Why don’t more people watch the evening news anymore? One commonly blamed culprit is schedules. People are busy at 6:30! Gotta work late! Soccer practice! Put the news on later, when people are home, the thinking goes, and they’ll have time to tune in.
Except that then, they want to watch American Idol. Last night, CBS experimented with putting the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric at 8 p.m. E.T. TV Decoder reports that it not only got crushed (unsurprisingly) by American Idol, but at 6.5 million viewers, it drew less than its average audience at 6:30. But it did beat Knight Rider and a rerun of Lost.
New plan for restoring ratings of network news: get everyone to lose their jobs, eliminate soccer practice, and figure out how to take American Idol off the air.
Update: Coincidentally, CBS just sent the above picture of Couric bowling with Lil’ Wayne on her primetime Grammy special next Wednesday. Maybe that’ll do better.