I see that Lester Holt is stepping down as anchor of “NBC Nightly News” after ten years in the job, although he’ll remain on the weekly series “Dateline” — a show that, frankly, I had no idea is still on the air.
I don’t know if it was Holt’s own choice, or if NBC was dissatisfied with him consistently coming in second to David Muir on “ABC World News Tonight” for the last nine years. I’ll bet that the new executive team at Comcast wanted to do away with what I’m sure was a very substantial salary, especially considering how the audiences for all television news have dropped dramatically in the last decade or two.
Still, NBC doesn’t have another star-in-waiting who will change the fortunes of “Nightly News” by replacing Holt, even with a smaller paycheck. It will have the same impact as changing the windshield wipers on a twenty-year-old car and hoping it yields better gas mileage.
The same is true of the concurrent anchor changes at MSNBC, with Joy Reid losing her nightly show and various others being displaced as part of the network’s latest talent shuffle, another desperation move that is supposed to prop up ratings. Don’t hold your breath.
The problem for NBC, ABC, CBS, and the cable news outlets is that their audiences are mostly made up of senior citizens. That’s why the networks air so many commercials for pharmaceuticals with names that seem made up of the worst letter combinations you can have in your Scrabble rack.
While there are new additions to the senior demographic every day (that’s how aging works), many of them have forsaken television’s version of events altogether, opting to consume information from online outlets throughout the day.
You can count us among them because we don’t watch any of the big three evening newscasts, or their multi-hour morning shows, or the primetime cable gabfests. It’s not that we have replaced them with other sources. It’s just that, seven years after my retirement from radio, I no longer need to absorb as much info as I used to.
Combined with what my wife refers to as her Ongoing News Blackout, that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. Regardless of who is in the anchor chair.
Previously on Harris Online…