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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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103089
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10308900.073
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1990-09-18
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VIDEO, Page 86Going Up Against the Big ThreeCNN breaks with the norms in a full-hour evening newscastBy William A. Henry III
From the moment in 1963 when CBS became the first network to
expand its 15-minute nightly newscast to half an hour, visionaries
there and at rivals NBC and ABC began to talk of the logical next
step: a full hour of news. A quarter-century later, they are still
just talking. But upstart Cable News Network, the 24-hour
information service that began in 1980 and reaches 52 million
households, has taken that step. Last week CNN launched The World
Today, a 60-minute newscast (airtime: 6 to 7 p.m. EST) that in much
of the U.S. competes head to head with the shows anchored by Dan
Rather, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings.
Stacked up against those three white middle-aged men was an
anchor team that made a striking symbolic statement.
Washington-based Bernard Shaw, CNN's leading political
correspondent, is black; Catherine Crier, based at the network's
Atlanta headquarters, is a woman. Inadvertently, the choice of
Crier, brought in from outside in preference to 150 in-house
anchors and reporters, also made a depressing statement about the
abiding importance of looks and packaging in TV news. A former
college beauty-contest finalist and later an elected Texas judge,
Crier, 34, has no journalism experience.
While Crier is articulate, she gave the opening installments
more than her share of bumpy moments, including one glaring error.
Reading a story about alleged CIA action against foreign
governments, she indicated that socialist Salvador Allende Gossens
had ruled Chile "from 1963 to 1973." As any news junkie would be
likely to remember, Allende came to power in 1970, amid criticism
from President Richard Nixon. Co-anchor Shaw so far sounds muted
in his enthusiasm. Says he: "What she's been doing has been very
adequate."
Other aspects of the show need fine tuning. Heavy reliance on
live coverage led to an excess of pleasantries and some outright
glitches. On Wednesday a San Francisco earthquake survivor was so
upset by watching footage of the disaster that she bolted from the
studio before her scheduled appearance. On Thursday a promised
survivor interview was finally bumped for lack of time. CNN uses
the hour to do a few stories fully rather than pepper the viewer
with here-and-gone 30-second items, but last week's feature pieces
often seemed simply long, not deep. Moreover, the hour seemed
deliberately broken into two repetitive half-hour shows, covering
much the same topics in slightly different fashion.
Executives at the three established networks noted that the
opening show achieved a mere .7 rating, meaning that just seven
cable households per thousand tuned in, one twenty-fourth of the
audience typically commanded by each of the Big Three newscasts.
Said a top NBC news official: "I'm more concerned about erosion of
our audience from nonnews sources (entertainment shows, VCRs and
so on) than competing news sources. I don't think this is going to
make any difference to us." Of course, that's what the Big Three
used to say, with misguided optimism, about CNN as a whole.