They’re doing the best they can with the dinosaural half-hour newscast, Mo Rocca says.

Question: What advice do you have for people like Rupert Murdoch or Katie Couric?

Mo Rocca:That’s interesting, but those are all very different people. I think a half hour newscast, which is sort of a dinosaur . . . I think at this point they’re really doing the best that they can. And I don’t watch those shows a lot, but you know when I look at the evening news – the half hour – I actually think they’re sort of doing the best they can under the circumstances. I think that the cable news nets are just such a flawed . . . They’re money making . . . The cable news nets are money making machines certainly; but you know the need to fill all that time makes them . . . makes them flawed. I think that . . . They need . . . The need to keep people there as long as possible, I don’t know. I guess . . . I guess it’s . . . I guess it’s I long . . . Maybe this is . . . Maybe I’m just romanticizing here, but I guess I long for the time when news was just simply a loss leader for these networks. And they accepted that, and they made editorial decisions about . . . based on what they thought the public needed to know. And then the public could then say, like they do with magazines and with cable news networks, “You know what? This network is too liberal for me. This network is too conservative.”

Recorded on: 2/14/08