Network TV and Katie Couric

“Network TV” was the first chapter that grabbed my attention in The State of the News Media. Not that I’m not interested in the other forms of media, but I get most of my news from network television; so I felt the need to pay special attention to the section. The first sentence in the introduction states that it was a year that people where waiting for, and it truly was. The part that really caught my attention in the reading was the question of whether or not the older audience would adapt to the new faces and changes that network television was bringing about. This is interesting because I’ve seen numerous reports throughout the year about the CBS Evening News and their falling ratings. In a way I found the ratings sad, because I wanted the first solo female night anchor, Katie Couric, to do well, and I truly thought she would. But as she said in an interview recently, she didn’t think the world was ready for that kind of change. Personally, I think change is a good thing and I don’t really understand why the rest of the world is against it. But it’s not just Couric’s fault, because the reading also stated that every media sector, except for two, has stopped growing. Could it be that people have become generally uninterested in the world around us? I can’t see how this could be, but it makes you wonder what really is going on.