September/October 2000 | Contents

SHILLING FOR PRIME TIME:
Can CBS News Survive Survivor?

BY LAWRENCE K. GROSSMAN

Television and television news have entered a terminal state and reached their "final period of decadence," a former NBC News president, Reuven Frank, wrote in the May/June issue of The New Leader. There's plenty of evidence lately to suggest he may be right, at least about network news. On CBS News's Early Show this summer, I saw Bryant Gumbel give the bum's rush to a major story, the Supreme Court's controversial decision permitting the Boy Scouts to exclude gays, and then spend what seemed to be an eternity chatting with the sex specialist Dr. Ruth Westheimer about whether two island castaways on CBS's hit show, Survivor, had had sex with each other. It was a trivial and embarrassing discussion for an accomplished and intelligent news anchor to be stuck in.

There seems to be no limit to what CBS News will do to shill for the network's prime time "reality" entertainment shows in the vain hope that their popularity will rub off on its offerings. The Early Show's senior executive producer, Steve Friedman, boasted to The New York Times's Bill Carter, "We'll have four of five days when we're dealing with either Survivor or Big Brother . . . . When you get a show that everyone's talking about, that's nirvana. We're in television nirvana right now."

CBS News's 48 Hours also got into the TV-nirvana act, devoting a whole hour to the Survivor promotion phenomenon. Fittingly, Dan Rather opened the July 5 broadcast with the query, "Is there anything people wouldn't do for fame?" -- the appropriate question for CBS News management itself.

To capitalize on Big Brother, which CBS thought would be a megahit but wasn't, CBS newscaster Julie Chen was chosen as the voice of the prime time program. She also conducted the first interviews on The Early Show with the participants the morning after Big Brother ran. And she hosted a weekly prime time interview show promoting the series. Julie Chen's reputation as a serious CBS News presenter will take a long time to recover. So will the once proud reputation of CBS News itself.

There's nothing new about network morning news shows touting prime time entertainment fare. But nothing in memory matched CBS News's promotional blitzkrieg. Neither Friedman nor CBS News's president, Andrew Heyward, seemed at all embarrassed by the extent to which they rode on the entertainment division's coattails. With The Early Show in ratings trouble, Heyward called the effort "an experiment well worth taking on."

The decadence quotient in TV news keeps growing, and not only at CBS. This summer, viewers of ABC News's Good Morning America got a good whiff of that news division's current priorities when the show abruptly cut out of an interview with presidential candidate Al Gore to move on to a story on eyeliners and eyebrow treatments. GMA assured viewers, who may have been puzzled by its ham-handed treatment of the vice president, that Gore could be seen elsewhere on TV at other times. Earlier, ABC News caught flak for assigning the actor Leonardo DiCaprio to interview President Clinton for its prime time news hour on Earth Day. Needless to say, ABC's regular White House correspondents had choice words to say about that editorial casting.

Perhaps on the theory that if actor DiCaprio can play environmental correspondent on a prime time newscast it's okay for TV journalists to try acting in the movies, a 60 Minutes correspondent, Steve Kroft, showed up in Woody Allen's frothy feature, Small Time Crooks, playing (what else?) a TV newsman. Members of Washington's hard-bitten press corps, also infected by the show-biz bug, were cast as journalists for the movie version of Jim Lehrer's novel about a scandal-plagued presidential race. Lehrer's work of fiction, The Last Debate, portrays reporters as piranhas, which didn't for a moment deter Al Hunt, Paul Gigot, Eleanor Clift, Robert Novak, Fred Barnes, Mark Shields, E.J. Dionne, and others from taking time off from their work in the news capital of the world to moonlight as actors. Fortunately, in the movie they play only themselves. Lehrer, it should be noted, declined the opportunity, thereby preserving his dignity and journalistic reputation. "The only thing I know about movies is how to turn them on in the VCR," he told The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz.

Reuven Frank concluded his essay on TV's "final hours" with the prediction that the logical and perhaps climactic next step to ratchet up ratings of the networks' "reality" shows will be to televise executions, live if possible, in prime time. Such a series would be designed to capitalize on "the irrefutable audience appeal of seeing someone die." Ghoulish as it seems, that's not such a farfetched idea. Years ago, the San Francisco public television station KQED, arguing the public's right to know, sued for the right to televise an execution. The station eventually dropped the effort, never saying whether it had intended to schedule an execution during pledge week.

Statistics suggesting that TV news as we know it may be coming to an end were released recently by the Pew Research Center. Its latest biennial survey of the national news audience found that increasing numbers of people are turning away from TV news in favor of Internet news. Only 55 percent reported having watched news or a news program on TV "yesterday," down from a high of 74 percent in 1994. Since May 1993, the nightly network news audience has been cut in half, which helps explain the sense of desperation (and decadence) that afflicts network news today. Worse, Pew found that growing numbers of Americans are losing the news habit altogether, while those who watch TV newscasts increasingly do so with remote control in hand, ready to zap stories they are not interested in.

Is there any sign of hope? Well, in Chicago, at one time a forerunner of television programming trends, the local CBS-owned station decided to head in exactly the opposite direction from its CBS News parent. To solve its local 10 p.m. news ratings problem, WBBM cut out all of the usual local gimmicks and glitter. Gone are the loopy anchor chatter, weatherman banter, sports hype, and tabloid investigative reports. Led by a local news pro, Carol Marin, WBBM is going back to basic, solid, sound news reporting. Marin, the heroic figure who quit Chicago's WMAQ in disgust when the NBC-owned station signed the notorious talk show host Jerry Springer as a commentator, explained WBBM's new approach to the news: "I think we had lost our way, and we disappointed a lot of people who counted on us. We stopped telling you things that were particularly important and started just telling you anything that we thought maybe offered you a little bit of eye candy." Now, WBBM is offering Chicago the news straight and serious. Let's hope it works. The good news is that somebody is trying it. The bad news is that what WBBM is doing is considered to be such a daring and radical departure from the norm.

Lawrence K. Grossman, a former president of NBC News and PBS, is a regular columnist for CJR.