TAKEOVER TREMORS TOP NETWORK AGENDAS

P ork bellies.

That’s how one former CBS executive sums up the current status of the three major television networks.

“Or widgets,” adds Fred Friendly, who headed CBS’ news division from 1964 to 1966. “The only thing that matters now is that bottom line.”

Wall Street jargon never before applied so readily to ABC, CBS and NBC, not even in the late ‘60s, when ITT and ABC considered a merger.

But today such talk is common, as takeovers and mergers loom over the once-inviolate Goliaths of news and entertainment. Television has become just another commodity.

That is the prevailing climate as this season’s round of network affiliates meetings begins today with ABC in New York. The gatherings traditionally are not so much a time for philosophical considerations as for whipping up enthusiasm for the fall schedules and their attendant promotional hoopla.

Indeed, foremost on the minds of third-ranked ABC’s affiliates, as general manager Charles Kennedy of Sacramento’s KOVR-TV put it, is “how the network is going to get out of the rut it’s in.”

But Kennedy’s fellow general managers--and to a lesser extent NBC’s meeting in Los Angeles next week and certainly CBS’ the week after in San Francisco--all must consider the hypothetical question: How much of an impact could a new owner have on the network?

If Ted Turner or a broadcasting entrepreneur of similar inclination gained control of CBS, might viewers tune in to find a totally transformed prime time and conservatively slanted news?

Could a “white knight” like Capital Cities, scheduled to merge with ABC Inc. effective next year, perceptibly transform the news and entertainment viewing content if it so desired?

Most knowledgeable industry observers concur that the crucial element is time. And even that, they say, might not be a sufficient brace against the powerful tide of market forces when it comes to programming a network.

“I would think that to be precipitous would be asking for real trouble,” said former ABC Inc. President Elton Rule. Rule said that the news divisions in particular “are extremely competitive among the major networks.” Any network that veered too rapidly from the expected standards “would lose its viewing audience immediately.”

Rule speaks from experience: At one time, ABC could not support “the numbers of bureaus and kinds of news activity that both CBS and NBC did.” The result was that ABC was “consistently third of the three” until its news more closely resembled that of its competition.

That transformation took several years to complete. The same probably would be true today. “It takes a long time to do good, to make serious changes for the better,” said Friendly, who now observes the goings-on in television from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where he is professor emeritus. “It takes a long time to wreck it, too.”

New developments are especially sluggish in series programming. Former NBC Chairman Fred Silverman, now an independent producer, illustrated with the following example: “Take ABC, because you know that (merger) is most certainly going to happen. The Cap Cities people don’t really become active executives until January, and by then the pilots are already committed for the fall (of ‘86). So you’re talking about the fall of ’87 to have some real influence.”

Silverman said that anyone who succeeded with a hostile takeover--Turner’s plan for CBS--would be “governed by the same time restrictions. What could he do? I guess in the entertainment side he could say, ‘I don’t want this or I don’t want that.’ I think if he tried to do that with news, the whole department would walk out.”

Dan Rather, for one, would not likely be around to see that happen. CBS’ lead newsman “would quit long before he got fired,” speculated Richard Salant, the former CBS news chief, contacted at his home in Connecticut.

Salant believes that “a hypothetical guy who wants to change the broadcasting--the news and entertainment--ideologically, could do so in one season.” The views of the “hypothetical guy” in question, of course, prejudice the outcome of that change. “There’s no question that Bill Paley and Frank Stanton made a helluva lot of difference (as chairman and president, respectively, of CBS Inc.). They set a tone, and every chief executive sets a tone.”

Stanton, Salant pointed out, “risked going to jail for contempt” because he denied a congressional subpoena for background materials used to produce “The Selling of the Pentagon,” a 1971 CBS documentary. “Somebody else might have just turned the information over.”

Stanton speculated that the first thing Ted Turner hypothetically could do at CBS is “hire George Will from ABC.” (Will, the conservative columnist, is an ABC commentator.)

Or, as Friendly suggested, any conservative owner “might decide to take a whole lot of people who are liberals off the air. Money for salaries is not much of an item. There are 12 documentary producers at CBS who haven’t produced a program in three years. Buying up somebody’s contract or paying somebody to not do anything is the way it works.”

Every network executive asked about the possibility of sweeping changes sooner or later mentions the name Bob Wood. A year after Robert D. Wood became president of the CBS Network in 1969, he made wholesale changes in the prime-time schedule, even though it was top-ranked in the ratings. Concerned that rural-oriented shows such as “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “Petticoat Junction” and “Green Acres” were losing viewers in major cities, Wood yanked them from the schedule and turned to urban vehicles such as “All in the Family,” “Maude” and “Mary Tyler Moore.”

“I don’t subscribe to the theory that things are so locked in cement that it would take somebody a long time to make perceptible changes,” Wood said last week. “Short of doing something that is scandalous, a guy could go in there and rip up the schedule pretty good.”

If Ted Turner were to take over CBS--a possibility every executive contacted for this story doubted--Wood said preliminary changes at his alma mater could be made “pretty quickly. What’s a year? What’s 18 months?”

But there’s a vast difference between “could” and “would” when it comes to changing a network, and it is the affiliates who can most effectively say “don’t.”

“A network is not really a company--it’s a very loosely woven form of federalism,” Friendly said. “The affiliates, (about) 200 of them, are very loosely affiliated. They’ll stay affiliated as long as (a new owner) is making money, and if not they’ll leave.”

In Turner’s case, there is speculation that his preaching about the need for wholesome values on TV might, in fact, appeal to affiliates.

“Sure, you do have to please the affiliates in the long run,” Salant said. “But if you go conservative, for example, it won’t displease them a bit. They had a delegation that wanted to go to Vietnam telling my people what to do. I had to hang on by my fingernails telling them to go to hell. “

Conservativism, Wood agreed, “might very well fly with the affiliates because that’s what most of them are: a conservative group of people. But they also love ratings points.” That, Wood said, is one of the “self-correcting forces” that keep the networks on the track they’re on. And conservative values don’t necessarily translate to top-rated programming.

Former NBC programming executive John McMahon, now president of Carson Productions, put the dichotomy between desires and realities this way: “Grant Tinker (NBC chairman) probably loves ‘St. Elsewhere’ and probably isn’t that crazy about ‘The A-Team,’ but he still keeps the (latter) show on the air.”

The other self-correcting forces mentioned include the advertisers and their interests, the press and its points of view, public-interest organizations, the Hollywood creative community and the federal government.

In the end, most industry observers agree, television is what it is, for better or worse, for a variety of reasons that a new network owner would not easily control.

“There are certain elements that are constant whether you’re writing a news story or a best seller,” said former ABC head Rule. “You have to have certain things in there. There has to be a beginning, middle and end. There have to be characters that are appealing. It’s what you want to do with them that counts.”