The "Evening News" Report: A Week Of Cancer Coverage

This week, the "Evening News" has been dominated by stories about cancer. There have been pieces about prostate cancer, pancreatic cancer, and how cancer spreads; also cancer research, the financial cost of cancer, and cancer prevention. And that's not even all of them: On Tuesday's show, to give you an idea, 17 minutes of the 22 minute broadcast was devoted to cancer stories.

There was a news hook for the cancer focus: Both White House spokesman Tony Snow and Elizabeth Edwards, wife of presidential hopeful John Edwards, announced renewed fights with the disease last week. But the coverage still went far beyond what would traditionally be considered commensurate to the news developments.

Whether you think that's a positive or negative depends on what you expect from the "Evening News." If you expect the show to fill the classic role of a nightly newscast – to provide viewers with well-rounded coverage of the most important stories of the day – than the cancer focus might have seemed excessive.

Those of us who feel that the role of the nightly newscasts has evolved, however, see things a little differently. Thanks to technological advances like the Internet and the rise of cable news networks, news today is everywhere – some of us even see headlines in the elevator on the way to work. Nightly newscasts no longer need to function, as they once did, as many people's primary source for news.

That means the nightly newscasts are somewhat less relevant than they were when Walter Cronkite was behind the anchor desk. But it has also freed up the "Evening News" and its competitors to experiment with the format.

Of course, that's not always a good thing – many a media critic bemoaned the "freeSpeech" segment that CBS tried when Katie Couric came on board as anchor, for example. But it can be a good thing, and I think that was the case this week. By focusing so heavily on cancer, the "Evening News" was able to educate viewers about the subject in a way that would have been impossible had producers felt the need to shove as much news into the broadcast as possible. And since we can get our news in a lot of different places these days, the decision to devote so much of the show to cancer strikes me as an admirable one.