Decline of materialist TV?

In The Last March of the Dinosaurs, Hugh Hewitt explains how and why network news has lost so many viewers (or snorers?), while reviewing Howard Kurtz’s Reality Show :

This is a detailed and often riveting account of the unexpectedly rapid and often dramatic transition from the network anchor era of Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather to the new "big three" of Charlie Gibson, Brian Williams and Katie Couric. From the high point of the first big three to the week just finishing, the networks lost about 30 million viewers, and now welcome a combined audience of less than 25 million each night. Reality Show is a chronicle of decline, long on the details of what happened, not so long on the why.

So if you have ever wondered why the earnest airheads of network TV are quite sure that materialism is true and that everything in the universe all just sort of “happened”, wonder no longer. These are not people who even need a why. They never asked and never knew.