Network news is just stupid. Always has been. Because it makes money the exact same way as any other TV show, selling your eyeballs to advertisers. It is, for all basic purposes, a half hour sitcom, and always has been. With less text than the front page of the newspaper there never was any chance that TV news would be informative, and it never has been.
As a guy that claims he used to read 5 newspapers a day it’s shocking you would EVER think TV news was useful. Even in the “good old days” you would have to have noticed that the TV versions of stories was basically the first paragraph of the newspaper version, and that 90% of the stories you read in the newspaper didn’t even get that much coverage. I don’t see how any newspaper reader from the old days would ever have taken TV news seriously, it boggles the mind.
Feminists didn’t do away with the women’s page. The NEWSPAPERS did, because it was their page to begin with, and they made the change. Because they realized it was a dumb idea in the first place.
I don’t know how old you are, but network news was not always stupid, and people depended on it to help flesh out their news needs.
You also seem to either be too young, or to have so little used news from 1969 through the mid 1970s to have been paying attention to the feminists demands to eliminate the women’s section. Gloria Steinem was a leader in that, don’t you remember?
Steinem even came to think it might have been a mistake.