I wish more people read hard copies of the newspaper and watched the evening news from start to finish.
I left the golden age of documentaries to go into the golden days of the 'CBS Evening News.' You could see that the audiences were eroding.
'Blacks were too scared to do anything, but they came out to greet James Meredith': That would have been the story in the evening news if I hadn't gotten myself shot. I got shot, and that allowed the movement protest thing to take over then and do their thing.
My siblings and I were watching the evening news and we saw it flashed across the screen that our father had been shot... we just knew that something terrible had happened.
Collectively, we must do more than simply watch, with resignation and a feeling of powerlessness, reports on the evening news about the latest terrorist atrocity.
Watching the evening news in 2011 is a strange time-travel experience. 'The CBS Evening News,' 'ABC World News' and 'NBC Nightly News' haven't changed their style over the decades, still going for that old-fashioned mix of voice-of-authority pomp and feel-good fluff. The difference is that people aren't watching.
You'd think if anyone could charm America into caring about the evening news, it would be Katie Couric, the Tri Delt from Virginia who became America's sweetheart on the 'Today' show. But her ratings have been dismal - she comes in last place every week.
People are interested in things not necessarily covered by the mainstream media, so they download things online. The categories are growing because people find out that they're not able to get information about stories that are of interest to them on the evening news.
Political grandstanding might make for great soundbites for the evening news, but it will do nothing to help the people that go to work every day knowing that they're one health emergency away from bankruptcy. It will do nothing to help the hospitals struggling to keep their doors open under the crushing cost of uncompensated care.
I'm so impressed with the quality of the 'Evening News.'
