Evening news transition doesn’t mean the end of nightly tradition
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The ABC, CBS and NBC nightly newscasts don’t have nearly the influence, or the viewership, they did before viewers could get news instantly on their pagers, telephones or cable TV. It’s a different world.
Despite the onset of a personnel transition following the remarkable 20-plus year reigns of Brokaw, Rather and Peter Jennings, the broadcasts seem on firmer ground than they did five years ago, when there were many questions about their survival.
“I think the institution still provides the most serious and well-organized look at what’s happening in our world every day and in these times, especially, it’s a great service. It’s as simple as that,” said Brokaw, whose last NBC “Nightly News” newscast is on Wednesday.
Most evenings, nearly 30 million people watch one of the three programs. Ratings have been sinking steadily, but that’s the case for most shows in a fragmented television world; evening news ratings have dropped at a rate 4 percent slower than prime-time broadcast fare over the past decade, according to Nielsen Media Research.
For all the attention they get, the three cable news networks — Fox News Channel, CNN and MSNBC — don’t even get 4 million viewers combined in an average prime time.
All of the evening newscasts seemed to go through some sort of identity crisis in the pre-Sept. 11, 2001 world, wondering if a mostly no-nonsense look at the day’s top stories made sense anymore. Those days are gone, said Andrew Tyndall, a news consultant whose firm, ADT Research, studies the content of each newscast.
“They’re very much like they were in the late 1980s, when they were still the flagship newscasts of the networks,” he said. “They’re serious newscasts dealing with domestic policy, politics and international news, with very little human interest, little water-cooler material. It’s a hard newscast.”
They all run a lot of health coverage, since most of their viewers are over 50, he said.
All had stories on House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s ethics problems this month. That’s a story the network morning shows would barely touch, Tyndall said, evidence that the content of morning and evening newscasts are becoming more distinct.
News executives say the evening programs have tried to be more explanatory, recognizing that many viewers have already had a chance to see headlines elsewhere.
Yet the presence of cable news is deceptive. Following industry leader Fox News, these networks have become more talk, less straight news over the last few years.
Even CNN Headline News — a dependable network that rotates newscasts every half-hour — plans to experiment with prime-time talk shows in the next year.
The evening newscasts are not nearly the profit-generating machines of their networks’ morning shows. But their older audiences provide a targeted opportunity for advertisers, which helped immensely when prescription drug companies sought advertising outlets.
None of these reasons for keeping the evening news would matter much if the stations that broadcast them wanted to stop.
These stations could decide it would be easier, and more profitable, to show a “Seinfeld” rerun or “Access Hollywood” instead. But there’s been no talk of that lately.
“We see the nightly news as being relevant, maybe more relevant now than it has in recent years with national news at the top of the headlines every day,” said Terry Mackin, executive vice president of Hearst-Argyle Television and head of NBC’s affiliate board. “We’ve never contemplated asking the network to do less national news.”