First Commercial: "Coming up after the break, we did some investigative journalism for once"

Second Commercial: "Coming up: That investigative Journalism"

Third Commercial: "Still after the break: What you actually want to see"

45 minutes and 10 commercials later: "And after this break, the investigative piece."

And the investigative piece is 30 second long, says that the one person of interest wouldn't comment, and has less information than you could find out using a public portal on your local government's website.

Then you get a 2 minute clip of a funny video from the internet chopped the hell up, with the anchors talking over it the entire time. "Tune in next week. More Americans get their news from ABC News than any other source."

I don't think that assertion holds water, and if you broaden beyond "broadcast" to "mainstream," even less so. I love Last Week Tonight, and they do some genuine investigative work, but a lot of their news coverage is parroting/spinning other people's coverage that they find especially insightful. I'm glad that they're giving broader voice to some of that material, but it would be much more expensive were they to produce it all themselves.

Foreign coverage, in particular, is extremely expensive, and almost nobody in the new media space is throwing serious money at it; it's super important and kept afloat almost exclusively by old-media behemoths who maintain scores of foreign bureaus all over the world -- CNN, NYT, NPR, etc. (Vice is the one possible new-media-company exception, here, in that they do foreign investigative work at all, but they don't maintain a permanent presence anywhere, I don't think.)

Speak for yourself. I'm as dumb as they come.