Reagan Interview by Network Anchors Not Exactly Prime Time

NBC twitted CBS Friday for deciding to air an interview with President Reagan by four network anchors late at night Thursday after initially saying it would broadcast the taped program in prime time.

“They apparently think the President is the late movie,” NBC spokesman Bud Rukeyser said.

But, as things turned out, CBS could have argued that NBC thought the President was the afternoon movie on the West Coast.

It happened this way:

CBS, NBC and ABC said on Wednesday they would air the half-hour program at the start of prime time Thursday across the country. (Cable News Network, the fourth network involved in the interview, delayed a scheduling decision until after the interview.)

But late Thursday afternoon, CBS notified its affiliates that it had changed its mind and would run the interview at 11:30 p.m. as a CBS News special. It restored a one-hour entertainment special, “The Story of Santa Claus,” that the Reagan program almost bumped from CBS’ 8 p.m. time slot.

ABC and NBC stayed with their original plans for the Reagan program.

However, when prime time began at 8 p.m. Thursday in Los Angeles, only ABC-owned KABC-TV Channel 7 aired the Reagan interview. KNBC Channel 4 had run it three hours earlier and thus was able to present its regularly scheduled program--television’s top-rated “The Cosby Show.”

John Rohrbeck, general manager of the NBC-owned station, explained Friday that the network had asked its affiliates to air the Reagan program simultaneously in their respective time zones, starting at 8 p.m. EDT--which was 5 p.m. in Los Angeles.

Rukeyser, executive vice president of corporate communications at NBC, said that NBC stations weren’t bound to follow that request and that the network’s prime-time “feed” of programs to its stations had begun with the taped Reagan interview.

Explaining CBS’ decision to reschedule the program to a late-night slot, spokesman Tom Goodman said network news executives had made an “editorial judgment” that the Reagan interview wasn’t sufficiently newsworthy to warrant the prime-time broadcast originally planned.

No one other than CBS News executives--not even CBS board chairman Laurence A. Tisch--was involved in the decision, he said. “It was our own call, a news call based on a unilateral decision.”

Officials at ABC News declined to comment publicly on the CBS decision, but one called it “a little surprising, considering that all the network newscasts led with the Reagan interview, and the information that came out of it wound up on the front page of every newspaper in America.”

Cable News Network aired the interview Thursday at 8:25 p.m. Eastern time.