Lester Holt’s announcement that he’s soon leaving his position as anchor at “NBC Nightly News” is only the latest in a wave of departures. And it comes at a moment when the national TV news media needs all the help it can get.
Holt, renowned for his ability to anchor over long periods of time during breaking news situations, said in his announcement that he plans to devote his energies to the newsmagazine “Dateline” moving forward. But his departure from the 30-minute nightly telecast that — still — draws millions of pairs of eyeballs is the latest iteration of a trend. Before Holt, there was Chuck Todd, who outright left NBC News earlier this year after exiting the moderator chair at “Meet the Press” in 2023; Hoda Kotb, who left “Today” in January; and Norah O’Donnell, whose final broadcast of “CBS Evening News” aired last month as well. All of this happens at a moment of media upheaval that has also seen a reshuffling of the board at MSNBC, which says goodbye to Joy Reid and Alex Wagner as weeknight anchors.
The ongoing diminishment of TV news — set into motion by the internet and social media, and accelerated by the rise of a political figure who has declared war on the press — necessarily means that each new hire is diminished by comparison to those who came before. Part of this is just common sense: Lester Holt has been the anchor of “Nightly” for a decade, and had been the weekend anchor on the broadcast for seven years before that. Whoever steps into his position will, of course, not have the earned trust that Holt built up. The problem, though, is that a substantial portion of the audience may not give his successor, whoever they may be, a chance. A person who has, for a decade since Trump first came down the escalator to declare his 2016 run, absorbed the message that the media is the enemy of the people, but who still had a sneaking fondness for Holt, now sees one more tether to the truth cut.
Holt, Todd, Kotb, and O’Donnell — all of their careers in TV news, if not the positions they most recently occupied, began before the Trump era. As such, all of them had a certain banked credibility, perhaps even with voters who became activated by the current President’s distrust and outright hatred of journalists. A new face does not have that advantage, and must build a reputation and a record facing not merely the headwinds of a distracted audience but also as aggressively anti-institutionalist an attitude in the air as has existed in recent memory. On NBC in the mornings, for instance, Craig Melvin, Kotb’s replacement, is already known to viewers (he’d been a part of the program previous to his elevation), but faces the challenge of breaking out as a one-name star in an eminently distracted news climate. That will take time, effort, and perhaps an abatement of the news cycle that hasn’t yet come.
It’s easy to see why, for a Holt or for an O’Donnell, leaving the grind of daily newscasting holds its appeals; O’Donnell’s new posting as senior correspondent leaves her, notionally, free to pursue high-profile bookings across CBS News platforms, just as Holt can devote more time to impact journalism outside the day-to-day churn. And O’Donnell’s own employer seems to view the position of chief newsreader as so tangent to its operations that it didn’t really fill the position — she was replaced by a pair of co-anchors, Maurice DuBois and John Dickerson, who place the focus on correspondents in the field rather than on the person reading the Prompter.
It’s easy for commentators of a certain cast of mind to get a bit lofty — CBS’ anchor spot, after all, is the one once occupied by Walter Cronkite, whose broadcasts informed the nation through wildly turbulent times. But in our own turbulent times, it’s striking not merely that there isn’t a unifying Cronkite figure (there hasn’t been for years) but also that those who come somewhat close are falling away. Many things in the TV business are cyclical, but the slow decline in relevance of TV news suddenly feels a lot less slow, and a lot more vertiginous. It’s easy to see why its stars want off the ride, but hard to know where that leaves the rest of us, in the audience at home and in an electorate increasingly divorced from fact.
