Evening News, Television

James R. Upshaw

World War II was raging when, by some lights, the age of network evening television newscasts haltingly got under way. In April 1944 an NBC series of short war-news programs, already tried out briefly on New York City viewers, shifted to a three-city network (New York City; Schenectady, New York; and Philadelphia) and began providing a quarter-hour of information “regularly” but on a frequently shifting schedule. These reports were mere snippets of news by modern standards but could later be seen as a milestone in broadcast journalism as television began developing into the dominant cultural medium it would become. Over the next two decades, television news from the “Big Three” networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) would coalesce into a daily wave of information reports surging across the United States. On couches or at dinner tables, tens of millions of Americans from the late 1950s forward would turn each evening toward ...

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