Nightly News Blues   

Long an American institution, the networks' nightly newscasts have lost viewers by the droves. Is there a future for them?

DON HEWITT, THE LEGENDARY creator-producer of "60 Minutes," has a bold idea about how to improve the three nightly network newscasts: Get rid of two of them. By Hewitt's lights, the networks (and perhaps less so, the public) would be better served by a single national newscast produced jointly by ABC, CBS and NBC. The money saved from such a joint effort, he says, could be used to make the networks' prime time magazine shows--the "Datelines," "20/20s" and, yes, "60 Minutes"--or special reports even better and more journalistically competitive.

"To do the same show every night, at that cost, on every network is ridiculous," says Hewitt, who includes his blueprint for a network news overhaul in a just-published memoir called "Tell Me a Story." Besides, "if I locked you and two other people in a room for a year, and you each watched one of the network's news, no one would know anything more than the other."

As radical as it sounds (and as unlikely as it is to happen), Hewitt's burn-the-village-to-save-it prescription has a sobering subtext. His implication is that the nightly news--the networks' around-the-world in 30 minutes summary (actually about 22 minutes after you factor in the commercials)--is an anachronism. Who needs Tom and Dan and Peter to tell them what's important at the dinner hour each day, Hewitt suggests, when news is so abundant, when it radiates around the clock from the Internet, local and national news channels, radio and print?

In a media landscape that has been bulldozed, transformed and re-created several times over the decades, few things have remained as remarkably constant, as unwavering in basic format, as the evening news. The original network newscast, "The CBS Evening News" with Douglas Edwards, which premiered in 1948, featured an anchor, a desk and a script of short news stories. Except for doubling the length of the original 15-minute newscast and adding flashier graphics and remote reporting, the dinner-hour news looks much as it did 53 years ago.

What's different now, of course, is that the networks' newscasts no longer command the attention, and hence the power, they once did. "The CBS Evening News," anchored by Dan Rather, draws half the share of the audience it attracted in 1981, the year Rather replaced Walter Cronkite. "NBC Nightly News" with Tom Brokaw has slipped 30 percent over the same period; ABC's "World News Tonight," anchored by Peter Jennings, has declined by 35 percent, according to Nielsen figures.

In 1994, the percentage of people who said they regularly watched a nightly network news broadcast was 60 percent; by 2000, the figure was 30 percent, according to the Pew Center for the People and the Press. It's not only how many people are watching, but which ones. In its survey last year, the Pew Center reported that two-thirds of people over 50 said they watched TV news the previous day, but only 44 percent of those under 30 did. Increasingly, and perhaps alarmingly for their financial health, the nightly newscasts reside in a gray ghetto.

"The demographics are staggeringly bad for the networks," observes Ellen Mickiewicz, director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Communications and Journalism at Duke University. "It's not clear that a younger generation is coming in. In an age when more and more people are customizing their news and ordering up what they want to know, it's hard to imagine that the choices that the network news offers are worthwhile to individual consumers."

It isn't merely the news itself; it's lifestyles that are working against a half-hour broadcast at 6:30 or 7 p.m., she says. Younger viewers--the ones most coveted by advertisers--are still working or commuting when the networks air their news. It's a change that has been in the works for more than two decades; CNN founder Ted Turner has said he knew the time had come for a 24-hour news channel when he'd get home from work at 7:30 p.m. and the only news available didn't come on until after he'd be in bed. Just as the evening newscast helped kill off the afternoon newspaper a generation ago, the all-day news cycle may now be doing in the evening news.

The ascendant news programs at the networks--both in terms of audience and profits--are the prime time magazine shows and the venerable morning programs, which attract younger viewers, especially female ones. NBC's "Today" occasionally draws ratings that approach Rather's third-place newscast, and at three hours in length, "Today" is more profitable than Tom Brokaw's newscast.

The harshest critics of the network news may be network news people themselves. Memoirists like Reuven Frank, the former head of NBC News, as well as esteemed reporters like Garrick Utley and Ted Koppel and news pioneers like Hewitt all have catalogued the perceived failings, from creeping tabloidism to the pursuit of news lite to network-ordered cutbacks in manpower and resources.

"The evening news should be about news, instead of being about biographies of movie stars and true-crime stories," Cronkite says. "The magazine shows can do the feature stories. We shouldn't be taking news time to tell magazine stories."

He adds, "There's simultaneously a lot of news and not enough news nowadays. There's not the kind of news that really grips people--well-written, well-reported and well-produced pieces that take people into stories that deeply affect them. There's too much demand from the top side for higher ratings to hold the profit up to the levels of what it was when the networks" had little direct competition. Instead of curtailing the news, as Hewitt suggests, Cronkite believes more is better: "I'd like to see an hour a night, not a half-hour, and it would be great at 10 p.m."

Network news executives have heard this before, and it all sounds unnecessarily gloomy to them. Considering how the news media have changed in the past 20 years, the nightly news is actually a success story, or at least a courageous tale of survival and renewal, they suggest. Representatives of each of the Big Three independently point to a salient fact: despite the decline, ABC's, CBS' and NBC's nightly broadcasts collectively still reach more than one in five American households every weeknight. The combined audience of the three networks is about 30 million viewers a night. That's more than the number who watch an episode of "Survivor," the single most popular program on television, and more than the combined circulation of the nation's 50 largest newspapers.

Viewed from a different angle, the audience decline may be a glass half-full. The desertion of viewers from the nightly news is no worse than the erosion of the network audience for soap operas, sports and sitcoms, says Andrew Tyndall, publisher of the Tyndall Report, which has tracked network news since 1988. He points out that erosion isn't just a network story. "The entire media landscape is atomizing," he says. "Compared with their smaller competitors, the networks' [newscasts] have maintained their relative superiority for years."

Indeed, the network guys turn the conventional wisdom on its head: In a world of bewildering competition and fragmenting audiences for virtually all media outlets, the franchise enjoyed by the networks grows relatively more valuable each day, if only by comparison with low-rated cable channels and Internet sites. "People focus on the evening newscast because it's been so prominent in American life for so long," says ABC News President David Westin. "But every media outlet has been affected by the expansion of the Internet and cable. We live in an era in which no single source of news is dominant anymore." That millions of viewers still tune in each night "speaks to the public's desire for a credible, strong news report from a source they trust, and from [an anchor] they identify with."

CBS News President Andrew Heyward argues that the nostalgia for Cronkite's time is misplaced. In an era in which they enjoyed a near monopoly, Heyward says the networks could afford to be comfortable, even lazy. It was possible, he says, to hoard the best footage to protect the evening news franchise, even if it meant sitting on news until airtime. "If a plane made a spectacular landing on a foam-covered runway, the only place you'd see it would be on the network news," he says. "No local station would get the money shot" because the networks were keeping the best for themselves. Now, he says, such thinking is unimaginable: "If you know CNN is going to have it, you can't put your affiliates' viewers at a disadvantage. They have to have it, too. Immediately.

"I mean no knock on Douglas Edwards or Cronkite or Don [Hewitt]," Heyward adds, "but we got a free ride. If you looked at the definition of news in the Cronkite era, there were huge stories--civil rights, Vietnam, Watergate. But there was also ridiculous over-coverage of official Washington, and you might not know that the women's revolution was happening. When you had just three competitors, it was OK to be essentially the same as the other guys. Now, we've got to do more to distinguish ourselves journalistically."

Heyward thinks that's precisely what's happening. All three networks have had the same anchors in place for 20 years or so (Rather since 1981, Brokaw since 1982 and Jennings since 1983). But during that time the lead has shifted from one to another--suggesting, Heyward says, that content, tone and story selection are just as crucial ingredients to viewers as the person reading the news. (Non-news factors such as affiliate lineups, promotion and prime time ratings play a role, too.) "With all the cost pressures the networks are under," he says, "they deserve credit for sticking to the news and maintaining a serious and responsible tone."

BUT HAVE THEY? A lot depends on your definition of news--as well as the phrase "serious and responsible." A review of the top news topics covered each night by the networks during the last decade is illuminating. At best, it's a mixed bag--plenty of crime, but lots of foreign and political news, too.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs, a non-partisan, Washington-based think tank, catalogued 135,449 stories on the three network newscasts from 1990 to 1999. It found that the 14 leading topics were, in order: crime, economy/business, health issues, USSR/Russia, disaster and weather, Yugoslavia/Bosnia, the Persian Gulf War, sports, the Middle East, accidents, the Clinton scandals, Iraq and the political campaigns of 1992 and 1996.

Crime, the leading topic, was driven by the O.J. Simpson case, but it had taken on its own life starting around 1993. Thereafter, according to the center, the number of crime stories more than doubled. The trend peaked in 1994 and 1995 with Simpson's trials, but crime of all kinds has remained a network mainstay since then. The coverage has included various celebrity misdeeds, the war on drugs, the murders of JonBenet Ramsey and Gianni Versace, as well as the socially symbolic homicides of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd. By the end of the decade, crime coverage was fueled by the rash of school shootings, culminating with the 1999 rampage at Columbine High School.

Certainly, the school shootings were a compelling public concern, but the figures suggest something a little more sensational was afoot. Consider: During the first third of the decade (1990-'92), the evening news averaged fewer than 100 stories about murder a year. In the middle years ('93-'96), the number jumped to 352 stories a year on average, even after excluding the copious O.J. coverage. In the final third ('97-'99), there were an average of 511 murder stories a year, five times the number at the start of the decade. This upsurge was at odds with the trend in the real world. The Justice Department reported a steady decline in homicides throughout the 1990s, with the low point reached in 1999.

Despite the closure of news bureaus abroad and perceptions of a decline in foreign news, the networks actually kept up a fairly steady diet of it, according to the center's figures. Although news about Russia, Israel, Iraq, Yugoslavia and the Persian Gulf War all individually ranked behind crime as news topics, had these topics been grouped under one generic heading, foreign news would have ranked as the dominant topic of the decade, by far.

Bill Wheatley, vice president of NBC News and a former executive producer of "NBC Nightly News," says it's somewhat misleading to equate the number of foreign bureaus with the amount of foreign news that gets on the air. The development of portable satellite uplinks and the easing of restrictions on American journalists in many countries has made it "somewhat easier to drop into a foreign story and broadcast from the scene," Wheatley says. "Clearly, now we can come from virtually any place in the world."

The center's researchers point out, however, that the networks' interest in foreign news tended to increase dramatically at a time of conflict or crisis, particularly when the American military was involved. The appetite for foreign news can often be narrowly focused; in 1999, there were more stories about space exploration than about any foreign countries except Yugoslavia and Russia, which suggests that the networks are more interested in life outside the planet than on it.

The trend in political coverage isn't entirely clear. The three networks offered more stories on the 1992 campaign and general election than they did in 1988. But the number of campaign stories fell dramatically in 1996 before rising again slightly in 2000 (the center didn't include the massive post-election coverage from Florida in its calculations). NBC had the biggest increase in coverage, up 11 percent over 1996, while ABC increased just 2 percent and CBS dropped 10 percent. The organization also found that anchors and reporters talked about the campaign seven times as much as the candidates themselves in 2000. Candidates Al Gore and George W. Bush got to talk far more during their appearances on Letterman in September and October, respectively, than they got on all three network newscasts during those months.

As for "infotainment" and other soft-news topics, researchers found no consistent pattern of increase--which may come as a surprise to critics who say the news grew more frivolous during the 1990s. The widespread perception of fluffier news may reflect the ways in which the news is packaged rather than the content itself, with the use of flashy graphics and such titles as ABC's "Person of the Week" or CBS' "Eye on America."

ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider says this isn't a drift toward frivolity but a way to create familiar elements that draw viewers back each night. "In addition to giving viewers hard news, people want news they can use, to some degree." Schneider, as well as other network spokespeople, say they've made no conscious attempts to tailor the news more to the tastes of younger audiences. "We'd love to have viewers 10 to 80 years old," he says. "But younger people tend not to consume news like older people do. We recognize that for the most part the news audience is fairly well established."

To S. Robert Lichter, the president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, the most important trend of the past decade wasn't which stories got covered or didn't. Lichter says it was the networks' diminished influence over the news agenda and the concurrent demise of the media elite. "There's been a great democratization of the news," he says. "We're moving back to the future," to an age when news sources are local and diffuse. "The days when a Walter Cronkite or a Dan Rather could dominate what Americans heard and saw and thought about are over. It turns out that that period was really just a transitory moment.... Some people would argue that standards are in awful decline. And there are those like me who say, 'Let a thousand flowers bloom.' "

WHILE THE TECHNOLOGY OF newsgathering has evolved and improved over the years, the format of the network news hasn't changed much. The single-anchor behind the desk (CBS and NBC have experimented with stand-up anchors) remains the visual staple, and except for the introduction of standing features ("Eye on America") the key elements have been static. Don't expect this to change much, either. "We've only got 22 minutes to cover the world," says CBS News spokeswoman Sandy Genelius. "It's a pretty straightforward newscast. You can't have a lot of bells and whistles." Among the most prominent--albeit relatively discreet--changes in recent years have been frequent pop-up graphics during stories promoting "more information" about a story on the networks' Web sites. This not only provides a public service, but may also help keep younger, Web-savvy viewers interested in the network.

News executives say it's likely that the networks' collective share of the evening news audience will continue to fall (at the end of the 2000 season, the three-network total stood at 44 percent, an all-time low). The same factors that have driven the audience away--competition from other news sources, the time pressures of everyday life--will continue to eat away at their viewership.

But there are several reasons to think the network newscast isn't an endangered species, at least not in the foreseeable future. Even with its falling Nielsen numbers, the news remains profitable, network executives say, largely because the networks have learned to spread the costs of their news divisions across more programs and over ever-larger organizations. The expansion of network news programming during morning and prime time hours, plus the creation of all-news cable networks like MSNBC and CNBC, gives NBC News more ways to justify its overhead, says Wheatley. "We now have many more vehicles for the material we gather," he says. "It's going to be critical for the survival of news organizations that we have economies of scale."

And maybe, just maybe, some of those long-lost viewers might even start tuning in again, he thinks. Wheatley notes that, in a few years, the oldest members of the Baby Boom generation will be hitting retirement age--the prime years for watching the evening news. Maybe that will mark the beginning of a nightly news resurgence.