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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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time
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040389
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04038900.063
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1990-09-22
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VIDEO, Page 70Star Wars at the NetworksWith a premium on news programming, the aim is charismaBy Richard Zoglin
Okay, TV-news fans, get out your scorebooks. A new round of
star wars is in full swing at the network news divisions. CBS, in
desperate need of a female power hitter, last week grabbed one of
the league's best, Connie Chung, from NBC. She will fill a gap in
the CBS lineup opened last month when Diane Sawyer left to join the
burgeoning Murderers' Row at ABC. Meanwhile, NBC, looking to
compensate for Chung's departure, found no superstars on the
trading block but managed to land a solid .280 hitter, Mary Alice
Williams, formerly of CNN. All three are expected to have
high-profile starting berths by the summer.
Their salaries are mind-boggling. Chung, who was making $1
million at NBC, will reportedly get in the neighborhood of $1.5
million a year at CBS, roughly the same as what Sawyer is said to
be getting from ABC for leaving her post at CBS's top-rated
magazine show, 60 Minutes. That puts both of them behind only
Barbara Walters (more than $2 million) as the highest-paid women
in TV news. Even Williams, coming from low-paying CNN, will ring
up a respectable $500,000 or so annually at NBC. "We are watching
a profound shift in the way networks function," says Marvin Kalb,
the former CBS and NBC correspondent who now teaches at Harvard.
"It is similar to what is happening in professional baseball or
basketball. Journalists are exchangeable commodities; the highest
bidder wins."
Stratospheric salaries for TV-news anchors are nothing new, of
course. But last week's round of anchor shifts marked a new phase
in the TV talent sweepstakes. In the past, high-visibility
newscasters were wooed mainly for anchor spots on the morning and
evening news shows. Now they are being groomed as prime-time stars.
Shows are even being constructed around them, the way Hollywood
studios in the '30s used to create vehicles for their contract
stars. Chung has been promised the anchor job on a soon to be
reconstituted version of West 57th, CBS's low-rated magazine show.
Sawyer will co-anchor, with Sam Donaldson, a new prime-time news
hour on ABC, scheduled to debut in August. Williams will be one of
several co-anchors of a new NBC prime-time news offering,
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, also planned for a summer premiere.
The moves reveal once again how thoroughly the network news
divisions have bought into the Nielsen mind-set. Faced with
shrinking audiences and rising costs, TV executives have discovered
that news programming, which costs much less to produce than
entertainment fare, can be a moneymaker in prime time. Yet once
these shows enter the arena with Knots Landing and The Cosby Show,
they must play by the same rules.
That means stars -- and star salaries. Though high-priced
talent raids have been attacked as a misguided extravagance at a
time when network news budgets are being slashed, these new stars,
for better or worse, usually justify their pay. Their presence can
mean precious ratings points, and sometimes even the life or death
of a show. Says Andrew Lack, executive producer of West 57th:
``These are very high-risk, high-profile jobs that go to people who
can handle them. They are worth the fuss made over them."
It is no accident that the latest objects of network bidding
wars are attractive women. None, of course, are journalistic
neophytes. Chung, 42, started her network career in CBS's
Washington bureau in 1971, later became anchor for the CBS-owned
station in Los Angeles and in 1983 moved to NBC, where she has done
everything from early-morning newscasts to prime-time
documentaries. Williams, 40, spent nine years as New York bureau
chief for CNN; before that she was a reporter for New York's
WNBC-TV. Sawyer, 43, has been with CBS since 1978, working as a
Washington reporter and co-anchor of the cbs Morning News before
joining 60 Minutes in 1984.
The crucial quality, however, is on-camera charisma. Sawyer has
it -- despite the fact she was always an unwieldy fifth wheel at
60 Minutes -- and she was pursued fervently by ABC's Arledge, who
knows a star when he sees one. (It was Arledge who inaugurated the
modern era of star journalism in 1976, when he lured Walters away
from NBC for the then unheard-of sum of $1 million a year.) The
battle over Chung illustrates even more vividly how much clout TV
news stars can wield when they have reached a certain level of
audience recognition. CBS executives had been courting Chung off
and on for years, but the sudden loss of Sawyer intensified their
efforts. As inducement, the network offered her not only West 57th
but also the CBS Sunday-evening anchor slot and fill-in duty for
Rather on the cbs Evening News.
Meanwhile, Chung asked NBC for a raise to $2 million a year and
a solo anchor position on its upcoming prime-time news show. "The
combination of demands was something I found unpalatable," says NBC
News President Michael Gartner. "She wanted an enormous amount of
money and a prime-time show in which she didn't share the billing.
That didn't fit with the programs we had under development." Chung
denies reports that she also sought "editorial control" of the new
show and says CBS's offer was simply more attractive. "NBC was
offering to make me the `greater of equals' (on the new show),"
she says. "CBS was willing to make me sole anchor." Despite an
eleventh-hour appeal by NBC President Robert Wright, who lobbied
her aboard a corporate jet while flying from Washington to New
York, Chung opted for CBS.
A job that Chung will not get, however, is Sawyer's old spot
on 60 Minutes. One candidate for that position is CBS medical
correspondent Susan Spencer, who has been supplanted by Chung as
anchor of the Sunday-evening newscast. But insiders give the
respected Spencer little chance of winding up on 60 Minutes (not
enough camera appeal). Lesley Stahl, another candidate, is thought
unlikely to want to move from Washington to New York. The current
favorite for the 60 Minutes spot: winsome West 57th correspondent
Meredith Vieira.
However expensive they become, the star wars seem sure to
continue. ABC, which recently hired not only Sawyer but also NBC
correspondent Chris Wallace, has been dubbed the hot network for
its aggressive talent raids. NBC, having lost both Wallace and
Chung, is hurting. Staff morale is low, and some warn that the
network's tightfisted attitude will doom it to the news-ratings
cellar. Gartner insists that NBC is not opposed to paying high
salaries to the right people but argues, almost quaintly, that by
rejecting Chung's money demands, the network cast a vote for
old-fashioned news values. "For $2 million," he says, "you can buy
an awful lot of journalistic horsepower." True enough. But in the
high-stakes world of TV news, a strong bench doesn't often win a
pennant.
-- Naushad S. Mehta/New York