All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Each week we invite someone from outside PE to weigh in with their thoughts about CBS News and the media at large. This week, we turned to Dan Bobkoff, a Public Eye reader and a reporter covering Massachusetts news for WAMC/Northeast Public Radio. A recent college graduate, he has interned with ABC’s "World News Tonight" and other ABC News and public radio programs. Below, Dan discusses the similarity of the network newscasts. He argues that to gain and maintain an audience, they should consider differentiating their programs from each other. As always, the opinions expressed and factual assertions made in “Outside Voices” are those of the author, not ours, and we seek a wide variety of voices. Here's Dan:

With the recent shuffle in nightly news anchors, media watchers will soon be eagerly poring over ratings, looking for fodder for Charlie-Katie-Brian competition stories. But I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. There is no real competition between the three newscasts. With no significant differences in content or style on ABC, CBS, or NBC, it comes down to whose face we like looking at most between taped segments. Longtime “60 Minutes” Executive Producer Don Hewitt realized this long ago. When he stepped down in 2004, he told PBS's Terrence Smith (also a recent "Outside Voices" contributor) that if you locked three people in rooms with each watching one of the shows, no one would know anything the others didn't know after a year.

This led Hewitt to a radical proposal: the three major networks should merge their news operations. He suggested that each of the three main anchors take turns anchoring, with the other two on the road when they're not at the anchor desk. He thought that would be a way of providing a real public service, while making money at the same time.

Smith responded by saying it was the "the most anti-competitive suggestion" he'd ever heard.

Hewitt said there is no competition under the current setup because the three shows all play it down the middle. They all do the same stories. "It always struck me as a terrible waste of time," he said.

Hewitt is right about the symptoms: there are some nights when the programs have virtually the same stories, in the same order, told in the same ways. The information at the Tyndall Report Web site supports that. Andrew Tyndall tracks the content of the three shows, down to how many minutes each devoted to a topic. For most stories, the chart shows they all devote roughly the same amount of time to the same set of stories.

This does not mean they should give up and combine their newsgathering into one mega-newscast, as Hewitt suggested. Instead, I think the shows should try to become as different from one another as possible.

Read full post…