Atlanta Affiliate Pulls Away From CBS--Temporarily

When CBS announced that it would drop its low-rated “CBS Morning News” in January and then offer yet another new morning show produced by a new unit, it was the last straw for Paul Raymon, general manager of CBS affiliate WAGA-TV in Atlanta. He decided to replace the two-hour “CBS Morning News” in September with his own mix of local news and syndicated business and talk programs. But, he said he has every intention of reopening the time period in January to CBS’ new effort.

However, cautioned Raymon, whose station serves the nation’s 13th-largest TV market, he is assuming that CBS will “come up with a new format, which I am still waiting to see.”

A top CBS executive who declined to be identified said the network anticipates that 10 to 15 affiliates probably will drop the “CBS Morning News” until January, but clear time for the new morning show then.

Raymon noted that CBS in recent years has tried a variety of new formats and faces, has on more than one occasion assured affiliates “that a solution would be forthcoming,” and yet failed to make its morning effort competitive against NBC’s front-running “Today Show” and ABC’s second-place “Good Morning America.”

Still, he said recently, he remained hopeful when CBS hired Susan Winston, former executive producer of “Good Morning America,” in May to try to make the “CBS Morning News” a contender.

He gave up last month when CBS executives told affiliates that her efforts hadn’t worked out and that the network would regroup and try again in January.

“They mentioned that due to a variety of circumstances, they were not going to be able to do the show that Susan Winston wanted to do,” and that “CBS Morning News” anchors Forrest Sawyer and Maria Shriver were leaving Aug. 1, he said.

“I thought of the old expression, ‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.’ Well, this is fooling me about nine times. We just decided that we could not go into the fourth quarter of this selling year with that kind of presentation to our advertisers.”

Raymon, a member of the CBS affiliates board, said that under CBS News, the network’s morning effort tended to be “this rather elitist two-hour news program, which was wonderful, except who can watch it in the morning?”

He praised the leisurely 90-minute “CBS News Sunday Morning,” which WAGA has aired ever since the program began in 1979. “It’s a terrific show,” he said.

“But that program is intended for you to get a cup of coffee and sit down and watch it. And on Sunday morning, most people can do that. But during the week, you can’t sit and watch two hours of news if you happen to work for a living.”

Experience and ratings have shown that viewers on weekday mornings “have opted for the quick capsuling of news the way you get it on ‘Today’ or ‘Good Morning America’ ” and those programs’ brisk features, entertainment reports and interviews, he said.

This, he said, “would be enough to make the average person say, ‘Hey, what we’re doing isn’t working.’ But not CBS News.”

When CBS, after much ballyhoo over the hiring of Winston, said no to her various plans, it at least should have offered an alternative, Raymon said: “Whatever the plan would have been, we would not have canceled.

“We would have tried anything new that they thought would be successful. The only reason we decided to do something is because they did nothing.”

CBS News chief Van Gordon Sauter, asked for comment, just smiled and gave a diplomatic reply: “I would just say I’m sorry we’ve lost the Atlanta audience for four months and I look forward to Paul’s continuing support in the future.”

There is suspicion by those on high at CBS News that Raymon’s decision to drop the “CBS Morning News” was due in part to his lingering anger that in 1985 the network lured Sawyer away from WAGA, where he had been a top anchor since 1980.

Not so, said Raymon, while cheerfully admitting that “I was not amused” when Sawyer left. That Sawyer was removed as co-anchor of the “CBS Morning News” after 13 months played no part, either, in his decision to drop the show, Raymon said.

“However, Forrest is in town now,” he said, “and I plan to tell him that I dropped the show when they took him off, if only to help his ego.”