Changing the State of Play (network evening news)
There was a time when each of the Big Three nightly newscasts on American television tended to open with the same story the latest campaign speech, a new government study or perhaps a big snowstorm. That time is gone.
Influenced by cable and the Internet, the nightly newscasts are shaking up conventions that stretch back 50 years, seeking to distinguish themselves by picking different stories and placing them in different orders.
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In the mornings, too, the networks are highlighting their differences. On Monday, CBS, which has been stuck in last place for decades, will introduce a new morning show featuring Charlie Rose that promises more hard news than NBC and ABC and no cooking segments or couch chitchat.
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On some days, the differences at 6:30 p.m. are substantive; on a Thursday in December, CBS led with Irans capture of a United States drone surveillance aircraft, NBC opened with an investigation into the mishandling of soldiers remains, and ABC with the mysterious shooting of a police officer at Virginia Tech.
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The main public TV nightly newscast, PBS NewsHour, also differs from the three commercial newscasts; it tends to have more coverage about government and international events and much less about crime and disasters, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, an arm of the Pew Research Center that studies the nations news output.
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/business/media/at-abc-cbs-and-nbc-news-accentuating-the-differences.html?pagewanted=all
In fact, Scott Pelley recently succeeded former Today show host Katie Couric as CBS Evening News anchor, and Pelley's background as a 60 Minutes correspondent likely was a factor in the Iran top story selection. And CBS' new morning show will be called "CBS This Morning", the title of the CBS morning show from 1987-1999.