‘Infotainment’ : Latest News at Networks: Cutting Cost

The stories began trickling out of CBS headquarters early this fall. First came word that some of the most respected figures in the network’s hallowed news division were angry over the introduction of a glossy prime-time news program called “West 57th.”

Next, CBS News--traditionally insulated from corporate cost trimming--announced it had fired 74 people, refused to renew the contracts of some famous correspondents and forced 51 others to retire. Richard C. Hottelet would no longer report from the United Nations. Fred Graham was leaving the steps of the Supreme Court.

Late last month came the strangest news of all. Some of the network’s best-known journalists--including “60 Minutes” producer Don Hewitt and anchorman Dan Rather--had offered to buy the CBS news division. Like other “traditionalists” at CBS, they had become convinced that the men running the network do not appreciate the journalistic autonomy for which CBS News is famous.

Simply a Symptom

A close look, however, suggests that the unprecedented public turmoil at CBS is simply a symptom of the fundamental changes occurring in the medium through which 90% of Americans receive most of their news.

For the first time, the networks’ news divisions are being asked to pay for themselves. The result is not only stricter cost accounting, but an increasing reliance on slick market research and sophisticated advertising. This, in turn, has produced an industrywide debate over whether network TV news is deepening or just softening as it tries to pay its way by more frequently turning to a hybrid of news and entertainment, which some are calling “infotainment.”

“The changes are not restricted to CBS,” said former CBS News President Richard S. Salant. “I think CBS was somewhat of a model. And when the model falls, the crash is a little louder.”

The great anomaly of television, one network executive explained privately, is that as the medium grew up, a corporate strategy evolved that allowed news to stand as “something serious of high aspiration amid the worst junk.”

As Salant recalled: “I was head of the news division at CBS for 16 years, and in my years nobody calculated what our broadcasts made. . . . We were first among equals, autonomous, independent.”

The other networks followed suit. “They treated news as a sacred trust,” NBC News President Lawrence Grossman agreed.

Today, that aura of sanctity has vanished, the victim of profound changes in the economics of American broadcasting. Networks no longer command 95% of the TV audience, as they did in the pre-cable 1970s. Advertising revenues, which were pushed up by inflation, are depressed. Competitive pressures among CBS, NBC and ABC are more intense because the ratings gap between the three networks is unprecedentedly narrow.

Finally, as production costs, salaries and the use of expensive technology have grown, news--in the words of Van Gordon Sauter, executive vice president of CBS Broadcasting Group--”has become an incredibly expensive business.”

Now add to this equation a more complex change: All three networks have seen a need to confront these greater financial pressures with a new generation of managers trained outside the traditions of network news.

‘Reality Programming’

Today, the senior man among the news division heads is ABC’s Roone Arledge, who only a few years ago made headlines because he came from ABC Sports. ABC itself is about to have a new owner, Capital Cities Communications, which hitherto has owned only local stations.

NBC Chairman Grant Tinker, who refers to news as “reality programming,” formerly produced acclaimed entertainment programs, such as “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” NBC News chief Grossman worked in advertising and public relations and for seven years was president of the Public Broadcasting Service.

At CBS, “the house that Edward R. Murrow built,” news division President Edward Joyce made his reputation as a local TV station manager, and his boss, Sauter, ascended the corporate ladder as a network censor, local station manager and president of the sports division. The network’s chairman, Thomas H. Wyman, was the big man at Green Giant and later Pillsbury food companies.

Among this new generation of managers is a sense that the high standards of the older generation also engendered a narrow-mindedness. “One of the frustrations when I came here was that sense of the priesthood, that it was patented,” NBC’s Grossman said. “You couldn’t ask questions. ‘Why did you do this?’

Business Orientation

“One of the changes we made when I came here four years ago was that we brought a greater sense of business orientation into the organization,” said CBS’ Sauter. “There was and is to this day a feeling of compromise and disappointment among some people here because of that.”

The new generation of network managers, however, has brought with it not only a more businesslike attitude but an unwillingness--or inability--to insulate the news divisions from the intense economic pressures of broadcasting.

ABC News, for instance, was not exempt this fall when the network, citing the “economic environment and our current competitive situation,” laid off 3% of its work force, or 350 jobs, and eliminated another 265 unfilled positions. A few weeks later, CBS News instituted its cutbacks, reducing its news staff by more than 10%.

NBC so far has stood firm, but its news staff already was pared under former Chairman Fred Silverman.

“It is no longer assumed that a network news department will automatically lose money,” said Richard Wald, senior vice president of ABC News, “though I don’t think they expect the kind of rate of return they do from other things.”

News Shows Cheaper

In one way the new business orientation has proved a clear boon. As cost pressures have risen, ABC’s Wald explained, the interest in producing news has intensified, because news programs are cheaper to produce than entertainment and, thus, require smaller audiences to break even.

Unlike most entertainment shows, news shows are entirely network-owned. Any additional news program a network can produce profitably lessens the continuing financial burden of maintaining a worldwide news division.

At ABC, for instance, the news division currently produces 21.5% of the network’s total programming. In 1975, the figure was 7.5%.

But some within the networks are worried about what this new generation of news managers and its concern with profit may do to the kind of news the division produces.

Entertainment Model

At NBC, for example, the news division has “followed the entertainment division’s model” of producing pilots, engaging in test marketing, interviewing focus groups and conducting market studies when trying to add new programs.

One of the first fruits of this process is the network’s new prime-time magazine program, “American Almanac,” hosted by veteran news personality Roger Mudd, which will become a weekly series in 1986.

The show has earned praise from TV critics as a sign NBC is committed to “traditional” news standards. But NBC Vice President Tim Russert explained that the show’s lack of investigative stories or confrontational interviews does reflect market research suggesting that “people sort of like the notion of sitting back and watching an explanation of weather, or test-tube babies, with no edge to it, no sense of this doctor doing something wrong.”

Perhaps the most disputed program in this debate is CBS’ new prime-time magazine prototype, “West 57th,” which aired six times last summer.

Dazzling Graphics

The show emphasized much of what some news executives describe as the future elements of news in prime time: intense, sometimes dazzling graphics, high-gloss production values, fast pacing, rock-video-like montages, and a heavy dose of the correspondents as hero characters, ever visible on screen, tracking down the story.

To supporters, like TV critic Tom Shales, the show did pieces “just as serious and sober as any ever done by ’60 Minutes.’ ”

To critics, “West 57th” was “a very cynical act,” as one CBS newsman said, consciously designed to attract younger viewers because market studies show the network has the oldest audience of the three.

“When you put a program on in prime time, you get into an incredibly more competitive environment,” Sauter explained. “ ‘West 57th’ was designed to be more broadly based in appeal than many other informational broadcasts, and frankly I saw no problem with that intent and execution.”

Morning Competition

This debate over the broadening definition of news has been played out most clearly in the competition among morning news shows, a contest started in earnest when ABC succeeded with, in Wald’s words, “a rather frothy” “Good Morning America” hosted by actor David Hartman.

“Good Morning America” forced both NBC’s “The Today Show” and the “CBS Morning News” to add more froth to their brew, a very public and sometimes messy mixing process. CBS has suffered most. After scrapping an erudite but low-rated broadcast with Charles Kuralt, it has tried several formulas, touching bottom in public relations terms when Sauter and Joyce decided upon former Miss America Phyllis George as co-anchor. Five anchorpersons and several format changes later, CBS’ ratings are little better than they were with dull, bald, erudite Kuralt.

To many of the news managers, the charges of growing frivolousness in pursuit of profits fails to take into account the fact that there is simply more news on the air.

“A network news organization is like a publishing business, and each one of its broadcasts serves a different audience at a different time of the day,” Sauter said.

News ‘Schizoid’

Others describe the phenomenon somewhat differently. “It used to be that the network had a schizoid personality,” said Barbara Matusow, author of “The Evening Stars,” a book about TV anchors. “Now the news division itself has a schizoid personality.”

For example, Matusow said, the morning programs have all increasingly strayed toward that tundra of TV programming now called “infotainment,” ground pioneered by local news magazines, syndicated shows in which entertainment and news are mixed.

“ ‘Entertainment Tonight’ has come in and been a factor,” NBC’s Grossman agreed. “This is a much broader business now, and all of these shows have had their influence.”

Local news, once an embarrassment, is considered by current network managers as something from which the networks can learn--particularly when it comes to better presentation, longer stories, graphics and specialized reporting.

‘Blow-Dried News’

“Local stations, lots of whom became successful doing feather-brained, blow-dried news, have become far more serious,” Wald argued.

NBC even has hired Frank Magid, the TV news consultant who pioneered “happy talk” local news, to work on “The Today Show” and “NBC Nightly News.”

Although most viewers may not have noticed, the three nightly news broadcasts--still the “jewel in the network crown,” as Grossman describes them--have changed dramatically in the last four years as competition has increased.

Nightly news programs today contain about 25% fewer stories than they did in 1980, averaging fewer than 15 stories a night, according to research done by Michael Robinson, director of the Media Analysis Project at George Washington University.

Many of the stories, on average, are longer. And most nights, Robinson said, the networks have adapted something akin to “a one-story-a-day format,” in which one issue is identified as primary and much of the broadcast involves background pieces, features and analysis on that issue.

‘Mini-Doc’ Trend

The three networks also have begun airing weeklong series each week--”mini-docs,” in TV parlance--in which a correspondent will get four or five minutes for five consecutive nights to explore an issue.

One consequence is that the number of documentary hours networks produce each year has shriveled. Although documentaries were usually costly and low-rated intrusions into prime time, special series approximate documentary coverage and market research shows that, if heavily promoted, they actually draw viewers to the nightly news.

The definition of news on the nightly broadcasts today also is far different. Much of each program is devoted to what might be described as sociology, “telling you what you did today,” Robinson said, and involves specialized reporting on medicine or law.

Much of this longer and more theme-oriented reporting also is based on the theory that the traditional role of network news--providing a rundown of headlines--has been usurped by local news broadcasts using network pictures and locally produced narration.

Headlines Known

“We start with the assumption now that a good part of the country knows the headlines by the time they get to Rather or (Tom) Brokaw or (Peter) Jennings at 7 p.m.,” Grossman said. “Therefore, now our job is to provide context, perspective and history.”

This notion, too, inspires disagreement. Is this a softening of the news or a richening?

“When CBS innovated this four years ago,” Sauter said, “the other two networks initially decried it as CBS News becoming a feature service. Now they have quickly emulated what we do on the air.”

Others, such as ABC White House correspondent Sam Donaldson, have doubts about the changes.

“It is true that we all strive to do more than just headlines,” he said. “But I must tell you I think people in Omaha coming home from a hard day’s work trying to sell insurance policies want to know what’s going on that day--as much or more than seeing a five-minute piece of a three-part series on how to curl your hair without burning it.”