TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/031891/0318250.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 9.7 KB | 202 lines

                                                                                VIDEO, Page 88

Assessing the War Damage


ABC establishes air supremacy, but the future of network news
is fuzzier than ever

By RICHARD ZOGLIN -- With reporting by Marc Hequet/Minneapolis
and William Tynan/New York


    The anchormen have come home. Star correspondents Arthur
Kent and Bob McKeown are eagerly anticipating their next
contract negotiations. Even for David Letterman, the end of the
war brought a sense of relief. "Finally," he said, "we can go
back to ignoring CNN."

    Well, some of us can. For the three broadcast networks, the
repercussions of the gulf war will not be shaken off so easily.
Their coverage from the Persian Gulf won big audiences and, for
the most part, critical acclaim. But it cost a bundle: nearly
$50 million at NBC alone, including  the loss of revenues from
squeamish advertisers. Losses were reportedly in the same range
at CBS, though "significantly less" at ABC, according to
network executives. At the same time, the war gave a major boost
to CNN, which won hordes of potential new devotees with its
round-the-clock saturation coverage. Now that the fighting is
over, the network news divisions are surveying the damage,
reassessing their mission and pondering the future. And
wondering whether they have one.

    War's end brought a hurried retrenchment for the Big Three's
news programs. After having expanded to an hour for much of the
war, the evening newscasts have gone back to their old
half-hour formats. America Tonight, CBS's experimental
late-night entry, which was kept alive when war broke out in
January, will be pulled from the schedule at the end of the
month. And network executives, faced with a war-induced budget
crunch, are once again embarking on a painfully familiar task:
looking for ways to cut costs.

    The gulf war has, moreover, reaffirmed the new competitive
order in TV news. Though each of the broadcast networks had its
scoops (CBS's McKeown's in Kuwait City), its stars (NBC's
Pentagon whiz Fred Francis), its high points and its low
moments during the war, ABC emerged as the clear and decisive
overall winner. What was once a three-way race may be
developing into a long-term mismatch.

    Even before the war, ABC had the highest-rated evening
newscast (World News Tonight), the only established late-night
analysis program (Nightline) and the deepest bench of star
correspondents. During the war, that army of talent simply
outgunned its rivals. The network boasted the most coolly
authoritative anchor (Peter Jennings), the sharpest interviewer

General Bernard Trainor). For lucid wrap-ups of the day's
events, ABC was the place to turn -- and judging from its wide
lead in evening-news ratings during the most heavily watched
weeks, the place most people did turn. When ABC ran a
late-night rebroadcast of General Norman Schwarzkopf's victory
briefing, it drew ratings that most entertainment shows would
have faced Scuds for.

    CBS and NBC have been reduced to battling not just for No.
2 but also for their very survival as full-service news
organizations. NBC has set up a task force to find ways to make
the news operation "more efficient." Translation: more cutbacks
ahead. At CBS, where downsizing was going on quietly months
before the war, executives have retreated to their bunkers,
refusing to comment on another expected round of cutbacks. The
question is where, after years of budget slashing, these new
cuts will come. "They're going to have to go back to the
drawing board and look for large, large chunks," says Peter
Herford, a former CBS News executive who is now director of the
Benton Broadcast Journalism Fellowships at the University of
Chicago.

    Some new money-saving ideas are gaining support. Several
network executives have proposed a wider use of pools to cover
routine press conferences and such events as presidential
trips. Despite weeks of complaints from journalists, the pool
setup in the gulf had one advantage for the networks: it cut
costs. For footage of breaking news, the networks will rely
increasingly on international news services and local
affiliates rather than on their own reporters. "What we're
trying to do is emphasize our correspondents who have expertise
and experience to bring a more analytical perspective to
reporting and not try to cover everything," says Don Browne,
executive vice president of NBC News. "We just can't do it
anymore."

    The dwindling roster of overseas bureaus and reporters may
dwindle further. With the rapid-deployment capability the
networks demonstrated in the gulf war, says ABC News president
Roone Arledge, "maybe the bureau structure is not as important
as it used to be. You still have to get out and cover the
story, but you don't have to be on location all the time."

    As their newsgathering resources shrink, the evening
telecasts are shifting from a traditional events-of-the-day
approach and embracing more magazine-style elements. The NBC
Nightly News, under executive producer Steve Friedman, has
dressed up its broadcasts with lengthy segments each evening
on health, the family and other subjects, collectively dubbed
the "Daily Difference." The CBS Evening News appears headed in
a similar direction. In the midst of the war, the show's
executive producer and two of its most senior staffers were
replaced. New boss Erik Sorenson, 35, is a graduate of local
news who has spent the past 16 months running the CBS Morning
News. His plans for the evening show are not yet clear, but
many insiders expect that Dan Rather -- who will mark his 10th
anniversary in the anchor chair this week with little fanfare
-- will be shoved aside or teamed with a co-anchor within the
next few months.

    The evening newscasts are groping for their role in a hotly
competitive environment in which viewers can see most of the
day's news well before the networks get around to their nightly
summary. Local stations get news footage not only from their
networks but also from such independent services as Conus (a
satellite-beamed cooperative with 103 member stations in the
U.S.) and CNN, which, along with its cable outlets, supplies
news footage to 246 broadcast stations. Early in the war, many
local stations replaced their network's coverage with reports
from CNN. One of them, Minneapolis' WCCO-TV, substituted CNN's
dramatic Baghdad footage for CBS's coverage on the first night
of the war and drew the highest ratings of any CBS affiliate
in the top 25 markets. WCCO executives say they will continue
to monitor their satellite feeds and pick the best. "The system
that I guess was born with the gulf war is one we will now
embellish and use as our frontline plan for any breaking major
story," says WCCO assistant news director John Lansing.

    Most local news directors still voice support for the
networks as their primary supplier of national and
international news. "Our ratings with the network news have
never been higher," says David Lane, general manager of Dallas'
WFAA-TV. "The Persian Gulf crisis underscores the importance
of network news." Yet some TV news veterans contend that the
money-losing evening newscasts are an endangered species. Says
Sandy Socolow, a former executive producer of the CBS Evening
News: "I'm betting that by the political conventions in 1992,
one or two of the networks will abandon the evening newscast
as we now know it." Instead, the networks could operate as
glorified wire services, supplying individual stories to
stations, which could then fashion the material into their own
newscast. NBC in January set up a low-cost prototype for such
an approach: an affiliate news service based in North Carolina,
where less-expensive, nonunion employees are putting together
reports from NBC correspondents and feeding them to network
affiliates 24 hours a day.

    Executives at all three networks insist that no radical
moves like eliminating the evening news are in the cards. ABC,
with the highest ratings and healthiest bottom line, seems the
most committed to maintaining the traditional news-of-the-day
approach. "We have tried not to go the sensational, magazine
kind of way that I think some of our competitors have," says
ABC's Arledge. Says Jennings: "I have been listening to people
talk about the changing format of the evening news since God
was a boy. There are not many ways you can change a 22-minute
format and still pretend to tell any of the news of the day."

    Actually, ABC's World News Tonight was one of the first to
experiment with magazine-style elements, in features like its
"Person of the Week." Yet the newscast hews most closely to the
fading verities of network news: it pays the most attention to
international affairs, seems the least enamored of show-biz
gimmicks and human-interest fluff, and has the anchorman who
most approximates the Cronkite-Huntley model of Olympian
detachment. While CBS's Rather and NBC's Tom Brokaw jetted to
the gulf for the start of the ground war, Jennings remained at
his anchor post in New York City. Some viewers and critics got
a charge out of watching Rather pick through Kuwaiti
ammunition stocks, but as Arledge contends, "We thought Peter
was better utilized here, where he could pull the story
together."

    There may be a bright side for viewers in this new
competitive landscape. For years the network newscasts have
gone about their business in pretty much the same way, like
three versions of the New York Times. Now that ABC has
apparently grabbed that franchise, CBS and NBC may work harder
to establish different niches. The challenge for them is to
settle on a new game plan before they can no longer afford to
remain in the match.