Whither the TV News Anchor?

“Did you know that 90 percent of people now get their news exclusively from social media?” Saturday Night Live’s Colin Jost joked at the 2024 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “I saw it in a random guy’s TikTok.”

In 1980, 53 million people watched the three networks’ anchor-starring nightly news shows, according to Barrett Media. In July, just 16.4 million did, and O’Donnell’s audience averaged a mere 4 million. But her recent 60 Minutes interview with Pope Francis reached more than twice as many, according to Nielsen: 7.3 million people, plus a longer version on CBS that reached 2.2 million.

TV news execs are out to trim costs and pivot to digital. And CBS is definitely betting on making more money with O’Donnell as a star interviewer with many outlets including digital.

Her illustrious predecessors had infinitely more clout than any anchor can today. In 1953, about 37 percent of all Americans watched CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow — 60 million viewers, according to TV critic Tom Shales. President Truman talked him out of running for Senator because he would lose power, according to Murrow biographer Bob Edwards. CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite had almost 30 million viewers, about 15 percent of Americans, according to Cronkite’s former CBS colleague Peter Herford. Cronkite was so influential that after he shockingly called the Vietnam War “a stalemate,” President Johnson, who had escalated the war, canceled his reelection campaign. Robert F. Kennedy urged Cronkite to run for Senator, according to The Washington Post, but he, too, figured he had more power as a news anchor.

When JFK was assassinated, people learned about it from Cronkite. When former President Donald Trump was nearly assassinated, they learned about it from a phone alert.

The CBS newscast of Cronkite’s appointed successor, Dan Rather, got about a third of Cronkite’s viewers — under 10 million in 2002. When Cronkite quit anchoring in 1981, 81 percent of Americans had a positive opinion of him, according to Forbes, but when Rather quit as news anchor in 2005, only 21 percent believed his reporting. Americans have broadly lost faith in TV news anchors, and prefer news tailored to their increasingly divergent worldviews, on social media, not so much on broadcast TV.

In the 2024 Hollywood Reporter/Morning Consult poll, the most-trusted nightly news anchor was NBC’s Lester Holt (65 percent trusted him), followed by ABC’s David Muir (63 percent) and O’Donnell (53 percent). She will likely have better luck with specials like her Pope interview, which boosted ratings 18 percent for 60 Minutes — which is the most-watched TV news show for the last 50 years. It doesn’t have an anchor, like a nightly news show, just star interviewers.

O’Donnell may be better off freed from a TV institution that looks to be in irreversible decline. The anchor chair is now a hot seat on a sinking ship — but the new, more 60 Minutes-like CBS Evening News promises to be an improvement. If she prospers, it will be through star power that bonds her with an audience increasingly distrustful of an old-style anchor who tries to tell them (in Cronkite’s famous sign-off line): “And that’s the way it is.” Today, we want our news from entertaining people who feel like friends we can relate to, not figures of authority. As she told AARP in 2021,  “We also try to deliver hard news with heart — storytelling that creates an emotional connection. As my mother always says, ‘If you capture someone’s heart, you capture their mind.’ ”