Rather and Chung Split Isn’t Real CBS News
Breaking up is hard to do.
What you recall most about Connie Chung’s early days co-anchoring the “CBS Evening News” with Dan Rather are those chatty, folksy, glossy TV promos with each going on and on about how talented and wonderful the other was. Such affection, such admiration, such bliss, such sincerity. Obviously, these kids were simply wild about each other and their new arrangement, and their professional marriage was going to endure indefinitely.
No less effusive were their comments to the media when it was announced that Chung would be joining Rather at the anchor desk starting June 1, 1993. Chung said: “We have known each other for more than 22 years, and I couldn’t be more excited about working with him in this new role.”
And Rather said: “Connie Chung is a wonderful person, an experienced network correspondent and an outstanding anchor. She will help make the ‘CBS Evening News’ a better broadcast. And her co-anchor role will also help me spend the rest of my career at CBS News doing more of what I like so much to do--report from the field.”
What you note most about their split--with Chung bitterly protesting being bumped last week as co-anchor while also facing the possible loss of her low-rated “Eye to Eye With Connie Chung” series--is how much more attention it is getting compared with the CBS News budget-gashing of several years ago. Deemed less significant in some quarters were the layoffs and erasures of those capable CBS News people and bureaus, domestic and global, that once had made the network’s evening newscast the best of its kind in the nation.
Symbolizing a general downsizing and realigning of all the once-sprawling network news divisions, that was epic news worthy of the sonic boom now greeting the crash-landing of Rather-Chung.
Compared with the heavy hemorrhaging inflicted by those jugular-slashing cuts--which severely diminished the capacity of CBS News to cover events as comprehensively as it once had--the demise of the Rather-Chung hybrid and the issues causing it merit little hand-wringing.
What does it matter whether Rather and Chung did or didn’t have chemistry on the air? What were they supposed to have done, hug or give each other high fives after stories? The attention now lavished on them as individuals affirms in bright neon just how personality driven TV news has become. It affirms that the industry’s relentless P.R. has worked, that we have become as impressed with the celebrities who deliver the news as with the celebrities who make the news.
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CBS began heaving rice at its new co-anchors at the altar. Like a cleric presiding over nuptials, network news president Eric Ober envisioned “an exciting new mission with a clear and direct strategy” and vowed that the pairing of Rather and Chung would provide “unmatched flexibility in reporting our broadcasting from anywhere in the world without losing continuity at home.”
Network spin notwithstanding, however, the fusion of this partnership nearly two years ago (with a public smooch for the media, no less) was lip gloss, a cosmetic attempt to gussy up a newscast whose ratings had waned with the veteran Rather as sole anchor. Thus, just as cosmetic is Chung’s removal from the “CBS Evening News,” whose ratings still trail “NBC Nightly News” and ABC’s “World News Tonight.”
Although denying a role in Chung’s fall, Rather admits that he didn’t like it when CBS dispatched her to cover the Oklahoma City bombing without recalling him from vacation to participate too. And he told The Times this week that, despite his early glowing comments to the contrary, he had early “reservations” about the dual anchoring format.
What you hear now, also, is that it was her overall tabloidesque work as a journalist that helped cost Chung her job. However, she didn’t unilaterally decide to stalk Tonya Harding on the ice for “Eye to Eye.” And it was her CBS News bosses, not Chung, who deemed it sizzling news when House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s mother told Chung on camera that her son used “bitch” to describe Hillary Rodham Clinton. It was her bosses, not Chung, moreover, who inexcusably withheld that “story” until its release would be most embarrassing to the Speaker. And when it comes to inept interviewing, Rather himself is hardly unblemished. Witness his famed live debacle on the “CBS Evening News” with a campaigning President George Bush.
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On the other hand, if her firing from “CBS Evening News” is sexist, as Chung now implies, then what was her hiring if not an aspect of the pretty-face syndrome that continues to afflict much of newscasting? In contrast to some of the other good-looking network newswomen who work on camera, her reporting didn’t help zoom Chung to the top. It wasn’t her journalistic skills that persuaded CBS she’d be just the ticket to lighten Rather’s ratings burden.
Chung may be more of a journalist than her critics maintain, but in essence, CBS News got exactly the person it wanted--a pleasing personality--when it promoted her to the “CBS Evening News.”
Her absence will make the program look different, but it will have only a marginal effect, if any, on the quality of its news coverage. It won’t make “CBS Evening News” as good as ABC’s “World News Tonight,” far and away the best of the three half-hour national newscasts, nor will it arrest the near network-wide ratings virus infecting once-mighty CBS.
As for Chung’s charge that she’s being made a ratings scapegoat, such are the stakes of TV newscasting, where cynical pragmatism usually takes precedence over fairness. Faced with choosing between Rather and Chung to continue heading the network’s flagship newscast and being, in effect, the symbol of CBS News, whom would you pick?