The Cavett Crusade

By their followings ye shall know the talk-show hosts. When CBS canceled Merv Griffin's nightly program last December, Merv's late-night fans seemed barely ruffled. When Westinghouse dropped David Frost in May the Frost constituency kept its cool. But when ABC announced in April that Dick Cavett would get the ax unless his ratings improved by July 28, Cavett's admirers raised a howl of protest that was immediate, loud and long. At stake, they charged with some justice, was the last haven of wit and urbanity in the wilderness of late-night network TV.

Early in the Cavett crusade, maverick FCC Commissioner Nicholas Johnson, a frequent guest on the show, telephoned Cavett from Washington to ask how he could help. Soon sponsors began to rally round. "The Cavett show is an outstanding buy that delivers a quality audience," wrote Hormel Marketing Director Thomas Purcell in a letter to ABC. "The general ratings really don't mean that much. What counts is the people the show is reaching."

Ralph Nader, another frequent guest, made Cavett one of his innumerable causes. "There are," said Nader, "a lot of people in this country who have a lot of valuable things to say for whom the Dick Cavett Show is a principal opportunity for expression." Meanwhile the ABC mailrooms have been deluged with 30,000 letters from viewers around the country. Last week one of ABC'S affiliates, WMAL-TV in Washington, ran an ad in the Washington Post urging viewers to write in giving their reasons why the Cavett show is "too important to be canceled."

In the face of all this, ABC in a sense remains less interested in the opinion of the many than of the few--the members of the 1,200 families that the A.C. Nielsen Co., the organization that charts TV ratings, has selected as a representative national sample. By Nielsen's rating, which is probably as accurate as any such poll, Cavett still runs a poor third to Johnny Carson on NBC and network movies on CBS, drawing 13% of the country's insomniac audience--or about 2,170,000 households--compared with 32% for Carson and 27% for the movies. But his audience has grown substantially since ABC'S April ultimatum. In a few cities, in fact, he seems to have done astonishingly well; in Washington, for example, his audience has almost doubled.

The general improvement is partly a result of better promotion by ABC, which, until April, was niggardly in buying newspaper ads and in plugging the show on its own air time. In addition, Cavett has worked to line up stronger guests--notably Jack Paar in two refreshing 90-minute appearances and Alfred Hitchcock in another--and he himself seems to have gained in confidence, becoming looser and brighter. Says Cavett: "There's a consciousness that every minute has to count and that every utterance is under scrutiny."

The scrutiny is particularly severe from managers of ABC's affiliate stations. In a recent series of regional meetings with network executives, more than half the managers advised ABC to drop the show.

What ABC and its affiliates seem to overlook is that not only Cavett and Nielsen but the whole ratings system is once again on trial. Cavett's literate charm could probably never match the broad appeal of Carson's accomplished vaudeville or woo away the diehard movie buffs. But should he have to? If he cannot, should the more than 3,200,-000 viewers who want his brand of intelligent alternative programming be summarily disfranchised?

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