Brian Williams, the least trusted man in America

Washington

ONCE upon a time in America, there were only three television news networks. From about the mid-1950s to the late 1970s, members of an average American middle-class family would gather in their living room, before or after dinner, to watch around 23 minutes (or 30 minutes with commercial breaks) of daily national and international news that were broadcast on one of the networks - CBS, NBC or ABC. And Americans would discuss what they had watched on the evening news the next morning at school or around the water cooler at work. It was a national ritual of sorts.

It may be difficult for young Americans, now used to uninterrupted 24/7 news flow on cable television news and the Internet, to realise that there was actually a time when their parents got most of their diet of daily news from the local newspaper they read with their morning coffee, and later in the evening, when they and most other Americans all watched the evening news on television.