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)
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Carol
Amoruso has had several vocational callings over the years. She's
taught young children, run volunteer programs for seniors, had a
catering business, designed clothes. Ultimately, she found that
nothing engaged and challenged her the way writing has. She's
written every day since childhood, professionally since 1990. Her
involvement in the arts, society and politics of Africa, the
Caribbean, and the Latin World have been the most inspiring and her
work concentrates on those areas. She travels extensively but lives
in New York City.