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Fox would give candidates space for commercials during elections. But maybe if they don’t get media jobs, they will at least be qualified for something other than waiting tables.”Rupert Murdoch is courting the politicians. “Too many of the profession’s entrants have no experience of life,” she says. “They understand soundbites but not how the Senate works.”Now Sanders is launching a course that forces students to understand the news as a condition of their degree “It’s not very popular. It’s sending wages, and quality, through the floor.”Sanders says the average age of newsroom staff has slipped to 28 from 34 over the past 10 years. This summer, about 30,000 students will graduate from American universities with degrees in “communications”.

Over half will struggle to find work in the broadcast media.”It’s a crisis,” says Marleen Sanders at the Columbia University School of Journalism. “We are training far too many TV journalists for the jobs available. “The nightmare scenario is that Ted Turner buys us, ships all the newsroom jobs to CNN headquarters in Atlanta and cuts everybody’s salary to $60,000.”This would not be difficult, given the number of Americans chasing the small pool of TV jobs. “If not, I can see them losing another 15 per cent of their ad revenues.”So will CBS fall to a takeover? “That’s all we talk about round here,” says one CBS News insider.

So advertisers are looking at other media.”The four major networks unveil their winter schedules next month “CBS better have something good,” says Cohens. Of all the US television networks, CBS has the oldest audience – not the kind that pulls in the big advertising dollars. And of the three CBS shows in last year’s top 20, two have been on the air for more than five years and the third was the news programme Sixty Minutes, now in its 26th year.
“CBS is being killed,” says Aaron Cohens, a media buyer at New York-based Media Edge. “There are now too many networks; we have four majors and two minis But there’s a terrible shortage of good programmes. Last year, CBS lost American football to Fox, and its prime-time shows look stale compared with NBC’s hospital drama ER and ABC’s NYPD Blue.