This summer’s crop of American movies included a popular, irreverent comedy called Anchorman. It revolves around a well-paid and cocky network television news anchor, Ron Burgundy (played by the comedian Will Ferrell), who dominates a fictional west coast TV market in the early 1970s.
A clueless womaniser, whose main skill is his ability to read from a teleprompter, Burgundy is presented as a relic that needs to be brought into the modern age.
The plot is driven by his increasingly desperate efforts to avoid sharing “his studio” with a new co-anchor, a woman reporter with real journalistic skills. In the end, of course, he succumbs. (And, it being an American movie, he falls in love with her).
You would be forgiven for noticing parallels between Burgundy’s fate and that of real TV network news in the US.
For the last twenty years television network news on the “big three” networks – NBC, CBS and ABC – have been dominated by three well-paid, white males (although not, as far as I know, clueless womanisers), each of whom have developed unparalleled levels of trust and visibility amongst the American TV-watching public.
Presidents, politicians, celebrities, and scandals came and went, while it looked like Tom Brokaw (64), since 1983 the sole anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News, Peter Jennings (66), since 1983 the anchor and senior editor of ABC’s World News Tonight, and Dan Rather (73), since 1981 the anchor and managing editor of CBS Evening News, were going to be around forever.
Then the first outward signs of change came two years ago, when Brokaw announced that he would step aside this coming December for a much younger replacement. And over the last month Rather has been the subject of heated public scrutiny, resulting from his involvement in a story dealing with President Bush’s military record.
The report, anchored by Rather, relied on “leaked” documents to substantiate a set of allegations that George W. Bush received favourable treatment and shirked responsibilities while enrolled in the Texas Air National Guard, thereby avoiding active duty in Vietnam.
These charges have in fact already been pretty well established to be true, though some details are still contested. But that story blew over relatively quickly. The bigger story, it seems, is that in this case CBS relied on forged documents to substantiate the charges.
Much of the subsequent debate centered on Rather’s alleged liberalism (he is actually very conservative). However, it also raised questions about whether the news anchor’s retirement would be hastened — and revived talk about the future of network news as we know it.
Rather took over at CBS when news divisions were living the good life — network executives viewed their news departments as sources of power and prestige, and threw money their way. The networks would often ship the whole studio crew, at great expense, to present the evening news live from wherever the anchors were reporting.
But by the end of the 1980s and through the early 1990s conglomerates had entered the television business — General Electric took over NBC, Capital Cites and later Disney got ABC, and CBS was swallowed by a succession of big media companies, most recently Viacom.
These companies didn’t need the prestige of big name anchors, had little or no appetite for news as such, and had their eyes firmly on the bottom line.
Together with severe cutbacks in news divisions’ budgets and resources came shifts in genres and content. Talk shows, celebrity “news,” political “debate,” consumer tips and murder trials became staple fare.
Inexpensive to produce, these programmes and inserts scored higher ratings and ensured lucrative revenues. For example, NBC’s morning show, Today, currently earns five times more revenue a year — an estimated $500-million — than its news division.
Still, the news divisions have hung in there — until recently, that is. The most obvious sign of the downturn is in the numbers. According to The New York Times, an average 26,3-million people watched network news between September 2003 and September 2004 — as against an average 36,3-million for the corresponding period a decade earlier.
One reason for this is the proliferation of cable television, which has brought the 24-hour news channel. CNN, which aped the networks’ news model, was for long the sole competition on cable. While successful, CNN at its best could only get a small fraction of the viewing public to tune into its broadcasts regularly.
NBC’s cable news channels, CNBC and MSNBC, later joined CNN. But probably the most significant development in this regard was the emergence of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News.
A big media story concerning the early coverage of this year’s US presidential elections has been the phenomenal growth of Fox News at the expense of network news.
Fox, which rejects the traditional news format in favour of the news talk show, drew a bigger audience individually than the networks during head-to-head coverage of both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, as well as the presidential debates.
It was to be expected that Fox would dominate during the Republican convention, as its broadcasts are overtly and notoriously slanted in favour of conservative commentators and Republican party spokespeople, but when it did the same for the Democratic convention industry watchers had to concede that its format was gaining a foothold among a wider audience.
The second major factor in the downturn has been the availability on the internet of instant news, often even faster than cable news can provide it. Network news with its one bulletin at the end of the day just can’t keep up with these two.
CBS and Dan Rather’s slip-up on Bush’s military record can be partly traced to these developments: ramped-up competition and pressure to produce sensational scoops rapidly.
And while the networks have quietly made known their respective “anchorman” succession policies, TV analysts doubt whether viewers will warm to the new faces they are offering, or even care. At any rate, the successors are virtual unknowns, and recent research indicates that young people are not developing the warm feelings of reassurance and trust that Rather, Jennings, and Brokaw inspired in their parents.
Yet news divisions remain crucial to the networks. According to the Nielsen Media Research figures reported in The New York Times, NBC Nightly News drew an average of 9,8-million viewers in the last year, with CBS Evening News averaging 7,4-million.
Of course, the news also serves as a gateway to other evening programming. Without household-name anchors, the networks are going to have to come up with new strategies for staunching their loss of market share.
As the New Yorker‘s television columnist noted during the Bush documents brouhaha: “At the moment, CBS needs Rather. He is the face of the network, and if his face were suddenly to be absent — if his face were fired, that is — the CBS eye [the channel logo] would look like a black hole, and you’d hear the wind whistling through the void. And then you’d turn the channel.”
Sean Jacobs is The Media‘s correspondent in New York.