Three for the Money

The faces are different, though not very: the macho Texan on CBS, the winsome South Dakotan on NBC and the urbane Canadian on ABC are all white, lean and youthfully middleaged; all part their dark, wavy hair on the left. They do vary somewhat in manner: Dan Rather of CBS is intense, Tom Brokaw of NBC is quick to laugh or lament, and Peter Jennings of ABC is elegantly detached. The newscasts that they anchored last week, in heavily promoted head-to-head competition, were almost exactly alike, not only in content but in specific imagery.

The same Korean girl grieved on ABC and NBC; the same act from the Moscow Circus performed on NBC and CBS; predictable American-flag graphics, to illustrate a succession of stories, appeared on ABC and CBS. On Wednesday, a viewer could look from screen to screen and see, simultaneously, three images of Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, then three images of Secretary of State George Shultz, then three images of Washington, D.C.

Hundreds of people share in the mounting of a network newscast, which may be the most collaborative enterprise in journalism. Anchors, in the judgment of the most successful of them, Walter Cronkite of CBS, are merely "the familiarity factor, like the typography and makeup of a newspaper." After surveying last week's ballyhooed return to solo anchoring, Cronkite faulted all three networks for "working on appearance rather than substance: if the content is right, it does not matter whether there is one anchor or six." Yet when the shows are so similar, perhaps all that the networks have to sell is Brokaw's lopsided grin, Rather's riveting eyes, or Jennings' meticulously folded breast-pocket handkerchief.

Preliminary ratings showed little movement from the week before, when CBS led with 26% of the TV audience, while ABC and NBC were roughly tied for second with 20% each. But then, if the promotional hype is discounted, the new season for TV news is not much of a change. Jennings has been anchoring ABC's show for two months, and Brokaw has been NBC's co-anchor (with the ousted Roger Mudd) for more than a year. Rather has been in place since March 1981. CBS News President Van Gordon Sauter cautioned, "There will be a lot of viewer sampling, and we will not know the outcome for a couple of months." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.