This caught me by surprise:
Ratings are way up for these old-school yet stalwart newscasts, helmed by the figurative descendants of Cronkite, Jennings and Brokaw, themselves descended from ancient anchors of television yore. Around 12 million viewers watched Lester Holt’s “NBC Nightly News” last week, reportedly the show’s best ratings in 15 years; Muir’s “World News Tonight” is seeing a similar big boost, with the coronavirus crisis delivering the show’s biggest ratings in two decades. CBS’s “Evening News” is way up too, with viewership last week that beat nearly all of its prime-time shows.
In two-plus weeks of staying home, I’ve renewed my faith in the broadcast networks’ nightly newscasts, perhaps out of some faintly nostalgic idea that watching it is what grown-ups do, come hell or high water. People who long ago gave up the habit — or never acquired it — are finding a similar solace at the end of the day with a half-hour of Muir or Holt or the “CBS Evening News’s” Norah O’Donnell. [Hank Stuever, TV Critic for WaPo]
If you’re a little confused about, as the young adults set tells me, that adulting thing, I can confirm, being aggressively middle-aged that, indeed, this is what adults of the previous generation would do: Tune that TV to one of the broadcast networks – there were only three, ABC, NBC, and CBS, and, yes, they’re still up and running, plus a few local independents who couldn’t do global news – and then …
>mutate voice into grating oldster tone< drag themselves back to their Barcalounger …
because remote controls didn’t exist back then, make themselves comfortable, and learn what was happening in the world. Topics depended on the time frame: the Cold War and its attendant incidents, such as the Bay Of Pigs, or the ongoing nuclear arms race; the Vietnam War, which was eventually broken wide open by Walter Cronkite’s reporting on the deceptions of American government regarding it; the latest earthquake in Chile; a plague somewhere else…
You get the point. Stuever continues:
In our binge-and-purge diet of ceaseless opinions, network news is almost shockingly neutral, the thing consumers keep saying they want from their news sources. They’d be even better if they had more time to do what they’re hopelessly trying to do, which is be all things to all viewers.
By design, they must inform everyone, from the dullest among us to the sharpest. Years ago, they determined (probably through dreadful focus-group consulting) that the news must always end on a positive word, the great giving-in to those dopes always complaining that there’s never any good news. It’s hard to tell if these segments work as the intended balm; very often they seem like a saccharine waste of crucial time.
It’s true: Fox News may be the worst, but CNN and MSNBC certainly have their points of view as well. The three broadcast networks have decades of experience, learning over and over that the facts come first, and then the opinion – if any. Only newspapers, now skeletons of their former selves for the most part, have more experience with the need for neutrality and accuracy. The self-centered obsession with finding opinions that fit our preconceptions may be the best description of our addiction to the cable- and Internet- associated news sources, as they all have their tinge – or, in so many cases, contamination – of under-the-covers inclination.
I’ll be interested to see if this is a temporary surge, or if people will decide their former favorite sources weren’t really all that good after all and stick with the networks.
And this may also play into the firing of Trish Regan, noted here last night. You can be subtly wrong for quite a while, especially when your audience views you with favor, but be shockingly wrong might damage the audience. Or, given the demographic Fox News attracts, kill them off.
