"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast" -Oscar Wilde |
"The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself." -- Proverbs 11:25 |
he looming change in the control room at “Nightly News” and the ratings surge by Mr. Gibson are but the latest developments in the most tumultuous two years in the recent history of broadcast news.
Mr. Williams succeeded Tom Brokaw in December 2004. After that, Dan Rather resigned as anchor at CBS in the midst of a reporting scandal, and was soon succeeded by Katie Couric. Peter Jennings died of lung cancer while still the lead anchor at ABC, and one of Mr. Jennings’s designated successors, Bob Woodruff, nearly died in a roadside bomb explosion in Iraq, setting off a sequence of events that ultimately led to Mr. Gibson’s move to the anchor desk at “World News.”
Only six months before Mr. Gibson got the evening news job, he was effectively passed over for it, in favor of two much younger journalists, making his current run at Mr. Williams’s broadcast all the more remarkable.
Even as some young viewers forsake television for the Internet, the three network newscasts continue to attract a collective audience of nearly 25 million viewers most nights. The programs are also among the most lucrative for the networks, with advertisers planning to spend nearly half a billion dollars on them this year.
More than a few viewers, and advertisers, choose their broadcast based on the personal strengths of those anchors. That has left some people at the networks wondering whether Mr. Gibson — who, at 63, is the oldest and most established of the three — may be proving more attractive to more viewers than Mr. Williams and Ms. Couric.
Labels: Television News