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Elizabeth Vargas Picked to Co-anchor ABC’s Nightly News

By Carol Amoruso, HAV Editor

A nation that has been weaned away from the liberating mechanisms of knowledge and reason and free thinking must depend on the opinions it hears and the images it sees to create its own reality.

Keepers at the Gate--He Who Controls Television Controls the Masses, by Manuel Valenzuela http://www.valenzuelasveritas.blogspot.com

The network nightly news will be a little more diversified in 2006, when on January 3, Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff become co-anchors of ABC’s “World News Tonight.” They will be permanent replacements for Peter Jennings who chaired the broadcast for 22 years before dying of lung cancer in August of this year.

“I’m so proud,” Vargas was quoted by the AP as saying. “ I know what this means to Hispanics in this country…to have people who look like you and talk like you in positions of importance.”

Born in New Jersey of a Puerto Rican father and Irish American mother, and a self-described “army brat,” Elizabeth Vargas slips into a comfortable chair; she’s been around the news block for years, working at both NBC and ABC. She co-hosts the newsmagazine “20/20” (and will continue to do so), and anchored the weekend edition of “World News Tonight” for ABC. Both she and Woodruff have been intermittent fill-ins on the nightly news show since Jennings’ death. At NBC, she was a correspondent and anchor for “Dateline NBC” and the “Today” show.

Vargas won an Emmy for her on-the-spot coverage of the Elian Gonzalez saga, in 2000, and scored interviews with Mick Jagger and the elusive Cat Stevens. She’s also done several reports on mysteriously missing persons for ABC’s “Vanished” and other shows.

Woodruff came to TV news after practicing law. He’s a former anchor of the “World News Tonight” weekend edition and covered the Justice Department for ABC.

Undoubtedly, the choice, of both Vargas and a team would meet with controversy. (There hasn’t been a prime time news anchor team since the short-lived Dan Rather/Connie Chung duo in the mid-90s.) Tina Brown, former editor of both Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, and now Washington Post columnist, claims Vargas has been genetically engineered for a puff job with a “made-for-TV face” and “market-tested appeal.” In addition, there is talk that the third main substitute in Jennings’ wake, Charles Gibson, was passed over because of his age (64—both Vargas and Woodruff are in their 40s), with the speculation that ABC was risking enough by appointing Vargas. In another quote from AP, former newscaster and current dean of the school of journalism at Boston University, Bob Zelnick, said, “I think ABC decided to take one risk instead of two.”

Vargas and Woodruff will have their work cut out for them, as, for the first time, the news will be broadcast live in each of the U.S.’s three time zones, allowing the networks to more regionally tailor coverage while freeing the West Coast from the yoke of stale news. The team will also anchor a daily Webcast and a “World News Tonight” preview for cell phone users.

Notwithstanding ABC News president David Westin’s oft-quoted remark that, “the job was too big for one person,” and in light of the seeming spurning of Gibson, it is also questioned whether ABC saw it as too much of a risk to anchor just Vargas, a woman and a Latina, “market-tested” or not. ABC has consistently lagged behind NBC’s nightly news in ratings in a highly competitive market.

But is the fanfare and ground-breaking irrelevant when hard news images are rapidly dissolving into infotainment? Comments Brown, “They [the die-hard news “junkies”] really don’t care anymore if it’s network, cable, webcast or iPod, for heaven’s sake, as long as someone is willing to invest in them doing something in depth.” (The Future Face of Network News, by Tina Brown; Washington Post, December 8, 2005; CO1)