ABSTRACT
In March of 2002 ABC entered into negotiations with late night talk show host David Letterman in an attempt to lure him from CBS to replace Nightline, hosted by Ted Koppel. When the story became public, it was prominently covered in the press, making the front page of The New York Times two days in a row and the nightly news broadcasts of all the networks except, not coincidentally, ABC. Outrage erupted over the network’s efforts to replace an award winning, twentyyear-old news program with a comedy and celebrity driven entertainment show. Typical were comments by Alex Jones of the widely respected Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, who said in USA Today that the proposed replacement would “be a body blow to news in this country as we know it…. This is a genuine breach of the covenant between a company that has stewardship of a great news organization and the American public” (cited in Johnson & Levin 2002).
