John Kreiser On Cancer Coverage

Earlier today, I posted my thoughts on the "Evening News" spending much of this week focused on cancer. I wrote that "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."

Not everyone agrees with my take on this, and CBSNews.com's John Kreiser has written a reply to my post. You can read it below.

There is a place for the kind of coverage the "CBS Evening News" provided this week on the subject of cancer. Unfortunately, the "Evening News" wasn't that place.

With 30+ years in the news business, I'm old enough to remember when the "Evening News" actually focused on the day's biggest stories. As Brian points out in his entry, with the abundance of sources these days, network news shows no longer function as the principal source of news for many people — though because network news demographics tend to skew older, a lot of the people who watch the news shows still get a great deal of their daily take on what's going on in the world from them. Also, there were indeed hard-news pegs on which the cancer coverage was hung — the recurrence of Elizabeth Edwards' and Tony Snow's cancer, the news that MRIs can be used to help diagnose breast cancer, and that a prostate cancer vaccine moved another step closer to approval.

But did CBS really need to spend part of its 22-minute news block telling you how cancer spreads within the body (a perfect thing to put on CBSNews.com, but not on some of TV's most precious real estate), or on many of the other aspects of the package that had informative value but weren't part of the day's news? It's the type of subject that screams for a one-hour special in the evening (the kind of thing CBS used to do so well, back in my day) — not a bunch of pieces centered around a common theme.

Putting a longer show on cancer (or Africa, or any topic) would also allow correspondents to do some real reporting. One problem with anything that airs on any of the evening news shows is time: Any piece that requires in-depth reporting also requires the time to give it the treatment it deserves — and that kind of time generally doesn't exist on an evening news program. One of the few pieces that I found interesting and useful was Anthony Mason's story on the costs of cancer. He got a little over two minutes. Imagine if he could have delved into the subject a little further — what are cancer's costs to business, for example? Watching correspondents do what I call "fly-by's" on a subject drives me nuts — there rarely seems to be enough time for a piece to actually tell viewers something useful.

Experimenting with the format is a good thing — there's nothing in life that can't be improved. And, as Brian points out, the evening news programs aren't as relevant as they were when I was in college watching Walter Cronkite and taking news writing classes from someone who worked at CBS. But if I were a viewer wanting to find out what was going on in the world this week, I'd probably have tuned in elsewhere.