Bob Schieffer is retiring from CBS’s Face the Nation and with him the closing of the Sunday Show mind is complete.
CBS, ABC, and NBC have long had Sunday morning news programming. I grew up watching David Brinkley hammer things out with Cokie Roberts, Sam Donaldson, and George Will. The real gold standard was Tim Russert. With Brinkley and Russert dead, Schieffer was kind of the old guard people could trust.
Brinkley was from North Carolina and fought in World War II. Tim Russert was from a blue collar Catholic family in Buffalo, NY. Bob Schieffer is a Texan and Air Force veteran.
CBS News has announced Schieffer is being replaced by John Dickerson, who might actually be more liberal than George Stephanopoulos. Not only that, but he is also the most inside the beltway of them all. Dickerson was born inside the beltway. From Wikipedia, we get this gem: “[Dickerson] grew up in Mclean, Virgina at Merrywood, a sprawling 49 acre estate with a 36-room Georgian-style mansion, high on a leafy bluff overlooking the Potomac River.” The mansion formerly belonged to Hugh Auchincloss, who was step father to both Jackie Kennedy and Gore Vidal.
The run down now on Sunday for ABC, CBS, and NBC is as follows:
ABC’s “This Week” is now presided over by George Stephanopoulous who worked for Bill and Hillary Clinton and, before them, Michael Dukakis and Dick Gephardt.
NBC’s “Meet the Press” is now presided over by Chuck Todd, objectively the most balanced of the three, worked on the 1992 Presidential campaign of [mc_name name=’Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA)’ chamber=’senate’ mcid=’H000206′ ]. The funny thing about Todd is that, though a native of Miami and now well settled in the Beltway, he has worked to figure what people within 100 miles of an American river valley think and not just what people within 25 miles of the coast think. But I still think he too frequently trips over his left-of-center world view. See e.g. this ridiculous tweet.
CBS’s “Face The Nation” is now going to be presided over by Dickerson, who is of the beltway, writes for the left-of-center Slate, used to appear on [mc_name name=’Sen. Al Franken (D-MN)’ chamber=’senate’ mcid=’F000457′ ]’s old left-wing radio show on Air America, and wrote a column advising President Obama to “go for the throat” in dealing with Republicans. He also used to share a byline with Jay Carney — yes, that Jay Carney.
The long and the short of it is that we can expect the Sunday Shows on ABC, CBS, and NBC to be further and further removed from the topics that most of America cares about, more and more reflective of the views of the Washingtonians that America has come to hate, and more and more an echo chamber of leftwing talking points and story generation.
Having grown up watching “This Week” and “Meet the Press,” it is kind of sad to witness. Fox News Sunday more and more has the field to itself for a place we might learn something other than left-of-center conventional world views as the editorial guiding light.
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