Last Sunday’s Washington Post carrying the article (see yesterday’s post) about a 26-year-old man telling why he and his friends have abandoned network news also ran an oped piece by Tom Rosenstiel, “The End of ‘Network News.”
Rosenstiel wrote of the time when “Networks were consequential – and serious in purpose.” By the late 1960s, CBS news anchorman Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America – so much so that after a 1968 visit to Viet Nam when he declared on The World Tonight that the war was unwinnable, President Johnson said to an aid, “If we have lost Walter, we have lost the country."
Uncle Walter, as many affectionately knew him, enjoyed brand resonance with tens of millions who answered him with deep trust and respect.
As cable news began undermining loyalty to network news programs, the networks adopted a defense that would eventually drain their news programs of substantial brand equity that had enhanced the value of a network’s entire franchise: letting cable competitors shape their defensive strategies by adopting cable’s game plan.
Hoping to beat cable outlets at their own game, network news began sensationalizing content, reducing substantive issues to quick-cut action shots and breathless sound bites, and treating news more as theater than as an important source of information. This cost to the networks: of a thoughtful and trustworthy worldview on which viewers placed the highest esteem which spilled over into non-news sectors of a network’s franchise.
Scott Bedbury’s calling brand resonance in yesterday’s post "the greatest single change in the concept of 'brand' in years" seems strange for all its obviousness. Yet, beyond a certain threshold of self-evidence, the obvious often melds into the background to become invisible.
That happened to network news. The importance of richly harmonic brand resonance receded from network consciousness and opened the way for ratings and ad revenues to become the controlling factor in shaping news broadcasts. This destroyed the kind of soul that made Walter Cronkite the most trusted human being in America.
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