Texas native tries to restore the house that Cronkite built at CBS,
After Norah O’Donnell was named anchor of the “CBS Evening News” in May, she received a congratulatory email from Maureen Orth, the widow of Tim Russert, the late NBC Washington bureau chief and “Meet the Press” moderator.
“Tim would be so proud,” the note read. O’Donnell said it brought her to tears. It also reminded her of how Russert, her first boss in TV news, influenced her work ethic.
“Tim used to say to me every day, ‘What do you know?’ ” O’Donnell, 45, recalled in an interview last week as she prepared for her new job at CBS News headquarters on Manhattan’s West Side. “And I would sit in the car and start calling people up on Capitol Hill before I walked into the bureau because I was afraid I would run into him and wouldn’t have a little scooplet for him. That always kind of stuck with me.”
Today, O’Donnell becomes part of broadcasting history by taking over the CBS program associated with legendary anchor Walter Cronkite. But she also is faced with the task of making a nightly half-hour newscast a regular appointment for viewers in an era when they are inundated with news throughout the day on their phones and on 24-hour cable channels.
The half-hour evening newscast is one of network TV’s longest-running formats—“CBS Evening News” launched in 1948. But the number of people watching has slowly declined over the years like the rest of network television. The three network newscasts still collectively averaged 23 million viewers a night in the 2018-19 TV season, compared to around 7 million that Fox News, CNN and MSNBC draw in prime time, according to Nielsen data. The audience also is getting older: The three programs have 4.7 million viewers in the 25-to-54 age group that advertisers target, down 5% from a year ago.
Mark Lukasiewicz, a former producer for NBC News and dean of the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University, said the even-handed approach of the network evening newscast is worth preserving even with its smaller audience.
“It’s one of the last repositories of carefully crafted, scripted broadcast reports that are concise, precise and still aim to be 100% factual,” Lukasiewicz said. “Opinions have become so much a part of the journalistic ecosystem now, it’s almost unusual to see reporters report facts dispassionately.”
O’Donnell believes her broadcast can be vital at a time when the most popular programs on cable news channels such as Fox News and MSNBC are hosted by political partisans. “If you want affirmation, you can turn on a cable channel,” she said. “If you want information, turn on the ‘CBS Evening News.’ People are craving a trusted, fact-based news source.”
Colleagues at CBS News and her former shop, NBC, believe O’Donnell is a hard-driving personality who will bring a competitive edge to the network’s evening news operation, which has been adrift for several years. “Norah is pretty fierce,” said one co-worker who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “She’s going to be aggressive and want to go after big interviews.”
O’Donnell is the granddaughter of Irish immigrants. Her parents raised her with a deep respect for news and journalists. Her father served as a doctor in the U.S. military and was deployed in the first Iraq war. World affairs could impact how long he could be away or where she and her three siblings would be living. “My mom wouldn’t throw away the newspaper until she finished reading the entire thing, which means, with four kids, sometimes there was a giant stack of papers on the dining room table,” O’Donnell recalled. “The two traditions in my house on Sunday were church and ‘60 Minutes.’” O’Donnell grew up in San Antonio—between her, Scott Pelley, Bob Schieffer and Dan Rather, Texas roots seem to be another tradition for CBS News anchors.
“I believe in this broadcast and the legacy of this broadcast,” O’Donnell said. “I do think that the truth is under attack, that journalism is under attack, that civility is under attack and I think we can help change that. I think we need to be the most trusted broadcast in America.”
O’Donnell’s high school friends remind her that she used to impersonate ABC News legend Barbara Walters when leaving phone messages. After graduating from Georgetown, O’Donnell began her career writing for the Washington newspaper Roll Call before joining NBC News in 1999, where she covered Congress and the White House. She moved to CBS News in 2011 to become chief Washington correspondent and a year later was named co-host of “CBS This Morning.” Along with competing against the proliferation of choices in the TV landscape, O’Donnell will have to overcome obstacles that have long faced “CBS Evening News” through a combination of bad luck and self-inflicted wounds by previous management regimes.
The program has been in third place for more than two decades and in the current TV season is averaging 6 million viewers a night behind “ABC World News Tonight With David Muir” (8.7 million) and “NBC Nightly News With Lester Holt” (8.1 million). Susan Zirinsky, who took over as president of CBS News from Rhodes in January, decided to revamp it with O’Donnell at the helm not long after taking her post.
“Norah is an incredibly fluid broadcaster,” Zirinsky said in an interview. “She has the ability to take multiple pieces of information and is able to synthesize them.” Zirinsky, who started her career at the network’s Washington bureau in the 1970s at the height of the Watergate scandal, said the storied history of the “CBS Evening News” is never far from her mind.
“We would want Walter Cronkite to call up and say, ‘That was a great show,’” she said. “There is a pressure for us to fulfill that legacy and I think we have the people to do it.”