Five Decades of TV News
"That's the way it is." --Walter Cronkite, CBS Evening News (1962-1981)
"That's the way we're betting you believe it is." -- Fox News, MSNBC, CNN
"That's the way we feel viewers like you think it is." --PBS NewsHour
So how did we get from Cronkite to where we are today? First, some background. I had a lively conversation recently with a younger acquaintance, safely distanced, on the topic of news coverage in our media-saturated era. His generation has never known any other kind.
As an early Baby Boomer who grew up watching CBS Evening News, I attempted to give him my historical perspective, such as it is, knowing from experience that observations from someone of my vintage must be carefully proffered to someone of his. It went something like this:
A half-century ago, in their hunger for higher ratings, many regional TV affiliates of the Big Three networks began hiring a new breed of experts, media consultants (AKA focus-group peddlers), to enliven their clients' news, weather and sports for delivery into viewers' homes. The name of game was to increase the number of those homes. By a lot. Out went the sonorous, professorial script-readings of the news. In its place emerged a lighter, breezier, almost neighborly back-and-forth featuring smiley anchors, cheery weather-persons and spunky sportscasters presenting what some of us scorned as low-calorie Happy Talk. Folksy, accessible talking heads who joshed, needled and kidded each other, blurring the difference between journalism and The Merv Griffin Show (or, um, Jimmy Kimmel Live).
Homogenized happy-talk on local TV news proliferated from then on. And the coffers of the Big Three (NBC, CBS, ABC) networks swelled with ad revenue. For a time.
But beyond the happy talk broadcasts arose increasingly lurid content, foreshadowing the prominence of radio's Howard Stern, Don Imus and TV's Jerry Springer. And colossal audiences. Steadily, the standard of what The News was supposed to be about, and not be about, descended. Ratings and audience were all that mattered. Inspiration for the fictitious Ron Burgundy in the movie Anchorman, much later.
In 1980, CNN gave the world 24/7 news and as the years passed in the disruptive wake of cable, there began an ever-changing media landscape. So began media saturation.
Bill Clinton was running for a second term in 1996 when the wily Roger Ailes, a former NBC executive and Republican strategist, unveiled the Fox News Channel. He took dead-aim at the rising number of grumbling viewers who had long talked back to Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather and Peter Jennings (NBC, CBS, ABC) and the talking heads on CNN. Ailes hit the bullseye with Fox News.
Back to our conversation. Sensing that ADD was overcoming the young guy, I summed up my condensed history lesson thusly: From the mid-'90s, in the news business, you can draw a straight line to the pugnacious, hyper-partisan Sean Hannity shout-fests on Fox News, and the imperious, haughty conceit of his opposite numbers on MSNBC and CNN, Lawrence O'Donnell, Don Lemon, Rachel Maddow, et. al. And here we are.
He and I agreed that it's an exasperating topic. But television has never been the go-to source for news for his generation. Come to think about it, neither is it mine anymore.
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