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Over time, many Americans abandoned their habit of reading an afternoon newspaper and began following the network evening news to catch coverage of the latest national and international events. By the 1960s, NBC, CBS, and ABC offered different thirty-minute versions of the evening news and dominated national TV news coverage until the emergence of CNN and the 24/7 cable news cycle began in the 1980s. The network news divisions have been responsible for a number of milestones. The CBS-TV News, which premiered on CBS in May 1948, in 1956 became the first news show videotaped for rebroadcast in central and western time zones on affiliate stations (i.e., local TV stations that contract with a network to carry its programs; each network has roughly two hundred affiliates around the country), while NBC’s weekly Meet the Press (1947–) remains the oldest show on television.

By early 2012, NBC’s nightly newscast drew about nine million viewers, ABC’s attracted about eight million, and CBS drew between six and seven million, all skewing on the older side. Faced with increasing competition from Internet news, bloggers, and 24/7 cable, audience numbers have eroded. In 2003, NBC and ABC attracted between ten and eleven million viewers each with CBS drawing about eight million viewers for each evening broadcast—and even these numbers were less than half the audience size that network evening news programs pulled in back in the 1980s. Nonetheless, all three network newscasts routinely draw more viewers than many prime-time programs.