There are signs of uneasiness throughout the net-work news business.
ABC, troubled by a ratings falloff and facing the departure of Ted Koppel, is tinkering (awkwardly) with the legendary “Nightline,” dropping the signature theme music and, many nights, the signature single-story format.
NBC has replaced the executive producer of the most popular and profitable morning news show, “Today,” as ABC’s “Good Morning America” closes the ratings gap with “Today.”
CBS has canceled the second night of “60 Minutes” and is reportedly thinking of taking an apparently radical step: adding “storytelling” to its evening newscasts, which raises the question of what its reporters have been doing.
But in fiddling so aggressively with the control knobs, the networks are ignoring a very large sign that they can afford to be measured in their responses to the changing media climate.
Over the past seven months all of the “Big Three” anchors have vacated the posts they held for two decades, leaving either by resignation or, in the case of ABC’s Peter Jennings, medical necessity.
And yet the sky remains in place: The newscasts are, still, the most polished daily news summaries on television, and the viewers remain, for the most part, in their easy chairs. During the monthlong May sweeps a year ago, 24.7 million people on average watched the three evening newscasts. This May, 23.4 million watched.
It’s a falloff, to be sure, but the loss of about 5 percent came in a slower news cycle, with the presidential election over and the Iraq situation one year less fresh. If you had told anybody back then that NBC’s Tom Brokaw, CBS’ Dan Rather and ABC’s Jennings would all be gone in a year and the audience loss would be so minor, they might have wondered about your mental health.
The continued popularity of ABC’s “World News Tonight” is especially telling. Unlike CBS and NBC, ABC had no time to prepare for the temporary departure of Jennings, who announced in April that he has cancer and left the job to begin chemotherapy immediately.
“Good Morning America’s” Charlie Gibson and “20/20’s” Elizabeth Vargas have been taking turns filling in, and viewers have continued tuning in, keeping the second-most-watched newscast as close to NBC’s ratings leader as it was before Jennings left.
“With ABC viewers not being told who it is they’re going to be seeing anchoring from one night to the next, they still tune in and watch, which seems to be proof of the proposition that when you watch the nightly newscast you’re watching for the news and not the anchor,” says Andrew Tyndall, whose The Tyndall Report monitors the newscasts.
“The proper way of characterizing these newscasts is they’re a correspondents’ medium, not an anchor’s medium. It’s sort of gratifying to understand that audiences . . . grasp that.”
Bigger picture, the network news operations remain dominant among all television purveyors of news and better than the rest of network TV at fighting audience erosion.
In the 1990s, the evening newscasts were almost twice as good at holding their audience as was network prime-time programming. And there is nothing on the horizon that looks remotely possible of achieving the reach, breadth and ratings impact of network news.
There was a memorable blip last summer, when Fox News made history by drawing more viewers to its coverage of the last night of the Republican National Convention than any network. But day-to-day, nothing in cable news, not even Bill O’Reilly’s nightly hour of sober intellectual debate, comes close to the networks.
And nothing on the World Wide Web will have a shot at doing so until broadband Internet access achieves the nearly universal household penetration that television currently does, and that’s not likely to happen until companies decide to offer it free of charge.
Morning shows shine
What the loss of the anchors may mean, however, is that the balance of power will continue to shift toward the more profitable morning shows. ABC had Gibson in Rome heading up its coverage of the death of Pope John Paul II.
Just this past week, NBC covered the terrorist bombings in London by extending the “Today” show until midday. Yet “Today” co-host Katie Couric, using her somber voice to call London “ground zero” — inappropriate terminology, considering there were four separate bomb blasts — was no match in gravitas for “Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams, who also anchored some of the coverage.
The real test of viewers’ response, Tyndall and others argue, will come during the next big national crisis. Will viewers accept a Vargas, Williams or Bob Schieffer, CBS’ interim anchor, as a guide, or will these people seem too callow or unfamiliar to exert the same steadying influence Brokaw, Jennings and Rather did?
Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, thinks its still too early to be drawing conclusions from what has happened.
“News consumption is a habit,” he says, and between the product changing and viewers reacting, “there’s a lag. . . . I don’t think you’re going to see an anchor change result in huge audience shift in a matter of months.”
Still, Rosenstiel’s watchdog organization concluded the Network TV portion of its 2005 “State of the News Media” report with cautious optimism. The report said that “network news remains a unique asset in television. While it has become a difficult and declining business, it has not fully relinquished the goodwill of the American public. Even after all the turmoil of 2004, on election night twice as many people watched the three networks as tuned to cable news. That ratio is shrinking, but it remains enormous.”
To ensure the future, CBS, for one, has seemed willing to tinker with its newscast. Already, under Schieffer, the “Evening News” has moved to incorporate a more casual give-and-take between anchor and reporters. And CBS News chief Andrew Heyward has been pushing the mantra of “storytelling” and driving toward a newscast that looks a little more like “60 Minutes,” the Los Angeles Times reported last week.
At a meeting of affiliates, Heyward surely ticked off his reporters by calling the current format “a dominant anchor surrounded by a bunch of people you don’t know and don’t care about.” But his newscast has been in third place so long that it probably makes sense to vary the format a bit.
Experimental phase
Meanwhile, “Nightline” is looking almost tawdry in its experimental phase. Wednesday’s show, guest-hosted by George Stephanopoulos, crammed together segments on a New York Times reporter being sent to jail for refusing to disclose a source, London winning the 2012 Olympics and, in a moment that must have made Koppel want to leave the show immediately rather than at year’s end, actors John Lithgow, Jeff Goldblum and Christina Applegate getting a chance to promote their Broadway shows.
But all of those changes may be moot if, as has been widely believed since ABC openly courted CBS comedy host David Letterman to take the “Nightline” time period, the network is really just waiting until the right comedian comes along.
Such a move could be taken as proof that, no matter how much the public may want it to stick around, the networks themselves may be able to do the job of killing network news.
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sajohnson@tribune.com
