News’ fate in today’s corporate culture

More than a rhetorical tic is at work when people use the term “Rathergate” to refer to the scandal and turmoil that have followed CBS’ broadcast of unverifiable charges about President Bush’s military record.

The impulse to locate a news organization’s institutional failure -- now amply documented in a 224-page report by outside investigators -- in the person of a single individual, even one as outsized as Dan Rather, is one clue to why CBS and the other broadcast networks are floundering toward irrelevance.

Collectively, the networks’ nightly newscasts still command a national audience of more than 30 million viewers -- 11.4 million for NBC’s “Nightly News,” 10.6 million for NBC’s “World News Tonight” and 8.3 for CBS’ “Evening News,” according to the latest available figures. Those are numbers any other serious news organization can only covet. Even CBS’ last-place audience far outstrips that of the cable news networks, of any American newspaper and of the most popular Internet news site.

So what’s the problem?

It isn’t simply that the networks’ collective audience for news is aging and in decline -- which it is -- but that the journalism on offer seems increasingly beside the point and, as in the case of the now notorious “60 Minutes Wednesday” segment, sometimes alarmingly slipshod. The consequences are a crisis of legitimacy among viewers and a crisis of confidence among the corporate managers who now are the arbiters of broadcast journalism’s fate.

If that seems disquieting, it’s probably because you’re one of those people who have come to understand that only a great white shark on speed is more frighteningly, mindlessly ruthless than a profit-challenged corporate executive in search of a new idea. It is, in fact, virtually suicidal to place yourself between the average media company CEO and a dollar.

Yet new ideas about the news and how to present it are precisely what the networks require, and much about their current situation follows from their inexplicably slow recognition of that fact. Today, CBS, ABC and NBC confront precisely the same situation that the success of television news created for newspapers more than 40 years ago, when their collective audience was double what it is now.

By the 1960s, it had become clear that technological advances in remote broadcasting and the popular appeal of nightly network newscasts had ended newspapers’ long preeminence as purveyors of breaking news. From presidential assassinations to manned space launches, TV was every news addict’s go-to medium. Every night, the networks’ evening broadcasts “scooped” the next morning’s papers.

Quality newspapers were confronted with the choice between changing or dying. Those that survived supplemented the requisite portion of breaking news with vastly expanded analytic and contextual reporting. They broadened their notion of news to include both popular and high culture, as well as lifestyle issues. Equally important, they bowed to irresistible changes in demography and daily life. Forty years ago, virtually every large American city had a morning -- or “a.m.” -- paper and an afternoon -- or “p.m.” -- broadsheet or tabloid. The p.m. papers were particularly beloved by journalists for their emphasis on good and lively writing. But they no longer exist. Changes in people’s work habits and the popularity of television’s evening news simply drained their readers away.

Retooling in this fashion required a great deal of reinvestment and expanded annual news budgets. The newspapers willing to meet those expenses have prospered qualitatively and, on the whole, financially. Those prevented from doing so by the wave of corporate consolidation that has swept the newspaper industry in the past couple of decades have not. Hence the declining number of genuinely first-rate papers. Consider, for example, that by the early 1990s fewer than a quarter of the nation’s largest 100 newspapers had a single full-time foreign correspondent on staff.

What goes around ...

Now, cable television’s 24-hour news cycle and the growing popularity of online news present the broadcast networks with the same challenge they inflicted on newspapers nearly half a century ago. The challenge is most immediate at CBS, and what does the network’s CEO, Leslie Moonves, propose? According to interviews this week with TV columnists and reporters, the 55-year-old actor-turned-executive proposes “a revolution and not an evolution” that reportedly will involve attempts to lure morning chat-show host Katie Couric from NBC and satirist Jon Stewart from Comedy Central and, perhaps, employ multiple anchors when Rather retires.

To anybody who remembers the partnership of Huntley and Brinkley or Roone Arledge’s experiments with three anchors at ABC in the late 1970s, there’s not much revolutionary there. In fact, even the possibility of taking the “Evening News” further down the road to entertainment seems like business-as-usual after years of corporate-ordered cost cutting that have reduced the networks’ news divisions to shadows of their former selves and radically circumscribed their journalistic choices. Do any of them really have the will to make the investments that analytic -- as opposed to opinionated -- journalism or specialized reporting would require?

That slashing sound

As the New Yorker’s Ken Auletta pointed out in a prescient piece shortly after 9/11, “All three networks have slashed their foreign bureaus and correspondents during the last decade, and before September 11th only about 9% of an average 19-minute-long broadcast was devoted to foreign news.”

Auletta correctly attributed this decline to the fact the “networks are owned by enormous media conglomerates whose primary profits and values derive from the entertainment business.” He then went on to quote Moonves: “The networks went through change when they went from being just networks to becoming part of larger corporations. The news division, for what was spent, was bringing less return than other areas of the company.... Earnings is what I’m judged on.”

It’s commonplace nowadays to hear the three network news divisions compared to dinosaurs. But if they follow the giant reptiles into extinction, it won’t be because their brains were too small. It will be because they were too cheap to buy bigger ones.