It’s Not the End of the World at CBS

A friend put down the paper earlier this week and asked her husband in shocked disbelief: “How could things at CBS News have fallen apart so quickly?”

Given how the press has covered the $30-million budget cut at CBS, her misunderstanding is forgivable.

Press coverage of the story has been clouded by a sense of brotherhood with the 215 employees that CBS News fired as part of the cut. As a result, the press has mistakenly reported this as a titanic struggle between the forces of light--journalism--and the forces of dark--business.

It is something less epic and more complex.

What the press is bemoaning at CBS is the very restructuring other industries have gone through as part of the campaign to make America more competitive. Such restructuring is not as good as suggested in the past, not as bad as some suggest now.

Among the most lamentable examples of press coverage this week was a story in this newspaper headlined, “CBS Firings: Toll in Personal Lives.” This heart-wrenching piece told how “the network that virtually invented broadcast journalism” faces the “worst period of financial austerity ever . . . and a toll in personal lives” unknown in television.

In Los Angeles, for instance, nine people lost jobs.

Some perspective: When Gemco department stores closed last fall, 9,000 here lost jobs. And got less coverage.

The quotes were enlightening, too. One unnamed producer, who called this the “dismantling of CBS News,” offered that, “It’s like being in a nuclear war: The survivors are going to envy the dead.” This fellow has an inflated sense of his own importance.

More to the point, this is not the dismantling of the “House that Edward R. Murrow Built,” as often claimed.

CBS News still will have more bureaus and staff than it did nine years ago, the glory era of Walter Cronkite, and its budget still will be 203% greater--so the cuts need not undermine the quality or amount of news gathering the network can do.

The other problem with coverage is the level of sophistication.

Anchorman Dan Rather, in a New York Times op-ed piece, wrote: “News is a business. “But journalism is something else, too. Something more . . . . A beacon that helps the citizens of a democracy find their way.”

True, TV news is more than business, and for 25 years was insulated from the pressure of turning a profit. But there were two reasons for that, and both had to do as much with business as with integrity.

First, networks had a monopoly. So news functioned as a loss leader: A strong news show helped build viewer loyalty.

Second, network news helped fend off a disapproving Federal Communications Commission, which in the industry’s early days was so appalled by much of the programming that it continually threatened network management. So leaving news alone was good business.

Today all that has changed. This is what recent news coverage of CBS has failed to recognize. It is not about good and evil. It’s about restructuring network television, both financially and journalistically, to adapt to the world as it is.

First, the economics: The FCC no longer threatens; it wants to deregulate.

And in the era of cable, VCRs, stronger independent programming and declining network news viewership, networks no longer have a monopoly.

Indeed, CBS has problems because it had to fend off a takeover bid from Ted Turner caused in part by the network’s declining profits and a more predatory Wall Street. ABC and NBC both avoided merger fights in the last two years by agreeing to friendly takeovers.

So networks cannot go back to the economic realities of the past. It isn’t a matter of choice. TV journalism itself also has changed, and part of what we are seeing is a debate over how the network news operations must cope with that. The choice of going back to the old ways is not on the table.

In the old days, network news programs still had first rights to network footage. So Walter Cronkite was our voice for national and international news. The local guys did local news.

Today those exclusivity rules are broken. The local guys now show the best network footage and stories before Dan Rather gets on the air. Add to that satellite technology, which allows local stations to buy national and international footage from independent cooperatives.

Journalist David Halberstam, on “Nightline” this week, moaned that most local anchormen are “airheads” incapable of dealing with international events. He may be right, but the only answer is getting better folks on local TV.

Already network news operations are producing longer, more in-depth stories. The network newscast of the future may look a lot like the “MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour.”

If all this means improvement in local news operations and change in the networks, which are altogether too similar and too slow to innovate, the result could be improved journalism.