TV News: Is More Better?

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Networks launch the biggest expansion in more than a decade

What bravado! Revolutions often start in quiet corners. But few try to rouse the masses when most of them are asleep. ABC and NBC did just that last week, however, in the first phase of the biggest growth of network TV news since the mid-1960s, when evening broadcasts grew from 15 minutes to a half-hour. ABC and NBC launched programs to serve news junkies as late as 3 a.m. and as early as 6 a.m. CBS will counter in October with news programs stretching from 2 a.m. to 9 a.m., thereby keeping the network on the air and available for live coverage of a crisis 24 hours a day, a genuine first. Says NBC News President Reuven Frank: "Networks must respond to the needs of people. If changing life-styles mean people are ready to watch at different times, we will do programs at different times."

Some 94% of U.S. TV sets, on average, are turned off between 2 a.m. and 7 a.m. But if only 6% of the national audience is watching, that still translates to 5 million of the 81.5 million U.S. TV households. This eyeful is quite enough to interest network executives, especially when the additional news coverage can be produced at relatively modest cost, in part by taking advantage of the networks' vast, often underutilized staffs and the accumulation of footage that fails to win air time on the evening and morning newscasts.

More to the point, perhaps, the networks are increasingly aware of a long-range threat: the encroachments of Ted Turner's round-the-clock Cable News Network and especially his most recent effort, CNN2, the headline-news service, which has been sold not only to cable systems but also to dozens of the networks' own affiliate stations. Most network executives publicly downplay creeping "Turneritis." CBS News President Van Gordon Sauter discreetly calls CNN "one of a number of factors in our thinking," but NBC's Frank confesses: "It was all Turner. That is why we did it."

The new weekday entries are NBC's Overnight, airing from 1:30 a.m. to 2:30 a.m. (Fridays 2 a.m. to 3 a.m.); ABC's This Morning, 6 a.m. to 7 a.m.; and NBC's Early Today, a 6:30 a.m. curtain raiser to the 30-year-old Today show, which airs at 7 a.m. To come in October are an ABC hour of news and talk from midnight to 1 a.m., featuring Interviewer Phil Donahue, and a CBS marathon from 2 a.m. to 7 a.m. that will lead into the network's Morning News from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. CBS was first to announce its move, but it will be the last into the fray. Claims a CBS executive: "We want to get it right the first time."

ABC might have benefited from such counsel. Despite slick graphics, pulsating music and all the other hallmarks of ABC News President Roone Arledge's razzmatazz, This Morning's first week was generally awkward and error prone. After a solemn-toned introduction to a supposed report about the economic woes of American auto manufacturers, Economics Editor Dan Cordtz delivered instead a primer on currency exchange rates. Segments on successive days ascribed the singular position of "front runner" for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination to two men, Edward Kennedy and Walter Mondale. Both anchors made frequent if trivial mistakes: once Steve Bell even announced the time wrong. The show's other anchor, Kathleen Sullivan, who was wooed, perhaps not coincidentally, from a highly visible role at Cable News Network, was appealingly energetic, but often seemed ill at ease. She mumbled, misread, and even looked abruptly away when she garbled words. One notable malapropism: "Police spokesmen are involving any comment." More seriously, the show hyped the as yet unsubstantiated charges of sexual misconduct between members of Congress and Capitol Hill pages, and used an artist's rendering of a compromising scene, also seen repeatedly on ABC's World News Tonight, that implied that the network had prejudged the charges as true.

Unlike This Morning's hectic newsroom set, which clashes oddly with the scene it leads into, the laid-back living room of Good Morning America, NBC's expanded Today used approximately the same cast on the same set. The only visible change last week was the less than exuberant mood of Co-Anchor Bryant Gumbel. Though he was given additional pay for having to rise at 4:30 a.m., Gumbel told TIME: "I don't think anybody in his right mind would choose to get up earlier and work more. But I was not going to be the reason why it could not get done."

NBC's late-night effort is in a sense an extension of its late lamented magazine show Weekend (1974-79). It has the same driving forces: News President Frank and Co-Anchors Lloyd Dobyns and Linda Ellerbee, who write and perform in an amiably wry style. Overnight has a casual look and quirky curiosity, even when examining hard news. For example, a rumination on Secretary of State Alexander Haig's resignation was preceded by a report that Haig was on a list of America's best-dressed men. Nancy Reagan's birthday was noted with a clip of her acting in a forgettable 1952 TV show.

Thus far the new shows are of unproven value financially. ABC is not even attempting, until January, to sell commercials for the first half-hour of its show, running instead promotions and public service announcements. CBS News President Sauter says, "The people in sales are optimistic, but it's impossible to say when we can reach a break-even point." NBC, however, has already covered its bet. Says Frank: "It was easy. We just added another commercial to our regular evening news." --By William A. Henry III. Reported by Denise Worrell/New York

With reporting by Denise Worrell

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