FRIENDLY JABS NETWORK NEWS

Fred Friendly’s network news career began when he joined CBS News as producer of Edward R. Murrow’s “Hear It Now” on radio in 1948. But were he starting today, he said, he’d start in local television news, not the network variety.

His reason: Satellites have radically changed the nature of television news-gathering, giving network affiliates the ability to cover out-of-town and even foreign news and air it well before local stations receive a network’s nightly news program.

“I know that (network) documentaries are an endangered species,” said Friendly, president of CBS News for two years in the ‘60s. “I think network news could become an endangered species unless they keep their standards high.”

In the days of Murrow, then Walter Cronkite and NBC’s “The Huntley-Brinkley Report,” he said, local stations couldn’t do what network news operations could do “intellectually or technically. But now the technology is there.

“So they (local stations) can do it technically,” he said. He also asserts that there’s little serious news analysis on network news programs nowadays, and thus “the difference, actually, between a good local station and the network is not very big.”

Friendly quit CBS in 1966 in a much-publicized flap over its refusal to continue live daytime coverage of Senate hearings on the Vietnam War. He also quit, he said, because he no longer had--as Murrow once had--direct access to then-CBS Board Chairman William S. Paley.

Now a professor emeritus at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York, Friendly was here last week to speak at an Academy of Television Arts & Sciences tribute to the memory of Murrow, his friend and mentor.

Interviewed at the Bel-Air home of one of his sons, TV producer Andrew Friendly, the 70-year-old former news chief and producer of Murrow’s acclaimed “See It Now” telecasts in the ‘50s talked of both the old and new days of television.

As he often does, he brooded aloud about what he sees as the lack of serious news analysis on network television today, and what he called “the great blight of network news, all (broadcast) news”--that most stories “run under two minutes.”

“I’m not saying anything that (Dan) Rather and (Peter) Jennings and all the producers don’t say, and say to me all the time,” he added.

Although network news executives insist that their nightly news programs indeed do pieces that try to provide context for a given story, Friendly doesn’t buy that. A 24-minute newscast just doesn’t hack it, he submits, and the only way to do things properly is with an hourlong news program each night, and in prime time.

Aware that this would be promptly dismissed as a pipe dream both by the networks and their affiliates, Friendly nonetheless said that were Murrow still alive, “he would be saying, ‘Let’s do an hour each night . . . at 10 o’clock.’ ”

Such an hour, he said, would incorporate the day’s breaking news, analyses of major stories, interviews about one particular story, as is done on Ted Koppel’s acclaimed “Nightline” on ABC, and the kinds of investigative pieces that one sees on CBS’ “60 Minutes” and ABC’s “20/20.”

The idea, Friendly said, would be to try “a new way, and try to make the American people--who get most of their news from television--understand what the real issues of our time are.”

That isn’t being done very much now, he argued. But it may happen on the local level, he said, as satellite technology makes possible the expansion of news programming by local stations, because “there’s so much revenue to be made” today in a local news operation.

“The next five years are crucial” for the networks, Friendly said.

“And if network news doesn’t fulfill its promise and doesn’t establish that you can get from the networks in news and documentaries what you can’t get from local stations, that will imperil the whole concept of network news.”

When interviewed, Friendly hadn’t yet seen Home Box Office’s much-publicized docudrama “Murrow,” which portrays Murrow’s career and the correspondent’s relationship with Friendly, Paley, and then-CBS President Frank Stanton.

Although he was interviewed by the show’s scriptwriter, Ernest Kinoy, Friendly said he turned down a request to be a consultant on the program because he dislikes docudramas and how they sometimes bend fact for the sake of drama.

(Indeed, he said, he wishes that the Television Academy would invite him and some of his colleagues back here do a seminar on docudramas.)

After viewing the broadcast of “Murrow” Sunday night, Friendly in a brief post-show interview, said that it “was quite an emotional experience” for him. The show, he said, “wasn’t as bad as I had been led to believe, but it wasn’t as good either.”

He wasn’t knocking Daniel J. Travanti, who played Murrow, he said, but “the real problem I have with it (the show) is that nobody could play Ed. . . . Nobody could seize an audience as he did.”

As for Kinoy’s script, he said that while there was much in it that was true, “sometimes the facts aren’t what they were,” particularly in the show’s depiction of conflict between Stanton and Murrow in the ‘50s.

Back then, he said, Stanton (played in the film by John McMartin) “didn’t have a direct relationship with Murrow or me. I saw him twice in the ‘50s.” It wasn’t until the ‘60s, he added, that Stanton became the executive responsible for CBS News.

Although the film depicts Stanton as worried about ratings, controversy and sponsors, Friendly noted that the CBS executive risked jail in 1971 when members of Congress assailed CBS News’ controversial documentary “The Selling of the Pentagon.”

Stanton, citing the protection of the First Amendment, defied a House committee’s demand for outtakes and notes on the documentary. The full House later refused to cite him for contempt. Stanton’s action, Friendly said, “was as courageous an act as anything Murrow ever did.”

What of Edward Herrmann’s) portrayal of Fred Friendly?

“That’s a hard judgment for me to make,” Friendly said. It would be quibbling, he said, to say that the movie’s Friendly was a cigar smoker when such never was the case.

Herrmann’s version of him, the real Friendly said, “had better manners than I had and was less volatile as I remember me being and my colleagues remember me being.”