Better Than Ever? : TV News: Demise Is Exaggerated

Four months ago, Andy Rooney suddenly stepped out of his best-known role as the avuncular (if crotchety) antidote to Mike Wallace on “60 Minutes” and wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column in which he blistered his employer, CBS, for turning its news division into “a business enterprise first, a moral enterprise second. . . . “

“CBS News will never again be as good as it once was,” Rooney warned.

Six weeks later, Bill Moyers--the erudite commentator and special correspondent for CBS News--announced that he was leaving the network, largely because he thought the line between entertainment and news was being “steadily blurred” at CBS.

“Tax policy had to compete with stories about three-legged sheep and the three-legged sheep won,” Moyers told Newsweek.

CBS News--the favored offspring of CBS founder William S. Paley, the home of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite--has long been the most prestigious of all network news operations. So the question inevitably arises:

If--if!--CBS News is declining, what’s happening to news programs on the other networks . . . and, more important, what is the future of network news?

Thanks to new satellite technology, local TV stations have developed the capability over the last two or three years to cover stories, live, anywhere in the world. Moreover, they can make more money if they do the news themselves, sell the commercials themselves and keep the money themselves, instead of broadcasting network news and letting the networks sell most of the commercials and keep most of the money. Given these economic imperatives, might local stations decide they no longer need network news?

Might the networks themselves now lack both the cash and the commitment to provide continuing, quality news coverage--especially with ABC and NBC under new, cost-conscious, corporate ownership and CBS burdened by low prime-time ratings and the residual effect of having fought off a would-be takeover last year?

Was Rooney right in saying, “The golden days of television news are over?” Are the networks embarking on an era of slick, superficial, overproduced and under-financed evening newscasts--newscasts in which stories about three-legged sheep predominate? Will network newscasts become little better than the game shows and situation comedies they are now sandwiched among? Will the medium that brought a moon landing and a presidential assassination into our living rooms now bring us “Brokaw, P.I.,” “Scarecrow & Mr. Jennings” and “Rather: For Hire”?

In September, Newsweek published a powerful cover story that helped crystallize resentment against--and ultimately contributed to the departures of--Thomas Wyman, then chairman and chief executive officer of CBS, and Van Gordon Sauter, then president of CBS News. Newsweek characterized the battle at CBS as “The Struggle for the Soul of CBS News.”

But Newsweek and all the dire forecasts inside and outside the broadcast industry notwithstanding, it ain’t necessarily so.

Interviews with network news executives, anchors, producers, consultants and competitors--and a viewing of scores of network news programs, old and new--suggest that the alleged desecration and possible demise of network news have both been greatly exaggerated.

It can even be argued, persuasively, that network news is, in many ways, “better today than it ever was,” in the words of Don Hewitt, executive producer of the “CBS Evening News” from 1961 to 1964 and now executive producer of “60 Minutes.”

Finds Agreement

Roone Arledge, president of ABC News, agrees with Hewitt.

“There isn’t any comparable period in history when there was as much news and information on the air as there is now . . . ,” he said.

This is a heretical view in many quarters.

Fred Friendly, former president of CBS News (and the producer of many of Murrow’s most celebrated programs), argues that the control of the networks today by “money managers . . . not broadcasters” has resulted in an obsession with bottom-line considerations that has seriously eroded the quality of network news at every level.

Specifically, Friendly and others lament (1) the virtual death of both the network documentary and the late-night or prime-time news special (2) “a pursuit of the sensational on the evening news” and (3) a neglect of many important but not “entertaining” stories on network newscasts.

Friendly said that the people who run the networks today, unlike the men who founded the business, do not regard news as a public service but as a commodity--”just like pork bellies.

“Murrow did a broadcast from Buchenwald the day it was liberated,” Friendly said. “It was 32 minutes long. Today, if Ed was at Buchenwald, they’d say, ‘Do it in a minute 45 seconds.’ There would be no Murrow today.”

Charge Is Not New

But the charge that the money changers have corrupted the temple of network news is not new. Murrow himself, in 1958, called television a “moneymaking machine . . . in the hands of timid and avaricious men.”

Some aspects of network news today are clearly inferior to what they were in Murrow’s day and in the years that immediately followed.

There is more emphasis now on pacing and drama, and that sometimes results in overheated, self-conscious writing. Moreover, in an effort to counter criticism that the media are too liberal, even unpatriotic, news about the United States and the Soviet Union “tends to be covered more as an ‘us against them’ kind of issue,” said Ron Powers, media critic for CBS News.

NBC even opens its nightly news now with pictures of the Statue of Liberty.

More important, news documentaries--once justifiably the pride of the medium--have diminished dramatically, both in numbers and in total air time in recent years (although some of the few documentaries shown now are two or three hours long, instead of the traditional one hour).

Fewer Documentaries

From 1974 to 1983, ABC did 12 documentaries a year; last year, it did two. NBC did 13 documentaries as recently as 1982; this year, it has done four.

In the 1960s, with 20 documentary-makers on its staff, CBS broadcast 18 to 20 documentaries--and 10 to 20 late-night news specials--a year, according to Robert Chandler, an executive with CBS for 23 years and now at NBC. This year, with one documentary-maker on the staff, CBS has broadcast seven documentaries and three news specials.

Instead of documentaries, television now offers either pure entertainment shows or the glitzy, news-entertainment hybrid known as the “magazine” show--with CBS’ “West 57th Street” the glitziest of the breed.

Documentaries usually received low ratings and were often heavy-handed and slow-moving--too much so for today’s audience, network executives insist. But “Harvest of Shame,” “The Selling of the Pentagon” and dozens of other network documentaries helped focus national attention on important issues with an impact and a sweep that would be impossible for a single newspaper or magazine or a series of two-minute special reports on the evening news to achieve.

Like the documentary, commentary on the evening news has also diminished considerably over the years--and what commentary there is now is just not as hard-edged as that offered in earlier years.

Regular Commentary

Alone among the three networks, NBC continues to provide regular commentary to its nightly news viewers--41 such offerings, for example, during the first six months of 1986.

But on ABC, where Harry Reasoner and Howard K. Smith alternated in giving commentary virtually every night 15 years ago, only four commentaries have been broadcast on “World News Tonight” in the last six months, even though ABC has a contract with George Will, the controversial and provocative political commentator and syndicated columnist.

CBS, which offered 10 Eric Sevareid commentaries in a single month chosen at random in 1977, presented its most recent commentator, Bill Moyers, only once in the entire first six months of 1986--and that one appearance was, in effect, a promotion for Moyers’ own special on the black family in America.

Moyers did more commentary in recent months, but he left the network last month to return to public broadcasting, so the future of commentary on the “CBS Evening News” is uncertain (although both Dan Rather, the anchor, and Howard Stringer, the president of CBS News, said that they are committed to regular commentary on the program).

Bill Lord, executive producer of ABC’s “World News Tonight,” said he would like more commentary on his broadcast, too, but--like Stringer and Rather--he offers no persuasive explanation for its absence.

Reluctant to Offend

Critics say that there is less (and less hard-edged) commentary on the evening news programs today because the networks are reluctant to offend (or bore) viewers in the current political (and economic) climate. Most network policy decisions these days come down to pleasing the audience, critics say, and the resultant emphasis on ratings and profits is widely perceived as the single greatest threat to the quality of network news.

Several former news division presidents at CBS and NBC told The Times in interviews that when they ran their divisions in the 1960s and ‘70s, they were always aware of ratings but were neither obsessed nor threatened by them, not even when their programs slipped to second place in the ratings.

In contrast, news ratings are now published, scrutinized and agonized over every week; when the “CBS Evening News” slipped to No. 3 one week last summer, a CBS producer likened the event to discovering that “there’s no Santa Claus.”

Why the sudden emphasis on ratings? Three reasons:

- Ratings mean money--money to finance the $225-million to $275-million annual budgets each network news division now has. The fee that networks charge advertisers to air their commercials is based on the ratings (i.e., the number of people watching a given show at a given time); the higher the ratings, the higher the ad rate, the greater the revenue for the network. With television now, more than ever, a business run by businessmen reporting to stockholders, it is not surprising that what Rather calls “ratings madness” extends to news programming.

- The print press, which first ignored and then sneered at television, now glamorizes it. Newspapers and magazines pay more attention to television than ever before. Few stories are easier to write--or read--than the horse race story: who’s ahead and why.

- There is now a horse race almost every week in the evening news ratings.

For most of television’s still-young life, network news--and especially the evening news shows--consisted largely of an overwhelmingly dominant CBS, a sporadically competitive NBC and a virtually nonexistent ABC. As recently as last June, the “CBS Evening News” was riding a win streak of 212 consecutive first-place finishes in the ratings.

But just as CBS’ prime-time rating slipped to a weak second last year after finishing first for six straight years--and 25 of the 29 previous years--so the “CBS Evening News” has slipped from sovereignty to parity.

Over the last 30 weeks, CBS has finished first 13 times, NBC has finished first 12 times and they have been tied four times. (ABC finished first once.) Regardless of who actually wins, all three are usually within a percentage point or so of each other in the ratings; for the current season, NBC leads with an 11.7 rating, CBS has 11.6 and ABC 10.6.

(One rating point represents 874,000 homes--1% of the 87.4 million U.S. households with television sets.)

Critics are correct in charging that in an effort to boost ratings, the network news shows resort to sensationalism and promotion far more often than they did in earlier years.

Anchors Are Stars

More than ever before, the anchors are the stars of the evening news. They interview news makers--and their own correspondents--on the air, and they go off to broadcast live from Manila and Beirut and Reykjavik.

“That’s show business; it’s not reporting,” Andy Rooney said.

The evening news shows also cover crime and disaster stories that were formerly left to local news, and ABC, in particular, has drawn considerable criticism for its “Person of the Week” feature every Friday.

“If I miss who the ‘Person of the Week’ is, my life is not a barren wasteland,” said ABC’s own Jeff Greenfield.

But even with all its problems, network news is in many ways better, stronger and more diverse than ever before.

ABC’s “Nightline” and CBS’ “Sunday Morning”--both less than 10 years old--are widely regarded as the best news programs on television today. Five years ago, “This Week With David Brinkley” joined “Face the Nation” and “Meet the Press” in bringing Washington politics into the nation’s living rooms every Sunday morning. CBS’ “60 Minutes” is still going strong, and ABC’s “20/20,” after several wobbly years, has found both an identity and an audience. ABC launched “Our World” and “Business World” this season.

CBS Has Slight Edge

Night after night, story after story, CBS probably still has a slight edge on ABC and NBC, but executives at all three networks agree that for the first time, all three have quality news divisions and quality evening news programs.

Critics who envision the imminent plunge of network news into the abyss of trivia should remember that the same predictions were made for ABC News in 1977, when Arledge, then president of ABC Sports, became president of ABC News. But under Arledge, ABC--once the ragamuffin stepchild in the network news family--now has the top-rated morning news show, the best late-night news show, the best Sunday morning Washington news show and a quality, competitive evening news show. Indeed, according to a study by the Conference on Issues and the Media Inc., ABC’s “World News Tonight” gave the Iran- contra story almost as much air time (214 minutes) as did the combined evening news programs on CBS (127 minutes) and NBC (88 minutes) in the Nov. 17-Dec. 14 period.

Arledge did give “World News Tonight” a quicker, flashier, more contemporary look, but he also helped make “World News Tonight” a better, more substantive program. The evening news programs on NBC and CBS now have a pacing and a visual look and feel clearly influenced by what Arledge did at ABC.

The three evening news shows are not only closer than ever in quality and in ratings but also in style, tone and appearance. There are some differences, of course--ABC’s “World News Tonight” tends to use more international stories, for example, and CBS is widely regarded as having the best writers--but the three shows tend to reflect their anchors, and all three anchors are attractive, white, Anglo-Saxon, male Protestants; all are in their mid-40s to mid-50s, married, with children; all live in apartments in New York’s upper Manhattan.

Seem Interchangeable

The three sometimes seem so interchangeable, in fact, that Don Hewitt refers to them as “PeterJenningsDanRatherTomBrokaw.”

“If you locked you, me and my wife in different rooms for a year, each watching only one anchor, and gave us all a current events test at the end of the year, we’d all get the same grade,” Hewitt said.

And what would we know about current events at the end of that year?

Cronkite has long said that network news is “primarily a front-page headline service.” He’s right. The 30-minute evening newscast--actually 22 minutes-- does not provide enough time for a complete presentation of the day’s news. The most silver-tongued anchor could not read aloud more than half the front page of a good daily newspaper in that time.

Television is primarily an entertainment medium, “an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news,” in the words of Edward R. Murrow. It never has been and never will be the best forum for reporting and analyzing the complex issues of the day.

‘Absurdist Literature’

“Television is about delivering audiences to advertisers,” said Neil Postman, a professor of communications at New York University. “Television news . . . is a form of absurdist literature, an 80-second . . . notice of some problem, without viewers being given any historical or sociological context (or) any sense of continuity. . . . “

But given the severe limitations of television, a careful examination of more than 100 hours of videocassettes and transcripts from the so-called “golden days” of television news strongly suggests that the three evening news programs, individually and collectively, are probably better now than they ever have been.

The evening news used to be “in essence, a sausage factory,” filled with stories from Washington, reported by correspondents standing in front of government buildings, “providing no larger meaning for what the story was nor any possible explanation of how that might impact on the viewers. . . ,” said Lane Vernardos, former executive producer of the “CBS Evening News” and now an executive producer for special events at CBS News.

Many stories on the evening network newscasts today provide more explanation, detail and perspective than they did 10 or 20 years ago. The stories are fewer but longer; they often are accompanied by one or two analytical stories on the same subject; they more often come from cities other than Washington; they are illustrated and explained by better, clearer, more sophisticated charts, graphs and other visual aids--and, thanks to satellite transmissions, they are accompanied by pictures that are more immediate than ever before.

10-Second Blurbs

Network news financial reporting used to consist of little more than 10-second blurbs on the daily rise or fall of the Dow Jones Average. Now the networks--aided by new, computerized graphics capabilities--routinely try to cover some of the more complex stories on the nation’s economy, often with two- or three-minute (or longer) special reports.

Technology in television, as elsewhere, is a mixed blessing, of course. Some of the computer-generated graphics intended to illustrate complex stories whiz and whir across the screen so quickly that they confuse more than they enlighten.

This mind-numbing, blizzard effect is compounded by the rapidity and brevity of most television interviews these days. An as-yet-unpublished study by Daniel C. Hallin, professor of communications at the University of California, San Diego, shows that the average “sound bite” (interview segment) on network news shows averaged 43 seconds in the late 1960s and early ‘70s; last year, the average sound bite was 11 seconds.

“I see many pieces on our show and the other networks that go by quickly and entertainingly and when they’re over, I have no idea what they were about,” said David Browning, a senior producer for the “CBS Evening News” in Los Angeles.

Worse, the same satellite technology that now makes it possible for instantaneous transmission from almost anywhere on Earth has also produced a rush-to-judgment mentality that often leaves little time for real reporting or reflection and, inevitably, results in rampant superficiality.

Speed Essential

Television can report quickly, so it must report quickly; reporters who formerly had hours, sometimes days, to gather, analyze and write their material while waiting for film to be processed (or delivered halfway around the world) now must be ready to broadcast instantly because the satellite can deliver the pictures instantly. The medium is, after all, called teleVISION.

As Peter Jennings, the anchor for ABC’s “World News Tonight,” said recently, “The new technology allows us to be there in an instant, but it doesn’t always give us time to think.”

But most people in network news seem to agree with William Wheatley, executive producer of “NBC Nightly News,” that the advantages of the new technology “far outweigh the disadvantages.”

Technology is only one manifestation of the extraordinary changes that have taken place in network news over the last decade or so.

A Times reporter visited the television news archives at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., this fall to examine videocassettes and/or transcripts of evening newscasts on all three networks from random weeks in every year from 1968 to 1986. The contrast in pace, style, tone and content were instructive, and the most important changes were not essentially technological but philosophical--almost as noticeable as the change from black and white to color.

Difference in Numbers

In one week selected at random in March, 1971, the three networks averaged 18 stories each on their evening newscasts; in that same week in 1986, they averaged 13--almost 28% fewer. Often, the difference in numbers was even greater.

In 1971, network news generally was just a “headline service;” NBC reported 25 stories in 22 minutes on March 4, 1971, for example, devoting 30 seconds or less to each of 12 stories (and 10 seconds or less to eight stories).

Exactly 15 years later, on March 4, 1986, NBC reported 12 stories. Only three were 30 seconds or less; one story ran 3 minutes 50 seconds, another 3 minutes, 10 seconds, a third 2 minutes, 30 seconds, and a fourth 2 minutes, 20 seconds.

Similar comparisons could be made at CBS and ABC.

Critics say that fewer stories (and longer stories) are not necessarily an improvement. Many important stories are now left out altogether, they say, and the longer stories tend to be lighter, less directly tied to the day’s news, less . . . serious.

As recently as five years ago, it was not unusual for all three networks to begin their evening newscasts with five or six consecutive stories out of Washington. Washington dominates the nightly news again right now because of the Iran-contra story, but in the last few years, the networks have tried to broaden the scope of the evening news by covering news at its point of impact throughout the country, rather than by limiting coverage to the institutionalized bureaucracy in the nation’s capital. In so doing, the networks have sometimes indulged in superficiality and abandoned their charter to tell the important news of the day.

Rather Replaced Cronkite

This was especially true at CBS after Rather took over for Cronkite in 1981, and viewers were treated to stories on exorcisms, on dog sled races in Alaska, on the annual tomato war between Colorado and Texas and on a driverless car going backward in circles for two hours.

Although CBS has shifted back to a more serious, hard-edged approach to the news this year--a change that began under Van Gordon Sauter in February and accelerated when Howard Stringer replaced him as president of CBS News--there are still more light stories on all three network evening news shows than there were 15 or 20 years ago.

But Cronkite had his share of light stories, too, and even Murrow did a weekly series of interviews (“Person to Person”) with such celebrities as Duke Ellington, Carol Burnett and Ella Fitzgerald.

What matters more than the occasional light story are the frequent series and special reports that all three networks now offer regularly on their evening news shows. There are far more of these longer, often multipart stories now on subjects that, while not necessarily tied directly to the day’s news, are clearly stories of substance and significance.

John Weisman, writing in TV Guide last August on today’s more “eclectic, electric” evening newscasts, echoed the criticism of many that these longer stories are essentially “feature stories” and that they are replacing “headlines and hard news.” But most of these “features” are serious stories, even if they are not based on news made or announced that very day.

Important ‘Features’

Among the stories that Weisman seemed to regard as “features” were an ABC story on unemployment, an NBC story on the nation’s farm crisis and CBS stories on gun control, growing up poor, the psychological problems of Vietnam veterans and a new study on the relationship between exercise and longevity.

CBS has broadcast more than 60 such major reports and series on the evening news in the last two years. This year alone, ABC’s “World News Tonight” has aired a five-part series on terrorism, a five-part series on immigration, a 10-part series on life in the Soviet Union and background stories on espionage, the Philippines, AIDS and a whole range of other serious issues.

NBC, with its “special segment” several nights a week, does more of this kind of reporting than either CBS or ABC, often at greater length; four or five minutes is not unusual for an NBC “special segment” story, and that is probably why the “NBC Nightly News” is seen by its critics as “the softest” of the three, in the words of CBS’ Stringer.

But the 75 “special segments” NBC has aired in the last year have included stories on the homeless, apartheid in South Africa, anti-Semitism in Austria, political action committees, governments that use torture, the sexual exploitation of children, Mexico’s deepening financial crisis. . . .

That’s “soft?”

No. That’s change--adaptation.

‘Truncated Form’

Much of network news used to be “official statements . . . simply reproduced in truncated form,” in the words of Hallin’s UC San Diego study, comparing network news in 1965-66 and 1985. Now, Hallin said, these statements are often “treated as raw material, which the producers of modern TV news take apart and combine with other material to create highly mediated packages of images and ideas.”

The evening network news programs skip some of those official announcements altogether today, but local news programs have expanded to 2 or 2 1/2 hours in most cities, and the expanded nationwide presence of newspapers such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today give viewers more sources of information than ever before; they are not necessarily dependent on the network news as their only (or even primary) source of information.

Thus, just as television’s ability to cover daily, breaking news stories with impact and immediacy played a role in the decision by major newspapers over the last 15 or 20 years to publish more comprehensive, analytical, explanatory stories, so local television’s ability to provide the pictures and headlines first have played an even greater role in network television’s decision to broadcast more comprehensive, analytical, explanatory stories.

The networks now feed much of their best film directly to their affiliates by satellite for the local news broadcasts well before the networks’ own evening newscasts are on the air. In a sense, the networks undercut their own newscast by doing this, but they are convinced that pictures alone are not news, that it is the expertise, the words, the prestige of the networks, with their anchors and their stables of experienced reporters, that attract viewers. So, they figure, let the locals show the pictures, with local reporters providing the narrative voice-overs; that will just whet the viewer’s appetite for the analysis and perspective the networks can provide an hour or two later.

Competitive Reason

Besides, the local affiliates want those early network picture feeds, and the networks are afraid that if they do not provide them, Cable News Network (CNN) or someone else will.

The threat that local stations--with the help of satellites, CNN and other services--now pose to the networks is very real.

About 175 local stations subscribe to CNN. Many local stations also belong to small, regional groups that exchange coverage by satellite, often with the help of the networks. About 65 stations now have specially equipped trucks, with dishes that can send and receive television signals via satellite for immediate relay to or from other local stations throughout the country.

About 45 local stations belong to CONUS Communications, a consortium of such stations. Another 78 stations are serviced by Group W’s NEWS FEED network.

When the space shuttle Challenger exploded in January, KRON in San Francisco aired live, non-network reports from the launch site in Florida, from astronaut Christa McAuliffe’s hometown in Concord, N.H., from the Morton Thiokol rocket plant in Salt Lake City, from NASA headquarters in Houston and from Washington.

Send Anchors Abroad

Many local stations sent their own anchors to Manila during the Philippine election. Others routinely send their anchors and reporters to Washington or to other news-making capitals, at home and abroad.

Some of this is just “window dressing,” said Bill Baker, president of Group W Broadcasting; many local stations remain largely local or largely superficial and sensationalistic--more interested in hucksterism than in headlines.

In Los Angeles, for example, a recent KCBS experiment with rotating anchors and alternating feature, interview and brief news segments was as widely criticized as it was quickly canceled.

But local news staffs--once widely derided as blow-dried pretty boys with blow-dried brains (and widely scorned for such stunts as dressing up like cowboys or gangsters on the air)--are increasingly competent at many stations, and they are highly respected at more than a dozen, among them, KSL in Salt Lake City, WDIV in Detroit, WTVJ and WPLG in Miami, WCCO and WSTP in Minneapolis, WBBM in Chicago, WBZ and WCVB in Boston, WFAA in Dallas and KIRO and KING in Seattle.

“Local station news-gathering has improved to the point where we can no longer denigrate it as a bunch of local yokels,” said Av Westin, vice president for program development at ABC.

Susanna Shuster of The Times editorial library assisted with the research for this story.