America Tonight was a late-night news program on CBS. It aired on weeknights at 11:30pm ET (10:30pm CT) from October 1, 1990 to March 29, 1991. It was hosted by Charles Kuralt (in New York) and Lesley Stahl (in Washington). On Friday nights, Robert Krulwich and Edie Magnus anchored the program instead.
Much like ABC's rival Nightline, which grew out of unexpectedly-popular late night reports on the Iran hostage crisis a decade earlier, America Tonight was what replaced late-night news reports on the Gulf War (branded "Showdown in the Gulf") also hosted by Kuralt and Stahl. CBS, seeing good ratings for these programs, looked to solve its constant late-night ratings woes by putting a regular program with Kuralt and Stahl on the air. In addition, at the time, overnight news was making a comeback: at the time America Tonight was making its debut, the other networks were making plans for their own overnight newscasts (which would debut in 1991, specifically NBC Nightside and ABC's World News Now).
The format of the program was much like a newsmagazine, with three main segments of more than five minutes plus other snippets of news.
Upon its debut, criticism was fast to come to the surface. Howard Rosenberg, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, called the pairing lacking in "chemistry and cohesion" and the format "musty".[1] Walter Goodman of the New York Times called it "less venturesome [than Nightline]", but "better than nothing, which as late-night news goes, is something".[2]
The program was cancelled early in 1991, and its last airing was March 29, 1991. At that time, Stahl, in addition to being CBS News' White House correspondent and then-moderator of Face the Nation, became a correspondent for 60 Minutes.[3]