Brokaw, NBC Wrestle With No. 3 Rating

Tom Brokaw has a perfectly simple explanation for his newscast’s third-place finish.

“Statistical error,” says Brokaw, in that familiar, low-slung warble.

Looking at the anchorman, slouching comfortably in a leather chair in his Rockefeller Plaza office on this recent morning, a sleepy, catlike grin on his face, you get the idea that he is kidding.

But it’s no joke, especially when ratings points translate into millions of dollars in the evening news race.

“I mean, obviously it’s mystifying,” he continues, “when they change rating systems where you go from one to three and have a hard time recovering.”

The last time the “NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw” was No. 1--or at least tied for the top spot in the evening news race--was in the 1986-87 season, the year before Nielsen Media Research began using so-called people meters. Since that time, the ratings service has shown an unprecedented decline in audience levels at all three networks, which are now openly calling for a new system of measurement.

ABC’s “World News Tonight with Peter Jennings,” Brokaw says, “is No. 1 now with a number that wouldn’t have gotten him into fifth place six, seven years ago.”

But whether “Nightly News” is second or third, “everybody knew we had to change,” says Brokaw.

“There was a time when I began in this business, and for a long period in my career, in which the evening news programs were the engines that pulled the rest of the train of television news in America. Now all those other train cars are going whatever direction they want to.”

And there is a fundamental change in direction taking place at “NBC Nightly News.” Brokaw, the sole anchor and managing editor of the broadcast since 1983, and Executive Producer Steve Friedman are behind the newscast’s refurbished look and point of view.

Friedman, the mouthy TV whiz kid who took “Today” from No. 3 to No. 1 in the ‘80s--but more recently presided over the critical and commercial bomb known as “USA Today: The Television Show”--took over last month for Bill Wheatley (who is now being reassigned within NBC).

“Bill helped define the newscast of the ‘80s and he grew up in that more traditional way of looking at news,” Brokaw says.

A longtime friend and colleague of Brokaw, Friedman (who worked with Brokaw and Jane Pauley on “Today”) went to work almost immediately on “Nightly News.” The broadcast, he said his first day on the job, had become “dull and boring” and “fallen behind the curve.”

“We’re looking at what a network news program ought to be in the 1990s, given all these other circumstances that exist in our world,” Brokaw says, adding that the information explosion has changed viewer needs and expectations when it comes to the network newscasts.

“Steve, I think, has a pretty apt metaphor,” he continues, “which is it’s no longer an island. It’s part of the landscape of television, so we have to be a little more analytical . . . and be less the kind of diary of the day that we used to be.”

Though he describes the “Nightly News” of the ‘90s as “a baby we haven’t even brought home yet,” the broadcast has already changed in appearance and attitude. Some of the ideas are going to seem familiar to ABC viewers.