Tom Brokaw passes the NBC anchor baton to Brian Williams next week. He'll be there one night, gone the next. And today, Dan Rather announced that he will step aside from being the face of the CBS Evening News come March. This news is really just the continuation of the beginning of the end (yes, I'm hedging my bets in vague description) for the major broadcast networks news programming. Their ratings have been declining for years, and the public simply doesn't have the same relationship with Brokaw, Rather and Jennings it once had with names like Murrow, Cronkite, Huntley, Brinkley, and Chancellor. Brokaw, Rather and Jennings have acted as a bridge from one era to another; a period when most Americans got their news from the papers (when there was a morning paper AND afternoon paper) or those evening broadcasts. Now, nobody needs to wait for or rush home in time for the 6:30 PM newscasts because of the internet and three 24 hour national cable news networks. There's no "most trusted man in America" like Cronkite once was, and while personalities still play a part in news programming, people don't have relationships with Shepard Smith, Brit Hume, Aaron Brown, Anderson Cooper, Paula Zahn, or Keith Olberman (I suppose CNN's Lou Dobbs is the closest thing to an old-style anchor around, but his program focuses primarily on business news) the way they did with the anchors of old. The cable nets, as it is, rarely do any straight news during the fringe and primetime hours; usually they present some reporting with a great deal of analysis or, sadly, partisan spin.
Jennings will probably benefit the most in the short term after Rather's departure., but don't expect him to stay around forever. At 66, he's no spring chicken himself. Ultimately, however, the departure of these network news icons will likely shift a larger audience over to the cable channels. I have personally always liked Brian Williams, and I'm sure he'll retain a fair amount of Brokaw's dominating ratings share, but Williams has already anchored a news cast (The News, first on MSNBC and then on CNBC) which simply couldn't gain a loyal following. Do people not like him, or does the audience just no longer care that much for single anchor, reporting-first broadcasts? CBS will likely have it even harder replacing Rather because there isn't really any one person in the stable naturally considered next-in-line. This is at least in part because of the declining importance of the evening newscast. When each of the current anchors were awarded their spots, it was big news, and while media critics may have had their doubts, none of their hirings were big surprises. The time was the years before the advent of CNN, and at the time, many star journalists' dream was to become a network anchor. Is that really the case anymore?
There has even been talk over the past few years about whether the networks will even continue to produce evening news broadcasts in the long term. While all three major networks still have much larger audiences than their cable counterparts, the numbers are much lower than they were 20 or 30 years ago. In hindsight, the golden age of network news probably ended in the late '70s or early '80s. It is yet another example of the brilliance and prescience of Network (which I will continue to promote forever), produced at a time when the network anchor was still king, but foreseeing the transformation of the news into entertainment-before-information programming.
(Just in case you're wondering, I'm deliberately not including The Newshour with Jim Lehrer into this equation just because it exists on a different -- and generally higher quality -- plane all together.)
A lot of people don't like Rather because of his often-apparent liberal bias. Andrew Sullivan has been calling for his resignation for a while, and even now is incredulous at the thought that Rather will stay on as a full-time correspondent for 60 Minutes. You know who CBS should hire to take over the anchor chair? Robin Quivers. That's right, Howard Stern's newsreader and sidekick. A black female anchor, that's what CBS needs to really break some ground and change its image. But alas, it seems like they might be too late. Quivers has apparently signed-on to host her own syndicated day-time talk show, thereby entering an arena with a high failure rate and notoriously poor job security. But upon further examination, it may be a safer bet than becoming the next major network news anchor.
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