ABSTRACT
The death knell for the nightly network newscast has been ringing for over twenty years now. Even seventeen years ago, in 1992, CBS Washington bureau chief Barbara Cohen noted, “It has become fashionable to predict the demise of network news in general and the evening news broadcasts in particular,” as she then added to the chorus she described while making some exceptions.1 Perhaps this phenomenon can be dated to an even earlier moment, but refrains forecasting the end began with considerable regularity by 1986, the year Fred W. Friendly, former president of CBS News and professor emeritus at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, publicly opined that, “Unless the networks make their product appreciably and dramatically superior, I doubt there’s much of a future for network news.”2 More than two decades later these newscasts remain on daily schedules, and arguably not as a result of the appreciable improvement he suggested. Since then, the newscasts, the networks, and even television-at-large has come to be challenged in ways these commentators could not have imagined.
