Puck’s Dylan Byers wrote Wednesday night in his latest must-read media article that the mood inside CBS News has grown even more grim as, not only are they facing a lawsuit from President Trump and an FCC investigation (and, we would add, a public and private struggle session over their far-left staffers objecting to a host’s basic decency to defend Israel), but network insiders are now forlorn over what they view as a dreadfully boring new format for the CBS Evening News.
In “CBS News’ Blue Period,” Byers used Tuesday’s impromptu Oval Office Q&A between Elon Musk, Trump, and that day’s White House press pool as a jumping off point to voice internal angst with the CBS Evening News’s newsmagazine format as it chose to lead off with a lengthy report on the pitiful state of American education.
Byers noted that co-anchor John Dickerson started with the show with the adage from 70 years ago of “[w]hy can’t Johnny read” before divulging that, “within CBS’s Washington bureau, it has become fodder for a broader internal critique of Evening News—and, indeed, the network itself—under C.E.O. Wendy McMahon and Evening News supervising producer Bill Owens.”
He dished these spicy stabs at Dickerson, who’s a pompous leftist hack in his own right:
“Why can’t John read the news?” one CBS News correspondent asked me, referring to Dickerson. “It’s tough to watch,” a former CBS News insider said. “I appreciate doing something new. I really do… [but] Bill and I have different theories of the case.”
(....)
“It’s just not good, sorry” one said—while irking several of the Washington-based correspondents[.]
(....)
On Wednesday morning, I’m told that Owens came down to the newsroom floor and made it clear to executive producer Guy Campanile and others that even he thought the broadcast had underplayed the Musk news. Was this ass-covering, an actual volte-face, or simply the latest sign that no one in charge really knows what to do anymore? “I think last night was the night many around here really got upset or confused by what they’re attempting to do,” one CBS News insider told me.
Owens — who added the weeknight newscast two years ago to his purview to go along with leading 60 Minutes — came up with, in Byers’s Cliff Notes version of events, “a new editorial strategy prioritizing longer enterprise packages, human interest stories, and ample weather coverage over the usual digest of the day’s big headlines” and not include then-anchor Norah O’Donnell.
Byers conceded “[p]erhaps none of these were great ideas, but they were at least an attempt to shake up a stale format whose decline mirrors the demise of linear television” and thus “could afford to take the risk.”
“[Y]ou can understand the desire to create a product that offered something other than headlines that audiences are already familiar with...If 60 Minutes and CBS Sunday Mornings have proven successful with the newsmagazine format, the logic goes, then why not Evening News? The longer packages seemed designed for social media and YouTube, which is where the future...resides,” he continued.
After revealing the show’s ratings sunk by nine percent in week two from last year and five percent from its debut, Byers painted what comes off as arguing about what to have for dinner while the Titanic is sinking:
Still, the 60 scandal and the aimlessness of Evening News have taken some of the shine off...adding insult to injury for journalists struggling to come to terms with the real existential crisis—which, as I’ve noted before, is that CBS News is a fading division in a fading network within a fading company.
