NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw was one of the three most uncomfortable men in America last Tuesday night. Like his counterparts at ABC and CBS, he had to vamp on the air as two bizarrely incompatible events prepared to collide: President Clinton's State of the Union speech and a verdict in the O.J. Simpson civil trial. In Brokaw's earpiece, frantic conversations were taking place between NBC News executives in New York City and the producer on duty in Washington, with Brokaw chiming in whenever he got a few seconds off the air. "It was an American cultural meltdown," he says. "There were no rules you could turn to." Yet there was, in the end, no real debate on what to do: NBC, like its two network competitors, stuck with Clinton's speech.
The decision, in retrospect, was a no-brainer--made easier for NBC by the fact that it had two sister cable channels, MSNBC and CNBC, continuing the O.J. stakeout in Santa Monica, California. But the decision had particular resonance for NBC. The network's evening newscast has faced similar--if less momentous--choices night after night for the past several months, and has come down, more often than not, on the opposite side: bypassing or downplaying traditional Washington stories in favor of news, trends and features from the heartland--plus a liberal dose of O.J. The strategy has worked: the NBC Nightly News has been No. 1 in the ratings for six straight weeks (with one tie), inching ahead of the longtime leader, ABC's World News Tonight.
The success can be attributed partly to a spillover from NBC's ratings dominance in prime time, as well as to the resurgence of its news division generally. After a long, embarrassing string of failed magazine shows, the network has created a successful, three-nights-a-week franchise in Dateline NBC, which provides a valuable promotional platform for the Nightly News. The weekday Today show and Sunday's Meet the Press are No. 1 in their respective leagues. NBC has also expanded more aggressively into cable, the Internet and overseas broadcasting than has any of its network rivals.
But winning the nightly-news race may be NBC's most impressive feat yet. The combined audience for the Big Three evening newscasts has declined steadily over the past 15 years, nibbled at by a horde of competing news sources on cable, local TV and elsewhere. Older viewers who do tune in to network news, moreover, are notoriously slow to change their habits. The CBS Evening News was No. 1 for all of the 1970s and most of the '80s. In 1989 ABC's World News Tonight took over the top spot and held on to it for years. The broadcasts have been anchored by the same three middle-aged white males for more than a decade.