Telling the News vs. Zapping the Cornea

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch

In the fickle world of television, where most programs have precariously short lives, the long-running network news shows have proudly been the most resistant to change. But they're changing now, as ABC's World News Tonight -- long a poor third -- prepares to overtake the NBC Nightly News, while CBS's Evening News continues its reign as No. 1.

The changes are not the kind that would satisfy James David Barber, the Duke University political scientist who thinks that network news is "too intellectual, too balanced. It passes right over the heads of the great 'lower' half of the American electorate who need it most." In the September Washington Monthly, he argues that the Cronkites and Chancellors should stop modeling themselves on the New York Times, stop "gearing the medium to the needs and knowledge of the better informed" and should go after "the great unwashed." Barber is disturbed by those statistics showing that more people get their news from television than from newspapers and magazines but that about half of all viewers say they almost never watch the evening network news.

Barber wants the network anchor man's words made simpler, the brief snippets of news filled out with more background. Well, may be. As Sol Hurok used to say, if people don't want to come, nothing will stop them. Mark R. Levy, a New York sociologist, made a two-year study of why people watch the news and concluded that "being informed is only a secondary motive for most viewers. Most people watch TV news to be amused and diverted, or to make sure that their homes and families are safe and secure."

The idea that news can be entertaining has surely occurred to Roone Arledge. Two years ago, in safari-jacketed splendor, Arledge emerged from a golden career as head of ABC Sports to take over ABC News as well. A collective shudder passed down through rows of the three-buttoned news executives. Arledge was celebrated for zippy sports coverage, instant replays, constant chatter (including the grating homilies of Howard Cosell) and ceaseless hype. Was he going to bring the same show-biz techniques to the serious business of news broadcasting? The man most worried was CBS News President Richard S. Salant, a dedicated keeper of the flame of news integrity against not only the advertising side, but also the entertainment side of TV.

Salant presided over a staff that backs up Walter Cronkite with the best newsgathering operation in the business.

Salant left CBS this year upon reaching its mandatory retirement age of 65, but NBC quickly hired him as vice chair man for news. A lawyer by trade, he is breezy, tough and smart -- and responsible. He was disturbed when ABC made Barbara Walters an anchorwoman; he was even more offended when Arledge began hyping up ABC News -- a process that reached a nadir with the tabloid-style coverage of the "Son of Sam" murder case in 1977. Unable to match Cronkite's authority and popularity, Arledge countered with the gimmickry of three anchormen, "tossing" the news from Washington to London to Chicago.

In the two years since, Arledge and Salant have come to exemplify the two poles of what network news programs want to do most: excite or inform. ABC's World News To night has got consistently sharper. Arledge demands and gets inventive technology. ABC, once el cheapo of the networks (it used to be said that ABC was the last to arrive at the scene and the first to leave), now spends good money to get good people. Arledge hired Richard Wald (once head of NBC News) to run his news operation, a job that Wald defines as "calming the process down." Salant concedes that ABC is "a good news organization now," though he still ridicules those three scattered anchormen: "Having somebody in London, 3,000 miles less far from a story, is hardly having him at the scene."

In his new NBC job, Salant labors to improve that troubled network's Chancellor-Brinkley Nightly News. This has put him in a two-way fight with ABC's Arledge: several times this summer ABC News topped NBC in the ratings, a trend that will take time to reverse. Salant sounds like a football coach after a bad loss: "NBC has got to get its pride back. I can't stand this 'you win some, you lose some' attitude." Salant has hired Bill Small, a top CBS executive, to shake up NBC News. "They say morale's bad, wondering what kind of changes are coming here," says Salant. "They ought to be worried." But Salant still refuses to jazz up the news. Just before he arrived at NBC the network made an admirably Salantesque gesture: it abolished the bouncy Henry Mancini theme that introduced Chancellor-Brinkley, substituting a newsy sounding melange of electronic music. The new theme is properly unobtrusive, though not nearly so classy as that grand old snippet of Beethoven's Ninth used in the 1960s. Earlier this month he warned his colleagues:

"We must not overemphasize pictures or fear words."

The scene is different at the seven-story ABC News center on Manhattan's West Side, which, in the hours before World News Tonight hits the air, becomes a busy electronic workshop. In little warrens crowded with equipment, teams of directors and technicians labor to give visual excitement to the taped voices of ABC correspondents, patching quick-shifting background scenes, stunting with double dissolves and freeze shots to fill the exact 47 or 73 seconds allotted a story by the producer. Then comes a final mixing of words and pictures, with a Chiron machine imposing labels or texts in front of the pictures, and a computer called the Quantel--a marvelous machine that Roone Arledge first used for some of his tricky sports effects--sucking in, widening out or moving around pictures on the screen. "Zapping the cornea," ABC's style has been called. (CBS and NBC have the gadgets too, but don't let them take over.) ABC's impressive technological wizardry, alas, is not matched by a comparable effort to assess the content of the day's news or reflect upon it, though World News Tonight is a lively illustrated headline service. But the watcher may find it a little harder to remember what news he has just seen.

Not that the more conventional CBS and NBC coverage is all that free of theater. Why should correspondents have to place themselves outside the White House or the Capitol in the sun or the wind to speak their piece when it would be easier and cheaper to get into a cab and broadcast right from the studio? At least all three network news shows are no longer lookalikes. One of them overworks the eye in the interest of excitement. The other two spend vast sums photographing events but don't let pictures distract from the serious business of dispensing information. Viewers who choose the former deserve what they get.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.