In May 2007, NBC announced it would not renew the contract of Stone Phillips, who had co-anchored the newsmagazine Dateline NBC since 1993. The network described it as part of cost-cutting. At the time it read as one more personnel story. Looking back, it fit a bigger pattern.
The end of the big three
For about two decades, the evening news belonged to three men: Tom Brokaw at NBC, Peter Jennings at ABC and Dan Rather at CBS. Each had an audience that followed him personally. Within roughly a year of each other, all three were gone from the anchor chair. Brokaw retired from NBC Nightly News in late 2004, Rather left the CBS Evening News in 2005 after a disputed report about President Bush’s National Guard service, and Jennings died of lung cancer in August 2005.
Their successors were capable journalists, but none commanded quite the same loyalty, and the audience for the evening newscasts kept shrinking as cable news and then the internet took over.
Where the stars went
Star power did not disappear from news. It moved. The biggest names on cable became opinion hosts rather than anchors. Later, it moved again, to podcasters, YouTube hosts and newsletter writers, many of whom built audiences larger than some network shows without any network at all.
At the same time, the format that made newsmagazines like Dateline valuable, from celebrity interviews to investigations and human-interest stories, became something everyone could do. Newspapers launched video units. Local stations streamed their investigations. Viewers could jump straight to the segment they wanted, skipping the anchor entirely.
What survived
Dateline itself survived by leaning hard into true crime, a genre with a devoted audience. Network evening newscasts still exist and still draw millions of viewers a night, mostly older ones, and anchors still change: in 2025 Lester Holt stepped down from NBC Nightly News after a decade, handing the chair to Tom Llamas. But no anchor today is the household name Brokaw, Jennings and Rather were. Phillips’s exit was an early sign of that change.
Sources: Stone Phillips, Wikipedia; Dateline NBC, Wikipedia; Network News Fact Sheet, Pew Research Center.
