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Challenges can be mounted against some aspects of a 40-month study, commissioned by politically liberal Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), that concludes that ABC's influential "Nightline" is a "fundamentally conservative political program."
For one thing, the study examines only the program's guests, not its content or host Ted Koppel's proven ability to play devil's advocate and himself represent points of view not expressed by those guests. For another, any show predicated on news is necessarily dependent on news makers. And it's arguable that news makers in the Reagan era-surely the political ones-were largely Republican and even conservative.
In a broader sense, however, the study is microcosmic, defining by implication a much larger arena of TV in which public-affairs programs are too often cozy clubs where gentlemen gather to talk politics over brandy and billiards. The result is the formation of a sort of media elite-consisting of both interviewers and interviewees-who are called and repeatedly recalled to the podium and whose views predominate because they alone have access to...