‘CBS Evening News’ Climbs to Second Place in Ratings

After more than two years in third place, “The CBS Evening News With Dan Rather” is moving up in the Nielsen ratings. It has finished second to “NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw” for three of the past four weeks, attracting an average of 11.49 million viewers a night last week compared to 11.79 million for NBC and 11.17 million for ABC’s “World News Tonight With Peter Jennings.”

NBC’s newscast has been in first place for 21 of the past 22 weeks. But the race is tightening, with CBS increasing its ratings by 7% over the past year. ABC is down 6% compared to a year ago while NBC is up 2%.

CBS executives believe that they are being rewarded for sticking with a traditional newscast that emphasizes the network’s hard-news roots.

“We make a consistent effort to deal with the important news stories every day,” Rather said in an interview. “One of our competitors is doing news lite,” he added, referring to NBC.

NBC executives, naturally, disagree with that characterization.

“The implication that we’re not doing hard news simply does not wash,” Brokaw responded. “We cover the day’s big stories--we’ve broken a number of stories on campaign finance, for example. But we have a richer mix of stories that are relevant to people’s lives.”

Defining hard news is an imprecise science--”Is it ‘feature news’ to do a series on prostate cancer?” asks NBC News Vice President Bill Wheatley. But, while CBS has been emphasizing the breaking news of the day, NBC has emphasized heavily promoted features on health, family issues and other non-traditional topics.

“CBS has the most traditional, hard-news broadcast among the three programs,” said Andrew Tyndall, editor of the Tyndall Report, an analysis of the content of the three network evening newscasts. “NBC is the most feature-oriented. And ABC has been alternating between the two approaches.”

According to Tyndall’s breakdown, so far this year CBS has carried 2,750 minutes of daily, breaking-news stories, compared to 2,210 minutes on NBC and 2,442 on ABC. CBS has increased its coverage of foreign news, nearly equaling ABC’s broadcast, which has long been identified with foreign coverage--1,193 minutes of foreign news on CBS compared to ABC’s 1,207 minutes. NBC has de-emphasized foreign coverage--carrying 804 minutes so far this year--while carrying more features (on subjects ranging from juvenile drug use to the financing of health-maintenance organizations and cures for the common cold) than its competitors.

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“We cover the news of the day, but we think it’s also important to give people stories that have relevance in their lives,” Wheatley said.

Wheatley added that it is difficult to tell whether the CBS newscast has risen in the ratings because of changes in the content or improvements in the network’s overall ratings.

In addition to focusing on the events of the day, CBS producers say, they’re aiming to break news themselves.

“We’re doing a newscast that plays to the strengths of our anchor and our correspondents,” said Jeff Fager, executive producer of the “CBS Evening News.” He cited recent stories on little-known but powerful Washington lobbyists, the melting of the Alaskan ice cap and an interview with a Palestinian terrorist as recent examples of original reporting on the newscast.

Fager, a former “60 Minutes” producer, took over “Evening News” nearly two years ago, after CBS’ ill-fated pairing of Rather and Connie Chung.

CBS executives acknowledge that they have been helped by their networks’ improving fortunes in prime time, but they say their research shows that viewers like their hard-news approach. “We have a different strategy from NBC,” Rather said.

NBC moved into first place last January following changes in the show under David Doss, a former “Dateline NBC” producer who began producing “Nightly News” in February 1996. The newscast also was helped by NBC’s dominant performance in prime time.

After an eight-year reign at the top of the news ratings, ABC News executives were divided over whether to emulate NBC’s more feature-oriented approach.

“I think all of us have been through a period where we looked at the success of NBC and wondered whether there was something there that we should be doing,” ABC’s Jennings acknowledged. “I think we got more embroiled in the JonBenet Ramsey case [a heavily covered story on NBC] than we might have. . . . We may have wandered a bit from what our viewers expect of us.”

Last fall, for example, “World News Tonight” replaced its long-running “American Agenda” report with a three-times-a-week segment called “Solutions,” which was supposed to offer solutions to problems facing the country.

Although it has included weightier subjects, “Solutions” has been criticized for doing features on topics such as snoring and home repairs. “We’re doing small solutions to small problems,” one ABC producer said sarcastically.

In recent weeks, the network has scaled “Solutions” back to once a week, and producers on the program say there has been a renewed commitment to hard news.

NBC executives, meanwhile, strongly dispute the notion that CBS and ABC do hard news and “Nightly News” doesn’t. CBS, they note, recently ran a series on living longer, while NBC did a three-part series on the hunt for Bosnian war criminals.

While Brokaw acknowledges that there may have been some excesses during the early, “experimental” days of the revised NBC format, today, he says, “If you look at the rundowns of our programs, the differences are at the margins.”

But Tyndall (and rival news executives) disagree. “If you look at the first 10 minutes of NBC’s newscast, the coverage is similar to the others,” he said. “But for the next 20 minutes, there are dramatic differences.”

He noted, for example, that while all three newscasts devoted coverage to recent events in Iraq, NBC has given twice as much coverage in the past two weeks to the Iowa septuplets (32 minutes on NBC, 12 on CBS and 14 on ABC).