Bring back Max Headroom

Centralized news gathering from a single corporate entity is so much better. None of that silly independence in journalism or sense of seeking out the story. or even maybe trying to find another angle to whatever the herd happens to be slurping up that day.

Over the last decade, CNN has held intermittent talks with both ABC News and CBS News about various joint ventures. But during the last several months, talks with CBS have been revived and lately intensified, according to the executives who asked for anonymity because of the confidential nature of the negotiations.

Broadly speaking, the executives described conversations about reducing CBS’s news-gathering capacity while keeping its frontline personalities, like Katie Couric, the CBS Evening News anchor, and paying a fee to CNN to buy the cable network’s news feeds.

Another possibility, these people said, would be for CBS to keep its correspondents in certain regions but pair them with CNN crews.

Thank the heavens they will keep their talking head to summarize the news they rebroadcast. Hopefully she'll make funny comments between stories too.

Actually, since CBS will just be using CNN's seconds, maybe this will mean the beginning of the end of tv segregation and give us all cable tv for free.

Why not make the whole thing cheaper and just directly download and broadcast the government feed? The Bush administration pre-edits news stories complete with talking heads. That way no news division has to find stories and can concentrate on the important things in life, like giving rimjobs to baboons.