Tuesday, April 04, 2006
From Cronkite
To Couric: The Death of Network News
Somewhere, Edward R. Murrow is weeping. The rumors continue to circulate that the affable Katie Couric (soon to be Katherine Couric) is set to take over the coveted chair at CBS Evening News. The seat once held by the likes of Walter Cronkite will now be held by a reporter best know for breaking into coverage of the Asian Tsunami to tell us about another tragedy ...the Brad Pitt-Jennifer Aniston break-up.
No doubt this will be a blog topic for a few weeks. I think it illustrates the massive change in how we as consumers get and process our news. In my youth your choices were simple, NBC, CBS, or ABC and your local morning and evening papers. Now nobody reads the paper and the ritual of sitting down to watch the 6:30 national news is on life support. (Aren't most of us stuck in traffic at 6:30 pm if not still in the office?). So the networks need to jazz things up and I guess that's what they're trying to do by bringing in someone who can seamlessly go from talking about spring fashions to Iraq. I don't watch the evening news, let alone CBS news that much to care but it just seems like another nail in the coffin of network news if you ask me.
(Note: My criticisms of Ms. Couric shouldn't be taken as sexist. I think there are other female heavy hitters out there who have much more hard-news gravitas than Katie. Diane Sawyer for example...)
Somewhere, Edward R. Murrow is weeping. The rumors continue to circulate that the affable Katie Couric (soon to be Katherine Couric) is set to take over the coveted chair at CBS Evening News. The seat once held by the likes of Walter Cronkite will now be held by a reporter best know for breaking into coverage of the Asian Tsunami to tell us about another tragedy ...the Brad Pitt-Jennifer Aniston break-up.
No doubt this will be a blog topic for a few weeks. I think it illustrates the massive change in how we as consumers get and process our news. In my youth your choices were simple, NBC, CBS, or ABC and your local morning and evening papers. Now nobody reads the paper and the ritual of sitting down to watch the 6:30 national news is on life support. (Aren't most of us stuck in traffic at 6:30 pm if not still in the office?). So the networks need to jazz things up and I guess that's what they're trying to do by bringing in someone who can seamlessly go from talking about spring fashions to Iraq. I don't watch the evening news, let alone CBS news that much to care but it just seems like another nail in the coffin of network news if you ask me.
(Note: My criticisms of Ms. Couric shouldn't be taken as sexist. I think there are other female heavy hitters out there who have much more hard-news gravitas than Katie. Diane Sawyer for example...)
