Nightline turning tabloid?

Has Martin Bashir turned Nightline into a late night tabloid program?

While The Leno / Conan saga began to unfold last year, there were runors that Leno might move over to ABC to take the Nightline time slot. That didn't happen and instead gave Leno the ill fated 10 pm timeslot.

We Nightline viewers sighed a breath of relief . Our prefered late night show was saved! But was it?

After Ted Kopel departed  Nightline and the Anchor spot was given to Bashir, Nightline has taken a decidely wrong turn away from in depth coverage of the important news of the day towards sensationalism and pop culture news.

The format of the show under Kopel was a full half hour dedicated to a single subject, often featuring interviews from major politcal leaders from around the world, addressing both sides of the issues. We even saw leaders from adversarial nations trying to defend their positions to the American public.

When Kopel left, Bashir turned Nightline into something more of a tv magazine with several  unrelated issues being covered in shorter segments. In tabloid TV fashion, we are tempted to stayed tuned with blurbs for upcoing stories only to find that the "story" is a poll question that one has to go online to answer. The viewers never see the results of the previous nights question. It's only a ploy to get viewers to log onto the Nightline web page.

 After Michael Jacksons death, Bashir, a friend of Jackson, fully dedicated several nights to him and kept on the story night after night  until it seemed that Nightline was about to become all Michael Jackson , all the time.

Yesterday President Barak Obama attended the annual Republican Retreat to answer questions. The local news programs didn't cover the story and the evening network news barely scratched it. Ted Kopel would have spent the entire half hour covering it and would have had politcal analysts and Republican and Democratic representatives to give their impressions of the meeting.

But that's not what we got. Instead we got coverage of the John Edwards scandel, a lesbian custody case and the discovery of the body of a Florida lottery winner.

Didn't we see those stories covered on "Extra?"

Martin Bashir missed the opportunity to cover an important story that would have been of interest to a great many people that did not get any prime time coverage. Instead he brought us the latest tabloid news.

Those  of us who worried that we would lose Nightline to  another late night talk show, breathed a sigh of relief when Leno was moved to 10 O'clock instead of ABC. But it seems that Nightline was lost anyway.

While there still remains on the air a showed called Nightline" it is Nightline in name only. The program that was the best alternative to late night talk, disappearred when Kopel left and Bashir took over the reins.