Immediately after the war, few imagined that television news would supersede its radio counterpart. Indeed, most correspondents vied for plum radio postings, and NBC’s initial TV news program was hosted not by a journalist but rather by announcer John Cameron Swayze, whose Camel News Caravan “hop-scotched” the globe, delivering a mere 15-minute sampling of headline stories. Sponsored by Camel cigarettes, the program nevertheless pioneered the use of remote film footage that was shot, processed, and edited under daily deadline conditions. CBS likewise launched Douglas Edwards with the News, and late in the 1950s, ABC floated its own nightly news round-up under the leadership of John Daly. Yet the transition from radio to television proved expensive, so all three networks allocated most of their resources to entertainment programming, allowing only occasional opportunities for experimentation in news and information programming.

The leading experimenter was Edward R. Murrow, who had been promoted to vice-president of CBS in recognition for his wartime service. Murrow used his corporate influence and celebrity status to launch television’s first news documentary series, entitled See It Now, which ranged broadly in its coverage of both domestic and international issues. Produced by Fred Friendly, the program took on prominent social issues and painted vivid portraits of the struggles of everyday citizens. It was also renowned for thought-provoking interviews with such leading figures as Robert Oppenheimer, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Harry Truman. Interestingly, histories of 1950s television less commonly acknowledge Person to Person, a companion program developed by Murrow that drew much larger audiences with its interviews of leading show-business personalities in their homes. In television’s first venture into infotainment programming, Murrow toured the homes of such stars as Marilyn Monroe and Eddy Fischer, while chatting about celebrity gossip and their personal lives. Both “high-brow” Murrow and “low-brow” Murrow helped to set the early standard for long-form television news.

In 1956, however, NBC began to bid for bragging rights in TV news when its new president, Robert Kintner, took charge. An avowed “news junkie,” Kintner expanded the scope and resources of the news division, creating a truly international newsgathering organization during his reign at the network. Most immediately, Kintner parlayed Chet Huntley’s and David Brinkley’s adroit coverage of the 1956 Democratic and Republican conventions into the Huntley-Brinkley Report, a program that would dominate nightly news ratings until 1967. Kintner also nurtured NBC’s documentary efforts, overseeing the launch of the distinguished NBC White Paper series in 1960. And he was furthermore an advocate of news specials, often breaking away from regularly scheduled entertainment shows in order to provide live coverage of important events, such as spacecraft launches, Congressional hearings, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet Kintner’s efforts were motivated by more than pro bono professionalism, as he was the first network chieftain to stress the profit potential of news programming. Just as importantly, Kintner, who would later serve in the Johnson administration, understood the public relations value of his news division at a time when government regulators began to press for more news and information programming.

Such growing pressures culminated in the 1961 appointment of Newton Minow, who famously referred to network television as a “vast wasteland” in a speech he delivered shortly after taking office. Like other officials in the Kennedy administration, Minow explicitly put network officials on notice that he considered television a strategic weapon in the struggle against communism, and throughout his two-year term, he prodded and cajoled network officials to expand their news departments and increase their coverage of international issues. TV executives were generally sympathetic to this shift in government policy and news department staffers were especially enthusiastic to see their profession restored to the prominence it had enjoyed during World War II. Indeed, it’s important to note that the generation of journalists that filed stories from the battlefronts of WWII were, by the 1960s, in charge of the network news divisions and generally sympathetic to the government’s strategic and ideologcal struggle against communism.

Former war correspondent Walter Cronkite took charge of the CBS Evening News in 1962 and Howard K. Smith (one of the “Murrow Boys”) anchored ABC’s nightly newscast. Both networks furthermore launched prime-time documentary series, CBS Reports and ABC CloseUp, which shared a similar set of topics and treatments as NBC White Paper. Indeed, the early 1960s would prove to be the golden age of the prime-time documentary in the United States, with much of the programming shaped by Cold War concerns. All three networks furthermore competed to provide breaking news coverage of important events, and in 1963, CBS and NBC expanded their nightly news programs from 15 to 30 minutes. By this point, American network news divisions had established bureaus in dozens of cities around the world and had developed a sophisticated infrastructure for the processing, shipment, and editing of news footage, so that visual accounts of important events around the world would find their way to national television screens within 24 hours. In a few short years, news became an integral component of network television and on-camera news professionals became major television personalities, their popularity carefully tracked by audience research services and monitored by network executives.

The growing prominence of television news also encouraged politicians and public officials to play to the camera in an attempt to advance particular causes. Most capable in this regard was the President Kennedy himself, whose press con ferences earned surprisingly strong ratings due in part to his telegenic appearance and his wry humor. Tragically, Kennedy’s assassination would also draw record audiences, followed by the capture and on-camera slaying of his assassin, and by live coverage of the visually stunning funeral service beamed from the nation’s capital. All three networks suspended commercial advertising and turned the airwaves over to their news divisions for several days, in what many would refer to as the coming of age of television. During those few days, the medium provided a common ground upon which citizens worked through the complex emotions engendered by that historic chain of events.

In the years that followed, however, the news divisions would find that the awesome power invested in them could also prove to be a liability. Although network news now had the authority to direct national attention at specific events and social concerns, it also stirred up controversy and counterattacks when it did so. News programs about the exploitation of migrant laborers angered farmers; criticisms of public education worried parents; and investigations into lung cancer stirred resentments among cigarette companies, then the leading advertisers on network television. Perhaps most significantly, news programs about civil rights elevated African Americans to a level of visibility they had never before enjoyed in the U.S. media. Sympathetic news portrayals of the plight of black citizens stirred both righteous indignation and racist antipathy. As the campaign for civil rights gained momentum in the 1960s, it sometimes skirted conventional politics, appealing directly to national television audiences through a series of carefully orchestrated non-violent protest demonstrations and through the charismatic appeals of black community leaders.

Likewise, as the war in Vietnam heated up, television news became a site of struggle between pro- and anti-war factions. During the early years of the war, Vietnam correspondents rarely challenged the U.S. government’s rationale for intervention or its progress reports on the war effort. Yet President Johnson’s decision to escalate troop commitments in 1965 greatly expanded the military draft, inciting resistance on American college campuses, within the government, and among military units in the field. Closely monitored by both sides, nightly news divisions juggled the competing claims of the administration and the anti-war movement, as opposing viewpoints began to work their way into regular news coverage. The growing protest movement discouraged Lyndon Johnson from seeking a second presidential term in 1968, and many critics—correctly or not—attributed his political demise in part to television news coverage that was increasingly critical of the war and sympathetic to protestors.

Now widely perceived as a news oligopoly, the networks both influenced public perceptions of key public issues and found themselves called to account for skewing political deliberation. Presidents were especially sensitive to the perceived power of television news: during his time in office, Lyndon Johnson grew increasingly agitated by network reporting, and Richard Nixon was hostile to the three networks from the very moment he entered the Oval Office. Giving voice to the administration’s sentiments, Vice President Spiro Agnew publicly lambasted the “effete corps of impudent snobs” that ruled the news media, while officials within the Nixon administration began to advocate the development of cable technology, hoping to undermine the power of the three commercial networks.

Despite these tensions, television would continue to prevail as the public’s dominant news source throughout the 1970s, even though the complexion of news organizations would change considerably. At NBC, changes began with the retirement of Chet Huntley in 1970, a vacancy that would stir several years of intense competition to fill the anchor slot. At the same time, executives were reassessing the Kintner legacy that had pushed NBC to a leadership role in TV news. RCA, the parent corporation of NBC, had earlier accepted the costs of an extensive global news operation because it assumed that such programming helped to drive the sale of television sets, both at home and abroad. By the 1970s, however, the sale of sets in the U.S. began to taper off and RCA began to shift its emphasis to informatic, aerospace, and military product lines. Given the importance of government contracts in such fields, and given changing government attitudes toward news, RCA no longer relished the expansive ambitions of the Kintner era. Consequently, NBC News began to trim budgets and close news bureaus. Its nightly news program then began to lag behind its CBS competitor until coverage of the Watergate hearings re-energized the division and catapulted Tom Brokaw to a position of visibility that would eventually earn him the anchor slot on the nightly news in 1976.

Watergate coverage also animated the fortunes of public broadcasting, as Robert McNeil and Jim Lehrer fashioned thoughtful interviews and commentary, providing some of the first regular coverage of national politics on PBS. In 1976, the duo launched the McNeil- Lehrer Report, a nightly half-hour program that quickly won a solid audience of opinion leaders and media critics. While earning both criticism and praise for its emphasis on “talking heads,” the program delivered precisely what was lacking in commercial network newscasts. It furthermore addressed two other criticisms often leveled at TV news when in 1983 the anchors bought the production company and expanded their program to an hour-long format, as the McNeil- Lehrer News Hour. Ironically, this gave PBS, the network with the most diminutive news resources, the most in-depth and independent nightly newscast.

The resurgent interest in television news could also be measured by the fortunes of the first prime-time newsmagazine, 60 Minutes. Premiering in 1968, many critics complained that the program represented a softening of the documentary news tradition by emphasizing investigative stories that focused on clearly defined villains, rather than broad-ranging reports on more abstract but pressing social issues. Yet despite the program’s calculated tilt toward a narrative style, it failed to attract large audiences and languished at the bottom of the ratings, threatened with cancellation. Ranked 101st among 106 network programs in 1975, 60 Minutes unexpectedly began a meteoric ascent to become the number 1 ratings draw in 1979. Some attributed its newfound success to a shift in scheduling that moved the program to early prime-time on Sundays, but just as importantly, the reversal of fortune seemed to reflect a growing popular interest in investigative reporting in the wake of Watergate.

ABC soon harnessed this same enthusiasm with the premiere of 20/20 in 1978, a magazine show that balanced tough investigative reports with lighter fare about fads, fashions, and celebrities. Both networks saw benefits to the new programs, since they seemed to fulfill public-service responsibilities while steering clear of government criticism by focusing their attention on unscrupulous crooks rather than hot-button political issues. Moreover, the newsmagazines proved to be money machines, costing only half as much as hour-long dramas, while delivering upscale demographics and premium advertising rates. Just as importantly, they helped to mitigate internal tensions within the news divisions, as they provided showcases for such high-powered talent as Mike Wallace, Barbara Walters, and Ed Bradley. Over the next two decades, both ABC and CBS sought to expand on their successful magazine offerings and NBC tried unsuccessfully to match its competition until finally, in 1992, it too scored a hit with Dateline.

For ABC, the growing emphasis on newsmagazines was only part of a larger set of transformations, as Roone Arledge, the architect of the network’s successful sports division, moved over to take charge of news in what critics perceived as a shocking triumph of showbusiness over journalistic professionalism.

Arledge, however, proved to be a prodigious booster of news, reformatting the nightly news show and launching 20/20 in 1978. The following year, with the hostage crisis in Iran, ABC was especially aggressive in its coverage, providing regular updates, including the sensationally titled late-night show, Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage. The program nevertheless provided sober, in-depth features and interviews, elevating the network’s chief diplomatic correspondent, Ted Koppel, to a position of prominence and, after the release of the hostages, allowing him to transform the show into Nightline, a commercial counterpart to McNeil-Lehrer. In 1981, Arledge also carved out a new home for a disillusioned David Brinkley, who fled NBC to host This Week with David Brinkley, a show that would finally bring ABC to a leading position on the Sunday-morning talk circuit. Shortly thereafter, Arledge shrewdly tapped his leading Middle East correspondent, Peter Jennings, to anchor the ABC World News Tonight. Thus, in less than a decade, Arledge played a prominent role in transforming ABC into the leading U.S. network news operation with some of the most talented personnel in the profession.

Meanwhile, CBS greeted the 1980s with its own agenda for change. Walter Cronkite, who was often referred to as “the most trusted man in America,” retired in 1981 after two decades anchoring the CBS Evening News. Dan Rather won out in the struggle to succeed Cronkite, but the ratings of the network’s flagship news program began to falter. In response, CBS went through a string of executive producers, trying to restore the luster of the Cronkite years, but the network found itself in an increasingly tight ratings race with its competitors. CBS has other problems, as well. A 1982 documentary, The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception, stirred up a major libel suit when it re-examined the calculation of combat casualties during the Vietnam War, claiming that military leaders manipulated weekly body counts in an effort to sustain support for the war effort. General William Westmoreland, the retired commander of U.S. forces in Southeast Asia, sued CBS, and the resulting legal settlement sent shock waves through the news department, as an internal investigation sought to rectify dubious journalistic practices, especially standards for editing on-camera interviews.

The biggest problem con fronting television news, however, was the steady erosion of ratings, as cable television increasingly siphoned off network viewers throughout the 1980s. Younger audiences were most likely to gravitate to cable channels, and consequently the age demographic for nightly news programs began to drift upward. Cable also posed a direct challenge when in 1980 Ted Turner launched Cable Network News (CNN), a 24-hour news channel, and one year later added Headline News, a news update program that rotated on a half-hourly basis. Journalists at the major networks generally dismissed the new challenger, noting that Turner, whom they regarded as a volatile personality, had shown no prior commitment to news, and CNN seemed to be operating on a shoestring budget. Yet the cable network enjoyed certain cost advantages, such as a non-union workforce and a base of operations in Atlanta, where real-estate costs were considerably lower than Manhattan. Turner also enjoyed the counsel of Reese Schonfeld, a veteran news producer who was tapped to lead the news organization during its early years. Schonfeld understood that the key weakness of his competitors was the relatively high cost of maintaining a global news operation in order to produce a half-hour nightly newscast and a few weekly magazine shows. CNN by comparison spread the cost of its news infrastructure across two channels broadcasting around the clock—48 hours of programming per day. In 1985, the cable network went even further, establishing CNN International (CNNI) to manage a collection of distinctive satellite news services targeted at different regions of the globe.

By the mid-1980s, cable TV in the United States was a growing force in both news and entertainment, and Ted Turner’s channels emerged as leaders in both cable ratings and advertising. Though still diminutive by comparison to the major broadcast networks, the Atlanta-based upstart began to maneuver for financing that would allow it to mount a hostile takeover of the venerable CBS. Executives at CBS responded by bringing in friendly investors, most prominently Laurence Tisch, who would eventually take control of the network in 1986. Tisch, ironically, proved to be no less disruptive to network operations, and in one of his very first acts as chairman, he toured CBS News bureaus around the world, shuttering operations, laying off staff, and slashing costs. In the same year, Capital Cities Broadcasting took over ABC, and General Electric absorbed NBC. At all three networks, executives suddenly returned their attention to cost controls, seeking to make news operations more efficient and more attractive to advertisers. With only a limited number of programming hours, news divisions sought to develop new prime-time magazine programs and to prop up the sagging ratings of nightly newscasts with more feature-oriented material.

Turmoil within news organizations began to grow, however, as staffers tried to resist what they saw as a further softening of journalistic and public-service standards. Remarkably, they could count on little support from government regulators. Indeed, throughout the Reagan Presidency, the administration aggressively sought to undermine the independence of network news divisions, and the FCC relentlessly rolled back government guidelines regarding the public-service commitments of broadcasters. Chairman Mark Fowler argued that the growing number of available TV channels diluted the government’s rationale for regulating broadcasting in the public’s interest. According to Fowler, television should enjoy the same First Amendment rights as newspapers and magazines, a position that has increasingly prevailed since the 1980s. Moreover, in its efforts to nurture a multiplication of services, the FCC made a number of rulings that allowed Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch to launch a fourth commercial broadcast network in 1986, despite the fact that the FOX Network had no immediate plans for news or public-affairs programming. Instead, the channel resolutely focused on entertainment, and its sole forays into news consisted of tabloid-style magazines such as Inside Edition and Hard Copy. The emergence of FOX, when coupled with changes at the major networks and the increasingly sensational focus of local TV news, fueled criticisms about the growing impact of ratings and entertainment values on the news judgment of television professionals. The word “infotainment” gained widespread currency during the late 1980s, and battles erupted within news organizations over the future of network news. At one point, six of the leading journalists at CBS offered to buy the news division and run it as a separate entity in the hope of protecting it from what they saw as the cynical economic calculations of network executives.

Sobering events at Tiananmen Square, the Berlin Wall, and in the Persian Gulf helped to slow the eroding status of network news operations, however. The Gulf War especially exposed the challenge faced by the down-sized network news divisions, as they seemed to be bested at every turn by CNN, which offered round-the-clock coverage that proved influential not only in the U.S. but also in the Middle East and Europe. CNN furthermore earned kudos for its independent reporting from Baghdad throughout the war, a stark contrast to the pack journalism practiced by its competition. Yet with the luxury of CNN’s many hours of programming, it also could swing from the most serious topical news to the most sensational tabloid stories, as it demonstrated with its capacious coverage of domestic stories such as the Menendez murder trial, Tonya Harding’s assault on Nancy Kerrigan, and Marina Bobbit’s castration of her wayward husband. The apogee of such coverage seemed to arrive with the surreal, slow-motion highway pursuit of O.J. Simpson and his subsequent murder trial, followed shortly thereafter by the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.

The latter is remarkable on a number of accounts. First of all, the story was broken not by a network news organization, but rather by Matt Drudge, a gossip columnist on the Internet. Several news organizations were already aware of rumors of the President’s romantic liaison with a White House intern, but despite intense competitive pressures, each had exercised restraint until Drudge published undocumented assertions on his web page, launching a frenzy of coverage that dominated national news for much of 1998, despite many other pressing social issues. Intense competition among broadcast, cable, and Internet news organizations paradoxically encouraged a growing diversity of electronic sources but also fostered a singular fixation on a story of little consequence in the realm of public policy. Since the networks no longer had a monopoly of airtime, talent, audiences, or advertising revenues they consequently found it difficult to resist the attraction of such a sensational news stories, even if it led to an imbalance in coverage.

Moreover, in a world of multiplying delivery channels, the news organizations that seemed most successful were those that could leverage their news output through as many channels and times of the day as possible, both at home and abroad. Such considerations led NBC to launch two global cable networks in 1995: MSNBC, a joint venture with Microsoft, and CNBC, a financial news channel. CNN took this philosophy to another level when it merged with Time Warner in 1995, hoping to realize synergies with such magazines as Time, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated. Soon after, News Corporation, the parent company of FOX and the owner of a growing collection of satellite TV services around the world, finally took a plunge into broadcast journalism with the 1996 premier of the FOX News Channel, a service that modeled itself on right-wing talk radio in the U.S., thereby distinguishing it from rivals and helping to push it ahead of CNN in U.S. cable ratings. Interestingly, this put ABC and CBS in a difficult position, since neither news organization enjoyed the same synergies as their competitors and yet both worried that it would be costly to launch yet another cable news service in an already crowded market. Consequently, ABC, now owned by Disney, began to search for strategic partnerships, entering into extended negotiations with CNN. As talks continued, the market value of the two organizations indicated a dramatic reversal of fortune, with CNN reporting profits in 2001 of $200 million on $1.6 billion in revenues and ABC News realizing only $15 million in profits derived from $600 million in revenues. Although at the millennium, the nightly newscasts of the major broadcast networks still drew the largest audiences, the proliferating services of cable television had dramatically redefined the meaning of network news.