“The emperor has no clothes,” network news analyst Andrew Tyndall told The Daily Beast. He was not referring to Charlie Rose parading naked in front of young female underlings, but instead to the thorough debunking of a TV truism: “It’s just not true that the reason why people watch television is to watch celebrities, and the only way you get celebrities is by paying them disproportionate amounts of money over what they’re worth,” Tyndall said.
Former CBS News president Andrew Heyward largely agreed, predicting that the recent firings of Rose and other high-profile anchors, coupled with continued decent ratings for the programs and networks they left, might finally imprint a long-unheeded lesson on the brains of broadcast and cable executives; the new reality demands a more hard-headed calculus in 2018.
“Just to look at it from a crass business perspective, it’s early to assess what the ratings impact will be, but I suspect that the impact of their departures, from a strict point of view of ratings and revenue, is going to be much less than people think,” said Heyward, a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. “Obviously, anybody is better off without having a sexual predator on the team.”
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