"Emotions Exhibit Themselves"
By Thomas Griffith
On most weeks when the hotly contested new ratings come out, CBS Evening News finds itself leading the pack, but just barely. Hooray, the challenge from Tom Brokaw's NBC Nightly News has been beaten off again. But CBS's edge is misleading. The audience of the proud longtime leader in network news has actually declined by 375,000 "TV households" from the same period a year ago. NBC and ABC news programs have been gaining viewers.
Whatever may be amiss, CBS News is doing more of it these days. It has gone all out for fast pace, assertiveness and emotion. Dan Rather has always been the most intense of anchormen, a tightly coiled man; if you want the news delivered low key, go to Brokaw, or to ABC's Peter Jennings, who seems the most reflective of the three. In crises, Rather's highly effective quick, clipped delivery heightens the drama. There he is, facing a television screen, calling in Secretary Weinberger or Secretary Shultz, asking "in brief" for a comment on Libya. They oblige (ah, the power of the press!) and even though neither has much to say, the effect is theatrical. Rather is also adept at another device to give urgency to a breaking story. When someone like David Martin, CBS's able Pentagon correspondent, finishes his piece, Rather throws an on-camera question at him. Martin is ready with an answer, but the impression lingers with the viewer that only the anchorman had the perception to see that the point needed making. Presumably this time-consuming gimmick, used increasingly by the networks, makes the anchor look as though he is on top of the story.
Rather has been anchor now for five years. After a rocky start (his manner seemed too frenetic), Rather has hit the top and stayed there. The new CBS team, headed by the jovial, bearded impresario Van Gordon Sauter (now president of CBS News), abandoned Walter Cronkite's meat-and-potatoes style. Instead of someone in Washington reporting the news from official statements, CBS sent camera crews out in the field to picture school closings and factory layoffs. Sauter likes to talk about capturing the big emotional "moments." He chewed his staff out when it failed to show a picture of Nancy Reagan dabbing a tear from her eye at a memorial service for servicemen and -women killed in a plane crash in Gander, Newfoundland. Tears often seem to preoccupy CBS. The camera zeros in on someone in church crying, unable to escape this invasion of privacy. Sauter is a strong believer in "letting emotions exhibit themselves" and says that he relies on the "gracefulness" and caution of his staff to keep the practice from becoming "exploitative, redundant and then mundane." He does talk that way.
Scripts on the CBS Evening News also run to a rich, ripe, compacted prose. When the space shuttle Challenger exploded, some journalists wondered whether NASA had been under too much pressure from the White House to launch the craft. David Ignatius of the Washington Post decided to look instead at whether the press caused some of the pressure. He picked as his most egregious example this lead-in by Rather, broadcast the night before the blowup: "Yet another costly, red-faces-all-around space shuttle-launch delay. This time a bad bolt on a hatch and a bad-weather bolt from the blue are being blamed. What's more, a rescheduled launch for tomorrow doesn't look good either. Bruce Hall has the latest on today's high-tech low comedy." It is hard to imagine Cronkite, trying to be clever, calling the shuttle's problems "high-tech low comedy."
Whether such matters of style and tone affect CBS's ratings is hard to say. News executives argue that many factors go into the ups and downs of ratings. CBS's news-gathering staff is still regarded as the best in depth of talent. In the past year the network has been buffeted by a takeover attempt, an embarrassing libel trial and distracting ideological attacks. The gung-ho Dan Rather believes "all of this has made us tougher, better, more mature." Still, a little anxiety might not hurt.