Network News: Minstrels and Anchormen

By Thomas Griffith

Networks argue that if their evening news shows were given more time, they would become more than animated headline services and could provide more depth and nuance. The argument has not been put to the test because the networks have been unable to persuade local affiliates to extend network news to 45 minutes or an hour. But what they do with the time already available does not favor their case. Their newscasts regularly sag, at about the two-thirds mark, into some forgettable feature. Why the evening's main story does not instead get that extra moment of rounding out has a lot to do with the networks' obsession with pace, variety and the eye appeal of film.

If given added time, it is doubtful that the networks would adopt the one real innovation in television news, a half-hour each night confined to exploring one timely topic. This is the special achievement of public television's weeknightly MacNeil-Lehrer Report, now seen in some 200 cities. Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer are good questioners and have shown a flair for quickly rounding up two or three people qualified to speak on a subject in the headlines. Often their guests do not have big names or even prepossessing camera personalities--they are the kind of people you find on panels at seminars--but the broadcasts often inform because the hosts have the courage to be serious.

Even when they try, networks find it hard to alter their half-hour formula. This probably explains why Barbara Walters at ABC has justified neither the fears nor the hopes for her million-dollar presence. Remember the outburst from CBS News President Richard Salant when Walters was signed? "This isn't journalism--this is a minstrel show. Is Barbara a journalist, or is she Cher?" It is as interviewer and not as minstrel that ABC has tried to use her. The interview format, it turns out, does not particularly enhance a headline service. There sit Barbara and Harry Reasoner, with backs half-turned to the camera, looking at their interview subject on what seems to be another television screen on the wall; the effect on the viewer is something like Aldous Huxley's definition of infinity: A Quaker Oats box with a picture on it of a Quaker holding a Quaker Oats box on which is a picture of, etc. A reporter bundled up against the cold reports on Congress against a backdrop of the U.S. Capitol, then is cross-questioned by Reasoner and Walters, as if he had not had the wit to include important points. You can tell he would have preferred doing his own wrapup.

Each night the commercial net works give you exactly what you would get on your car radio, except for the pictures and the visual presence of the anchorman. Much, therefore, turns on these two factors. CBS, which consistently leads in the ratings, has also long led in the excellence of its news-gathering staff. This strength began with Edward R. Murrow (Charles Collingwood and Eric Sevareid remain from that era), continued with a middle generation of Roger Mudd and Dan Rather, and has now resulted in a set of people as good as Bob Schieffer, Ed Bradley, Richard Threlkeld and Lesley Stahl. CBS constantly comes up with better film and clear, informed reporting. ABC has yet to make a commitment to a first-rate reporting staff; without that, Walters and Reasoner are not competitive enough.

It is the closer NBC-CBS rivalry that fascinates. NBC'S lack of strength on the bench blurs what might otherwise be a simple personality preference by viewers for either Cronkite or Chancellor/Brinkley. Walter Cronkite is everybody's uncle, "the most trusted man in America," and with a contract that guarantees him three months off a year, he may go on forever--or until he suffers the fate of Aristides the Just, of whose justness Athenians finally wearied. When the younger John Chancellor became Cronkite's rival five years ago, he spoke of an anchorman's need to show himself trustworthy. He therefore gave up some of his natural ebullience (remember his sign-off as he was being expelled from a Democratic Convention: "This is John Chancellor, somewhere in custody"?). He adopted a slow, didactic reading style. NBC, in fact, often seems to be tailoring its nightly news to what the advertisers apparently assume the audience to be--the gerontic, laxative, denture crowd. Bringing back David Brinkley, as wry of manner as ever but now less acerb, has improved the show but not its share of the audience. Cronkite, the dogged loner, will not share his spotlight; but then, as Salant says, why should it take two people to read the news during the six or seven minutes out of 22 that the anchorman is actually on the air?

NBC trails CBS in the nightly news ratings by a margin that is small, but frustratingly persistent. Why is it, then, that NBC steadily led CBS on election night? The simplest explanation may be that on such a lengthy program, viewers tire of a single anchorman. But another possibility is more intriguing. NBC'S handsomer election-night set, dominated by Executive Producer Gordon Manning's electronic map of the U.S., emphasized a subtle difference in star systems. Chancellor and Brinkley shared a V-shaped table with Cassie Mackin and Tom Brokaw, so that all four could casually exchange comment. CBS's more celebrated team of Rather, Mudd and Mike Wallace, among others, seemed to be sitting at school desks trying to attract Cronkite's attention. Even when Cronkite browsed with CBS's brooding "heavy thinkers," Sevareid and Bill Moyers, he appeared to be grading their papers as they recited. Over on NBC, with Chancellor sharing the stage with Brinkley & Co., the spontaneity of his lively intelligence and wit showed to better advantage than it does on his buttoned-up nightly newscasts.

Such psychological shadings may be too fragile to draw conclusions from; it may simply be CBS's in-depth news-gathering superiority that gives it the lead. Of course, ratings are not necessarily "right," but they are often decisive, with dollars and prestige at stake. Television viewers, who jump channels easily to catch a favorite sitcom, do not lightly change their news-viewing habits. NBC's problem is that with the election year over, it is the nightly news and not the specials that matter.

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