A Prime Time--Again--for the News : Glitzy Upstarts Hope to Match Success of ’60 Minutes,’ ‘20/20’

The news divisions at ABC, CBS and NBC, so recently the center of cutbacks and retrenchment, are back in favor, having an impact this fall on prime-time television not seen since the golden days of network news.

Last month, ABC added a second news show to its prime-time schedule. CBS News will have three hourlong series in prime time this season, including a newly fashioned replacement for “West 57th” that premieres tonight with Connie Chung at the helm. And NBC, for years unable to get any one of numerous prime-time news pilots off the ground, has just extended the tryout of its most promising effort so far.

That’s six hours of news series, as well as an increasing number of specials produced by the news divisions--two from ABC News and a special three-hour version of CBS’ “48 Hours” just last week.

But the new boom in news-based programs is less a return to the Golden Age than an expression of the new ethic operating in network TV: Even news, given looser standards and the right packaging, can score in the ratings. And that development brings warnings from old-line news purists, who caution that the new programs owe less to the Golden Age than to the recent tabloid TV trend, less to Edward R. Murrow than to Geraldo Rivera.

“These new shows are playing all sorts of games,” says Richard Salant, a former president of CBS News, under whose hand “60 Minutes” was put on the air in 1968. “We were much more careful to draw the line between news and entertainment.”

Two of the new shows, CBS’ “Saturday Night With Connie Chung” (which checks in at 10 p.m. on Channels 2 and 8) and NBC’s “Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow,” use devices taken from entertainment to tell their stories--employing actors to dramatize scripted scenarios. Such re-enactments of events were, until recently, banned by the networks as not meeting standards of accuracy.

At CBS, where the news division once lived by the most stringent standards in the industry, there have been discussions about consulting comedy writers for news-spoofing segments on “Saturday Night With Connie Chung,” the very title of which suggests an entertainment show more than a news broadcast. On tonight’s program, actor James Earl Jones will portray an early civil rights leader, Vernon Johns, in the first of several dramatizations planned for the series.

The promotions for the program have been notably low-key, deliberately obscuring the show’s content--possibly, insiders say, to avoid in-house controversy over standards before it goes on the air.

The very subjects considered by the new wave of news programs reveal their underlying entertainment values. Some news specials deal with subjects that could just as easily be grist for TV movies-of-the-week, which is exactly how promotional spots depicted “Bad Girls,” a recent hour on female juvenile delinquents from NBC News.

Though some critics blasted the program as mere titillating fluff, it placed seventh in the week’s ratings and was, according to NBC publicity, the highest-rated NBC News special ever. (The highest rated “documentary” ever aired on NBC, it may be instructive to note, was Geraldo Rivera’s independently produced special on Satan worship last year.)

And while ABC’s “PrimeTime Live” is the most orthodox of the new shows, it is also the one most obviously designed as a celebrity vehicle for its news stars--Sam Donaldson and Diane Sawyer.

In a sense, the same bottom-line orientation at the networks responsible for the severe reductions at the news divisions a couple of years ago is now proving to be their salvation.

News shows are cheap--at about $400,000 per hour, they cost about half of what a sitcom or dramatic series costs to produce. That has always been an incentive for networks to keep trying to find a new “60 Minutes,” the most profitable network program in TV history.

Add to that the networks’ more urgent desire now to control programming costs by producing more of their own prime-time shows, rather than buying them from the Hollywood studios and independent producers. The network news divisions, with a little relaxation of the old rules, proved to be ready-made production houses, complete with contract players, cameramen, technicians, writers and producers.

“I think it’s exciting to see the news division so busy and thinking in new ways,” says Howard Stringer, a former CBS News president who now is running the entire network as president of the CBS Broadcast Group. “The nonfiction world is much larger than we have understood it. Why shouldn’t this body of talent tackle it with verve and without having its hands tied?”

One man’s verve, of course, is another’s subversion, which is precisely what Reuven Frank, the former president of NBC News, now a Gannett Fellow at Columbia University, sees in the new trend in network news programming.

“It aims less to inform the audience and more to exploit its emotions than at any other time I know of,” Frank says.

At Frank’s former network, NBC, the first glimpse of network re-enactments occurred this summer, on “Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow,” which is trying to win a permanent place on the network’s schedule this year. In one report, anchor Maria Shriver dramatized life in a mental ward, with actresses in hospital gowns writhing and rocking in a din of moans. One actress, costumed in an iron mask, repeatedly banged her head on a bedpost for the camera.

The installment of “Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow” that aired Sept. 15 featured a re-enactment of a 1972 airliner crash, starring the plane’s real pilot “playing” himself.

“When you watch one of these shows,” Frank says, “ask yourself how much more do you know when you’re finished than when you started?”

But a drastic departure from the traditional “talking heads” approach of network news is one way of making information “more palatable” to viewers, says Sid Feders, executive producer of “Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow.”

“It’s part of the gimmick, it’s a little dazzling,” Fedders says. “People like it. They know they are being entertained.”

The summer’s series of NBC News specials, of which “Yesterday, Today & Today” was a part, performed strongly in the ratings, suggesting that Fedders may be right, at least in the short run. But the purists argue that, in the long run, a news division’s seriousness of purpose is the final test of its credibility, and that the urge to entertain will take its toll.

“It destroys the credibility of the organization producing it,” says Bob Chandler, a former vice president of CBS News, whose job had been to ensure that news programs met standards. “Not immediately, perhaps, but ultimately. . . .”