The News Axis Has Shifted From 'Evening' to Mornings

The announcement that Diane Sawyer will replace Charles Gibson at ABC's "World News" desk speaks far less to shifting gender politics -- as some would like to couch it -- than a change in the balance of power at the network news divisions.

Although old-line news talent still see anchoring nightly news as the premiere jobs in broadcast journalism, they're living in the past. The real power now resides in the morning programs, which thanks to sheer volume -- that's four hours of "Today" each morning for NBC's sales department to peddle, compared to a half-hour of "The NBC Nightly News" -- have become the primary focus of the news divisions. (Update: The New York Times cites the profitability of "Good Morning America" in this piece regarding the hunt for Sawyer's replacement.)

Moreover, the morning mix of infotainment -- a news recap, followed by giddy cooking segments and soft interviews with network reality stars or actors plugging upcoming movies -- has also triumphed over the hard-news approach traditionally embodied by the evening newscasts. So while Sawyer might understandably see this move as a step up in class, it's actually a step down in the current news pecking order. (Katie Couric has probably discovered as much, whether she'd acknowledge it or not, since vacating "Today" for her leap to CBS' anchor chair.)

Anyone of a certain age doubtless thinks first of the late Walter Cronkite, followed by the 20-year reign of Rather, Jennings and Brokaw as the apex of TV news. Those men (and yes, then it was all men) not only invested the anchor chair with gravitas but also set the standard for their respective networks.

But those days are over. And while most of the reporting has proclaimed Sawyer "the leader of ABC's network news division" (New York Times) or occupying "the top news spot at ABC" (Los Angeles Times), the Wall Street Journal was closer when it noted that she is "inheriting a diminished throne." Despite the romance surrounding the evening news, the tone is now largely set between 7 and 9 a.m. by the likes of Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira -- and it has also filtered into latenight, where the surviving "Nightline" has morphed into a program as apt to lead with pop culture as global politics.

By that measure, having Sawyer and Couric anchoring nightly news after their stints in the morning merely reinforces what's been apparent for quite awhile -- that they might still call it "evening news," but in terms of morning-TV values, the sun never sets.

Update: From the "Mediocre minds think alike" file, the LA Times' Joe Flint draws pretty much the same conclusion.