CBS Thrives as News Anchor Pelley Is Pushed Out

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 12, 11:31AM EST · Published May 31, 5:37AM EDT

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CBS Thrives as News Anchor Pelley Is Pushed Out — © Wikimedia Commons

It used to be that the anchor of the “CBS Evening News” was the face of the broadcast network. After Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather, that is no longer true. The current anchor, Scott Pelley, had his office cleaned out while away on assignment. He will decamp to “60 Minutes.”

CBS Corp. (NYSE: CBS) shares were not moved by the news, nor will they be. Shares of the network TV company have risen 12% in the past year to $61.52. Long-time CEO Les Moonves, one of the highest paid chief executives in the United States, has kept the traditional media company in good shape during a period when many old-line media companies have succumbed to digital upstarts. CBS has plenty of this sort of competition, from YouTube to Vice.

CBS’s success shows that content has remained the most relevant factor in long-time media success. CBS Sports continues to be a juggernaut. CBS was the most watched network last year, according to Nielsen. It has held that spot for 14 of the past 15 years, according to Deadline Hollywood. “The Big Bang Theory” has been a remarkable success as it leads all prime time ratings. The NCIS franchise has become one of the most successful sets of prime time programming in history. CBS’s “Survivor,” the grandfather of its genre, still pulls better that its rivals.

Moonves has set up CBS so that what happens to the Evening News does not matter anymore.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.