Last Updated on August 24, 2024
There will soon be another vacancy in the CBS evening anchor spot. Norah O’Donnell announced this week she will leave the desk this year.
If you go back and look at a timeline of the CBS Evening News and its immediate predecessor, you’ll notice something interesting under the CBS evening anchor column. For nearly 60 years, there were only three of them. In less than 20 years since, there have been six.
The late Douglas Edwards was the first formal anchor on the Tiffany Network. His Douglas Edwards with the News started in 1948. Forty years later, when Edwards retired, Dan Rather paid tribute to him:
“He invented the job, the job of anchoring, did it himself for 40 years, and taught two generations of anchormen, including this one, how to do it,” Rather said the day before Edwards’ final broadcasts anchoring Newsbreak.
Edwards anchored weeknights from 1948 until 1962, when the late Walter Cronkite took over. The broadcast was just 15 minutes then. It expanded to its current 30-minute format the following year and was retitled The CBS Evening News. Cronkite, who would come to be nicknamed “the most trusted man in America,” would hold the job until 1981.
Rather assumed the role and continued until he stepped down in 2005 amid a controversy over fake documents in a report about then-President George W. Bush’s military record.
But that was just three anchors sitting in that chair for a span of 57 years. Certainly, an impressive record of longevity.
Then came the CBS evening anchor ‘revolving door’
I’m not exactly breaking a story to suggest that the once-dominant CBS Evening News has struggled in ratings for decades. In an interview with the Archive of American Television, Rather explained that a change in the way ratings were measured in the early 1980s, shortly after he took over from Cronkite, drastically changed ratings.
CBS has struggled in the news ratings ever since. It doesn’t help that they haven’t dominated the morning news wars, either. An old joke — that’s not so much of a joke — suggests CBS hasn’t had ratings success in the mornings since they canceled Captain Kangaroo.
Bob Schieffer took over from Rather in what was expected to be a temporary basis. But ratings began to improve under his time at the desk. In fact, the CBS Evening News with Schieffer actually beat ABC World News Tonight for a while. That seemed to surprise everyone, including Schieffer.
But Schieffer stepped down when Katie Couric, who had been attracted to the evening news seat after spending 15 years on NBC’s Today, took over. Her time at the desk lasted from 2006 to 2011.
Harry Smith, who’d anchored CBS’s Early Show for years, served as an interim anchor for months until 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley took over. Pelley tried to “refocus” the program toward harder news, and CBS announced it had become the “fastest-growing network evening news broadcast.” It finished the 2015-2016 with its highest ratings in 10 years.
Anthony Mason filled in after Pelley left in 2017.
Jeff Glor took over that same year. After two years as CBS evening anchor, the network pulled him, leading to a viewer backlash. Glor, I’m happy to say, landed on CBS Saturday Morning where he remains.
Norah O’Donnell took over the job in 2019, moving from CBS This Morning, where she had co-anchored with Charlie Rose and Gayle King.
O’Donnell says she’s leaving that post after the 2024 presidential election.
So who’s next?
O’Donnell is not leaving CBS News. In fact, she’s moving to what some might consider a lesser role: as senior correspondent. But the senior correspondent role means she will cover breaking news and big stories from around the globe. That role also means she will conduct major interviews as well.
She noted the “rigors of a relentless news cycle” over her time in the anchor desk, both morning and evening in a memo to staffers, The Washington Post reported.
“…It’s time to do something different,” she said.
No one has said who the network is eyeing as a replacement for O’Donnell. I’m pretty sure we’ll see a series of rotating anchors starting some time in November after O’Donnell departs the anchor desk.
It wouldn’t surprise me to see CBS Mornings’ Nate Burleson and Tony Dokoupil; CBS Saturday Morning’s Dana Jacobson and Michelle Miller; Face the Nation anchor Margaret Brennan and weekend evening anchors Adriana Diaz and Jericka Duncan sitting in the seat.
But in terms of a clear successor, I just don’t see one.
Maurice DuBois and John Dickerson will co-anchor the CBS Evening News. I like Dubois (he has filled in for O”Donnell several times) but I don’t understand this “co-anchor” format. Let Dubois be the sole anchor
Gayle King started at the local CBS affiliate WFSB (Or it might still have been WTIC). I have heard the news division went from a cost center to a profit center. Do you think that had anything to do with the increase in turn-overs? I see that network news is all about ratings which wasn’t a problem when news was a cost center. But not just with CBS but all the network news program. A friend who is the news director at a local station is the only person that I know who OD on Tums. As for your question.… Read more »
I think the focus on ratings had a partial effect on turnover. But it’s also that there are so many more choices now that networks can’t spend a lot of time waiting for ratings to build before the pressure to replace talent for someone who draws in more viewers just becomes too great.
I watch ABC for world news. Oh, for someone like Cronkite again! He was the person who hooked me on watching world news when I came home from work, right after high school. He cried with us and he laughed with us.