“It’s a shame. I wouldn’t have blamed Barbara if she had bailed out,” Downs recalled over lunch this week at New York’s Four Seasons hotel.After 21 years in the seat beside Walters and six decades as a broadcast personality, Downs left ABC in 1999, having become disenchanted with television news. At age 78 then, he didn’t retire to his home in Arizona. He landed instead landed in a somewhat unlikely place-cyberspace. Downs joined iNEXTV, a New York-based Internet company specializing in streaming video. For the past two years, he has served up commentaries on business, society and the body politic in his own weekly program, “My Take with Hugh Downs.”
Now, Downs is poised to expand his presence on the Web. On Monday, iNEXTV will debut “Conversations with Hugh Downs: Values in America.” As the title suggests, Downs will chat with personalities about American values. The new show will launch with nine pretaped interviews, a total of 20 are scheduled for the first season. Among the guests: NASA boss Dan Golden, Hugh Hefner and Joan Jett, with whom Downs discusses the gender prejudice that she says still permeates the music industry. “It’s all timeless enough” to run anytime, Downs notes. And given the interactive nature of the Internet, it will all be available anytime on demand by anyone from iNEXTV’s programming archive. And that is the major advantage that the Internet has over television, Downs says. On TV, “I felt locked into a time slot,” he says. “Now, if I want to do a commentary in 90 seconds or three minutes, that’ s what I do.”
Downs, in fact, has quickly become an ardent fan of the Web. “There’s something raw, young and refreshing about the Net,” he says. “I see it as a great opportunity and challenge.” He says he envisions a day when the Internet will overshadow television. “It will absorb everything”-that is, all media, he says.
For Downs, at age 80, the Internet is merely one more titanic shift in the media landscape. He vividly recalls the beginning of television and talks familiarly about “Gen. [David] Sarnoff,” the late boss of RCA often called “the father of television.” By the end of his full-time television run (he still sits in occasionally for talk-show host Larry King on CNN), Downs was becoming turned off by the format. “What bothered me was that network television, and particularly news, was becoming centrist, with no range,” he says. On the rare occasion that he did commentary on “20/20,” he recalls, “the roof would cave in on me; I always took a battering from the traditionalists.” Working as an Internet journalist, he says, “I don’t have a control room full of lawyers to deal with.”
Downs says his new show doesn’t involve the grilling of his subjects. “They really are conversations,” he says. “To do the ordinary traditional interview wasn’t what we wanted. We got people to talk about things that they otherwise wouldn’t have talked about.”
