Article 12“You -.News”It’s not your father’snewscast anymoreCall it “News Lite” or “‘News you can use”--bywhatever name, TV is racing for relevance.But what gets lost along theway?Andie TucherTom Brokaw comes to our tele-phoneinterview loaded forbear To my boilerplate ques-tion-“Howdo you respond tothe critics who say your newscast hasbecome softer?“-he snaps back thatmany of the critics are also competi-tors with agendas of their own.‘There is an elitist, myopic point ofview about what these broadcasts havebeen and what they should be,” hesays, “and I’m getting a little weary ofit. There are no important stories wehave missed.” After we hang up, hecalls me back to say I had overstatedthe length of a piece I had mentionedas an example of a softer story-twominutes on the Oregon death-penaltylaws for sheep-chasing dogs-and toremind me that critics have their ownagendas.Of course they do. Some of the criti-cism does come from rivals at CBS andABC, who fear that NBC may be tak-POLITICIANSJOURNALISTS ALIKEWANT YOU TOKNOW THEY AREJUST FOLKS WHOFEEL YOUR PAINing over as the new top dog in the rat-ings war among the Big Three. Frommid-December through mid-MarchBrokaw’s half-hour evening broad&consistently edged out-barely but vis-ibly-the seven-year ratings leader,AECs World News l’bnight with PeterJennings, winning ten times, tyingthree, and placing second once in four-teen weeks. @uring the week endingMarch 7, for instance, NBC had an 8.8rating, an 18 share, and an average of12.01 million viewers; ABC came in at8.5/17 with 11.16 million viewers; andCBS at 7.6/16 with 9.95 million viewers.)And this advance comes at a timewhen the market for network eveningnews is inexorably shrinking through-out the 1970s the three network news-casts together would routinely attractup to three-quarters of the viewingaudience, but Nielsen reports that thecombined audience share for the threehas now slipped under 50 percent.But edgy rivals aside, Brokaw’sslicked-up newscast would still be ripefor reassessment. While all the net-works have been tinkering with theirprograms, The Nightly News with lbmBrokaw has given itself an inside-and-out makeover. NBC’s broadcast nowsports a hipper, more high-tech feel,with a new video-wall backdrop,74From ColumbialotdiSm Review May&me 1997. pp. 26-31. 0 1997 by Columbia journalism Review. Reprint& bypermission.12. “You News”have been provided with “news youcan use” about, among other topics,clot busters, osteoporosis, memory lossmacular degeneration, allergies, diabeltes, male menopause, estrogen, bloodtransfusions, brain injuries, Alzhei-mer’s, flu, antihistamines, panic at-tacks, arthritis, beta blockers, grapesas cancer fighters, uterine fibroidsobesity, drinking and driving, car:phoning and driving, and mammo-grams. “The New England Journal ofMedicine should be charging,” saysSandy Socolow, a former executive pro-ducer for Walter Cronkite at CBS. “Allthree broadcasts are mesmerized byanything that involves the humanbody-and I’m not talking about sex.”What distinguishes NBC now isthat both the gossamer and the usefuloften outweigh the grit. Its NightlyNews tends to air fewer stories eachevening than ABC or CBS, and farfewer of those come from the nationalcapitals, whether Moscow, Belgrade, oryes, Washington. More of them focudon trends, life-style and consumer is-sues, pop culture, and heartland Amer-ica-and NBC isn’t hiding its Liteunder a bushel, either. An ad for thenewscast appearing in The New YorkTimes on March 28 touted what wasobviously considered the evening’s hot-test story: ‘Marriage Boot Camp’:Could it Save Your Relationship?’ (Thestory was bumped by the news of theCalifornia cult suicide and actuallyaired April 4.)Brokaw says he’s simply “trying tobe less of a wire service of the air? be-cause it’s clear people have alreadyheard the major news of the day bythe time they click on the eveningnews. “I travel across this country alot,” he says, “and everywhere I go Ihear what people are talking aboutand what interests them and whatthey are desperate to know about. Anda whole lot of that has very little to dowith what we would routinely put onthe air ten-fifteen years ago.”Last year, according to Tyndallviewers were apparently most desperlate to know about the summer Olym-pics, which were broadcast by NBCSports and which got more airtime onNBC News than any other story in1996 (CBS’s biggest story was TWAFlight 800 and ABC’s was the Dolecampaign, which included the entireprimary season; see box). At the sametime, NBC’s attention to such hard-news topics as the presidential cam-paign and the Middle Eastern peaceprocess was drastically lower than itscompetitors’.And NBC has figured out the plea-sures and profits of packaging. TyndallBrokaw’S face in a monitor mirroringBrokaw’s face on Brokaw himself,Brokaw’s face appearing suddenly onthe giant video screen overlookingTimes Square as he signs off. Whereonce the airtime was full of congres-sional wrangles and Middle East peacetalks, now it’s heavy with medicalnews and features from fly-over coun-try NBC has indeed gone softer andmore user-friendly-‘populist,” NBCexecutives like to call it-and Brokawargues urgently that “what we’re at-tempting to do is to cover the impor-tant news of the day and the news thatis relevant to our viewers, and thatnews now has a much different woofand warp than it did twenty-five yearsago.”Brokaw’s competitors detect a be-trayal of journalistic standards in allthis. CBS anchor Dan Rather told ThePhiladelphia Inquirer in February thatNBC was purveying ‘News Lite.” Inlate March, when Paul FriedmanABC’s executive vice president fo;news, also took back his old job as thenewscast’s executive producer, he toldThe Washington Post that ABC would“cover serious news that the otherscan’t manage.”Wat’smore, the newscasts’core viewers tend to beolder; The Pew ResearchCenter reckons that almosttwo-thirds of people over sixty-fourwatch a network newscast “regularly,”while less than a quarter of GenXersdo. So “sooner or later the currentnews audience is all going to die,” saysAndrew Tyndall, editor of the !l)ndallWeekly, which tracks and times thestories covered on the evening news.“And that’s sooner rather than later.”In some fundamental ways thethree newscasts haven’t broken farfrom tradition-or from each other. Allpay due attention to the