Reality Show

Introduction I grew up with a black-and-white television set on a rusty metal stand in my bedroom, and when you wanted to change programs you had to get up and turn this round metal protrusion-it was, I believe, called a dial -- from Channel 2 to Channel 4 or Channel 7 or the handful of local stations. This did not seem like a terribly heavy burden at the time. I had, and this may be hard to grasp, no computer. No VCR. No fax machine. No e-mail. No voice mail. No FM radio, no tape cassettes, no DVDs, no music player capable of holding thousands of songs. There were no blogs to read, no Web sites to surf, no video-on-demand to download. If you wanted news, you bought a newspaper in the morning, and if you wanted more up-to-date news, you bought an afternoon paper, one of which I delivered for a time, stuffing the copies into a canvas bag that hung from my bike's handlebars. And if, during or after supper, which was generally eaten together by families, you wanted the latest available information from the rest of the world, you turned on the network news at 6:30. No wonder it loomed so large in our lives. The news at that hour was fresh, there was film from around the country, and tuning in was a shared experience, not unlike watching the comedians, singers, and jugglers on Ed Sullivan. With little in the way of competition, Walter Cronkite, along with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, enjoyed an enormous market share, to use a modern sales term. Never mind that their broadcasts were primitive by today's standards, with public officials droning on at length, reporters holding microphones while interview subjects fumbled for answers, and little sense of drama or storytelling. The newscasts fit the times, and the anchors fulfilled our needs. Fast forward a few decades. I am totally wired, from the hundreds of cable choices on my TV set, complete with digital recording device, to the 170 channels on my car's satellite radio, to the blessing and curse of my constantly buzzing BlackBerry. As a reporter forThe Washington Post, I am surrounded by news, practically choking on news, all day long. As the host of CNN's media program,Reliable Sources, I am immersed in the making of television. As a journalist who has patrolled the media beat for 17 years, I am intensely interested in the gathering and shaping and communicating of information. A few short years ago, I realized that I was increasingly missing the network newscasts, and for reasons that were all too familiar. I got home too late, or was busy making dinner, or was distracted by a dozen other things. When I had the set on, I realized that I already knew the details of the top stories and often clicked it off. Sometimes I was on the computer, where any story, it seemed, was at my fingertips within seconds. I was losing the habit. When there was a big, breaking scandal or a hot political campaign, I usually found time to watch. The rest of the time, not so much. Without really thinking about it, I was concluding that the newscasts had little to offer me that I couldn't get, in timelier and more compelling fashion, elsewhere. The world had changed since the days of my little black-and-white set with the gnarled antenna, and so had I. It soon became apparent that the tectonic plates of network news were about to shift. The men who had dominated the television landscape for more than two decades--Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jennings -- were nearing the end of their long run. I had gotten to know them reasonably well over the years, understood their strengths and weaknesses, and had a hard time imagining the evening news without them. In times of crisis and celebration, of triumph and tragedy, they were there, as entrenched a trio as had ever peered out from the small screen. What would television news be like without them? Would their successors be able to fill their sizablKurtz, Howard is the author of 'Reality Show', published 2007 under ISBN 9780743299824 and ISBN 0743299825.