TV news is still dead

ABC is bragging that the debate was the most watched of the campaign season.

Which means that they blew an even bigger opportunity.

A few more:

The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan:

The loser was ABC News: one of the worst media performances I can remember - petty, shallow, process-obsessed, trivial where substantive, and utterly divorced from the actual issues that Americans want to talk about.

The Washington Post's Tom Shales:

It was another step downward for network news -- in particular ABC News, which hosted the debate from Philadelphia and whose usually dependable anchors, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, turned in shoddy, despicable performances.

"For the first 52 minutes of the two-hour, commercial-crammed show, Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news. Some were barely news to begin with.

Talk show host Randi Rhodes:

"We don't have the luxury of spending 1994 covering the O.J trial or spending 1998 talking about a stained dress."

Commondreams.org's Jerry Lanson:

Granted. Reporters get paid to ask tough questions. No complaint there. But they should be tough questions of substance, not rehashed spam. Surely, if ABC’s producers had done some hard reporting, they could have found something fresh — inconsistencies of policy statements over the campaign’s long march, perhaps; contradictions between the candidate’s current stands and past votes; or subtle differences between them on issues that really matter to the American public. Relooping an already weary newsreel, trotting out the tired and really terribly limited fudges and guilt-by-association embarrassments of this campaign, make for neither good debates nor good journalism.

And finally, Obama's reaction from today, which is great: