TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/081291/0812470.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.4 KB | 120 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 60

See How They Run


By RICHARD ZOGLIN

THREE BLIND MICE: HOW THE NETWORKS LOST THEIR WAY
By Ken Auletta
Random House; 656 pages; $25


    It was a grim day for CBS chief executive Laurence Tisch.
News writers were on strike against his network; employees were
up in arms over another round of layoffs; criticism in the
press was mounting. Now, on this March morning in 1987, Tisch
opened his New York Times to see an op-ed piece signed by none
other than Dan Rather, bitterly attacking the Tisch-instigated
news cutbacks. The Washington Post offered yet another litany
of complaints from news staffers about the cost cutting.

    "Unbelievable!" Tisch moaned on reading one charge,
tossing his newspaper against the flowers that adorned his
private dining table. To reports that some CBS News stars had
offered to take salary cuts in order to save jobs, Tisch
scoffed, "These are the biggest bunch of liars I've ever seen
in my life!" His son Jimmy came into the office to commiserate.
"Calm down, Dad," he pleaded.

    Ken Auletta, a resourceful and very fortunate reporter,
was sitting at breakfast with Tisch that morning. In fact,
Auletta seems to have been practically everywhere he wanted to
be over the past six years. He began researching Three Blind
Mice, his exhaustive behind-the-scenes look at the three
broadcast networks, just as they were entering the most
turbulent phase in their history. Cable and other competitors
were gaining power; network audiences were shrinking; new
corporate owners, with a bottom-line orientation, were taking
control. Through it all, Auletta was the proverbial fly on the
wall. He talked regularly with the corporate chiefs as well as
with network programmers and news anchormen; sat in on sales
meetings and affiliate conferences; examined the workings of the
TV business from Madison Avenue to Universal City.

    Name a well-publicized episode over the past six years,
and Auletta supplies the kind of detail that sources offer only
when they know their accounts will not blow up in their faces in
the next day's papers. What led to NBC News president Larry
Grossman's downfall? Auletta traces it partly to a disastrous
dinner party that Grossman gave on the night of the sixth game
of the Mets-Red Sox World Series. (General Electric chairman
Jack Welch, a rabid Red Sox fan, wanted to watch the game.) Why
did Dan Rather walk off the set in September 1987, leaving six
minutes of dead airtime on the CBS Evening News? Auletta's
second-by-second account is more sympathetic to Rather than many
others. There are fresh nuggets as well. ABC anchorman Peter
Jennings, before signing a new contract in late 1987, was
weighing an offer from CBS to become Rather's co-anchor. NBC
president Robert Wright once suggested that stars like Bill
Cosby and Don Johnson be used as hosts of news documentaries.

    Even more impressive are the intimate glimpses Auletta
provides of the men at the very top and his nuanced picture of
the different corporate cultures they fostered. Welch, the
brusque, combative chairman of GE, which took over NBC in 1986,
treated the network as another GE unit to be whipped into shape.
(Why, Welch wondered, was there so much agonizing over layoffs
at NBC when hundreds of people were getting axed at GE's
turbines division? "You think they're happy?" he snapped.)
Tisch, the Loews chairman who had never fired an employee before
taking over CBS in 1986, is portrayed as a Wall Street trader
with no strategic vision and few management skills. Tom Murphy,
who engineered Capital Cities Communications' 1985 acquisition
of ABC, is the hero of this tale by default. Though Cap Cities'
no-frills style caused a rude culture shock at ABC, eventually
Murphy proved to be the most humane and broadcast-savvy of the
new network owners.

    Yet each of the corporate top dogs had to go through the
same learning curve. Contrary to what most people think,
Auletta notes, a network is neither a giant production studio
nor a grid of stations but simply "an office building, where
executives package programs they do not own and sell them to
advertisers and local stations they do not control." Trying to
deal with these stations, advertisers and program producers (not
to mention the ever nosy press) startled, annoyed and ultimately
chastened the corporate newcomers.

    Auletta's book achieved a certain infamy long before it
hit the bookstores. Jacob Weisberg used it as Exhibit A in a
much discussed New Republic piece about the alleged decline of
editing standards in book publishing. To be sure, Auletta's
600-plus-page account could use trimming. But his writing is
never less than serviceable, and usually quite lucid. A bigger
problem lies in the subject itself. Each of the episodes Auletta
recounts -- Tisch's fight to gain control of the CBS board, ABC
News president Roone Arledge's battle to keep 20/20 on
Thursdays at 10 p.m. -- was once a hot topic in media circles.
Today they seem more like questions for a 1980s edition of
Trivial Pursuit. In his zest for detail, Auletta trudges
dutifully through events that are now just so much TV-industry
ephemera.

    Still, if he is occasionally too fascinated by the trees,
Auletta never loses sight of the forest. On a shelf overflowing
with behind-the-scenes tomes and tell-all memoirs, his is the
network book to beat.