All righty, then, friends, it is long past time for me to strike again. In the honorable tradition of Steve Urkel from Family Matters and Dennis the Menace (Jay North, of course), I come to agitate this hallowed forum and pester you ... well ... gentlemen for no particular reason (BTW, any ladies hit this forum? I dunno.).
And the question inquiring minds want to know this time is: network newscasts are a much more slippery thing in terms of impact and ratings than they used to be because of cable, internet, and the whole all-day media circus. But in the times when Pa had to go to the set at precisely 6:41 in the evening to fire up the thing in the time for the nightly news, does anybody really have an accurate idea about who, beginning with, say, the Eisenhower administration and the Korean War, was on top? We know the cast of characters here: Douglas Edwards helmed the Tiffany Network's 15-minute powwow every night, while across the dial on NBC, we got John Cameron Swayze and his somewhat rambunctious Camel News Caravan, the latter having been held up to ridicule in recent times for Swayze's pushing Camel cigs (both figuratively and literally, between his lips) in between stories, while in studio. If Wikipedia is to be believed, it looks like John Charles Daly, best known for his long stint on What's My Line?, was the mainstay on the Alphabet channel, but everybody who knows jack-squat about the history of American television knows that ABC didn't have anywhere near the number of stations that CBS or NBC did.
The Fifties probably weren't much to brag about in terms of network news division performance, but as the Kennedy presidency brought about crisis after crisis, TV news had to grow up quick, and this was BEFORE the November 1963 assassination. By 1956, though, NBC outgrew the antics of Swayze and gave him a pink slip (or perhaps a Timex watch?) in favor of the two of the most-memorable broadcasters on their age, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. Inspired by a local newscast in West Virginia, the Peacock hierarchy came upon the idea of stationing Huntley at 30 Rock and Brinkley at Nebraska Avenue in D.C. Put together with a hard-hitting but rock-steady presentation by Huntley and the inimitable wit and genteel sarcasm of Brinkley, HBR got the upper edge as Eisenhower left office. Over at the Eyeball ranch on West 57th, Douglas Edwards had measured up for years to the gold standard of Edward R. Murrow as the statesman newscaster. But feeling the Huntley-Brinkley Report heat, CBS pulled the trigger and demoted Edwards to daytime, bringing in the personification of television news for a generation of viewers: one Walter Leland Cronkite.
Somebody on Wikipedia has muddied the issue of who was the first to expand to a full 30 minutes each night, but NBC and CBS did so by '63; ABC, meanwhile, would hold out for four years while it tried everything but circus acts in the anchor chair. For a while, it looked like a young Canadian by the name of Peter Jennings might be the Golden Boy for the Alphabet crew, but he didn't cut it right off (with his strong, British-inflected accent then, there was no way he could have), and he went back into the field for more seasoning. General wisdom holds that HBR held a narrow lead during the middle of the decade, but as Vietnam went full-blast in '65-'66 and America seemed to be careening out of control to many, Mr. Cronkite, with his measured, serious, but calming tone became the preferred supper-time companion for a growing number. It wasn't until toward the end of the decade that ABC finally settled on a stable lineup of Howard K. Smith and Frank Reynolds--or so it seemed for awhile.
The Age of Aquarius dawned on CBS' competitors rather sharply. Huntley hung it up in the summer of '70, and HBR became just plain generic NBC Nightly News, with, get this, a troika of rotating newsmen: Frank McGee stationed at 30 Rock, Brinkley staying put in Washington as he had for the past 14 years, and the senior correspondent of HBR, John Chancellor, going wherever one of the first two wasn't, meaning that when Brinkley was off for the night, on the East Coast line he went to D.C, probably not getting back to NYC until midnight. (Actually, McGee was sick for awhile in late '70, and Edwin Newman pinch-hitted in Gotham.)
And over at ABC, network execs got the itch for better ratings and a way to exploit the mess at NBC, so they busted Reynolds down to reporter and shelled out high moola to get Harry Reasoner from the Eyeball channel. Viewers balked at that also and decided that Cronkite was the Gibraltar rock of evening news, and "that's the way it was" until CBS' then-mandatory retirement policy required "Uncle Walter" to step down in '81. By '71, NBC had learned its lesson and decided on Chancellor every night, with Brinkley relieved of the nightly grind in favor of several commentaries per week, and McGee going to The Today Show (a job which more than one person has observed he thoroughly loathed) until his untimely death in Spring '74. It still wasn't happening, though, and the Peacock brass opted to bring Brinkley back in the anchor's chair in '76 and see if the old HBR chemistry night pull off a renaissance. No such luck.
ABC was still floundering at mid-decade, and the decision was to make to milk the Reasoner acquisition for all it was worth by easing HKS into semi-retirement with commentaries only (a la Brinkley and CBS' Eric Sevareid) and trying Reasoner solo. When that didn't fly, ABC went back to its old strategy of luring away rival talent and snatched Barbara Walters from Today and NBC. What ensued was what what TV critics deemed the worst pairing of anchors in American TV history. It looked for awhile like the Alphabet boys might have considered running Howdy Doody reruns as counter-programming or other desparation tactics. But salvation was on its way from the one strong suit ABC had: its sports division and its innovator head, Roone Arledge.
Arledge was given the commission in '78 to revamp everything. First off, he sent Reasoner packing back to his old haunt on West 57th and 60 Minutes, which he co-founded with Mike Wallace a decade earlier and, more importantly, which was now a big ratings hit. Barbara Walters was allowed to return to her natural habitat of sob-sister and celeb interviews, and wound up reunited not long after with her old Today chum, Hugh Downs, when he opted to come out of retirement for the new 20/20, one of Arledge's new aggressive ideas. Arledge decided to reverse not one, but TWO previous demotions from the anchor desk: Peter Jennings returned after a decade's absence at the London bureau, and the venerable, authoritative Frank Reynolds was vindicated from the unconscionable brushing aside he got eight years earlier. The result was World News Tonight, with multiple anchor desks: the third man would break the color barrier for a network newscast, Max Robinson, who set up in Chicago.
This configuration finally clicked with the American public, and gradually ABC built a solid reputation as a serious, thoroughgoing operation, rather than an afterthought as it had been in previous decades. NBC kept hitting the skids no matter what it did, thanks in no small part to the network's deterioration in all dayparts. John Chancellor finally called it a day in early '82 and handed the reins over to the Peacock's Golden Boy for nearly a decade, one Thomas John Brokaw. We must arbitrarily end the story there, as cultural changes such as cable were taking off around that time.
But does anyone have an idea if this understanding of the network's vagaries and fortunes over the three-decade period? I'm ready for a long thread on this one, so send 'em on.
And the question inquiring minds want to know this time is: network newscasts are a much more slippery thing in terms of impact and ratings than they used to be because of cable, internet, and the whole all-day media circus. But in the times when Pa had to go to the set at precisely 6:41 in the evening to fire up the thing in the time for the nightly news, does anybody really have an accurate idea about who, beginning with, say, the Eisenhower administration and the Korean War, was on top? We know the cast of characters here: Douglas Edwards helmed the Tiffany Network's 15-minute powwow every night, while across the dial on NBC, we got John Cameron Swayze and his somewhat rambunctious Camel News Caravan, the latter having been held up to ridicule in recent times for Swayze's pushing Camel cigs (both figuratively and literally, between his lips) in between stories, while in studio. If Wikipedia is to be believed, it looks like John Charles Daly, best known for his long stint on What's My Line?, was the mainstay on the Alphabet channel, but everybody who knows jack-squat about the history of American television knows that ABC didn't have anywhere near the number of stations that CBS or NBC did.
The Fifties probably weren't much to brag about in terms of network news division performance, but as the Kennedy presidency brought about crisis after crisis, TV news had to grow up quick, and this was BEFORE the November 1963 assassination. By 1956, though, NBC outgrew the antics of Swayze and gave him a pink slip (or perhaps a Timex watch?) in favor of the two of the most-memorable broadcasters on their age, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. Inspired by a local newscast in West Virginia, the Peacock hierarchy came upon the idea of stationing Huntley at 30 Rock and Brinkley at Nebraska Avenue in D.C. Put together with a hard-hitting but rock-steady presentation by Huntley and the inimitable wit and genteel sarcasm of Brinkley, HBR got the upper edge as Eisenhower left office. Over at the Eyeball ranch on West 57th, Douglas Edwards had measured up for years to the gold standard of Edward R. Murrow as the statesman newscaster. But feeling the Huntley-Brinkley Report heat, CBS pulled the trigger and demoted Edwards to daytime, bringing in the personification of television news for a generation of viewers: one Walter Leland Cronkite.
Somebody on Wikipedia has muddied the issue of who was the first to expand to a full 30 minutes each night, but NBC and CBS did so by '63; ABC, meanwhile, would hold out for four years while it tried everything but circus acts in the anchor chair. For a while, it looked like a young Canadian by the name of Peter Jennings might be the Golden Boy for the Alphabet crew, but he didn't cut it right off (with his strong, British-inflected accent then, there was no way he could have), and he went back into the field for more seasoning. General wisdom holds that HBR held a narrow lead during the middle of the decade, but as Vietnam went full-blast in '65-'66 and America seemed to be careening out of control to many, Mr. Cronkite, with his measured, serious, but calming tone became the preferred supper-time companion for a growing number. It wasn't until toward the end of the decade that ABC finally settled on a stable lineup of Howard K. Smith and Frank Reynolds--or so it seemed for awhile.
The Age of Aquarius dawned on CBS' competitors rather sharply. Huntley hung it up in the summer of '70, and HBR became just plain generic NBC Nightly News, with, get this, a troika of rotating newsmen: Frank McGee stationed at 30 Rock, Brinkley staying put in Washington as he had for the past 14 years, and the senior correspondent of HBR, John Chancellor, going wherever one of the first two wasn't, meaning that when Brinkley was off for the night, on the East Coast line he went to D.C, probably not getting back to NYC until midnight. (Actually, McGee was sick for awhile in late '70, and Edwin Newman pinch-hitted in Gotham.)
And over at ABC, network execs got the itch for better ratings and a way to exploit the mess at NBC, so they busted Reynolds down to reporter and shelled out high moola to get Harry Reasoner from the Eyeball channel. Viewers balked at that also and decided that Cronkite was the Gibraltar rock of evening news, and "that's the way it was" until CBS' then-mandatory retirement policy required "Uncle Walter" to step down in '81. By '71, NBC had learned its lesson and decided on Chancellor every night, with Brinkley relieved of the nightly grind in favor of several commentaries per week, and McGee going to The Today Show (a job which more than one person has observed he thoroughly loathed) until his untimely death in Spring '74. It still wasn't happening, though, and the Peacock brass opted to bring Brinkley back in the anchor's chair in '76 and see if the old HBR chemistry night pull off a renaissance. No such luck.
ABC was still floundering at mid-decade, and the decision was to make to milk the Reasoner acquisition for all it was worth by easing HKS into semi-retirement with commentaries only (a la Brinkley and CBS' Eric Sevareid) and trying Reasoner solo. When that didn't fly, ABC went back to its old strategy of luring away rival talent and snatched Barbara Walters from Today and NBC. What ensued was what what TV critics deemed the worst pairing of anchors in American TV history. It looked for awhile like the Alphabet boys might have considered running Howdy Doody reruns as counter-programming or other desparation tactics. But salvation was on its way from the one strong suit ABC had: its sports division and its innovator head, Roone Arledge.
Arledge was given the commission in '78 to revamp everything. First off, he sent Reasoner packing back to his old haunt on West 57th and 60 Minutes, which he co-founded with Mike Wallace a decade earlier and, more importantly, which was now a big ratings hit. Barbara Walters was allowed to return to her natural habitat of sob-sister and celeb interviews, and wound up reunited not long after with her old Today chum, Hugh Downs, when he opted to come out of retirement for the new 20/20, one of Arledge's new aggressive ideas. Arledge decided to reverse not one, but TWO previous demotions from the anchor desk: Peter Jennings returned after a decade's absence at the London bureau, and the venerable, authoritative Frank Reynolds was vindicated from the unconscionable brushing aside he got eight years earlier. The result was World News Tonight, with multiple anchor desks: the third man would break the color barrier for a network newscast, Max Robinson, who set up in Chicago.
This configuration finally clicked with the American public, and gradually ABC built a solid reputation as a serious, thoroughgoing operation, rather than an afterthought as it had been in previous decades. NBC kept hitting the skids no matter what it did, thanks in no small part to the network's deterioration in all dayparts. John Chancellor finally called it a day in early '82 and handed the reins over to the Peacock's Golden Boy for nearly a decade, one Thomas John Brokaw. We must arbitrarily end the story there, as cultural changes such as cable were taking off around that time.
But does anyone have an idea if this understanding of the network's vagaries and fortunes over the three-decade period? I'm ready for a long thread on this one, so send 'em on.