News was considered to be one of the cornerstones and most important aspects of network programming from the foundations of network television. The networks, although profit-seeking entities as all businesses are, loved to consider themselves guardians of the pubic trust, and the news bureaus by which they would inform and enlighten the viewing public were the primary way that they would accomplish that mission. DuMont, of course, was no exception. Though the news division of DuMont extends back to the formative years of the network, the culture of what DuMont News had become by the early 1980’s was shaped in large part by the partnership that Allen DuMont had forged with National Educational Television in the 1960’s. That partnership set the tone for the mission of News, as even moreso than the others at the time they would commit to a standard of journalistic independence and drive to shine light on problems in society that could be fixed when brought to the light.
One of the primary expressions of this was the flagship news magazine show of DuMont News, DuMont Journal. Journal was basically a direct carryover of NET Journal after NET had been forced out of existence and replaced by PBS. It continued that show’s mission of providing hard-hitting insight into societal problems of the day, now unfettered by the need to satisfy political actors that had been present during its time as a non-commercial program. Another news magazine that was launched at the end of the 70's was Lateline, launched originally as coverage of the Iran hostage crisis, but was able to stick especially because nobody else was doing news in the late-night after news slot. NBC had its dominant late-night comedy show, Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, and ABC was running reruns of Lawrence Welk and Hee Haw, while CBS had ceded the slot to affiliates.
DuMont’s evening newscast was titled DuMont Evening News, and dated back to the network’s third attempt to field an evening newscast in the 50’s. When Evening News was launched, the network lured radio announcer Morgan Beatty from NBC to anchor the program. He sat in the chair until 1968, when declining health would force him to retire. He was replaced by a procession of short-lived anchors until 1975 when James Day, the president of DuMont News who had joined the network from NET after assisting the launch of PBS, used his connections with that network to convince Jim Lehrer to come to DuMont and stabilize the anchor chair. Lehrer had made his name as a correspondent for PBS covering the Watergate scandal and the drawdown in Vietnam, and had parlayed that into a co-host position on Robert MacNeil’s evening news program there. His hiring helped make Evening News competitive with the other titans of network news then, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News, while ABC World News Tonight lagged behind.
Finally, DuMont launched a one-hour morning news show, the Early Show, in the mid-70’s that it had expanded to two hours by 1980. This was an era when all of the networks save NBC, whose venerable Today show had been running since 1952, were still experimenting and finding their footing around morning television. CBS had tried several morning formats that they had fit around their morning children’s show Captain Kangaroo, and ABC also struggled to find the right fit in the morning. DuMont, like CBS, also showed children’s programming in the mornings in this era, first with a collection of animated and live action shows and eventually settling on the WGN version of Bozo the Clown, until the early 80’s when Bozo and CBS’s Kangaroo would be cancelled due to children attending school earlier.
