They’re Out Stalking Heads

Phil Donahue has put out the word that he wants former President Bill Clinton as a guest when his MSNBC show launches July 15, while Connie Chung is crowing about an interview that she promises “will make news” her very first night on the air at CNN on Monday. She’s pre-taped it, just to make sure her quarry doesn’t get away.

Move over, Larry King, and make way, Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric and Mike Wallace. Some not-so-new kids in town are going after “the get,” as the big newsmaking interviews are called, in a very aggressive way.

The booking wars promise to get real dirty, real quick, rivaling the last-minute guest-snatching that routinely takes place among the morning news shows and during the most competitive days at ABC News’ newsmagazines.

Chung’s temporary CNN office is a chaotic jumble of unpacked boxes with labels such as “[son] Matthew’s Winnie the Pooh Growth Chart” and a prominently displayed cooking apron that proclaims “I Grilled Condit.” But her files are in pristine order, some 300 of them sitting in three neat rows on the window ledge, each containing vital contact numbers for an interview Chung hopes to land. She won’t let a reporter interviewing her get close enough to read the names at the top, paranoid about keeping her subjects “under the radar” until the show launches. She says she has lured one interview from the networks and “I’m licking my chops.”

Chung, of course, has experience getting the get. Before she left ABC for CNN, she bested colleagues Walters and Sawyer, as well as then-rival King, for last summer’s prize catch of U.S. Rep. Gary Condit (R-Ceres), probing his relationship with intern Chandra Levy for “PrimeTime Thursday.” It didn’t win her brownie points with her ABC colleagues, but about 23.7 million people tuned in.

But now she’s on cable, where King’s top-rated 2002 show so far--interviewing the lawyers representing actor Robert Blake and his murdered wife--averaged just 2.6 million viewers.

What the cable networks can do, however, is replay interviews as many as 50 times in one day, which can balance out the broader one-time reach of a network interview, and CNN is often seen as a valuable way for heads of state and policymakers to reach an international audience, say those who control access to some guests.

Nevertheless, some big players shy away from CNN, Fox and MSNBC.

“It is more difficult to get into [cable] as much,” says an official at the White House, where only about 30 of each week’s 300 or so TV requests are fulfilled. “If you do one, you have to do them all and it’s physically impossible. If Colin Powell were to do all the cable shows, he’d do nothing but cable shows.”

That won’t stop cable players from jumping into the fray. In early June, six weeks before Donahue’s show launches, interview bookers from the program were already hitting the phones and e-mail in hot pursuit of a trifecta: an interview with Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw, all in the same studio at the same time to talk with Donahue about news anchor “war stories from behind the desk.”

Despite promises from his staff that Donahue’s show “will have real conversations--the kind of conversations that change ideas and lives,” that particular interview lineup so far seems unlikely to take place, network sources say.

King is tireless, say the objects of his pursuit, playing on his longtime friendships and picking up the phone himself, where some of his colleagues let their staffs do most of the work. His guest list reflects it, ranging recently from Bush administration officials to buxom model Anna Nicole Smith, who turned to King to talk exclusively about her court fight over her dead husband’s estate.

The little secret of cable, however, is that the biggest name doesn’t mean the most viewers. King’s Top 10 most-watched list since the beginning of 2002 includes child poet Mattie Stepanek, Rather, CBS commentator Andy Rooney, self-help guru Dr. Phil McGraw and “America’s Most Wanted” host John Walsh--who figures on the list twice. Chung herself, interviewed when she joined CNN, made the list at No. 10.

There are only about 10 names at the moment--including first lady Laura Bush and former Vice President Al Gore--who can really capture a major audience, says Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly, whose show will air head-to-head with Chung’s and Donahue’s on weekdays at 5 p.m. O’Reilly, whose show thrives more on his personality than on guest bookings, nonetheless plans to counter with a couple big names of his own on Monday, but he’s not saying who.

Standing in a back corner, leaning against the wood paneling at Monday’s Chung launch party at New York’s 21 Club, O’Reilly repays the hospitality by saying he has a welcoming counterpunch ready for Chung and will have one for Donahue, as well.

“I am worried,” he insists, even though his audience is the largest among all three cable news channels and his combative style doesn’t have much in common with Chung’s. But, he says, “If I slip two-tenths of a rating point, that’s bad.” So he says he’ll do what he has always done with his competition: Log their every move and scrutinize the 15-minute ratings blocks every day, then adjust accordingly.

King, whose show will follow Chung’s, has his own welcome gift for his new colleague: On her first night, he’s booked an exclusive interview with the parents of Daniel Pearl, giving their first interview since the Wall Street Journal reporter was kidnapped and executed in Pakistan. Other guests next week include none other than ratings-getter Walsh.

Gearing up for battle, some employees of Chung’s show say flatly that their biggest competition is internal; King’s staff is ruthless about insisting they won’t have on any guests who appear on other CNN shows. CNN insiders are still buzzing about King’s snippy questioning of Chung when he had her as a guest right after she signed with the network in January, working in practically every controversial interview she has done, down to ice skater Tonya Harding, and throwing this zinger: “Did you feel shunted around at all at ABC, which has such prominent women in journalism? Did you feel like third-rung?”

At Chung’s launch party, however, King was nothing but gracious, posing for pictures and recounting how one of his ex-wives used to work on a Chung-anchored newsmagazine at NBC.

King and Chung will often be going after different prey, in any case, with Chung playing off the news of the day and tracking more of the ordinary players caught up in extraordinary circumstances.

CNN executives are practically giddy about the possibility of having to mediate booking fights between the two. “This is a goldmine for CNN. We should have this problem,” says Teya Ryan, CNN’s executive vice president and general manager.

“It certainly didn’t hurt ABC,” she says, referring to the intense guest chase among Sawyer, Walters and Chung, when she was there. “At the end of the day, CNN is going to get the interview, no matter what.”

Chung herself spoofed the whole process of chasing the interviews at her party, singing off-key, to the tune of “Get Me to the Church on Time,” such humdingers as “That’s right, Osama, come talk to Mama.” Her lyrics perhaps revealed whom she’s chasing, hinting she’d be happy with former and current first daughters Chelsea Clinton and twins Barbara and Jenna Bush.

Chung continues to chase some interviews that she’d been pursuing at ABC, and she says some subjects have told her that “even though you changed banks, your money is still good.” Others she lost, however, one because the subject had a book to promote and wanted the broad reach of NBC’s “Today” and “Oprah.”

Chung says her former newsmagazine homes have “all gone a little tabloid, a little sensational,” and CNN’s reputation for straight news will give her an advantage. One senior network newsmagazine executive sniffs back that CNN “isn’t even on the same playing field.”

Chung tried to bring two of her top ABC producers with her to CNN but was rebuffed. Both ended up with nice promotions at ABC. Chung fared better internally at CNN, securing a booker from King and a well-regarded political producer from Washington.