Jerry Weinstein Reviews the Three Network Evening Newscasts
In a Newsweek piece last fall, NBC anchor Brian Williams fondly recalled, "I grew up in the blue glow of the television, in a home where dinner could not be served until the nightly news was over." Despite Williams' claim that "… the three network evening newscasts still represent the largest single news audience in the nation," the audience of his adolescence bears little in common with today's viewers.
As we approach September 5th, year one of Kate Couric's stand as anchor of the CBS Evening News, it's an opportunity to take stock of all three networks. Qualitatively. For the week of July 30th, thanks to TiVo and iTunes, I watched all three newscasts, as anchored by Williams, Couric, and Charlie Gibson.
Hopefully, I come to this task with fresh eyes. Raised with the New York Times, I continue to revel in print, reading the Wall Street Journal and the Guardian on an almost daily basis. Less frequently, I watch The NewsHour, BBC, with doses of CNN and MSNBC. For my news digest, I have been reading Today's Papers on Slate since it launched in 1996 and I scan Marumushi.com, a visual map of Google News, daily as well. Thanks to Internet radio, my earbuds are not far from NPR stations WNYC, WBUR, and KCRW.
While this piece emphasizes content over style, there is something to be said about newscast presentation. Of the three anchors, Brian Williams is the quarterback, moving with fluidity, making it look easy. Gibson, too, is a professional of the first rank, but he doesn't leave fingerprints. Couric, subject to unreasonable expectations (before her arrival CBS hadn't won back-to-back weeks since July 1998) seems to be slowly finding her way. She sparkled three times during the week: engaging with 35W survivors, uttering a powerful end-of-Thursday telecast closer (see below), and reacting to good will of "The Rose Man" during the handoff of an "Assignment America" segment in which viewers vote for the story. Couric, if she is to justify her place in the food chain, needs to stop being a mere news reader and act the managing editor. Having Couric present a YouTube clip of Filipino prisoners dancing to Michael Jackson's Thriller has no context, as it does on Keith Olbermann's "Oddball" segment. As it is, Couric helms a newscast that is journalistically competitive with her rivals. The problem remains that the 6:30 evening newscasts are no longer part of the collective unconscious that Williams remembers so well. But what these network shows can achieve, that cable cannot amid an ocean of time and frivolity, is the difficult balance of breaking news with thoughtful analysis.
If one quote was a stand-in for the week's big picture it was, "We stand by [its] safety." This might have referred to the product recall of Ford's cruise-control switches, or that of Mattel'schildren's toys, painted with deadly levels of lead. It could have applied to both Minnesota's and the Department of Transportation's indifference to the structural deficiencies of the 35W Bridge. But it was actually uttered by the spokesman for Avandia, the GlaxoSmithKline drug deemed by the FDA to elevate cardiac risk. By Thursday of last week, the second day's coverage of the 35W tragedy went wall-to-wall, morphing into a broader discussion of our national infrastructure.
This was a textbook example of how national newscasts excel. While the 24-hour cable news nets can often vainly try to take a uber-local story ("girl falls down a well" is an evergreen) into a national happening, the constraint of time and resources can sometimes work in the favor of NBC, ABC, and CBS. While the coverage of the three nets overlapped this week to a great extent, differences in tone, emphasis, and the depth of respective teams were revealed during the Bridge coverage.
ABC's Gibson, who's recently crested to #1 in ratings, opened the ABC Thursday World News in a helicopter, personally surveying the disaster. But where he effortlessly radiated gravitas, he had little of the bond that Brian Williams displayed on the ground with a first responder. Katie Couric was also on location. And in her Final Thoughts segment on Thursday, she found her voice, pointing out the obscenity of committing dollars to mega-sports stadiums even as our cities stand at a precipice. While NBC reported that "eyeballing" was the best way of evaluating structural stability, it was CBS that detailed how Los Alamos was embedding sensors as a more effective means of assessing integrity, suggesting a future solution. As the week closed out, the networks focused on the "miracles" of the survivors, doing little to tie our infrastructure blues with the pork barrel spending of the legislative branch that might just signal the end of Sen. Ted Stevens's political career (whose FBI and IRS probes were given only glancing coverage).
Of the three nets, NBC appeared to have the deepest bench. While CBS and ABC hedged their bets about John Robert's seizure, NBC (without stigmatizing him) identified the Chief Justice as an epileptic. Again, after the NewsHour, which has almost 3x as much air time to cover nightly news, NBC did the best job on Avandia. That said, no reporter confronted Glaxo or the toothless FDA. It was NBC that examined the meeting between President Bush and new British PM Gordon Brown: David Gregory noted that Brown "would decide by fall" about any drawdown. On Wednesday Williams had a "get" - the first US interview with Brown. Space prevented more than a couple of on-air questions, but the anchor re-directed viewers to watch it in full on NBC.com. In two other ways did the network distinguish itself: On Friday it wheeled out its financial expert (the livewire) Jim Kramer from CNBC to analyze the week's volatile stock market; oddly, the other networks chose not to take a step back. That day it also briefly covered the monsoons in Northern India and Bangladesh cited as the "worst in human history."
The stingy coverage of the floods reminds us that international reporting takes a back seat on these nightly newscasts. In the last week, most of foreign coverage turned on Iraq. All three networks were quick to cover "A War We Just Might Win" by New York Times journalists O'Hanlon and Pollack but, in retrospect, they mischaracterized the pair as recent converts to the surge; at least CBS had them on first-hand. There were thirty-second segments on the Gates-Rice meeting with the Saudis; Britain's final departure from Ireland; Darfur; on Bush's scolding of Maliki. But CBS' reporting that only one in three Iraqi's had access to potable water was stunning, if only for its otherwise absence from the mainstream media.
Following the bridge collapse and Iraq coverage, health seemed to be the third most popular topic of network news coverage. Sidebar: Isn't this something that cable news can do better? In most cases two of the three, or all, of the networks reported on: SIDS findings, eye checkups for Boomers, an ABC News reporter sharing her breast cancer diagnosis, a revolutionary new procedure of deep brain stimulus via electrodes. Strangely there was a dint of coverage over SCHIP, a vehicle to expand medical coverage to children that Congress hopes will avert a Bush veto (CBS did a cursory segment).
After 35W, Iraq, and health, there were scores of stories covering a range of politics (Rumsfeld's Tillman testimony; Obama's polarizing foreign policy address; a profile of presidential candidate Mike Huckabee; a bill reigning in Big Tobacco), but the key thing is, if you blinked, you missed 'em.