The current landscape of network evening news anchors — Katie Couric, Charlie Gibson, and Brian Williams — was formed almost one year ago, when Couric started at CBS. USA Today’s Peter Johnson writes that Americans are still adjusting to the three “new kids” after many years of Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, and Dan Rather.
“The marketplace is incredibly turbulent — churned up more than a farmer’s field in October,” NBC News president Steve Capus tells the paper.
So, what to make of Gibson and World News being #1 at this one-year point? Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism says “it’s no surprise that the audience for these shows respond to an anchor who has seen it all and who seems to understand this hard news agenda. After all these years, it’s the Cronkite model.”