Clock Is Ticking for Sunday’s Newsmag War

Between ratings losses and a blow to its reputation with the spiking of a story about the tobacco industry, it’s been a long season for CBS’ renowned “60 Minutes.” And while audience levels have improved in recent weeks and the cigarette story did eventually run, the show isn’t out of the combat zone yet.

Beginning Sunday, it will be challenged in the 7-8 p.m. slot that it has dominated for 20 years by “Dateline NBC,” the 4-year-old newsmagazine that already airs in three other prime-time slots.

NBC has little to lose and much to win with the challenge. It hasn’t done well competing against “60 Minutes” with entertainment programs, so “Dateline” needn’t score a knockout to be regarded as an improvement. And if it does manage to take away a sizable chunk of the “60 Minutes” crowd--particularly the younger viewers whom advertisers prize--it would be a major coup.

As the newcomers, NBC producers and executives are taking a respectful approach to the competition, saying they don’t expect to beat “60 Minutes” and merely hope to get more attention for their own show, which they believe has grown more serious than it’s given credit for.

“The expectation from NBC management is that we do better than the [low-rated] entertainment shows that had been opposite CBS,” said “Dateline NBC” co-anchor Jane Pauley. “Nobody expects us to beat ’60 Minutes.’ And we’re sure not going to teach them how to do television.”

At CBS, meanwhile, Don Hewitt, the creator and executive producer of “60 Minutes,” downplays the head-to-head competition, but another producer on the program acknowledges, “Of course, ‘Dateline’ is a concern.”

Last month, Hewitt announced the first changes on “60 Minutes” in many years. He hired Texas liberal Molly Ivins to do weekly political commentary, with conservative critic Stanley Crouch and social critic P.J. O’Rourke alternating as her sparring partners; said the show would have fresh episodes every week instead of reruns during the summer; and, to make it more topical, would have a breaking-news story each week, sometimes with a CBS News correspondent on the scene instead of one of the “60 Minutes” stars.

Before Hewitt announced the changes, “60 Minutes” had lost 20% of its audience over the past year, due both to the loss of NFL football as a lead-in and to CBS’ third-place ranking in prime time. Its image of tough-minded independence was damaged last November when corporate managers acted to kill a controversial expose about the tobacco industry. The piece finally aired in February, and a positive response from viewers indicated that many blamed CBS management, not the producers, for having tried to squash it.

Since then, “60 Minutes” has rebounded in the ratings, finishing in the Top 10 for the past five weeks. Sources on the show say that Hewitt is wary of going too far to fix something that isn’t broken.

“I think Don has backed off from making some of the changes he announced last month,” “60 Minutes” commentator Andy Rooney said in an interview this week.

“I don’t think ’60 Minutes’ needs that much changing,” Rooney declared. “Changing the show has been on everybody’s mind here over the past several months. But this is a terrific show. We’re back in the Top 10 in the Nielsen ratings. . . . And who says we don’t get viewers under 25 years old? I received 15,000 letters from young people--more than I’ve ever received on any subject--when I editorialized on the suicide of Kurt Cobain.”

Although Hewitt had never announced a start date for the show’s new commentators, many on his staff had believed they would begin this weekend against “Dateline NBC.” But Hewitt said this week that they won’t start until April.

“They’ll definitely be on,” he said. “We just haven’t figured out yet how this is all going to work.”

And while former “60 Minutes” producer Josh Howard has returned to head a new breaking-news unit, Hewitt said the frequency of such stories may be scaled back. “If there’s an important breaking-news story that we can do our way,” Hewitt said, “we’ll be there. There may not be such a story every week.”

As one “60 Minutes” producer puts it, “We want to do more breaking news. But we don’t want to look like the ‘CBS Evening News.’ ”

Finding that balance will be one of the challenges for “60 Minutes” in coming months. “The great thing about the changes is that there are stories that don’t fit our [traditional] format of three 15-minute pieces per hour,” correspondent Steve Kroft said of the breaking-news pieces, which are expected to run seven to eight minutes. Kroft did a piece on last Sunday’s show about a leader of Hamas, the radical Palestinian group in Israel, that was done over a few days.

But even though he is enthusiastic about the changes, Kroft added, “the only way ’60 Minutes’ will fail is if we do it to ourselves, by changing the show too much.”

“Dateline NBC,” meanwhile, has risen from the ashes--literally--of the scandal involving a rigged, fiery crash on a 1992 broadcast. Under NBC News President Andrew Lack, who took over three years ago, “Dateline” has expanded across three nights (Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday), getting good ratings overall and especially among viewers in the coveted 18-to-49 age bracket.

“Dateline,” one NBC executive said, accounts for 40% of the record $100 million in profits NBC News made in 1995.

“Dateline” has been criticized for teary interviews, a lot of O.J. Simpson stories during the trial and some “investigations” that seem thin compared to “60 Minutes” (“Are you paying too much for your contact lens?”).

“60 Minutes,” which has won many awards for investigative reporting, is practically the only newsmagazine that regularly does stories on foreign news. Earlier this season, for example, the show featured tough pieces on Haiti and the CIA and land mines in Cambodia. “We didn’t do O.J. Simpson and we won’t go after momentary newsmakers like Heidi Fleiss,” Hewitt declared.

But “Dateline” executive producer Neal Shapiro makes no excuses for his show’s approach. It is aimed at baby boomers and has a visual humor and style that appeal to younger viewers.

“We do stories on popular culture,” he said, “and we’re willing to do stories on topics like parenting.”

At the same time, however, “Dateline” has been praised for its extensive, live coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing and other breaking stories. “We’ve put the news back in newsmagazines,” Shapiro maintained.

He cited an hourlong edition about a reunion of former classmates from a poor neighborhood and an investigative piece this Sunday about emergency-room medical care as examples of innovative journalism on the show.

“Dateline” has a staff of more than 200 and three (now four) nights of programming to fill. “They do a very creditable broadcast,” “60 Minutes” star Mike Wallace said, “but with so many hours, they don’t have the time to produce, edit and craft a piece” the way “60 Minutes” can.

But, told that one CBS producer called “Dateline” “a factory,” “Dateline” producer Tim Uehlinger responded: “If this is a ‘factory,’ it’s a very well-run one. There’s pride of authorship here too.”