CBS MAPS COURSE TO BRIGHTER MORNINGS

Gene F. Jankowski, president of the CBS Broadcast Group, smiled gamely when asked if one might conclude that when it comes to a creating a competitive morning program, CBS in recent years has been the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.

“Quite the contrary,” he said, despite much uproar over CBS’ most recent major attempt to concoct a winning plan and its subsequent decision to end after December the nearly 23-year saga of the troubled “CBS Morning News.”

And, he said, “I’m afraid there is a lot of misunderstanding” by some in CBS News that what they considered their property “was suddenly taken out of their hands and they no longer were going to be a contributor. Nothing could be farther from the truth.”

In January, the “CBS Morning News” will be history. CBS News won’t have the program’s time slot then, either. It has been announced that a new unit created in the broadcast group will run CBS’ next attempt in the morning ratings race.

It also may mean a finale for the “CBS Early Morning News,” which precedes the two-hour program. CBS News President Van Gordon Sauter said the new unit will be responsible for the entire 6-to-9 a.m. weekday period.

He declined to say if this also means the end for the “CBS Early Morning News.” “It’s premature to speculate about it at this stage,” he said. “There’s going to be a significant news presence there, but what form it will take has not been decided.”

Sauter, to whom the new morning-show unit will report in his capacity as an executive vice president of the broadcast group, was asked if the new unit is a stopgap measure and if the morning effort eventually will be assigned to CBS Entertainment.

“Well, there’s no plan for it to do so now,” he said. “I don’t think that’s part of anybody’s vision.”

In recent years, uncertainty has periodically been the news at the “CBS Morning News,” what with changing anchors, producers and formats, and now CBS’ decision--made after strong pressure from affiliates to create a contender--to take the time from CBS News.

The news division’s efforts have resulted only in a program that remains a distant third in the ratings to NBC’s front-running “Today Show” and ABC’s second-place “Good Morning America.”

According to the latest available Nielsens for the week ending Aug. 1, the “CBS Morning News” had an average rating of 2.7 compared to 4.9 for “Today” and 4.2 for ABC’s entry. Each ratings point represents 859,000 homes.

The losing legacy of the “CBS Morning News” includes the controversial nine-month stay of Phyllis George; the subsequent exit after only 11 months of co-anchors Forrest Sawyer and Maria Shriver; a shift in emphasis from hard news to lighter fare that emulates that of the competition and five executive producers in seven years.

Affiliates were hopeful in May when CBS News hired Susan Winston, former executive producer of ABC’s “Good Morning America,” to revamp the “CBS Morning News” and boost its ratings. But she quit on Aug. 1, saying CBS had no clear vision of what it wanted.

More recently, according to one source, nearly 100 CBS News staffers in New York considered signing a petition, accusing CBS News of giving up on the program rather than trying to return it to the straight newscast it had been in the early 1970s.

No petition materialized. But “60 Minutes” humorist Andy Rooney, in his syndicated newspaper column, sharply criticized the network for removing the program from CBS News and losing a place for important stories that might otherwise go unaired.

“CBS, which used to stand for the Columbia Broadcasting System, no longer stands for anything,” he wrote. “They’re just corporate initials now.”

Sauter remained unruffled, at least publicly, about Rooney’s blast. “If we become irate at that,” he said, “it would be difficult for us to defend Andy against the people who become irate over what he says on ’60 Minutes.’ ”

Sauter and Jankowski, in separate interviews last week, insisted the new morning efforts will involve CBS News as what Jankowski called “a major contributor.”

Still, Burton Benjamin, a retired CBS News veteran and a respected documentary maker, lamented, as did Rooney, the impending loss of at least 10 hours of weekly air time once owned by CBS News. “I think it’s regrettable,” Benjamin said. “It’s hard enough to get time on the air. You’re not seeing many documentaries in prime time anymore.”

However, noting reported threats by CBS affiliates to take the morning time back for their own use, he added that “I rather suspect that they (CBS executives) had no alternative.”

So far, one affiliate, WAGA-TV in Atlanta, has said it will drop the “CBS Morning News” in September (see related story) but with the probability that the station will clear time for the new CBS morning effort in January.

Sauter said he knew of no other similar actions, “but there will be a certain number of stations which will drop the program for the fourth quarter. We knew that going in. I mean, that’s not a surprise.”

Surprisingly, one station executive gave short shrift to the threat-of-cancellation reports. James G. Babb Jr., a former head of the CBS affiliates board, said he had heard talk by some colleagues of taking back the morning time, but filling two hours is no easy task, and “I doubt that there would have been a wholesale defection.”

“I think there has been frustration and I think some legitimate frustration,” Babb, executive vice president of Jefferson-Pilot Communications Co. in Charlotte, N.C., said last week.

“But I would remind everybody that this is not a new problem. I’ve been here with this company for 30 years, and the morning segment of CBS has been a problem for 30 years.”

Actually, it has been 32 years. The start was “The Morning Show” which, according to CBS, was a two-hour news-entertainment package. It emphasized news, was hosted by Walter Cronkite, but also featured Bill Baird’s Puppets.

Retired CBS News executive Sig Mickelson, present at the show’s origin, said it was begun as a competitor to NBC’s 2-year-old “Today” and it initially was in the news department. But after four months, he said, it was moved to the programs division, now called CBS Entertainmment.

NBC moved “Today” from entertainment to its news division in 1961, where it has remained. ABC’s “Good Morning America,” begun in 1976, always was produced by ABC Entertainment.

Mickelson, an adjunct professor at San Diego State University, said that CBS’ morning shows later went through various formats, mostly offering entertainment, with one even featuring Pupi Campo and his orchestra. They shrank, too, dropping to an hour, then 45 minutes.

In 1963, CBS News began the half-hour “CBS Morning News,” which was expanded to an hour in 1969, and followed by “Captain Kangaroo.” The “CBS Morning News” became a 90-minute program in 1981, and took over the 7-to-9 a.m. period in 1982, evicting the good captain.

With all the network morning shows now two hours long, a three-way race got under way in earnest, with ABC’s newcomer leading the pack with a brisk, entertainment-oriented approach that NBC’s “Today” soon followed, finally overtaking ABC this year.

The “CBS Morning News” tried to keep up, taking a lighter approach, offering more features. But it still was perceived by viewers as a “hard-news” broadcast, Sauter said, and research has shown that the morning audience “doesn’t have an interest in a news broadcast.”

To stay with it, he said, “would have been disastrous. The losses would have continued to mount, and the affiliate defections would accelerate, and it was a death ship.” But to make it the kind of show that would satisfy today’s audience just wouldn’t have worked with CBS News still running it, he said. Sauter declined to comment on rumors some anchor proposals for the show included ABC sportscaster Frank Gifford or even actors.

However, he said, that would have gone against the ethics of CBS News.

That the news division soon will yield the morning chores to a new unit that is neither in news nor entertainment doesn’t particularly alarm former news executive Mickelson because the program “has been a hybrid creation from the beginning, anyway.”

The important thing, he said, is that CBS News’ contributions to it remain distinct from anything else aired on it.

A number of affiliates, Atlanta’s WAGA among them, have long wanted CBS’ entertainment division to produce the network’s morning program, to give it the entertainment values that they believed would draw the audiences that it needed to compete--and thus give them a strong lead-in to their own programming.

On the other hand, Ron Handberg, general manager of Minneapolis affiliate WCCO-TV, which has a strong news tradition, said CBS News should have remained in charge.

“I think they (CBS executives) have a point when they talk about the restrictions of a wholly CBS News program placed on a program that has to appeal in a more entertaining way,” he said. “I think there is legitimacy to that.”

However, he said, he thought there should be a way to ease the restrictions, to make the program a special case. But now, with what he called a “never-never land” unit producing it, “I think it is not going to resemble a news program come January, and I think that’s sad.”

The new effort wasn’t assigned to entertainment, Jankowski said, because that division--which last season saw NBC defeat CBS in prime-time ratings--”pretty much has its hands filled” to stay competitive with the peacock network this fall.

It wasn’t left with CBS News, he said, because CBS executives concluded that to compete at reveille nowadays, “we can’t continue to do what we have been doing, namely, invest $35 million (annually) and lose more than $10 million a year.”

Echoing Sauter, Jankowski also said CBS executives concluded that “we have pushed the propriety and the boundaries of CBS News standards about as far as we could in terms of the kinds of host, anchor people and so forth” on the “CBS Morning News.” He didn’t elaborate.

CBS will announce the “news component” of its new morning effort in several weeks, “and sometime after that we’ll be announcing general plans for the rest of this (three-hour) time period,” Sauter said.

Conceivably, he said, there could be three separate one-hour broadcasts in the morning.

Babb, the North Carolina broadcaster, said he thought the decision to remove CBS News from running the new effort may prove a blessing for the news division, despite the criticism that has attended the action.

“In some ways, it can relieve CBS News of a burden in that they can then concentrate fully on the hard-news aspect and not worry about having a dual identity” of news and entertainment in the morning, he said.

And, he said, with the “NBC Nightly News” now nipping at the heels of the once-dominant “CBS Evening News,” “they can concentrate on that, on ’60 Minutes,’ on ‘West 57th,’ and hopefully a couple of (prime-time) specials along the way.”

But he warned that CBS’ new push at dawn in January, regardless of what form it takes, won’t be easy, “and anyone who expects instant gratification is going to be in for a major letdown.”