A Sporting Look to the News

By Thomas Griffith

Now that all the anticipation and palaver of Super Bowl XVI is past, and sports on TV are reduced to what Red Smith dismissingly called the "back and forth" games of basketball and hockey, it becomes possible to talk more sensibly about sport's real place in television.

The truth about it may disquiet some. Whatever else television once gave promise of becoming, the Big Money programming of the three commercial networks in down to three staples: entertainment, news and sports. Only in sports has there been much real inventiveness.

Drama is Hollywood reduced to a small screen or made more cheaply to car-screeching formula, unless those televised comic strips--sitcoms--can be called an invention. Only lately has news begun overhauling its old way of presenting stories. Perhaps this is one reason why CBS, best and haughtiest of the news organizations, has gone to its sports division to find the new head of CBS News, Van Gordon Sauter, 46. CBS and NBC were the first to sneer 4 1/2 years ago, when ABC chose its sports wonder Roone Arledge to head both ABC News and Sports. Arledge sent Sauter a wry congratulatory telegram, suggesting that CBS obviously knew the right place to look for a new news boss.

Arledge brought over from sports a lot of hustle, money, audacity and electronic gadgetry. What assaults the eye often benumbs the brain, but now all the networks are doing the same. Overdoing it, in fact. Arledge thinks his imitators' gadgetry is more distracting than his own. The anchorman still sits there quietly, but over his shoulder his surroundings have taken on a dancing, flip-flopping life. A machine called Quantel inserts a picture in a corner of the screen, zooms it up to full screen and back down; a computer called Chyron flashes numbers and text on the screen. Such zippiness is a long way from the paleolithic days of newsgathering in the 1950s, when "creepie-peepies" roamed the floors of political conventions so fast that the camera had moved on before a sign could be lettered identifying the politico.

Mulling this over one morning at a diner, Don Hewitt (now executive producer of 60 Minutes) looked up at the menu on the wall -- HAMBURGERS 35-c- SOUP 25-c---and asked to buy the sign itself. With it a politician's name could be inserted in the slots of the menu board and photographed in no time at all. Though news was prestigious, sports made the big profits ($10 million for CBS on Super Bowl XVI) and got the big budgets. Out of sports' costly innovativeness have come instant replay, slow motion, the isolated camera, the reverse-action camera, stop action--devices that news broadcasts put to vivid use in covering the assassination attempts on President Reagan and the Pope.

News happens in inconvenient places at unexpected times, while sports can concentrate on unpredictable events at predictable places. CBS had 23 cameras in place at the Super Bowl; Arledge, with a camera at every hole and a few to spare, used 26 on the U.S. Open, and will use more than 100 at the Winter Olympics. Sports reporters shy from criticizing the powers that be in sports but are airily bolder than news reporters in commenting on and criticizing the players and coaches they cover. They don't need to worry about the political clout, or the dignity, of people they show (dignity in hockey?). They are freer to rearrange reality. Roone Arledge invented prime-time Olympics--singling out anticipated stars to build up in advance, juggling tapes, and the clock to show the most dramatic events at peak hours. Purists may object that Arledge's rewed-up Olympics test like the sprawly Olympics of actuality, but the test is the same as for orange-juice concentrate: more people seem to prefer it to the real thing.

Over at CBS News, Van Sauter, a large and relaxed ex-newspaperman and station manager, thinks news can gain from the energy of sports coverage. He believes that sports bring the viewer (in a phrase he found in a textbook somewhere) "the sweet resolution of anxiety." Viewers make an emotional investment in a player or team that intensifies their watching interest, and, by the end of the game, their hopes have been satisfied or their worries confirmed. Sauter thinks viewers also invest emotionally in people they see in the news. Trouble is, there is no final score anxieties, the end of a newscast, and the evening news resolves few anxieties.

The three networks are now about on a par in the ratings, with CBS hoping to build on the narrow lead it enjoys under Dan Rather, with NBC about to replace John Chancellor with Tom Brokaw, and with Arledge still seeking the right anchormanly combination. There is no assurance of a sweet resolution of anxiety.

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