Has new anchor missed out on the glory days of network news?(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

Byline: Ken Parish Perkins

As early as age 8, Brian Williams would stand in the bathroom of his upstate New York home and deliver the news through a paper-towel roll. He has always been relentlessly driven for the things he holds dear, be they fast cars or the Holy Grail of TV journalism.

Williams never chased his NASCAR dreams, partly because, I suspect, they might have negated the one he really wanted: network news anchordom.

On Thursday, after a lifetime of waiting and a decade of being groomed for the job, Williams takes over "NBC Nightly News" from departing legend Tom Brokaw. It will be the first time in 20 years that the anchor chair of a Big Three network will belong to someone other than the Supreme Court Justices of TV News: 64-year-old Brokaw, ABC's Peter Jennings, 66, and 73-year-old Dan Rather of CBS, who announced last week that he will vacate his anchor post March 9.

Williams confesses to having a romantic vision of life as a network anchor _ the stability, the power, the financial reward. He's had his eye on this prize a long time. So long, perhaps, that he can't see that it has lost much of its luster.

Ask almost anyone how often they tune in to one of the three network broadcasts, and the answer more than likely would be "rarely, if ever," or "when the sky appears to be falling."

The networks' nightly newscasts, which still command a large share of viewers (30 million collectively) when compared with cable news outlets like CNN and the Fox News Channel, have seen their audience cut in half since 1981. In fact, if you examine the numbers of the past decade, it illustrates just how swiftly viewers are finding their news elsewhere, whether it's on cable or on the Web. According to Nielsen Media Research, the average audience for network news has declined by 10 million viewers, from 36.3 million in 1994 to 26.3 ...