Sorry but network news HAD to always be superficial at best for reasons I already outlined. There’s no choice in the matter, it’s simple logistics. Even without commercials half an hour simply cannot present a useful level of news. Then of course you get the cult of Walter Kronkite in there deciding which wars can and cannot be won and any chance TV news had of being useful just went away.
Network news was useful, something tells me that you weren’t paying much attention to any news in the 1950s and early 1960s, from any source.