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17 articles from 2008

20 August 2008 10:39 AM, PDT | From Studio Briefing | See recent Studio Briefing news

The huge audience tuning in for the Beijing Olympics has given a boost to NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams, which precedes it in primetime in many markets. After ordinarily running neck-and-neck with (and often being beaten by) ABC's World News With Charles Gibson, the NBC newscast pulled far out in front last week with an average of 9.4 million viewers to ABC's 6.9 million. CBS's numbers appeared unaffected. CBS Evening News With Katie Couric remained a distant third with 5.6 million viewers, which is about its average weekly figure.

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18 August 2008 10:26 AM, PDT | From Studio Briefing | See recent Studio Briefing news

The overwhelming majority of people who watch cable and broadcast newscasts and topical variety shows are unable to identify the party that now controls Congress, name the current secretary of state, and name Britain's new prime minister, according to the new Pew Survey on News Consumption. The national average for answering those three questions is only 18 percent, the study found; only 10 percent among viewers of the CBS Evening News With Katie Couric, by far the lowest ranked among the nightly news programs. The survey said that 21 percent of the viewers of NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams could answer the questions; 19 percent of the viewers of ABC World News with Charles Gibson could. Ranking higher than any of the nightly newscasts, however, were Comedy Central's The Colbert Report and The Daily Show with 34 percent and 30 percent respectively.

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30 July 2008 10:26 AM, PDT | From Studio Briefing | See recent Studio Briefing news

Among the network nightly newscasts, NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams remained in the lead with 7.31 million viewers, once again edging out ABC's World News with Charles Gibson, which captured 7.17 million viewers. CBS Evening News with Katie Couric continued to trail with 5.60 million viewers.

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29 July 2008 10:16 AM, PDT | From Studio Briefing | See recent Studio Briefing news

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams interviewed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the Today show Monday, suggesting up front that the telecast may have been as newsworthy as any remarks by the Iranian leader. "We're broadcasting from the grounds of the presidential compound in Tehran via an American television network on live television. That's never happened before," Williams said. In the interview Ahmadinejad insisted once more that Iran was not attempting to manufacture an atomic bomb, then added, "Nuclear weapons are so 20th century." (Some critics of the Iraq war have suggested that Iran, Iraq's neighbor, has been the real "winner" of the war, with the installation of a friendly Shiite government ending decades of conflict with the Sunni regime of Saddam Hussein.)

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23 July 2008 10:27 AM, PDT | From Studio Briefing | See recent Studio Briefing news

ABC and NBC wound up in a virtual tie for first place among the three nightly newscasts. Nielsen gave them an identical 5 rating and 11 share and noted that NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams averaged 7.23 million viewers, while ABC's World News With Charles Gibson drew 7.22 million. The difference was statistically insignificant. CBS Evening News with Katie Couric remained substantially behind with 5.5 million viewers.

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2 July 2008 10:37 AM, PDT | From Studio Briefing | See recent Studio Briefing news

NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams remained the most-watched network evening newscast during the second quarter, averaging 8 million viewers each night, according to Nielsen Media Research. It edged out ABC's World News With Charles Gibson, which recorded 7.8 million viewers. Last year, the order was reversed. Meanwhile CBS Evening News With Katie Couric continued to lose viewers, averaging 5.6 million, down 528,000 viewers from the same quarter a year ago. If Couric was feeling depressed by the latest ratings news, they may have been lifted by the announcement that the Radio-Television News Directors Association had awarded her program the Edward R. Murrow Award for best newscast.

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20 June 2008 10:33 AM, PDT | From Studio Briefing | See recent Studio Briefing news

A study by the MediaCrit.com blog examining criticism that the TV news media's coverage of the death of Meet the Press host Tim Russert was overblown, noted that the three major networks and CNN devoted a total of 1 hour an 17 minutes to his death on the first day of news coverage on June 13 while the same outlets devoted 1 hour and 1 minute to the death of ABC's Peter Jennings in August 2005. The study pointed out that NBC used the entire 28 and a half minutes of NBC Nightly News to report the Russert story while in 2005 ABC World News Tonight saved five minutes for other stories. The report observed: "The results are interesting, given that Jennings had a much longer on-air career, and that he anchored five days a week, compared to Russert's much smaller audiences for a niche Sunday morning program."

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16 June 2008 10:41 AM, PDT | From Studio Briefing | See recent Studio Briefing news

Before the death of veteran NBC newsman Tim Russert was announced by any broadcast or cable news network on Friday, word of his passing took the form of changes on Russert's Wikipedia listing, published reports observed today (Monday). The first official news came from Russert's employer, NBC, when Tom Brokaw broke into programming at 3:39 p.m. (NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams is currently on assignment in Afghanistan.) However, the New York Times reported that the Wikipedia site edited Russert's listing with word that he had died and began modifying his entry more than a half hour earlier, at 3:01 p.m. The Times observed that the listing was updated by someone whose Ip address belongs to Internet Broadcast Systems, the company that operates websites for NBC's owned-and-operated stations.

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4 June 2008 10:41 AM, PDT | From Studio Briefing | See recent Studio Briefing news

The ABC and NBC newscasts once again ended in a photo finish, with Nielsen giving a slight edge to ABC World News With Charles Gibson which, it said, attracted 7.66 million viewers, while NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams attracted 7.65 million viewers, a statistically insignificant difference. The CBS Evening News With Katie Couric remained well behind with 5.54 million viewers.

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29 May 2008 10:04 AM, PDT | From Studio Briefing | See recent Studio Briefing news

Among the evening newscasts, NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams continued to lead with a 5.5 rating and a 12 share representing 8.1 million viewers -- a bigger audience than most of Nbc's primetime programs. ABC World News With Charles Gibson remained close behind with an identical 5.5/12 but with about 300,000 fewer viewers. CBS Evening News with Katie Couric set another record low with a 3.8/8, representing 5.33 million viewers.

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20 May 2008 10:12 AM, PDT | From Studio Briefing | See recent Studio Briefing news

The White House on Monday accused NBC News of "deceitful" editing of an interview with President Bush by correspondent Richard Engel. In the interview, Engel asked Bush about remarks he made before the Israeli Knesset last week in which he accused his political opponents of saying "we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along." Engel asked Bush if he was referring to Barack Obama. As broadcast on NBC Nightly News, Bush replied, "You know, my policies haven't changed, but evidently the political calendar has. ... And when, you know, a leader of Iran says that they want to destroy Israel, you've got to take those words seriously." The White House objected to the deletion of this passage from the president's response following the words, "the political calendar has:" "People need to read the speech. You didn't get it exactly right, either. What I said was that we need to take the words of people seriously." Removing those words, Bush counsel Ed Gillespie said, amounted to "deceitful editing to further a media-manufactured storyline." NBC maintained that the report accurately reflected the president's comments and that the entire unedited interview is available on its website. In its own report on the controversy, the Associated Press observed, "The White House routinely pushes back against news stories it does not agree with. The one against NBC News stands out for its angry tone and its accusation that the news division deceptively and deceitfully edited the president's words."

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2 May 2008 10:33 AM, PDT | From Studio Briefing | See recent Studio Briefing news

The former president of CBS News has expressed anger over recent revelations by the New York Times that military analysts hired by the networks to present unbiased observations about the conduct of the war in Iraq had undisclosed ties to the Pentagon and/or military contractors. "There was a deliberate attempt to deceive the public," Andrew Heyward, who served as president of CBS News from 1996 to 2005, told National Public Radio. "Analysts whose real allegiance was to the Pentagon and who apparently were given at least special access for that allegiance were presented as analysts whose allegiance was to the networks and, therefore, the public." Former Army Maj. Gen John Batiste, who eventually became critical of the war and was not invited to the Pentagon for briefings as some of his colleagues were, told Npr that there was "a very deliberate attempt on the part of the administration to shape public opinion" about the war and that it seemed to him that most military analysts appearing on the broadcast networks and cable news channels "were parroting administration talking points." Nevertheless, on his blog, The Daily Nightly, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams insisted that the two principal military analysts employed by NBC News, the late former Gen. Wayne Downing and former Gen. Barry McCaffrey "never gave what I considered to be the party line. ...At no time did our analysts, on my watch or to my knowledge, attempt to push a rosy Pentagon agenda before our viewers."

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18 April 2008 10:27 AM, PDT | From Studio Briefing | See recent Studio Briefing news

Former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw has said that he attempted to warn Katie Couric about the pitfalls that awaited her as she moved from host of the Today show to anchor of the CBS Evening News. In an interview with the Boston Herald, Brokaw said, "I told her when she left that it's a dive off the high board. ... This is harder than it looks, to go from the morning to the evening." Brokaw himself had made a similar dive in 1983, when he, too left the Today show to become an evening anchor. Brokaw remarked that CBS "made a number of mistakes in terms of how they marketed her and what their approach to the news was," before cutting off the discussion about Couric. "The last thing I'm going to do is get involved in Katie's business," he said. As for the current debate over whether networks and stations should do away with high-profile, high-priced news personalities and invest the money in news gathering, Brokaw remarked succinctly, "People watch people" and pointed to the appeal of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite.

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17 April 2008 10:30 AM, PDT | From Studio Briefing | See recent Studio Briefing news

Legendary TV journalist Roger Mudd, who spent nearly 20 years at Cbs's Washington bureau, expressed his dismay Wednesday over a recent New York Times report that CBS is considering outsourcing some of its newsgathering activities to CNN. Appearing on Npr's Talk of the Nation, Mudd, who went on to co-anchor NBC Nightly News, said that if CBS embarked on a policy of farming out news coverage to CNN the news organization might eventually end up producing Face the Nation and 60 Minutes and little else. "That would be the sad end" of CBS News, he remarked. Appearing on the same program, Face the Nation moderator Bob Schieffer maintained that such a scenario "is not going to happen." He insisted that there had only been some talks about CBS and CNN "sharing some resources in Baghdad" and that the talks ended inconclusively. He insisted that the network would "stick with its own reporters through the foreseeable future." But Schieffer's attempt to spike the rumors was challenged by Mudd. "Who told you that?" he asked. Schieffer, however, declined to name his informant and responded that his remarks represented "pretty much what we were told inside the company." Asked if he would be willing to take over the anchor desk at the CBS Evening News again if Katie Couric stepped down, Schieffer replied, "I haven't been asked," then added, "I think that would be a question I would not want to discuss."

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7 April 2008 10:36 AM, PDT | From Studio Briefing | See recent Studio Briefing news

Tom Brokaw, who fronts a two-hour documentary about Martin Luther King on the History Channel this month (it debuted Sunday night), has acknowledged that it is difficult to get people -- especially young people -- to tune in to long-form documentaries these days. Interviewed by Forbes magazine, Brokaw said, "It's tough. It's the same thing as trying to get them to read a long-form magazine and newspaper pieces. Everyone wants to do YouTube and Match.com." Brokaw, the former anchor of NBC Nightly News, said that developing an evening newscast is "a struggle." Recalling a visit to Mit last week, he said, "There were about 15 students in the room with me, and I asked how many of them read a newspaper on a daily basis. Two hands went up. Then I asked how many watched the evening news on a nightly basis. No hands went up. And then I asked how many spend a lot of time during the day going to their Pda or computer to find out what's going on, and every hand went up."

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18 January 2008 | From Studio Briefing | See recent Studio Briefing news

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams acknowledged Wednesday night that he and other reporters on the program have sometimes mispronounced Nevada as "Nuh-VAH-duh," rather than -- as the locals do -- "Nuh-VAA-duh" -- something that angers Nevadans who flooded the network with complaints. In a lead-in to a story by George Lewis, Williams said, "We haven't always said it the same way and there is a correct way." Lewis then warned presidential candidates campaigning in the state that they had better pronounce the state's name correctly or lose votes. Valerie Fridland, a sociolinguist at the University of Nevada, Reno, told the Reno Gazette-Journal, "News anchors make a big effort to correctly pronounce the names of places around the world, so when they don't do it in their own country, people get upset." The Associated Press quoted Josh Guenter, pronunciation editor for the Merriam-Webster dictionary company as saying, "People in other states have become upset, but I've never heard of a national flap over it like this." [Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has yet to master the pronunciation of "California."]

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10 January 2008 | From Studio Briefing | See recent Studio Briefing news

In an effort to make available more produced news material than ordinarily makes the cut for its nightly newscast, NBC News has announced plans to launch a new website Wednesday that will provide longer versions of stories and interviews seen on the TV broadcast as well as features that did not get on the newscast at all. The website will also sport a new video player providing bigger pictures and higher-quality video than previously, the network said. In an interview with Broadcasting & Cable Alex Wallace, executive producer of NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, said, "Hopefully, it will give us the ability in a visual and video-centric way to show you that NBC does have a lot more going on than you get in 22 minutes on Nightly." Wallace also said that she hopes to increase overseas coverage by putting it on the website.

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17 articles from 2008