See How They Run

By Richard Zoglin

THREE BLIND MICE: HOW THE NETWORKS LOST THEIR WAY

by Ken Auletta; Random House; 656 pages; $25

It was a grim day for CBS chief executive Laurence Tisch. News writers were on strike against his network; employees were up in arms over another round of layoffs; criticism in the press was mounting. Now, on this March morning in 1987, Tisch opened his New York Times to see an op-ed piece signed by none other than Dan Rather, bitterly attacking the Tisch-instigated news cutbacks. The Washington Post offered yet another litany of complaints from news staffers about the cost cutting.

"Unbelievable!" Tisch moaned on reading one charge, tossing his newspaper against the flowers that adorned his private dining table. To reports that some CBS News stars had offered to take salary cuts in order to save jobs, Tisch scoffed, "These are the biggest bunch of liars I've ever seen in my life!" His son Jimmy came into the office to commiserate. "Calm down, Dad," he pleaded.

Ken Auletta, a resourceful and very fortunate reporter, was sitting at breakfast with Tisch that morning. In fact, Auletta seems to have been practically everywhere he wanted to be over the past six years. He began researching Three Blind Mice, his exhaustive behind-the-scenes look at the three broadcast networks, just as they were entering the most turbulent phase in their history. Cable and other competitors were gaining power; network audiences were shrinking; new corporate owners, with a bottom-line orientation, were taking control. Through it all, Auletta was the proverbial fly on the wall. He talked regularly with the corporate chiefs as well as with network programmers and news anchormen; sat in on sales meetings and affiliate conferences; examined the workings of the TV business from Madison Avenue to Universal City.

Name a well-publicized episode over the past six years, and Auletta supplies the kind of detail that sources offer only when they know their accounts will not blow up in their faces in the next day's papers. What led to NBC News president Larry Grossman's downfall? Auletta traces it partly to a disastrous dinner party that Grossman gave on the night of the sixth game of the Mets-Red Sox World Series. (General Electric chairman Jack Welch, a rabid Red Sox fan, wanted to watch the game.) Why did Dan Rather walk off the set in September 1987, leaving six minutes of dead airtime on the CBS Evening News? Auletta's second-by-second account is more sympathetic to Rather than many others. There are fresh nuggets as well. ABC anchorman Peter Jennings, before signing a new contract in late 1987, was weighing an offer from CBS to become Rather's co- anchor. NBC president Robert Wright once suggested that stars like Bill Cosby and Don Johnson be used as hosts of news documentaries.

Even more impressive are the intimate glimpses Auletta provides of the men at the very top and his nuanced picture of the different corporate cultures they fostered. Welch, the brusque, combative chairman of GE, which took over NBC in 1986, treated the network as another GE unit to be whipped into shape. (Why, Welch wondered, was there so much agonizing over layoffs at NBC when hundreds of people were getting axed at GE's turbines division? "You think they're happy?" he snapped.) Tisch, the Loews chairman who had never fired an employee before taking over CBS in 1986, is portrayed as a Wall Street trader with no strategic vision and few management skills. Tom Murphy, who engineered Capital Cities Communications' 1985 acquisition of ABC, is the hero of this tale by default. Though Cap Cities' no-frills style caused a rude culture shock at ABC, eventually Murphy proved to be the most humane and broadcast- ) savvy of the new network owners.

Yet each of the corporate top dogs had to go through the same learning curve. Contrary to what most people think, Auletta notes, a network is neither a giant production studio nor a grid of stations but simply "an office building, where executives package programs they do not own and sell them to advertisers and local stations they do not control." Trying to deal with these stations, advertisers and program producers (not to mention the ever nosy press) startled, annoyed and ultimately chastened the corporate newcomers.

Auletta's book achieved a certain infamy long before it hit the bookstores. Jacob Weisberg used it as Exhibit A in a much discussed New Republic piece about the alleged decline of editing standards in book publishing. To be sure, Auletta's 600-plus-page account could use trimming. But his writing is never less than serviceable, and usually quite lucid. A bigger problem lies in the subject itself. Each of the episodes Auletta recounts -- Tisch's fight to gain control of the CBS board, ABC News president Roone Arledge's battle to keep 20/20 on Thursdays at 10 p.m. -- was once a hot topic in media circles. Today they seem more like questions for a 1980s edition of Trivial Pursuit. In his zest for detail, Auletta trudges dutifully through events that are now just so much TV-industry ephemera.

Still, if he is occasionally too fascinated by the trees, Auletta never loses sight of the forest. On a shelf overflowing with behind-the-scenes tomes and tell-all memoirs, his is the network book to beat.