Campbell Brown Quotes

The evening news is a concept whose time has come and gone.

There used to be three networks, and now there are 40 million networks. There's a lot more competition out there, too. We would bring in 27 million people. Now, they're lucky if they have 17. I looked at the ratings, for the first time in 25 years, just to see, and there were 130 shows on. There used to be maybe 30.

The people who watch Fox are not going to watch CNN. You know, let's be honest.

The 800-pound gorillas of TV news are gone. When I was the White House correspondent at NBC, and Tom Brokaw was anchor, the reporters were protected.

I think we're in a time when people are much more interested in a show than where you find it.

I think a lot of people in television news look at the cable networks with great envy.

I think the networks, in general, have to evaluate what's happening around them. I'm sure they're scared about a lot of things: Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, and all these places that allow people to watch shows in chunks.

I'm fascinated by journalism. I put a keen eye, not a negative eye, on its role, particularly how it is changed by the times we're living in.

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.

I think everybody in news understands that the audience that watches for more than an hour is not your target audience - because those people are on life support.

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.

The more opportunities people have to experience television on different platforms, the more television they consume overall. So there actually has been a benefit, but the ratings have gone down. But we've seen kind of the horizontal benefit of this. And it remains a great, great promotion engine.

I think TV is the only place left where you can have a midsize something.

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.

We'll never see national shows with 45 shares again.

Journalism talk is part of the nonstop background noise of American life.

With the fragmentation of television audiences and the advent of cable and on-demand services, the prestige of being an anchor is not what it was in the days of Walter Cronkite.

In 2010, one in four Americans got the news from Fox News.

I think it's really good that you have great competition among news networks, and for that matter all the networks in general. It's bringing more and more people in to watching the news.

I mean, all the ratings wars are silly. But, I mean, someone has to be concerned about the ratings because it means, you know, it translates into revenue.

ABC wouldn't be a player in the news major leagues until the 1970s, when Roone Arledge brought to ABC News the energy and programming approach he had applied to ABC Sports.

The Fox News cable channel is doing very well because there is a market for what Fox News has to offer.

Reporters now are better educated than the crowd I knew when I broke in. We still had guys shaped by Prohibition and the Depression, so the news business still had badly paid people who loved it for the life, because every day was different.

News may not be very profitable anymore, but it sure is popular.

A show like the 'Only Fool and Horses' Christmas special got 24 million viewers, so practically everyone in the country was watching. But of course it's a different world now, with so many channels. And those kind of figures are really difficult to achieve.