A Frank look at NBC sounds a warning for all network news

It pains Reuven Frank to think of what has become of TV network news.

He got into it in 1950 as a writer for NBC, and was part of its incredible growth as a medium of great import and consequence.

Now, network news has to cope with Cable News Network, declining network revenues, constant pressure to cut costs and earn its way, and a three-network combined share of the nightly news audience that slid from 72 percent in 1980-81 to 59 percent last season.

Now, says Frank, president of NBC News in 1968-73 and again in 1982-84, the idea that one or more network news divisions may slowly fade to black no longer is unthinkable. He includes his alma mater in that assessment.

“I don’t know, but I think it’s possible,” he said. “I hate to say that, because my whole life was in it. But if you asked me to justify it, I’d have a tough time. What does a network news division supply that isn’t already supplied?”

One thing it supplies is authors of books about the business. In fact, Frank, at 70, is the newest author. His book, due out in July, is “Out of Thin Air,” his insider’s account of 38 years at NBC and in network news.

The last decade saw a flood of somber tomes about TV news, most detailing the agony and lack of ecstacy at CBS News.

But Frank’s is a wry, often funny chronicle of NBC life from the perspective of an inmate who went from peon to producer to El Supremo and back to producer, collecting seven Emmys and a Peabody award en route.

There are no lamentations, no revelations of low deeds in high places from Frank, whose dossier includes production of the “Camel News Caravan” and “The Huntley-Brinkley Report,” forerunners of today’s “NBC Nightly News.”

But the former newspaperman does include a few observations, such as this one about the 1988 arrival of newspaper executive Michael Gartner as president of NBC News:

“He claimed to know everything about news and nothing about television, a position he has since adhered to.”

And, writing of today’s lean times in which news bureaus are closed and cameramen laid off, he says it’s worth noting ‘that in all the cost-cutting imposed by the new proprietors at all three networks, most of the cuts came out of getting the news and almost none from the costs of presenting it.”

Frank, who has been through lean times himself and even closed NBC’s Moscow bureau during one retrenchment in 1971, thinks today’s budget cuts are only part of the woe.

He also cites syndicated early evening interview or tabloid news shows, and CNN--which counts 142 network affiliates as customers--as helping change network news forever.