Study Suggests Public Pressure May Curb Tab TV

Tabloid TV. Skinheads fighting Geraldo Rivera. Morton Downey Jr. screaming at guests. A bit of kinky sex on NBC’s “Favorite Son” miniseries.

Is this television’s anything-for-a-rating future?

Not necessarily, says James Rosenfield, a former CBS executive whose company has co-sponsored a future-of-the-industry study, “Television: 1995.”

Whether TV travels the low road as caustically forecast in Paddy Chayefsky’s movie “Network” depends on the public and advertisers, says Rosenfield, now chairman of John Blair Communications here.

The once-large gap between what cable TV and over-the-air broadcasters show “is being narrowed every day,” he said in a recent interview.

But “the marketplace exerts ameliorating pressure on going too far,” added Rosenfield, whose company makes and syndicates programs and also is a national sales representative for 130 TV stations.

“There is a very strong brake on (TV) management and the programming people,” he contended. “It’s pressure from advertisers and from viewers, and that pressure is very real. It’s both economic and public relations.”

Rosenfield speaks from the experience of 30 years at CBS. When he took early retirement in 1985, he was executive vice president of the CBS Broadcast Group, head of strategic planning for the company.

Blair Television, a division of the company he heads, and the Wall Street brokerage firm of Smith Barney recently unveiled the TV-in-1995 forecast that they commissioned. Among other things, it says that TV’s Big Three networks, their shares of audience eroded by the fierce competition from cable, videocassette players and independent stations, will have lost $30 billion in potential ad revenue between 1988 and 1995.

But neither Rosenfield nor David Wilkofksy, a former CBS economic analyst who co-authored the report, subscribes to the theory that CBS, NBC and ABC are headed the way of the pterodactyl.

Far from it. Addressing stock analysts recently, Wilkofksy said that the networks will recover from their current woes, go from $9.7 billion in advertising revenues this year to $15.6 billion in 1995, and remain “viable and important.”

Cable, which after a period of rapid growth now is in more than 50% of the nation’s estimated 90.4 million TV households, also will enjoy financial health, with its advertising take up to $3.4 billion in 1995, his forecast said.

However, Wilkofksy added, “cable penetration has essentially run its course” and probably will “taper off at 60%” of the marketplace, even though cable’s share of advertising revenues will increase.

The 85-page report doesn’t touch on what the network news divisions will be like in 1995. There has been speculation in recent months that the new bottom-line brigades running the networks, constantly seeking ways to cut costs and improve profits, would like to lop off their news divisions because they aren’t “profit centers”--or, short of that, might convert the news operations into sort of a video version of the Associated Press that merely feed affiliates bare-bones news reports and features for their local newscasts.

Rosenfield expressed doubt that such scenarios will come to pass.

“No. I don’t think extinction is a word that should be used in connection with any phase of a network,” he said.

“The big changes that are going to take place are in the news-gathering techniques. That’s where you’ll see some profound changes,” he said.

Indeed, one of the Big Three could well start specializing in news, he added.

“I have suggested that there’s certainly a real possibility that the networks will specialize as this new competitive era (in TV) develops, and there may be one network more concerned with news than the others.”

Whatever happens, it’s likely that the new network managements will be much more tightfisted than their predecessors at contract-negotiation time with “name” correspondents and anchors, he says:

“I think the star system will ameliorate a little bit. I don’t think they’ll be willing to pay the kinds of price they pay today for stars.

So the era of the millionaire anchor--in which Peter Jennings earns more that $1 million per, Tom Brokaw nearly $2 million and Dan Rather $3 million--is over?

Rosenfield laughs.

“Not for the foreseeable future,” he says. However, he adds, referring to the agents for news stars, “I wouldn’t want to be the guy to negotiate the next anchor contract.”