Anchor Scott Pelley on steering CBS News on Super Tuesday

When Scott Pelley isn't steering coverage from one of TV's most venerable newsrooms or hopscotching across the world as a "60 Minutes" correspondent, he likes to go sailing, an interest he shares with a previous CBS anchor, the late Walter Cronkite.

"I live in a high-stress environment," Pelley said last Thursday, between fielding a call from one of his reporters in Syria and presenting "CBS Evening News," a job he has held for the past five years. "To be able to move silently through the water, to be unreachable by cellphone, is just a wonderful, wonderful break. Just you and 12th-century technology."

There hasn't been much time to hit the open waters lately. Pelley has been landlocked the past several days, rehearsing for prime-time coverage of Super Tuesday, the most significant event yet in a presidential election that's been as unpredictable — and bloody — as a season of "The Walking Dead."

But while the competition has feasted on the election's eccentricities, CBS has continued to treat its nightly newscast as grown-up time, with substantial coverage, in-depth analysis and feature pieces that often run over four minutes, an almost unheard-of commitment in a business that assumes that the audience has the attention span of a fruit fly.

Despite the temptation to dedicate an entire 22-minute broadcast to the state of Donald Trump's hair, Pelley and his team won't be changing course anytime soon.

"I think people pay attention to substance, especially now," said Pelley, who will lead a live wrap-up Tuesday featuring the network's all-star team, which includes Charlie Rose, John Dickerson and Norah O'Donnell. "During the summer, a lot of this was people expressing their outrage. But now the ballots are real. People are punching punch cards, pulling levers. When it comes to this point, people are saying, 'Wait a minute. What's going to happen to taxes under Hillary Clinton? What's going to happen to Obamacare if Donald Trump wins?' "

Assuming the audience has a functional brain may have seemed like a foolhardy strategy some years ago, but the highbrow approach seems to be working for CBS during all hours of the day.

And then there's the evening news. The broadcast has yet to recover fully from the way it dismissed anchor Dan Rather, an unceremonious dumping that made Mike Yeo's recent bodycheck off the Wild squad look like a love tap.

In the decade since then, the hot seat was filled by Bob Schieffer, never perceived as more than a substitute teacher, and Katie Couric, who, fairly or not, was treated like a daytime talk show host who had temporarily lost her way.

Enter Pelley, who in 2011 had been part of the "60 Minutes" family for 11 years and had honed his chops as a White House correspondent.

Since his ascendancy, the program has been unable to move out of third place, but it's making progress. Of the three major network news broadcasts, it's the only one to show consistent growth over the past four years, adding more than 1.5 million viewers in the process.

Locally, the ratings are even better. Since 2013, Pelley has finished first in total Twin Cities viewers, averaging about 172,000 households a night. In 2010, that number was 142,000.

While Pelley's no-nonsense approach may be catnip for Minnesota viewers, he was expected to be a harder sell in other parts of the country, where there was a growing belief that it was essential that an anchor be someone viewers might want to have a beer with. Pelley, on the other hand, can come across as a sommelier at a four-star restaurant.

In other words, don't expect Pelley, 58, to be hosting "Saturday Night Live" anytime soon.

"You have to make decisions based on who is in the chair at any given time," Capus said. "He could more than hold his own in a setting like late night TV if he wanted to, but he's a newsman through and through."

Capus said some of his favorite moments working with Pelley have come in the "fishbowl" — the hub of the newsroom — when Pelley has taken a moment to remark how great it is to have so many tools at their disposal.

"He's like a little kid in a candy store. That's what makes him tick."

But that doesn't mean Pelley will use a microsecond of Super Tuesday coverage to reveal an impression of Al Pacino.

"The problem CBS has with me is what you see is what you get," he said. "I don't spend any time worrying about being approachable or being one of the guys. I'm just about covering the news in a clear, concise way. That's about all I can accomplish in a given day.

"I just hope my wife finds me charming."

Neal Justin • 612-673-7431 •

njustin@startribune.com Twitter: @nealjustin