NEWSBAR PRIME TIME TV

CBS’s “60 Minutes” (Sunday), the industry leader, has attracted an average of 13.4 million homes so far during the 1998-99 TV season. Prime-time news programs connect with even larger audiences. This represents a reach that is greater than the total circulation of the nation’s 10 largest newspapers. In turn, what stories the Big Three choose to broadcast and how they tell them also still matters.ĭuring 1998, the three evening newscasts reached a combined average of about 30.4 million viewers in 22 million homes. What do such changes mean for the practice of journalism at the Big Three? Is this possibly the best of times for network news, since as the news becomes more profitable, its status will rise within the corporation, and with increased status will come a finer product? Or is this a troubled time for network news, as old-fashioned values of public service that once guided news judgment cede ground to business-driven imperatives? Most importantly, given the current economic climate, how best can journalists respond to these corporate, societal and technological changes and preserve the quality and integrity of news?īecause so much has been written recently about the decline of the Big Three and the rise of cable and the Internet, it is worth observing that network news still matters.

To some extent, news programs are now looked to as ways to subsidize entertainment and sports offerings-just the reverse of the way things used to be. The networks’ entertainment and sports operations are so troubled that news, particularly in prime time, is becoming one of the networks’ most consistently profitable businesses.

All of this leaves the TV entertainment business struggling to find its way. The TV entertainment business, in particular, has deteriorated because programming costs are rising while, due to more competition, ratings are falling and hit shows are harder to find. This demand for profit arises not because these owners are greedier than their predecessors were, but because the financial challenges they face are tougher. with its major stockholder, Mel Karmazin, and General Electric (NBC)-all demand that their news operations make money. Those who own these networks-Disney (ABC), CBS Inc. NBC’s network profits are also falling sharply. The ABC and CBS networks (now subsumed into larger corporate structures) are losing money, according to Wall Street analysts. Those most severely threatened by the way the broadcast business operates are the Big Three. That has transformed not just TV news but the entire television industry.

Today, ABC, CBS and NBC operate in a competitive environment in which most viewers have dozens of channels from which to choose. It is no exaggeration to say that just about everything has changed since then. “I have Jack Benny to make money,” he told them. Former CBS correspondent Marvin Kalb recalls Owner and Chairman William Paley instructing news reporters at a meeting in the early 1960’s that they shouldn’t be concerned about costs. They presented news programming for the prestige it would bring to their network, to satisfy the public-service requirements of …given the current economic climate, how best can journalists respond to these corporate, societal and technological changes and preserve the quality and integrity of news?Congress and the Federal Communications Commission, and more broadly so that they would be seen as good corporate citizens.īack then, the networks earned enough money from entertainment programming that they could afford to run their news operations at a loss. Nor did they expect to turn a profit from news programming. Twenty years ago, there was no network news “business.” The Big Three broadcast television networks-ABC, CBS and NBC-all covered news, but none generally made money doing so.

Newsbar prime time