway, he says, "it may not even matter much who fills [Peter] Jennings' chair" since, in the end, the most desirable demos seem increasingly to be migrating to cable news, the Internet, and "The Daily Show." "They have dismissed TV news," Friedman says, "because the shows don't give them what they want--headlines with some irreverence."

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