EXCERPT
Network Anchors See a Diminished Role
Nightly news loses viewers and substance
This article is excerpted from a new book, The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril (Knopf), by Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert G. Kaiser. Downie has been executive editor of The Washington Post since 1992, succeeding Ben Bradlee. Kaiser was managing editor from 1991 to 1998 and now is an associate editor.
This is truly amazing," said Dan Rather, staring at a youthful version of himself reading brief news items into the camera. Rather was sitting in his cozy, windowless office just off the main CBS newsroom on West Fifty-seventh Street in New York, from which he broadcasts the CBS Evening News. The room was dark and comfortably furnished; an aromatic candle burned on a side table. With rapt attention, Rather watched himself delivering the news of March 25, 1981, nearly twenty years earlier. What amazed him was the number of brief news items — eight in all, each of ten to fifty seconds in length — that he simply read facing the camera, without fancy graphics or any other diversion. This, said Rather, would never happen today.
His surprise had begun with the first items on the old broadcast, an eighty-second report from San Salvador, where the American embassy had been attacked by terrorists, and a four-minute, forty-second story from Washington about a power struggle in the new Reagan administration involving the secretary of state, Alexander M. Haig. Later a correspondent gave a two-and-a-half-minute report from Poland. "No one among the big three [networks] would run this long at the top [the beginning of the show] with these kinds of stories" now, Rather said. Nor would there be so much foreign news. If he tried to do a similar newscast now, Rather said, CBS executives would tell him, "Dan, you cannot lead with El Salvador and take the broadcast through an inside Washington power struggle and go to a piece about Poland . . . . There was a time when you could do that, 1981 was the time. But if you do it today, you die, and we die."
The three network news shows together still attract a bigger audience each evening than any other regularly scheduled program on television. And when a big story breaks, Americans still turn to Rather, Tom Brokaw on NBC, and Peter Jennings on ABC, who have been our national masters of ceremonies since the early eighties. After terrorists flew jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, most American adults turned to the three major networks to follow the story. There was no measurement of the daytime television audience on September 11, 2001, but that night, at least 80 million Americans were watching ABC, CBS or NBC throughout prime time (8-11 p.m.). Before the terrorist attacks, 20-25 million people watched the three evening news shows each night.
But their longevity and the size of their collective audience disguises the fact that all three networks, and their nightly newscasts, have survived tumultuous changes during the past two decades. The three newscasts actually lost about 40 percent of their audience between 1981 and 2001. This remarkable decline reflects increasing competition for viewers as the television universe was transformed by cable, satellite services, and the Internet, giving Americans scores of alternatives to the three broadcast networks. Viewers were also lost to new life-styles and changing tastes. Under new economic pressures, the networks themselves have been reconstituted: all three have gone through wrenching ownership changes since 1985; ABC and CBS have had two of them. New owners transformed the status of network news.
To explore the fundamental ways network news has changed, we asked all three anchormen to look at tapes of their broadcasts from the first month that each of them sat in the anchor's chair. Then, in the spring of 2000, we asked them to explain what had happened in the years since.
When the tape of the March 25, 1981, CBS Evening News broadcast ended, Rather explained how he had altered his approach to the news. Like the other two anchors, Rather is a senior editor of his broadcast as well as its lead performer. He and his executive producer collaborate in deciding the program's content, subject to guidance from CBS News executives.
"I want to go home at night saying, 'Well, we had in the broadcast at least a mention of those things we consider to be the most important and the most interesting of the day,'" Rather said. Some days what's most interesting was also most important, so it was easy to decide what the main story was. But "there are other days when the most interesting things are not the most important, or, indeed, one may question whether they are important at all." For example, "We do have more celebrity news in the broadcast than I would like to have."
Rather's preference is for strongly presented stories on serious subjects from overseas and from Washington. In 1981 such stories provided the meat, potatoes, and often the gravy for the CBS Evening News. The 1981 newscast contained, after commercials, twenty-three minutes, twenty seconds of news; of that, nearly seventeen minutes was devoted to stories from Washington or overseas.
In 1981, Rather said, when confronted with a story like the civil war in El Salvador, "We wanted at least two correspondents assigned there with at least two camera crews and at least two producers. The key point is that nobody said, 'Well, it costs too much and we can't afford that.' Those decisions were made on the basis of, Is it important? Is it interesting? That's changed quite a bit."
By 2000, foreign stories rarely got one CBS crew, let alone two. The once-vast network of CBS correspondents and bureaus around the world was a small fraction of that. If Rather tried to cover more foreign news in 2000, he said, his bosses might point out that NBC had the most popular evening news show, and "they do the least" foreign news. And of course, "it's the most expensive; international news costs more than the others."
The 1981 broadcast also included a five-and-a-half-minute report on two toxic dumps near Buffalo, New York — the famous one at Love Canal and another one nearby. A correspondent introduced a cast of worried local residents, a reassuring executive of the company whose hazardous chemicals went into the dumps, local officials, and more. "A piece like this is as close as we could come to a mini-documentary," Rather said as he watched. "Today we rarely do something four and a half minutes — maybe twice a year . . . and there would be a lot of discussion whether we should do it at all."
The new approach emphasized shorter pieces, softer stories, less reporting from Washington and abroad. "I myself remain unconvinced" that viewers actually preferred this diet to harder coverage, Rather said. But he also acknowledged the limits of his ability to win these arguments. When we asked him who at CBS had the ultimate power to make the important decisions, he replied, "They're all on the corporate side."
We watched the 2000 version of Rather's CBS Evening News on the night of our interview with him — June 16 — to see how it compared with the 1981 broadcast, and how it reflected the new realities he had discussed with us. The 2000 broadcast was faster-paced and shorter. The longest story took up two and a half minutes. The show still filled half an hour, but the time actually devoted to the news had fallen from 23:20 in 1981 to 18:20 in 2000. More than ten minutes was devoted to commercials, and Rather spent eighty seconds on "teases" — brief previews of what was still to come on the program to persuade viewers to stick with CBS through its four commercial breaks, each lasting two minutes or more.
The lead story was hard news: authorities had found two computer hard drives containing sensitive nuclear secrets that had been "lost" at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Next came an "exclusive CBS News report" on Osama bin Laden, the Saudi terrorist, from Jim Stewart, CBS's Justice Department correspondent in Washington.
This story demonstrated how television has moved away from classical definitions of news. It conveyed a smidgen of information, and a lot of ominous implication. Stewart began this way: "If you thought Osama bin Laden's terrorist activities were limited to the Middle East, then consider the plight of these twenty-one foreign tourists entering their third month of captivity in the Philippine jungle." He showed a grim snippet of videotape depicting weeping hostages, one of whom says, "We are finished . . . . We-we-we cannot face this anymore."
This reference to the hostages in the Philippines provided a
reason to use that bit of gruesome videotape. And it created a
bridge to the real subject of the story, anxieties about terrorism
at the Olympic Games in Sydney.
We found much to wonder about in the two-minute, ten-second report, beginning with its opening line. Why would anyone think bin Laden's terrorism was "limited to the Middle East"? Bin Laden became notorious after allegedly organizing attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa, and American authorities suspected him of trying to organize incidents in the United States to welcome the year 2000. His scope of activity was never confined to the Mideast. So where was the news?
Stewart's report contained only one new fact: that the FBI had
sent twelve agents to Australia. The idea that bin Laden might
target the Olympics was not new, and Australian papers had earlier
reported that the government there had asked for FBI assistance.
The rest of this report consisted of vivid, ominous video, most
of it not fully explained, accompanied by rather dark speculation.
It was followed by a two-minute report on rising gas prices. The other major stories in this broadcast were all features: drought in Minnesota (2:30); the potential benefits to heart-disease patients of folic acid (2:10); a flawed version of the new golden dollar coin that would be worth a lot of money (1:50); and the eighteenth birthday of Britain's Prince William (2:30) — the only story of the broadcast reported from overseas.
Only in one respect did this 2000 newscast resemble its 1981
ancestor: Rather again read a great many brief news items into
the camera. There were ten, every one illustrated with some kind
of graphic. His goal to at least mention "those things we
consider to be the most important and the most interesting of
the day" was met, thanks to these ten brief items. The next
day's New York Times and Washington Post had only one good story
that Rather had missed. Israel that day had completed its withdrawal
from south Lebanon after an occupation that had lasted twenty-two
years. Rather noted every other major story covered in the next
day's papers. Of course he gave just a headline for most of them,
a reminder of how sketchy the television news is.
Tom Brokaw revealed none of Rather's
nostalgia when he watched the NBC Nightly News broadcast for September
23, 1983. Brokaw has made an easier adjustment to the new forms
of network news. He talked less about the old days than Rather
and offered a vigorous defense of the new version of the program.
The 1983 NBC broadcast resembled Rather's 1981 CBS Evening News in many respects. Brokaw in 1983 also began with a foreign story — from Beirut, where U.S. forces had intervened. A correspondent's report from the scene lasted nearly three minutes. The next story, also nearly three minutes long, described continuing demonstrations in the Philippines against the government of dictator Ferdinand Marcos. There followed two Washington stories, one on calls for the resignation of James Watt, President Reagan's Interior secretary, the other on President Reagan's courtship of Hispanic voters. All together, fourteen minutes and twenty seconds of that broadcast (which devoted twenty-two minutes, ten seconds to news) was spent on stories from Washington or overseas.
The program included three features, stories not pegged to the day's events, with a human-interest angle. One, lasting not quite two minutes, reported on an attempt by employees of a West Virginia steel plant to buy the company before it went out of business. The story was confusing and incomplete, conveying no real sense of the workers' prospects for success. A second feature, two minutes long, was devoted to the "doomsday" jetliner that was supposed to carry the president away from a nuclear attack on the United States. The third, just over two minutes, reported on a reunion of now-elderly men who had worked in the New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps. It was sentimental and easy to look at and contained no real information.
Brokaw watched all this in a conference room lined with promotional posters for top-rated NBC shows on the third floor of NBC headquarters in Rockefeller Center. The world, American society, and television had all changed since then, he said — "both quantitative and qualitative changes." In 1983 the news was dominated "by white middle-aged men" and subjects that interested them. Now his newscast is self-consciously diverse, often aimed at women, "because we know that women still are probably our most loyal viewer base."
In 1983 NBC could rely on the news of the day to fill the show. In 2000 it had to construct a program to appeal to viewers who, the producers assume, may already know the headlines of the day by the time they sit down to watch Brokaw. So NBC produced feature stories that could be broadcast whenever Brokaw and his producers decided such segments would help a particular program. "We know . . . beginning on a Monday about what we're going to have on that week in the back end of the broadcast," Brokaw said. "We try to almost do it thematically.
"Every feature that we do has a purpose, it's not just entertainment or because it's interesting," he said. "The features that we're doing we think have real application." Brokaw was critical of the features in the 1983 show because they were too thin and lacked purpose. The piece from West Virginia "shouldn't have been on . . . . It had no context whatsoever."
Brokaw said some things have not changed. "We'd sure as hell be doing today" a big story equivalent to the Beirut and Manila stories of 1983 — "probably do more on them today than they did" then. But the news isn't always that compelling now, he said — a subjective judgment, certainly, that easily allows for the sharp reduction in foreign reports on the NBC Nightly News.
But Brokaw's philosophy of foreign news had changed. It wasn't necessary, or desirable, to track each developing story incremental step by incremental step. "What we try to do episodically is a two-and-a-half-minute piece that puts it in some context and wraps it up," he said. Such a report might contain 440 words, the length of a short newspaper story.
"I think our role still is to do as much as possible to give people at the end of the day a snapshot of their world," he added. But more than a snapshot, too — "value added" reporting on subjects of interest to viewers, he said, is now a regular part of the program. "More and more of it is in the medical and scientific field."
"Dan [Rather] is always complaining about the hard-news thing," Brokaw said. "Well, what does that mean? That's become a kind of mantra or a liturgy, if you will. And some hard news — so-called — has almost no meaning."
The challenge, Brokaw said, is to seize and hold an audience in this era of multiple channels and remote control devices. "We get one crack, we've got to get them, they've got to stay with us." In a simpler, less competitive era, the producers of the 1983 newscast "didn't have to worry about somebody going 'click.'"
To newspaper editors like us, one of the most striking aspects of a television news broadcast is the fact that any single item can turn off a viewer, sending him or her to another channel. Our readers can browse through the newspaper looking for items that catch their eye, skipping those that bore them. But television viewers have no such freedom: they are stuck with the sequence of items the producers decide to provide. They can't skip a story or skim through the program until they find something appealing. So every item on a broadcast carries the weight of the entire program. One false step and you've lost a viewer, or a million of them.
So how does NBC try to grab and hold an audience? We watched the Nightly News the evening we had talked to Brokaw, May 18, 2000. The show began in a wall of flame on NBC's futuristic set; the flames were from forest fires in New Mexico. Brokaw stood, full length, beside the crackling, flame-orange and smoke-gray conflagration. "It was a government blunder of colossal proportions," he began. "And the financial and emotional price tags still are being calculated. The wildfires in New Mexico, which are still burning tonight, began as a deliberate policy of the National Park Service. Today the government acknowledged the complete failure of the plan."
A correspondent then recounted the day's news against a backdrop of more footage from the fires, pictures of raging fires and destroyed homes. His report lasted nearly three minutes.
Next came a weather story from the Midwest, which apparently earned its place in the broadcast because NBC had acquired an extraordinary home video of a tornado crossing the Nebraska plain. For more than two minutes viewers saw the giant, spinning funnel of a classic tornado speeding across farm fields, occasionally setting off a lightning-like flash when it tore through electrical wires. The impact of the twister? The correspondent reported, "One house destroyed, major damage to two more. Several farm buildings ruined as well. But miraculously, no one seriously injured."
Great video, but no real news.
Next came two and a half minutes from Washington on maneuvering over legislation on U.S. trade with China, a straightforward account that showed viewers a range of opinions on the issue.
Most evenings the Brokaw broadcast included a segment called "NBC News in Depth." On this broadcast it was devoted to more on the New Mexico fires — specifically the difficulty owners of destroyed homes will face when trying to collect damages from the federal government.
The longest piece in the broadcast, three and a half minutes, was a feature called "Best Medicine." This one described the Cleveland Clinic, a leading center treating heart disease. The clinic gave NBC correspondent Robert Bazell and his camera crew access to the operating room while open-heart surgery was under way, which produced marvelous footage. But there was little real information in this story.
NBC had decided that medical features add to the appeal of its broadcast. Brokaw's Nightly News often included two of them. On this occasion, the second was about the fate of chimpanzees used in medical experiments. "They really are our next of kin," began a correspondent. And they can live to age fifty, "at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars apiece." How should we take care of them? The correspondent reported conflicting views on this subject, concluding: "Eventually, Congress will have to resolve" the question.
All together Brokaw covered seven news stories in nineteen minutes of news, mostly with brief headlines. There was one story from Washington (China trade), which lasted two and a half minutes. The only foreign news in the broadcast was a twenty-second "read" — Brokaw announcing Pope John Paul II's eightieth birthday. Five other pieces lasted more than two minutes: three on fires and weather, and the two medical pieces.
NBC chose not to report these stories that were covered in the
next day's New York Times and Washington Post: The Senate's close
vote against a provision that would have forced an early U.S.
withdrawal from Kosovo; the decision by the opposition candidate
in Peru's presidential election to withdraw from the race because,
he said, it was rigged; the UN Security Council's decision to
impose an arms embargo against both Ethiopia and Eritrea, and
the Ethiopian army's successful offensive in Eritrea that forced
hundreds of thousands of Eritreans to flee their homes; the victory
of the opposition candidate in the Dominican Republic's presidential
election; the World Bank's decision to resume lending to Iran
after seven years, over U.S. objections; the final vote by the
South Carolina legislature to remove the Confederate flag from
atop the state capitol; the announcement by Time Warner and Disney
that they had settled an argument that temporarily caused Time
Warner cable companies to drop ABC television signals; a new study
by psychologists at UCLA, which found that men and women react
quite differently to stress; and finally, a new computer virus,
akin to but more damaging than the "Love Bug" that had
begun circulating on the Internet, infecting many computers.
In his office filled with stacks
of books, just off the newsroom of ABC News, Peter Jennings confronted
the videotape of his World News Tonight newscast of October 6,
1983, as an analytical challenge. Like CBS and NBC newscasts from
the early 1980s, this one emphasized foreign news. Its lead story
was from Nicaragua, about the crash of a cargo plane carrying
arms to the contra rebels. That story filled the first two minutes,
forty seconds of the broadcast. There followed a one-minute, forty-second
report on peace efforts in Central America. Then two and a half
minutes on controversy surrounding the impolitic James Watt, Reagan's
short-lived secretary of the Interior. Next was a one-minute,
forty-second report making sport of a House of Representatives
debate on a pork-barrel water-projects bill.
All together this broadcast devoted five minutes to news from Washington, and more than eight minutes to news from abroad. The longest foreign story (3:20) was a report by Barrie Dunsmore, an experienced correspondent (now retired), on the tenth anniversary of the last Arab-Israeli war. Dunsmore reviewed the history of that decade and the prospects for peace in 1983, packing a lot of information into those 200 seconds. The only feature story took up the last minute and forty seconds of the broadcast, a report on a San Diego zookeeper's efforts to save a newborn emperor penguin.
When the tape was over, Jennings wanted to talk first of all about technology and technique. "Production capabilities in the main have much greater potential, so the technology of production, the graphics . . . the ability to do maps and things . . . has much greater capacity today than it did then," he said.
Redone today, the stories in that 1983 broadcast "would be all more accessible, to use that word of the nineties," Jennings explained. "They wouldn't be as heavily written. We would strive to put more sound in them, we would strive to put more effect in them, because I think increasingly we are mindful of the variety of competitive universes in which we operate. Competition for the viewer's attention has become greater."
What does that mean in practical terms? He said the stories from
1983 "seemed longer than we would give them on the air today."
If they were redone now, "I think [the broadcast] would be
slightly edgier, slightly more staccato. It [the '83 show] seemed
to have a kind of potential to let the mind wander, which I think
we would avoid now."
Under some prodding, Jennings acknowledged that the subjects addressed
on his broadcast had changed too. Despite his own interest in
such stories, "we do not do a lot of 'process' pieces out
of Washington," stories explaining what the government is
up to. And "there's a lot of foreign news on that [1983]
broadcast that you would not see on a regular basis on an evening
newscast today."
How has the presence of ABC News overseas changed since Jennings made his own reputation as a foreign correspondent? "Much slimmer. Much slimmer."
Why the cutback? Jennings blamed money, technology, and "national confusion" about the importance of foreign news. And "our own uncertainty [at ABC] about who we are and our commitment in this new marketplace" was also a factor. The network's attitude toward spending money had changed profoundly, Jennings said. "When we send a reporter into the field today it has to be costed out before the reporter travels . . . . In other words, if we want to send a reporter to Libya, our accounting department wants to know in advance how much is it going to cost."
What was the purpose of the evening-news broadcast in 2000? "I think our mission . . . is to try to stay with the major national and international stories of the day which are relevant to and/or important to Americans. And on a more provincial basis, we are very conscious . . . [of] trying to put stories on the air which have some resonance in Oregon as well as in Massachusetts."
Definitions of news were changing, Jennings said. "There's much greater demand for personal news . . . about health and personal finance," for example. He said he was trying to emphasize technology news, and he was proud ABC has a religion correspondent. "We try to do something on business every day." Generally, he said, "we've tried to pick up on what the country's interested in at the moment and tried to accommodate it, if not follow it."
The ABC World News Tonight on the night of our conversation with Jennings, April 24, 2000, felt more like a traditional hard-news program than the other two, in part no doubt because of its timing. This was Jenning's first broadcast after the early Saturday morning raid by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to seize Elián González, the young Cuban, from his Miami relatives' home. The first seven minutes of the program were devoted to three items about the raid, all of them informative and aggressively reported. The business story of the day was about Microsoft — its stock fell on Wall Street as its troubles with the government continued. The program included one purely visual feature story: two minutes, forty seconds of beautiful pictures from space taken by the Hubble Space Telescope — no factual information, but remarkable photographs.
The longest item on the program, just over four minutes, was also its only foreign story, another ominous report on terrorists affiliated with Osama bin Laden. This was the regular feature called "A Closer Look," normally the longest segment of the broadcast.
Like the CBS report on the same subject, this one conveyed very little hard information and a lot of generalized anxiety. A correspondent reporting from highly photogenic mountainous regions on the Afghan-Pakistani border told viewers there were "more than a dozen training camps" in the area, "producing a new generation of Muslim fighters: thousands of young men learning to fight the enemies of Islam. Often that means America and its allies." The story included a brief interview with an unarmed "Taliban official" who denied the existence of these camps.
What were these "Muslim fighters" trying to accomplish? The correspondent, standing outside one of the training camps, answered that question this way: "On a wall surrounding the camp we noticed this graffiti: 'Yesterday we broke the Soviets. Tomorrow we break America.'"
This story had no "peg" — nothing had happened to make it particularly timely. Nor did it have many confirmed facts, or any new facts at all. Its appeal was its locale — remote and exotic to look at — and, evidently, the implicit threat against the United States it described. It was, obviously, a warning of things to come in September 2001.
In all, Jennings touched on seven events that had occurred that day. His program included seven distinct segments, plus four "reads." There was nineteen minutes for news, one minute and ten seconds for teases, and nine minutes and fifty seconds for commercials.
This wasn't a particularly heavy news day, but ABC did skip a
number of stories that could be found in the next day's Washington
Post and New York Times: a Supreme Court argument on whether California
could allow voters to participate in primary elections of parties
to which they did not belong; the first formal charges in a Los
Angeles police corruption scandal brought against three officers;
Kenneth Starr's successor, independent counsel Robert Ray, subpoenaing
White House e-mail; a pledge by four U.S. foundations of $100
million to support African universities; George W. Bush and Al
Gore both campaigning for president; Kofi Annan, secretary-general
of the United Nations, criticizing U.S. nuclear weapons policies
at a United Nations conference called to review the Non-Proliferation
Treaty; the General Accounting Office's release of a report concluding
that there was no factual support for dramatic accusations of
gross misbehavior by IRS agents made at heavily televised congressional
hearings two years earlier; Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
punishing two officials and changing security procedures after
the disappearance from the State Department of a laptop computer
containing sensitive intelligence information.
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