Hot Pockets at Tiffany's
I grew up loving CBS News. It was known as the Tiffany Network, and its news division was at the head of that, bringing luster and reputation to all the rest that CBS aired. Though he was the centerpiece of CBS News before my time, Edward R. Murrow was one of my heroes later on -- I’ve read four books on him and even put together an Independent Study at Northwestern that was a one-on-one research project with Sig Mickelson, who’d been President of CBS News when Murrow was there. And then on to Walter Cronkite and beyond. And 60 Minutes has been a mainstay of our lives for 57 years.
So, I always wish CBS News well in its leadership of quality. Not just for its history and reputation as the Tiffany Network, but because serious news is important. And no matter how much their new ownership deserves to fail for it new draconian editorial policy and shifting focus to the right, I take no pleasure in seeing it take hits under Skydance/Paramount-Ellison and its editorial overseer Bari Weiss. But some bad news for it nonetheless gave me hope.
And the news is very bad for them.
But first, for comparison sake, we have to see the competition. And as terrible as the numbers are for CBS, that's not the good news.
In the latest ratings, ABC’s World News Tonight averages 8.48 million viewers. NBC’s Nightly News averages 6.51 million viewers.
On the other hand, the CBS Evening News had an audience of only 3.83 million people, falling under the dreaded 4 million barrier. Basically half the ratings of its competitors.
And CBS has no one to blame but itself. Taking its Tiffany reputation and turning it into Cubic Zirconia.
For further perspective, when former anchor Norah O’Donnell left the chair in 2024, the CBS Evening News had 5.4 million viewers. The plummeting started when the new ownership took over and began its rightward-drift. When Tony Dokoupil was brought in this past January, the show only got 4.17 million viewers. That briefly went up to 4.6 million, which is still paltry. But now, just about six weeks later, they’ve lost 800,000 viewers each night.
But the news (no pun intended) is even worse for CBS. That’s because TV networks are less concerned with overall ratings than they are with the numbers of viewers between the age of 25-54, a demographic that advertisers love. CBS’s numbers in that age-group were just a paltry 468,000. ABC and NBC are running circles around CBS there.
By comparison, in that key demographic, ABC had 1.03 million viewers age 25-54, and NBC had 946,000. Both more than double CBS.
Here’s where the good news is.
And it’s not a case of schadenfreude, taking pleasure from their fall. But something else. The entertainment media paper Variety noted that the last time CBS News viewership dropped under 4 million a night, a major shake-up took place at the network. So, as much as the Ellisons might like to please Trump, they’re also businessmen and they draw half the viewers of the competition is not only embarrassing, but it drags down the entire network. So, we’ll see if (in time), CBS makes some changes and returns closer to its old standards. It doesn’t seem likely that they’d throw up the white flag quickly – that’s too soon – but perhaps when there’s a reason they can hitch onto as for (supposedly) explaining why they’re having a shakeup, they’ll do it then.
(Might they also see about keeping Stephen Colbert on the network? It’s a lovely hope, though unlikely bordering on improbable.)
But the bigger hope and good news for me is that Paramount/Skydance-Ellisons just bought Warner Discovery. Which owns CNN. And seeing what happened to CBS when they screwed around with it to move more to the right, I would like to think that demolishing a second news network right on the heels of what they just did with the Tiffany Network would be a bridge too far and that they’ll be hesitant to completely undermine themselves a second time and crush another highly-valuable property.
They might keep going on the same path, of course, but if so, it would appear to be a path that takes both properties over the cliff. Who knows? That might be their strategy, willing to take a political but ruinous loss -- unlikely, but certainly possible. Elon Musk has done so with Twitter -- but Twitter was the massive leader in its field and remains ahead, if unprofitable, while CBS News is running third and the public has other, more popular options. But if that is where the Ellisons decide to head, it would show their competitors (not just ABC and NBC, but also MS NOW, which is not governed by the FCC) -- if it hasn't already shown them -- that it's a deeply horrific business model of self-destruction to avoid at all costs. Figuratively and literally.
The Ellisons are rich beyond Midas -- though they're a quarter of MuskRich. And not only did their merger with Paramount and purchase of Warner Discovery cost around $120 billion, three times what Musk paid for Twitter, but personal immolation over two glittering media corporations for political purposes -- when there are other competitors already ahead of them -- doesn't seem like a particularly wise game plan one might think incredibly successful businessmen would take. We'll find out.
At the very least, it’s also good to see what should have been obvious: that if people wanted to see shift-to-the-right news, they have a three-ton elephant in the room and would watch Fox or worse, to go full-fictitious, Newsmax or OANN. And that ripping apart something important that people liked and move it to the right – especially at a time when Trump’s approval has plummeted to just 37% -- is not something the American public went for.
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