Vision of New ‘20/20’ Isn’t Crystal-Clear

No one likes to feel redundant, especially household names. So ABC gathered a half-dozen anchors under one roof Thursday morning in a polished performance of network unity to launch the new version of its newsmagazine “20/20.”

The informal continental breakfast at ABC’s sleek Manhattan headquarters wasn’t much of an unveiling, however. The amended show, which premieres Wednesday night, is absorbing the talent and time slot of “PrimeTime Live,” and anchors and executives alike seemed skittish about discussing such details as dividing up beats, meting out assignments, and the types of stories lined up for the fall season.

The more candid in the crowd acknowledged that there had been duplication and some measure of internal competition over the years that everyone hoped would finally end.

“What we’ve been joking about is that now we can talk on the elevators,” said veteran “20/20” host Barbara Walters.

In what could be the most symbolic union of the newsmagazine merger, Walters and Diane Sawyer, of the now-defunct “PrimeTime Live,” will co-host the 9 p.m. Sunday installment of the new “20/20.” Both anchors maintained Thursday that they had no qualms about the assignment and felt they had been subjected to unfair reports of cat fighting over the years because they were women.

“Diane and I rarely had conflicts,” Walters said.

Sawyer agreed but recalled other, somewhat notorious instances of duplication between the shows, including the fact that both newsmagazines sent teams to the Gulf War and to the O.J. Simpson trial.

“We famously delivered . . . letters from every ABC [news] broadcast to every juror in the O.J. Simpson trial,” continued Sawyer, who attended a wrap party for “PrimeTime Live” after its final broadcast Wednesday night.

“We really were autonomous, independent republics, so we deployed a lot of different people on the same stories,” Sawyer said.

Her former “PrimeTime Live” colleague, Sam Donaldson, and “20/20” anchor Hugh Downs said they both had sought exclusive interviews with astronaut John Glenn. In the end, it was Downs who prevailed because “we’re both the same age and we’re both from Ohio” and had known each other for many years.

The merger of the shows was announced in May along with a new fall schedule, apparently designed to help the network recover from its worst season ever in the Nielsen ratings. ABC News President David Westin said Thursday that ratings hadn’t been the driving factor so much as the effort to consolidate news-gathering efforts against the other networks, especially NBC’s “Dateline.”

“This gives us critical mass against ‘Dateline,’ ” Westin said Thursday, although he said that even the merged staff of “20/20” was still smaller than the NBC unit, which will fill five hours of programming a week this fall compared to ABC’s three.

The other two nights of the new “20/20” will be hosted by the teams of Walters and Hugh Downs on Fridays and Sawyer and Donaldson on Wednesdays. A fourth anchor team of Connie Chung and Charlie Gibson will be waiting in the wings as substitutes--and to host what ABC publicists said will likely be a fourth night of “20/20” once the “Monday Night Football” season ends.

One thing Westin and other ABC executives voluntarily pointed out was the program’s new set, a peach-toned, postmodern design that will allow anchors to move from behind the big desk.