Why Has ABC's Evening Newscast with Charlie Gibson Vaulted to Number One?
In The New York Times' profile of Gibson, we read:
Asked if he knew why ABC was up and NBC was down, Mr. Gibson said: “I don’t have any answer.”
Pressed to offer some theories, he ticked off several possible reasons. The most important, he said, was “stability.” Specifically he was referring to how he had sought to calm the program’s employees after a turbulent year. Mr. Jennings’s death was followed by the departures of his designated successors (Bob Woodruff and Elizabeth Vargas) last year after Mr. Woodruff suffered injuries in Iraq, and Ms. Vargas then decided to step down because of her pregnancy.
He also suggested that the program had “caught some breaks” in recent months, including Brian Ross’s early reporting on the Congressional page scandal that would claim the career of Representative Mark Foley, a Florida Republican. ABC News also received an extra half-hour in prime time on the night of the midterm elections in November. And finally there was the return of Mr. Woodruff, who reported not only on his recovery but on the treatment of wounded veterans.
To me, the answer to why Gibson's newscast has shot up to number one since January is far simpler than the anchor's answer suggests. It's this: Evening newscasts are, in some ways, dinosaurs, favored by the over-60 crowd. Those in other age categories aren't tied to these traditional news venues. They're going to the Internet, cable news channels, and even late night talk shows for their news and information. In the era of the twenty-four-hour news cycle and long commutes to the suburbs, younger people just aren't as acculturated to the evening newscasts as most were in the era of Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley.
But older viewers of these newscasts quite naturally gravitate to older anchors. That's why after the often shrill and irresponsible Dan Rather left the CBS Evening News, older viewers were attracted to his interim replacement, Bob Schieffer, a solid presence they'd known for years.
When Katie Couric, deliberately chosen by CBS execs for her appeal to a younger demographic, took over the news at the "Tiffany Network," evening news traditionalists, not wed to Brian Williams in spite of GE/NBC's typically careful succession planning, cast about for a different anchor to watch.
When Gibson talks about "stability" as an explanation for his evening newscast's ascendancy then, I think he's right. But not for the reason he cites. The stability of the production's staff is probably irrelevant to the upward sweep of ABC's evening news ratings. Instead, it's the stability that older viewers feel when seeing the face of a newscaster they've known for decades.
Me, I'm in a completely different demographic, I guess. After years of watching half of The NewsHour on PBS and switching over to Tom Brokaw, I've taken to watching the PBS offering for its full sixty minutes.
[THANKS TO: Joe Gandelman of The Moderate Voice and Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit for linking to this post.]