Star Wars at the Networks

By Richard Zoglin

Okay, TV-news fans, get out your scorebooks. A new round of star wars is in full swing at the network news divisions. CBS, in desperate need of a female power hitter, last week grabbed one of the league's best, Connie Chung, from NBC. She will fill a gap in the CBS lineup opened last month when Diane Sawyer left to join the burgeoning Murderers' Row at ABC. Meanwhile, NBC, looking to compensate for Chung's departure, found no superstars on the trading block but managed to land a solid .280 hitter, Mary Alice Williams, formerly of CNN. All three are expected to have high-profile starting berths by the summer.

Their salaries are mind-boggling. Chung, who was making $1 million at NBC, will reportedly get in the neighborhood of $1.5 million a year at CBS, roughly the same as what Sawyer is said to be getting from ABC for leaving her post at CBS's top-rated magazine show, 60 Minutes. That puts both of them behind only Barbara Walters (more than $2 million) as the highest-paid women in TV news. Even Williams, coming from low-paying CNN, will ring up a respectable $500,000 or so annually at NBC. "We are watching a profound shift in the way networks function," says Marvin Kalb, the former CBS and NBC correspondent who now teaches at Harvard. "It is similar to what is happening in professional baseball or basketball. Journalists are exchangeable commodities; the highest bidder wins."

Stratospheric salaries for TV-news anchors are nothing new, of course. But last week's round of anchor shifts marked a new phase in the TV talent sweepstakes. In the past, high-visibility newscasters were wooed mainly for anchor spots on the morning and evening news shows. Now they are being groomed as prime-time stars. Shows are even being constructed around them, the way Hollywood studios in the '30s used to create vehicles for their contract stars. Chung has been promised the anchor job on a soon to be reconstituted version of West 57th, CBS's low-rated magazine show. Sawyer will co-anchor, with Sam Donaldson, a new prime-time news hour on ABC, scheduled to debut in August. Williams will be one of several co-anchors of a new NBC prime-time news offering, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, also planned for a summer premiere.

The moves reveal once again how thoroughly the network news divisions have bought into the Nielsen mind-set. Faced with shrinking audiences and rising costs, TV executives have discovered that news programming, which costs much less to produce than entertainment fare, can be a moneymaker in prime time. Yet once these shows enter the arena with Knots Landing and The Cosby Show, they must play by the same rules.

That means stars -- and star salaries. Though high-priced talent raids have been attacked as a misguided extravagance at a time when network news budgets are being slashed, these new stars, for better or worse, usually justify their pay. Their presence can mean precious ratings points, and sometimes even the life or death of a show. Says Andrew Lack, executive producer of West 57th: "These are very high-risk, high-profile jobs that go to people who can handle them. They are worth the fuss made over them."

It is no accident that the latest objects of network bidding wars are attractive women. None, of course, are journalistic neophytes. Chung, 42, started her network career in CBS's Washington bureau in 1971, later became anchor for the CBS-owned station in Los Angeles and in 1983 moved to NBC, where she has done everything from early-morning newscasts to prime-time documentaries. Williams, 40, spent nine years as New York bureau chief for CNN; before that she was a reporter for New York's WNBC-TV. Sawyer, 43, has been with CBS since 1978, working as a Washington reporter and co-anchor of the cbs Morning News before joining 60 Minutes in 1984.

The crucial quality, however, is on-camera charisma. Sawyer has it -- despite the fact she was always an unwieldy fifth wheel at 60 Minutes -- and she was pursued fervently by ABC's Arledge, who knows a star when he sees one. (It was Arledge who inaugurated the modern era of star journalism in 1976, when he lured Walters away from NBC for the then unheard-of sum of $1 million a year.) The battle over Chung illustrates even more vividly how much clout TV news stars can wield when they have reached a certain level of audience recognition. CBS executives had been courting Chung off and on for years, but the sudden loss of Sawyer intensified their efforts. As inducement, the network offered her not only West 57th but also the CBS Sunday-evening anchor slot and fill-in duty for Rather on the cbs Evening News.

Meanwhile, Chung asked NBC for a raise to $2 million a year and a solo anchor position on its upcoming prime-time news show. "The combination of demands was something I found unpalatable," says NBC News President Michael Gartner. "She wanted an enormous amount of money and a prime-time show in which she didn't share the billing. That didn't fit with the programs we had under development." Chung denies reports that she also sought "editorial control" of the new show and says CBS's offer was simply more attractive. "NBC was offering to make me the 'greater of equals' ((on the new show))," she says. "CBS was willing to make me sole anchor." Despite an eleventh-hour appeal by NBC President Robert Wright, who lobbied her aboard a corporate jet while flying from Washington to New York, Chung opted for CBS.

A job that Chung will not get, however, is Sawyer's old spot on 60 Minutes. One candidate for that position is CBS medical correspondent Susan Spencer, who has been supplanted by Chung as anchor of the Sunday-evening newscast. But insiders give the respected Spencer little chance of winding up on 60 Minutes (not enough camera appeal). Lesley Stahl, another candidate, is thought unlikely to want to move from Washington to New York. The current favorite for the 60 Minutes spot: winsome West 57th correspondent Meredith Vieira.

However expensive they become, the star wars seem sure to continue. ABC, which recently hired not only Sawyer but also NBC correspondent Chris Wallace, has been dubbed the hot network for its aggressive talent raids. NBC, having lost both Wallace and Chung, is hurting. Staff morale is low, and some warn that the network's tightfisted attitude will doom it to the news-ratings cellar. Gartner insists that NBC is not opposed to paying high salaries to the right people but argues, almost quaintly, that by rejecting Chung's money demands, the network cast a vote for old-fashioned news values. "For $2 million," he says, "you can buy an awful lot of journalistic horsepower." True enough. But in the high-stakes world of TV news, a strong bench doesn't often win a pennant.

With reporting by Naushad S. Mehta/New York