• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

CBS Morning News (1963-1979; 1982-2024)

W

Wright County Guy

Very quietly, the "CBS Morning News" is no more as of February 2. The early morning newscast is now "CBS News Morning", which shares its name with a different, yet similar, newscast that airs on CBS's streaming service.

Over the decades, the broadcast was anchored by Mike Wallace, Joseph Benti, Hughes Rudd, Sally Quinn, Diane Sawyer, Douglas Edwards and, quite possibly, you.
 
It's amazing how CBS has never quite gotten a competitive morning show. I guess the one they have now, featuring Gayle King, is OK, despite the slight name change this month. Some call the problem, "The Curse of The Captain."

In the early days of network television, NBC had the successful Today Show, ABC didn't send its stations anything until mid-morning and CBS had an hour of news at 7 a.m. followed by an hour of Captain Kangaroo for the kiddies at 8 a.m. When ABC finally started a network morning show that quickly became competitive with Today, CBS was stymied. Every year or two, another host or two would be hired. But they always failed expectations. Why couldn't CBS score a win in the morning like NBC and ABC?

It must be because Captain Kangaroo takes the entire second hour. But there'll be an uproar if a big, bad network takes away an acclaimed weekday show for children. (This was before PBS stations aired morning children's shows.) CBS gave the Captain plenty of warning it would take away his 8am hour, hinting in the press this would eventually happen to make its morning news show competitive. Captain Kangaroo was moved to Saturday mornings for a few years and finished his run on PBS.

Yet to this day, no matter the host or the format, CBS just can't compete with NBC and ABC for morning show audiences.

.
 
The title and original post of is misleading and nothing but clickbait 🤣 especially when considering the program was actually titled the CBS Early Morning News for its first five years or so from 1982-87 and had no relation to the previous program.
 
genius said:
The title and original post of is misleading and nothing but clickbait 🤣 especially when considering the program was actually titled the CBS Early Morning News for its first five years or so from 1982-87 and had no relation to the previous program.
Click to expand...
Sharp memory for a CBS news program that can easily be overlooked.😄

Wikipedia aligns with my recollections: CBS News Mornings - Wikipedia

Anyone remember the long running Sunrise Semester that preceded it?

Sunrise Semester - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
Agreed that the original post is misleading, and the Wikipedia entry isn't especially clearly written, either.

There's the flagship 7-9 AM timeslot that's been the traditional network morning news scheduling going back to the 1950s and 1960s. That's where Walter Cronkite got his CBS TV start, followed by decades of half-baked attempts to compete with Today and later GMA: Hughes Rudd doing the "just the facts" newscast that was the first to be called "CBS Morning News" (late 60s-70s), the Sally Quinn debacle, a brief early 1980s attempt to transplant the "Sunday Morning" format to weekday mornings with Kuralt, "The Early Show," and eventually today's "CBS Mornings."

But that's not the show that just changed its name again. This is the one that airs in the 4 AM hour on most stations, with later rollovers that can be aired in the 5-7 AM slot at small stations without local morning newscasts. This was the "CBS Early Morning News" starting in 1982, and later took the "CBS Morning News" name - but, again, unrelated to the earlier 7 or 8 AM "Morning News." This is the broadcast that competes with "Early Today" on NBC and "America this Morning" on ABC, to whatever extent newscasts at 3:30 or 4 AM really compete with anything other than sleep.
 
The "CBS Morning News", when it began in 1963, actually ran from 10-10:30 A.M. EST/EDT, so it wasn't in direct competition from NBC's "Today Show".

It was moved to 7-7:30 A.M. EST/EDT in the Fall of 1965. By 1969, it had expanded to an hour, from 7-8 A.M. EST/EDT.
 
Gregg. said:
Yet to this day, no matter the host or the format, CBS just can't compete with NBC and ABC for morning show audiences.
Click to expand...
CBS Mornings, which is not to be confused with the show that is the topic of this thread, is increasingly close in viewership to GMA and Today. A lot of that is attributable to GMA's viewership really falling by the wayside in the past year, Today also declining, though not by as much, and CBS Mornings holding mostly steady. Basically, CBS is becoming competitive in the morning, perhaps for the first time ever, thanks to ABC and NBC falling to near its level.

www.adweek.com

Week of Jan. 22 Morning Show Ratings: Today Closing Gap With GMA in Total Viewers

CBS Mornings is also feeling good about its morning show performance.
www.adweek.com www.adweek.com
 
True, and CBS This Morning did actually beat GMA on a regular basis back in ‘98 during the nadir of the McRee/Newman era of GMA but fell back to #3 after Gibson & Sawyer took over in early ‘99.
 
As a sidenote, neither CBS, NBC, the cable nor streaming channels have been able to compete with ABC in the overnight hours (Though CBS is trying (??) with its CBS News Overnight program) as NBC dumped its overnight news back in 1983, the cable news channels are all in primetime reruns by Midnight ET & all the streaming news channels (Except ABC News Live) are all in assorted reruns as well

Some call it "The Curse of Comedy" or "The Curse of Ellerbee" (Who anchored the NBC newscast)
 
JeeperOne said:
As a sidenote, neither CBS, NBC, the cable nor streaming channels have been able to compete with ABC in the overnight hours (Though CBS is trying (??) with its CBS News Overnight program) as NBC dumped its overnight news back in 1983, the cable news channels are all in primetime reruns by Midnight ET & all the streaming news channels (Except ABC News Live) are all in assorted reruns as well

Some call it "The Curse of Comedy" or "The Curse of Ellerbee" (Who anchored the NBC newscast)
Click to expand...
Did you forget about NBC News Nightside (1991–1998), which started a few months before ABC's World News Now and Up to the Minute on CBS?

Speaking of WNN, is it still on? I ask because my ABC O&O dropped it several years ago, and that is usually the death knell for such a program.
 
Back
Top Bottom