 |
         
|
With changes afoot at the anchor desk at CBS Evening News, it is time for a periodic reminder of the state of journalism at the flagship nightly newscasts of the three broadcast networks.
The audiences for the three newscasts remain substantial, averaging well in excess of 20m viewers every night, a total that is larger than any other journalistic format in any medium. ABC World News Tonight has recently edged slightly ahead of NBC Nightly News as the leader in audience size. However the difference between the two is more a matter of bragging rights than a matter of substance. CBS Evening News, on the other hand, is clearly in third place.
That third place position may seem to warrant the replacement of anchor Jeff Glor but such an assumption would not be justified. The underperformance of the newscast in attracting an audience under Glor is no worse than under any of his predecessors, dating all the way back to Dan Rather.
Glor's arrival in the anchor chair, following Scott Pelley, did bring with it a change in the pacing and visual style of the newscast. These changes served to integrate it with the headline-delivery service of CBS News' 24-hour digital content.
Nowadays, David Muir at ABC and Lester Holt at NBC both kick off their newscasts with an exhaustive recitation of the upcoming contents of the day's newscast, as if they were some seemingly interminable waiter offering the menu at a pretentious restaurant. Glor's newscast, by contrast, kicks off with quotes from headlines from other newscasts -- reminding viewers that CBS News swims in the sea of the continuous 24-hour news cycle.
Glor's anchoring style, too, projects the sense that viewers are watching the ongoing efforts of a working newsroom, rather than the polished conclusion of an effort to summarize the day's key newsworthy developments. Glor often addresses his correspondents rather than his viewers: he'll give them a pep talk on a well-sourced segment; he'll chuckle over a memorable soundbite; tears will well up over an emotional piece of human interest.
Viewers of this iteration of CBS Evening News are put in the position of spectators to the operation of a newsroom rather than consumers of finished object that that newsroom has produced.
All three newscasts have adapted their journalistic approach in response to contemporary conditions. Invented as newscasts of record -- the sole source of daily audio-visual reportage on national and international news -- they no longer have to shoulder the responsibility of comprehensiveness. All sorts of previously compulsory topics are now overlooked.
Chief among these are international developments. Admittedly, CBS has not cut back on its foreign coverage as drastically as ABC or NBC. Nevertheless all three newscasts are shells of their former selves as far as global news coverage is concerned. Budgetary considerations are clearly a factor here -- both the money saved from closing expensive overseas bureaus, and ratings buoyed by concentrating on the domestic topics that audiences tend to prefer.
But also, more abstract beats -- those that are less apt for televisual journalism -- are more glancingly covered than they used to be. The economy and healthcare have taken the biggest hit, being replaced by more kinetic beats such as crime, transportation and weather.
This sacrifice of the abstract for the kinetic is most clearly seen each night on ABC's newscast. On World News Tonight, the criterion for newsworthiness is not such much the event's importance or consequence -- but the availability of dynamic video to illustrate it.
ABC has recognized that TV journalists no longer have a privileged role in collecting such video. Amateurs with their cellphones and surveillance cameras -- on dashboards, on the bodies of police officers, on CCTV systems -- are ubiquitously positioned to record events. Its newscast, therefore, is less the production of news-gatherers and more that of video editors, narrating images procured from elsewhere.
The downside of ABC's switch from gathering to editing is that fewer of its stories are either abstract or important or consequential. Routinely, each night, there are two or three stories that are properly local news -- a traffic accident, a rogue cop, a tree downed in a storm -- with no national impact whatsoever. The upside is that these inconsequential stories are accompanied by dynamic, kinetic video, underlining ABC's oft-repeated claim that it is delivering Breaking News.
Thus CBS and ABC both tell us, in their own way, that they are newscasts swimming in the sea of the continuous 24-hour news cycle: ABC by cherry-picking and packaging the most vivid (domestic) events of the last 24 hours; CBS by inviting us to sample the production of its newsroom over that same timeframe. ABC specializes in news and in video; CBS in background features and in the soundbites of real people.
It turns out that the current state of the body politic has been a godsend for ABC. The potential flaw in its decisive switch to Video Breaking News was always that it would thereby consign itself to mere trivia, unable to claim with a straight face that it was covering affairs of state. The arrival of Donald Trump turned out to be the happy solution to that conundrum.
ABC has embraced the turmoil of the Trump Presidency with enthusiasm, spending more time on the White House beat, more time on Brett Kavanaugh and Robert Mueller and Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen. The fact that Trump's tenure has been so light on serious abstract public policy proposals and so heavy on outrageous defiance of norms means that ABC can have its cake and eat it: cover affairs of state without having to abandon its dedication to the kinetic. CBS, by contrast, has consistently spent most time on controversies surrounding race and immigration, the most incendiary of Trump's public policies.
That same Trump Turmoil has caused difficulties for the winning formula traditionally adopted by NBC Nightly News. During its prolonged period of pre-eminence in the ratings, first under anchor Tom Brokaw, then his successor Brian Williams, NBC structured its newscast with a first-half emphasis on foreign and domestic policy inside-the-Beltway; and a second-half of features on the daily lives whose problems those policies were supposed to address.
It was a formula adopted during Tim Russert's tenure as DC Bureau chief and implemented by such NBC mainstays as Andrea Mitchell, Pete Williams and Chuck Todd. NBC always focused on the administrative developments of the alphabet soup of federal agencies -- FDA, EPA, FTC, FAA and so on -- a beat developed by Robert Hager and taken up by Tom Costello.
Trump's arrival represented a crisis for this formula. What happens when the DC correspondent's job is no longer to report on the functioning of the federal government -- but its dysfunction? NBC finally threw in that towel last fall and its replacement iteration has been a work in progress for the past six months.
Holt's NBC newscast is now as rapidly paced as Muir's at ABC, but without its rigid insistence on video breaking news. The role of the DC bureau has been scaled back -- but it is not the newshole for local-news-style crime-weather-accidents that has been significantly enlarged in response. Instead it seems that a morning-show sensibility is being added.
As noted, NBC Nightly News still seems to be a work in progress but there are signs that the beats it will focus on instead of the Beltway will include coverage of celebrities, on the impact of popular culture, of hi-tech and digital trends, of personal health and lifestyle problems.
A shift more towards Today than towards Eyewitness News.
You must be logged in to this website to leave a comment. Please click here to log in so you can participate in the discussion.
