We now assume that when people turn on the evening news, they basically already know what the news is. They've heard it on the radio. They've seen it on the Internet. They've seen it on one of the cable companies. So that makes our job a bit different.
As anchorman of the CBS Evening News, I signed off my nightly broadcasts for nearly two decades with a simple statement: 'And that's the way it is.' To me, that encapsulates the newsman's highest ideal: to report the facts as he sees them, without regard for the consequences or controversy that may ensue.
I miss particularly the managing editor role on the 'Evening News.'
On the day I started college in 1979, no woman had ever been on the United States Supreme Court or served as the Speaker of the House. None had been an astronaut or the solo anchor of a network evening news broadcast. Not one had been president of an Ivy League college or run a serious campaign for president.
The democratic system is challenged by the failure in television because our evening news programmes have gone for an attempt to entertain as much as to inform in the desperate fight for ratings.
The evening news is evolving rapidly, and I think we have to be extraordinarily nimble.
Every evening, I would excuse myself from playing in the backyard and go inside to watch the evening news... I wanted to get out there and see the world, and as a kid, I knew that Peter Jennings had a thirst and hunger to travel the world, too.
It is every producer's dream to be part of a dedicated, hard-working team that produces an outstanding broadcast like the 'CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley.'
If you watch the evening news, Dr. Kissinger is very often brought on to sort of be the statesman of his age and to reflect dispassionately on world events. And so a film challenging his legacy, a film that assesses charges that are quite grave against him, is something that is touchy for the media to show.
At the end of the day, my focus will be to make the 'Evening News' as strong from an editorial perspective as it possibly can be.
The evening news is a concept whose time has come and gone.
Imagine what it would be like if you didn't know that the evening news was funded primarily by 'Big Pharma.' You would actually believe the stuff that they're saying. You might even think those are the stories that matter.
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.
The 'Evening News' is going to have a long run, both as a broadcast and as a presence online and on cellphones. It is a franchise with a very rich tradition.
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.
Honestly, anchoring the news on a nightly basis is the hardest job I've ever taken on.
Every once in a while, a book so possesses me that I happily give up a couple of consecutive nights of sleep - as well as the evening news broadcasts and latenight talk shows - to finish it. That's what happened when I opened the novel 'Shadow Tag' by Louise Erdrich.
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 wish more people read hard copies of the newspaper and watched the evening news from start to finish.
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.
When I stepped down from the evening news at the age of 65, in '81, things were still going well. Immediately after that, the whole tenor of the CBS News Department changed.
The perception is that more important people watch news in the evenings than in the mornings.
Introductions, that is, belong to the masterpieces and classics of the world, to the great and ancient and accepted things; and I am here introducing a short, small story of my own which appeared in The Evening News about ten months ago.
I'm so impressed with the quality of the 'Evening News.'
Peter Jennings was the James Bond of evening news, and I always wanted to be that. His evening news was really a conversation with America, and I hope that's something I can achieve.
