Revving Up the Television News

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch

For 15 years or more, nightly network television news has been of a predictable muchness--earnest, responsible, muted. Behind the scenes, huge sums are involved in ratings rivalries, in promotional buildups of anchormen, in bouncing live pickups off satellites, in devising ever more elaborate news stage-sets--but what appear over the air are three lookalike, sedately animated versions of the New York Times. The professional news-gathering staffs of CBS, NBC and ABC have a caste solidarity. Their views generally prevail because the giant networks are concerned with prestige--and during most of the broadcast day, with game shows and trashy sitcoms, the networks do so little else to earn it. But at long last the sober world of network news is in for major change.

The kind of coverage that the professionals try to resist is glaringly visible in dozens of local TV news shows--sensationalism, indifference to serious news, schlocky personality chatter, on-camera exploitation of people caught in tragic situations, all mixed with relentless upbeat jollity. Such coverage also repels Roone Arledge, who made ABC first in sports coverage and has now been given the assignment to do the same with ABC News. But he is also fascinated. He is not a man to leave ABC a poor third in news ratings.

"In pure circulation, all three network news shows together attract just 74% of the viewers," says Arledge. He adds with a shudder: "More than a quarter of the people get their news elsewhere. Half the television station owners around the country are just businessmen who can't be trusted to cover news with any responsibility, and their local news directors are extensions of their sales forces." The way to draw many of their viewers to ABC, Arledge suggests, is to have "responsible but vigorous and fresh journalism." Over at the other networks, people wonder how responsible ABC will be once it gets more vigorous and fresh.

In the past few weeks, before the fall season begins, Arledge has been practicing in public. The results have been lively but confusing. One night ABC gave Son of Sam, the New York lovers'-lane killer, lengthy and sensational treatment. On another night Barbara Walters, ABC's million-dollar anchorwoman, appeared for only a minute or two on-screen at the beginning and end. Next night, in a different hairdo, she was dispatched, like any local girl reporter, to stand before a bombed-out glass front to talk about Puerto Rican terrorists--a story on which ABC breathlessly lavished twice as much tune as the other networks. Such new tactics have generated a flood of newspaper rumors: Is ABC's expensive anchor team of Walters and Harry Reasoner out of favor? About to be fired, about to quit? No. About to be downplayed? Yes. Roone Ar ledge is radically challenging the conventional anchor role itself.

In a lecture delivered at Columbia University more than a decade ago, David Brinkley proposed doing away entirely with "the role of the all-wise, all-informed, all-knowing journalistic supermen." Brinkley objected to the way "the whole apparatus of press agentry and promotion is put to work ... promoting stars along with promoting news, to the point where it is not clear which is which." The only solution, Brinkley argued, was to "report the news the way newspapers report it," with many reporters spending the day developing stories, "then having them, all of them, report on the ah" whatever they have learned. And to give up having a star or two stars trying to keep up with everything." Only then, once TV news was "free of the artifice of show business," said Brinkley, would it have achieved stability, would it have grown up at last.

That proposal of his now seems too radical to Brinkley, but Arledge, no stranger to the artifices of show business, is thinking along the same lines. Anchorman Brinkley, who has collected $2 million dollars or more from NBC since making that speech, no longer talks about the vanishing anchorman. Wry as ever about his job, Brinkley now concedes that a familiar face is needed as a "switching agent," but he deplores those elaborate anchorman desks that to him look like airline ticket counters. Not to worry. Now that Brinkley is returning to Washington, from a New York he has never felt at home in, NBC is building two new stage-sets--one for Brinkley in the capital, another for John Chancellor in New York. Neither will have a desk, only a chair. NBC also plans to concentrate more on the day's top story and on business news.

Chancellor and Brinkley might well agree with Arledge that being an anchorman "who may or may not have written his own stuff, reading from a TelePrompTer what others have gathered," is no big deal. How accomplished does one have to be to read switch cues like "President Carter today signed a bill creating the Department of Energy. Bob Schieffer has that story"? Yet the nation's celebrated top anchormen have held office, and popularity, for longer terms than Presidents. The fact is, their best qualities are only on stand-by reserve when they read the evening news. It is on other occasions--in knowledgeable ad-lib coverage of political conventions, space shots, presidential funerals--that they earn their spurs, their reputations, the trust of their viewers. Would Arledge himself be so dismissive of the anchoring role if ABC had Walter Cronkite and was No. 1 in the ratings? Arledge, though he professes to admire Reasoner's whimsical essays and Walters' interviews, is convinced that ABC'S broadcasts are too slow-paced. "Cronkite," he says admiringly, "has that laid-back appearance, but he is a speed reader. He talks as fast as people on the street, rapid-fire."

If all three network broadcasts are essentially alike, and it comes down to which anchorman you trust most, Arledge reckons that Cronkite will still be No.1 and ABC will still be third. Arledge is no man to play to the other fellow's strength.

Casually dressed, easy of manner, Arledge exudes the smell of success the way Joe Namath exudes Brut. Arledge is a restless competitor (when Son of Sam was caught, Arledge spent the night at police headquarters). He is also a confident gambler. He gambled millions on the 1976 Olympics, and made that sprawling assortment of track meets, wrestling and swimming contests a prime-time commercial success. Chronology and coherence may have been sacrificed as he zeroed in on the flashiest contests and concentrated on popular favorites, switching relentlessly from one arena to another, but the result was exciting television. Arledge liked the way his sportscaster Jim McKay "in the 30 seconds between two events could add a dimension, a fact, a clarification." To Arledge, the news anchorman's function, "if there is a function, is not just to read a lead-in to a piece of film, but to provide reaction to a story, put it in perspective. Anchor people are concerned with peer acceptance. They find it degrading to educate people because they think they are talking to the intelligentsia. We had a good interview with Sadat, but nobody explained when he mentioned Gaddafi. Not only the slob on the street but the average educated people who go to '21' or whatever wonder who or what a Gaddafi is. It sounds like a disease."

Arledge goes first-class. Given a big news budget (ABC is no longer the cheapo among network news operations), he has recently hired such good people as Av Westin, Cassie Mackin, Sander Vanocur. Impatient with all the "back to New York" cues between items, Arledge is setting up what he calls "regional anchors." The Middle East anchorman and his correspondents pass the story along from one to another like Tinker to Evers to Chance, and talk endlessly above a shifting kaleidoscope of film, whose relevance is not always explained. Looking at the new ABC Evening News these days, one is suddenly reminded that Roone Arledge also invented Monday Night Football with Howard Cosell. And then his method comes clearer. Arledge is a master of sensory overload.

There are ambitious mavericks in every field (Clay Felker of New York in magazines, Rupert Murdoch in newspapers) who know the expected limits of respectability in their craft, but choose to succeed by excess. Arledge is such a man. His conversation is full of proper responses ("A commentary mustn't fight the film," "The single biggest problem of television is that everyone talks so much," "The first law of football is that when the teams line up, you go to the play-by-play man"); yet it is he who stuffed the Monday night booth with three garrulous commentators, with only the play-by-play man, Frank Gifford, concentrating on the game, straining to interrupt Cosell's anecdotes, disputatious opinions and constant hype of himself and of coming ABC promotions. Arledge feels no need to take a viewers' survey of the matter: "Everybody hates Cosell. But he's a catalyst and makes stars out of everyone he's with--Don Meredith, Eddie Arcaro, Alex Karras--by making them speak honestly."

The games are often ones you can sleep through, even with ABC'S dazzling replays, multiple cameras and split screens, but it is hard to sleep through the chatter too. Some of this same barrage is now evident on ABC Evening News, though Arledge is quick to plead that he is still experimenting. The direction seems apparent enough. ABC, not surrendering news "responsibility" in other ways, may well end up the most revved-up, visually busy network news show. The other two networks can specialize instead, if they prefer, in coherence and proportion. But Arledge may be on to something. It is a good bet that a year from now all three evening news shows will be different.

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