Affiliate Reportage Key to ABC Comprehensive Drug Special

There’s something different about the ABC News special airing Sunday, and not just because it includes the home videotape of an alleged major drug dealer in Detroit as he points at piles of money and chortles, “I’m gonna buy me three cars tomorrow.”

In putting together “Drugs: A Plague Upon the Land,” executive producer Av Westin got 73 ABC-affiliated stations around the country to contribute to this one-hour report on the nation’s drug crisis.

From all of that material, plus information generated by eight network correspondents and two ABC-owned stations, including KABC-TV Channel 7 in Los Angeles, the network says it wound up using about 50 different segments in the program (airing Sunday at 10 p.m. on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42).

Some of the material was merely footage that previously had aired on a station’s local news. But much of it was specifically shot for the network documentary--either new stories or updates on local cases to illustrate that drugs, particularly crack, aren’t just a big-city problem but rather are increasingly pervading every level of America, at an incredible cost to society.

The program represents “the first time, as far as I know, that we have combined a network news division and the news departments of the network (affiliates)” for a special of this kind, Westin said.

Maybe so. But broadcast groups have done it before with stations they own. Geraldo Rivera’s syndicated specials also have used the multiple-city technique, notably in a controversial show about the spread of crack that featured live broadcasts of raids-in-progress in Texas and Florida.

And Reuven Frank, a former NBC News president and now a producer under contract to that division, recalled that in the 1960s, NBC’s “Huntley-Brinkley Report” used the multiple-city approach on occasion. On slow news days, he said, it would “go around the horn,” airing live reports from selected NBC affiliates around the country on local aspects of a national topic such as unemployment.

But that was then.

Speaking of now, Westin maintains that “Drugs: A Plague Upon the Land,” anchored by Peter Jennings, represents an innovative way to take advantage of the fact that “affiliate reportage has improved dramatically over the past (few) years.

“And what I believe very strongly is that it (the program) is an opportunity for those of us at the network to coordinate and dip into that reportage.”

And to cut down on costs?

“This program is not motivated by cost,” said Westin, whose program was approved by ABC brass only a month ago.

But the attention “we now are paying to the affiliates’ (news) capability was probably motivated by . . . cost concerns, cost-consciousness six months or a year ago,” he said.

Sunday’s documentary marks the fourth major project that Westin has major-domoed since his return last June to the good graces of ABC News president Roone Arledge.

Arledge had suspended him for four months and relieved him as executive producer of “20/20” and as vice president of program development after an 18-page internal memo by Westin found its way into reporters’ hands and then into newspapers. Written in response to Arledge’s requests for ideas from senior executives on restructuring ABC’s “World News Tonight,” the memo implied that ABC News had grown too fat and wasted money and manpower.

The awareness that affiliates’ news reportage has improved in recent years, Westin said, probably wouldn’t have come about if “we hadn’t been looking for new ways to save money a year or so ago. Now we have recognized that the affiliates are better, and here is the first attempt, I think, to take advantage of our new-found discovery.”

Westin noted that all network evening newscasts occasionally use news reports by affiliate staffers, who sign off stories by saying they are reporting “for” the network. The practice began long before the networks began trimming staffs and budgets several years ago.

What is different in ABC’s news special, he said, is that “we took the (local) reporters and told them where they were going to be” in the program--which segment--and how their report would fit with others.

But won’t the special make the brass at all three networks think about cutting more news staffers, closing a domestic bureau here and there and relying more and more on their affiliates’ news staffs?

Westin didn’t directly answer the question. Instead, he said that this technique “lends itself to coverage in certain stories” that have been heavily reported by local stations. “I’m not sure this will work on every kind of story,” he added.