CBS’ Bill Stout to Do Star Turn During Sweeps

According to KCBS-TV management, it was just dumb luck that the opening day of the February ratings sweeps would be the very day that Bill Stout would get his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

“No kidding? Ah jeez,” groused the veteran Channel 2 commentator when first informed last week that sweeps, star and Stout would harmonically converge today at 12:30 p.m., Sunset and Vine. “You know what I think of sweeps.”

The 59-year-old newsman is no ingenue when it come to the cross-pollinization of entertainment and journalism that sweeps fever brings to the tube every February, May and November. In their drive to maximize ratings, TV news departments often forget the news and, in its place, says Stout, program “the worst kind of garbage.”

For years, Stout has refused to participate.

“I’m not the only one,” he said. “Practically all the newsroom types grumble when this sweeps thing comes up. There’ll be one or two who’ll say it’s OK because he or she had an idea for a project he or she wanted to do.”

But sweeps hype is anathema to no-frills news, Stout said.

“A new manager will come in and say he has two (sweeps ratings periods) to make his mark--maybe three, but no more,” Stout said. “ ‘We’ve got to do it quick!,’ he’ll say. ‘We’ve got to do it quick! Imitate the other stations’ hype for sexier, raunchier sweeps series.’

“The untried avenue is always better,” Stout said. “Just do it straight. Do a better, more solid news job. How do you know it won’t work? Nobody’s tried it.”

But now, unwittingly, Stout--who has been off the air recovering from an October heart attack--is part of sweeps even before he returns to the air, which he hopes will be within a few weeks.

“Don’t think that someone (at KCBS) didn’t know it was the first day of sweeps,” quipped anchor Ann Martin of rival KABC-TV Channel 7.

Not so, said KCBS spokeswoman Andi Sporkin. While it’s true that the station asked for a February date for the dedication, Sporkin said it was coincidence that it happened to fall on the first day of Arbitron Rating Service’s sweeps period. (A.C. Nielsen’s four-week February sweeps period begins Thursday.)

“We picked February because we wanted everyone from the station to be here. People go on vacation but they’re all here during sweeps,” she said.

However, Anna Martinez, a spokeswoman for the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which bestows the stars, said the sponsor can name the date when the star is to be dedicated. KCBS picked Feb. 3 as Stout’s star day more than two months ago, she said.

Invitations to cover the unveiling of Stout’s star on the Walk of Fame have gone out to the news departments of all TV stations in Los Angeles, according to Sporkin. Just how many KCBS rivals will show up for the ceremony is uncertain. But Channel 2’s cameras will definitely be there, Sporkin said.

Stout’s star will go between George Raft’s and Celeste Holm’s, but he won’t be the first broadcast journalist to join company with actors, comedians and pop vocalists. KTLA Channel 5’s Stan Chambers, KABC Talkradio’s Michael Jackson and former TV newsman George Putnam (now a radio talk show host on KIEV-AM) have also been honored with their own stars. A required fee of $3,500, posted in this case by Channel 2, covers maintenance, installation and security of the star.

While Stout talks a tough game, he is no stranger to the entertainment side of TV. A card-carrying member of the Screen Actors Guild, he has portrayed a newscaster or reporter in a half-dozen movies over the past 15 years, including “Somewhere in Time” (1980), “House” (1985), “The Underground Man” (1974) and “The Phantom of Hollywood” (1974).

(He’s certainly not alone: Such CBS hard-news stalwarts as Mike Wallace, Walter Cronkite and even Edward R. Murrow did entertainment stints. Wallace was once a game-show host, Cronkite was the host of a hokey 1950s history-entertainment series called “You Are There” and Murrow was a radio actor before he launched into his broadcast journalism career.)

But Stout maintains that he has been very careful to avoid mixing entertainment with news and is appalled when they do intermingle.

“Six years ago we had an executive here at Channel 2 who’s now back in New York with CBS,” he recalled. “I wasn’t part of whatever sweeps carnival they were putting together that season, whichever season it was, but I stopped him before he went into his final planning meeting on the sweeps series and asked him, ‘What are we gonna do for sweeps?’ ”

Without waiting for an answer, Stout offered his own unsolicited suggestions: public education, smog and illegal immigrants.

“I told him to just find out for me if any of the things I considered the top matters of concern to this community would be covered by his dam sweeps,” Stout said. “Just those three issues. Because it seems to me that those were the three issues that concerned all of us, everyone in our viewing area.”

But when the CBS executive emerged from the planning session, he told Stout that none of his issues was discussed.

“Not one of those was touched on!” Stout said. “They were all things like night-walking whores in Hollywood and rectal cancer and transvestites and all that garbage that they do.”

If larger audiences do watch during sweeps, news departments are missing a chance to inform rather than merely entertain those viewers, he said.

“I think it’s too bad,” he said. “If they’re gonna spend the money in the marketing and the merchandising, they ought to do it with topics that have some useful application, some meaning to the people who live in Southern California instead of the froth that they go in for almost habitually.”