Sam Donaldson Warming Up for a New News Show

About ABC News’ new “PrimeTime Live” series: It will, as the title suggests, be broadcast live, it will be co-anchored by Sam Donaldson and Diane Sawyer and, in a departure from weekly network newscast tradition, it will have a studio audience.

But there won’t be re-creations of news stories, dramatizations that to a certain extent will be utilized in a new NBC News program, “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow,” and in CBS News’ revamped “West 57th.”

That’s the word from Donaldson who, while saying he is certain those two programs will be responsible about their re-creations, said that “I leave it to them, gladly.”

In January, he gladly fled the White House beat he had covered since 1977 to work on what will be ABC’s latest attempt to launch a second prime-time news series to join its 11-year-old “20/20.”

With Sawyer, who left CBS’ “60 Minutes” in February for a reported $1.6-million annual stipend at ABC, their one-hour Thursday series premieres Aug. 3 at 10 p.m. (West Coast viewers will get it on a tape-delay basis).

“PrimeTime Live,” whose on-air staff includes former NBC White House correspondent Chris Wallace, has had four practice runs so far, and will do four more in the next two weeks.

When it bows, Donaldson said, viewers will see a topical broadcast, one with investigative pieces, but a program that generally spotlights current stories, with each segment containing some live reporting.

And, he said, “I’d like to see the first story of each broadcast be one which swings with the thing people are talking about that week, the hot story if you will.”

“We’re also going to try to do a lot of the old ‘Person to Person’ stuff,” he said, referring to the old CBS series in which Edward R. Murrow interviewed celebrities and others either in their homes or by long-distance, he in New York and the subject at home.

Donaldson and Sawyer will co-anchor from a New York studio, “but it is our intention, both of us, to get out of the studio and not just sit there on those chairs,” Donaldson said.

Sawyer was not available for an interview.

Donaldson, although accessible, was somewhat busy himself this week. In addition to work on “PrimeTime,” he filled in for the ailing Ted Koppel on Wednesday’s “Nightline.” He also was preparing for his regular Sunday stint on “This Week With David Brinkley.”

Asked why the new program will have a studio audience, he explained that it “gives us the energy of being able to talk to people, some of whom may be just off the street.”

“But a lot of them will be people we’ve invited,” and will be identified as ABC’s guest experts on various subjects being scrutinized in a given broadcast, he said.

“We will have a studio audience every Thursday,” he said. “But I don’t promise you that we will interact with them every Thursday. We’ll do that only when it is sensible to do that. This isn’t ‘Donahue’ or ‘Oprah’ or ‘Geraldo,’ and we’re not going to use a studio audience that way.”

There has been some controversy over the news re-enactment segments planned for CBS’ re-tooled “West 57th,” to be anchored by NBC alumnus Connie Chung, and NBC’s “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow,” which is getting a three-program tryout that starts a day before “PrimeTime” premieres.

Former CBS News president Richard S. Salant has decried news re-creations by news organizations, although they aren’t new. CBS’ “You Are There” in 1953-58 re-enacted historical moments such as the Boston Tea Party. So did an ABC News bicentennial special several years ago.

Donaldson, like Salant, is against re-creations by broadcast news organizations, even though he emphasizes that he feels the NBC and CBS news programs doing them “will do it responsibly, to the extent they can, and I’m sure they’ll be honest about it with their viewers.”

The problem, he said, is that “if you hold yourself out to be doing a news broadcast, it automatically, in viewers’ minds, means that this is the real McCoy, that these guys are going to show us, tell us, talk to people, for real.”

Even if a news program is honest about its dramatizations, he said, and tells viewers “ ‘This isn’t the real McCoy; we weren’t there when it happened but we’re going to re-create it faithfully,’ I think you set up questions in the viewer’s mind about everything else you do. And I don’t think you ought to be in the business of being confusing about your mandate and who you are.”

Donaldson spoke by phone from Washington, where he lives and from where he will commute to New York for “PrimeTime.” He said the program has a two-year commitment from ABC/Capital Cities chairman Thomas Murphy.

That doesn’t mean ABC will stick with the program’s format if it proves a misfire, Donaldson said: “He’s no fool. He’s not saying, ‘If you put a bomb on the air, I’ll stick with that bomb for two full years.’ No, of course not. They’ll change it, they’ll modify it, maybe they’ll throw me off.”

What he believes the commitment means, he said, is that if the first version isn’t successful, “we’re going to keep on trucking” during the two-year period until a version that works evolves.

Donaldson intends to keep spending his Sunday mornings on the Brinkley broadcast unless it becomes clear that he can’t do that and “PrimeTime” too, he said. In that event, he will give up the Brinkley program.

He also will continuing living in Washington unless it becomes clear that it interferes with his “PrimeTime” duties, he added. If that happened, he would move--but very reluctantly. “I don’t like New York,” Donaldson said. “I love Washington.”