Strapped Networks Spread Thin in Moscow : Television: Veteran broadcast observers say the crisis exposes limitations of the Big 3’s depleted news staffs.

During the past 48 hours of the Moscow crisis, America has witnessed the threadbare network news coverage that pundits have been warning against for six months, some veteran newswatchers said Tuesday, and the broadcast journalism promises to get worse before it gets better.

“The coverage hasn’t been very good. It’s a little bit like amateur hour out there,” said former CBS News President Fred Friendly, referring to ABC correspondent Sheilah Kast’s on-air apology Sunday evening for her lack of information because she hadn’t been in the Moscow bureau very long.

“The networks have been cutting back and now they don’t have anyone who can explain what’s happening to the public,” Friendly said. “It’s like a fire department: You don’t need one until you have a fire.”

According to Friendly and other network news veterans, the inevitable double whammy of recession and last winter’s expensive Persian Gulf coverage has been eroding the news divisions since the yellow ribbon victory parades began dying down in April. NBC alone estimated that it absorbed $55 million in advertising losses and extra news expense during the two months of the war.

News divisions of the other two major networks were similarly strapped. The nation’s viewers didn’t notice when ABC closed its Frankfurt, Prague and Budapest bureaus or CBS pulled Beijing correspondent John Sheahan out of China in order to lay him off along with another 100 CBS News employees.

Now they will, veterans predict.

“It’s obvious they don’t have the resources to cover,” said one recently fired network news correspondent. The veteran, who still has a network affiliation, asked that his name not be used, but did have this assessment of both his former employer and the other two major networks:

“They have been robbing Peter to pay Paul and it shows. If they have another major story breaking within the next week or so, it’s going to be even more apparent because what they’re doing now is moving people from one part of the globe to another and leaving vast areas of the world uncovered.”

Indeed, NBC foreign editor David Miller said he is already playing that kind of chess.

“I’m sending a crew into Moscow from Poland,” he said. “To send a crew in from the U.S. would be madness. In the old days, we might have sent in an American crew because they were somebody’s favorite, but not now. It’s less expensive, and, besides, the Polish crew speaks Russian.”

Despite the NBC budget crunch, Miller maintains that he has yet to hear from upper management about the cost of his various news crew deployments.

“I’m not saying I’m reckless with money, but if you have to do it, you have to do it right. Sometimes there’s no way to avoid doing things (expensively),” he said.

Still, Miller and other network news veterans acknowledge that many Americans now switch first to Cable News Network. One former correspondent says the habit now seems to be going to CNN for headlines on a breaking story and, then, back to one of the three traditional networks for perspective and analysis.

All three networks have at least two knowledgeable correspondents each in Moscow and are scrambling for visas to bring in even more. Their analysis has been good, but sparse. What Friendly and others find themselves doing more and more, however, is switching back to CNN instead of sticking around for CBS, ABC or NBC perspective.

“We have 15 people in Moscow and are trying to get visas for more,” CNN spokesman Anthony Masterson said Tuesday.

Alone among the networks, CNN has beefed up its personnel in the months since the Gulf War. Three weeks ago, CNN announced the opening of three new foreign bureaus--in Amman, Jordan; New Delhi and Rio de Janeiro--bringing the network’s total to 18. While the news divisions at CBS, NBC and ABC are hovering near the 1,000-employee level, CNN is at 1,700 employees and growing, said Masterson.

Beginning with CBS News, which announced a 10% cut in its annual $350-million budget, all three networks began shutting down bureaus and laying off staff after peace was declared in Iraq.

But when the Gorbachev ouster was announced late Sunday in the midst of Hurricane Bob’s whipping of the East Coast, a pared-back CBS News rose to the occasion, according to network spokesman Tom Goodman, even though the first dispatches from Moscow were spare.

“You’re seeing a network news division in full gear doing quite extraordinary coverage on two stories simultaneously,” he said. “Yes, we would always like more people, but you have to make the best of the group you have and count on the professionals out in the field.

“It had a lot less to do with the time of day than the amount of information that we could have delivered,” Goodman said, explaining the bare-bones coverage that the network gave Sunday night when the story first broke. “Had there been more information, we would have been able to continue coverage in a more elaborate way.”

At ABC, vice-president for TV news Robert Murphy was obviously irritated when asked about the budget impact on the network’s Soviet coverage.

“I can’t say how (news budget cutbacks) will affect coverage,” Murphy said. “The Gulf War coverage lasted for seven months and the Gorbachev coup is only hours old. There’s no comparison. Your question is premature.”