Ratings Wars: UFOs Land Tonight on ABC

You know that it’s ratings sweeps time when TV promos breathlessly tease: “Near-Naked Swimsuits! Are today’s young women going too far and showing too much? Tonight we do a hands-on, close-up expose of this shocking scandal!”

ABC News tonight offers a similar tabloid special: Peter Jennings Reporting: UFOs – Seeing Is Believing.

“More than 40 million Americans believe they have seen or they know someone who has seen an unidentified flying object, a UFO,” Peter Jennings, the last dinosaur of his generation’s Big Three network anchors, reveals in tonight’s two-hour pop news documentary.

(One who reported seeing a UFO is Democratic President Jimmy Carter, whose incompetent administration’s out-of-this-world inflation and toppling of America’s key ally in the Middle East was for most Americans a close encounter of the worst kind. Will Jennings mention this, or that 2000 Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore was born exactly nine months after the purported UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico?)

Jennings’ own production company began investigating the UFO topic more than a year ago. (At that time Jennings himself was an still an alien, a Canadian citizen anchoring news for the American Broadcasting Company; he has since become a dual citizen of the U.S. and Canada.)

Jennings' priority given to investigating UFOs must be why he and his reporters found no time to investigate Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry’s shady campaign moneymen here and in Iran, Kerry’s time in Nicaragua supporting the Communist Sandinistas, Kerry’s falsehoods about his service in Vietnam, or Kerry’s refusal to sign Form 180 that would make public his complete military record.

So will Jennings reveal new photographs of UFOs tonight, or interview an extraterrestrial, or otherwise make Earth-shaking news with his lengthy investigation? Apparently not.

"I went in as a skeptic," Jennings told Jon Stewart on the cable channel Comedy Central's satirical pseudo-news The Daily Show, "and I'm still a skeptic."

But Jennings will have entertaining special effects depictions of what those who saw lights in the sky or believe they were abducted by E.T.s described. Jennings will be out for ratings by selling his own George Lucasian Industrial Light & Magic, his version of sugary junk food for the mind.

This is not real news or genuine journalism, of course, but an amazing simulation, rather like ABC's formidable Thursday night ratings competitor the CBS drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation or -- come to think of it -- like the Disney-owned left ideological fantasy ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.