• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, December 30, 2024

Politics and news media in 2024 were a match made in TV heaven -- or hell, depending on one’s point of view.

Good, bad or indifferent, the intersection of the two created the most memorable moments of the year in TV.

Three events come to mind immediately -- the Trump-Biden debate on June 27, President Biden’s prime-time interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC July 5, and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13. 

In the debate (photo above), Biden lost the confidence of the American people and his party when he stumbled on answer after answer.

The performance ended Biden’s campaign for president, setting up the Trump-Kamala Harris clash which she lost. 

The writing was likely already on the wall in the days after the debate that Biden would be persuaded by powerful Democrats to step down from the presidential race. 

But the July 5 interview with Stephanopoulos just days later gave even more evidence that the President was not up for the rigors of the campaign -- despite his assertions to the contrary.

It likely fed fuel to the fire that was already burning for him to relinquish his candidacy.

As for the assassination attempt, Trump’s narrow escape from death was the year’s top breaking news story.

His miraculous survival helped galvanize his base and may have added undecideds too. And it launched a campaign slogan that served him well: Fight, fight, fight.

Those three events took place in the space of two weeks and two days -- a remarkably short but historic interval of time.

But politics dominated TV throughout the year, as it always does in presidential election years. 

Other key televised events included the Democratic and Republican conventions last summer, the sole debate between Harris and Trump in September and, to a lesser extent, the vice-presidential debate between the Republican J.D. Vance and Democrat Tim Walz in October.

Speaking of adding fuel to the fire, with the country at its most divisive in any of our memories, the TV news channels and their prime-time talkers seemed hellbent on stoking the furnace to the breaking point.

This kind of hollering from the right and left on TV was nothing new, but sometimes it seemed this year that it had now advanced to unprecedented levels of hysteria.

The TV campaign commercials did too, from the presidential race on down. The strategy across the board seemed to be: Attack, attack, attack; and smear, smear, smear. It was a disgusting display.

But through it all, the rest of the TV biz hummed along as usual, starting with Ken Jennings, who is now ending his first full year as the full-time host of “Jeopardy!,” and he’s doing great. 

On the nation’s other top-rated game show, Pat Sajak stepped down from “Wheel of Fortune” and was replaced by Ryan Seacrest -- a smooth transfer of power that was previously announced.

Jon Stewart returned to “The Daily Show,” although for just one night a week, and CBS said good-bye to “Blue Bloods,” which had its finale earlier this month after 14 seasons.

The TV Blog’s year was greatly enlivened by the Great Disney Proxy War of 2024. I made five columns out of this entertaining boardroom fracas in which an activist investor, Nelson Peltz, sought to expand his power on the Disney board to force changes in the company’s structure and management that may have resulted in the ouster of Disney CEO Robert Iger.

Peltz lost, Iger survived and nobody got hurt. In fact, Peltz ended up unloading his Disney stock a few months later and made $1 billion.

Throughout the year, the big TV companies were grappling as never before with the decline of basic cable to the point where their many channels -- once cash cows -- could no longer be counted on for growth.

Comcast announced plans to spin its cable networks off into a new company. Warner Bros. Discovery said it would section off its cable holdings from the rest of the company.

Paramount Global agreed to be taken over by another company, Skydance Media, which will still have the basic-cable problem to contend with in the coming year after the deal is done.

Photo courtesy of CNN.