There is a marvelous scene at the start of this book in which Lawrence Grossman, then the president of NBC News, hosts a dinner party for Jack Welch, the chairman of General Electric, NBC's corporate parent, and other company bigwigs. Grossman wants to talk about news, but Welch and NBC president Robert Wright keep sneaking upstairs to watch the sixth game of the 1986 World Series. There is so much sports banter that Grossman's wife is left feeling that her party, in Wright's words, had been "interrupted by people who are talking in Yugoslavian" -- a language, of course, that doesn't exist.

That is the theme that runs through this impressively researched volume -- the jarring clash of cultures between the driven humorless, penny-pinching men who have taken control of the three major television networks, and the crusading, irreverent, cost-be-damned journalists who regard their calling as a sacred priesthood.

Unfortunately, Ken Auletta rarely fleshes out this theme over the course of 656 pages. We hardly ever hear from anyone below the level of Brokaw, Rather, and Jennings. This is network life as viewed from the executive suite, the kind of inside, blow-by-blow account of corporate intrigue that Auletta mastered in Greed and Glory on Wall Street. There is meticulous detail on each board meeting, each management coup, each phone call about downsizing or programming or affiliate relations. Auletta has interviewed 350 people and been given "generous access," as he puts it, to the powers that be at CBS, NBC, and ABC. His brisk prose keeps things moving, but after a while the endless infighting among rich men (women barely have a walk-on role here) becomes wearying. He could just as well be writing about Coca-Cola or The Disney Company (both of which wanted to buy CBS). The reader is left with only a vague sense of what the new corporate regimes mean for the actual gathering and reporting of news.

Still, there are startling insights into the values of the corporate czars who now rule the networks. We learn that when Jack Welch exclaims, "This is the greatest day of my life!" it is because GE stock has just hit a new high. That Welch once asked why the Today show couldn't charge authors for book interviews. That Bob Wright wondered whether stars like Don Johnson of Miami Vice could host NBC news documentaries.

We learn that Larry Tisch, the Loews corporate chairman who took over CBS, scarcely watched television, like to sit at his desk checking stock prices on his Quotron machine and hired an accounting firm to tell him once a week where more CBS employees could be cut. That one of Tisch's minions boasted of raising the price at the office Tampax dispenser from a nickel to a quarter. That Tom Murphy and Daniel Burke, the top executives of Capital Cities, which swallowed ABC, brought drug-sniffing dogs onto the premises.

"Cap Cities inspired paranoia. Suddenly ABC felt like a conquered nation," Auletta writes. One ABC executive refers to the network as "a distribution system for Procter & Gamble and other advertisers."

Auletta is equally good at illuminating the "limousine mentality" that reigned at the networks through the early 1980s, when overpaid stars criss-crossed the globe with little thought for who was paying the bills. A consulting firm brought in by NBC found that half the storied assigned by NBC Nightly News in one two-month period never aired, even though the average correspondent was, in 1986, being paid $ 174,000.

But the endless wailing about waste by men who worship at the altar of stockholder value -- and Auletta gives them plenty of kvetching room here -- misses something about journalism that at least aspires to a higher calling, that cannot be measured as if its practitioners were cranking out engines for GE's turbines division.

What does it mean that the networks are closing bureaus around the world? That softer, fuzzier features are replacing the hard-edged stories of the past? That the Big Three now aspire to become lower-cost operations like CNN? These are questions that get lost amid the subplots about whether Larry Tisch has the votes to dump Tom Wyman at CBS or about Wright's maneuvering to replace Grossman with Michael Gartner at NBC (and toying a year later with the idea of firing Gartner).

Once every few chapters we hear from people like producer Christopher Isham: "When I first got ABC, if you had a story, you were told to do it. Now for an investigative story you have to go through enormous hoops with the accountants. . . . The accountants have more influence on how we cover the news. They ask whether it's cost effective. There are whole parts of the world we don't cover because it's not cost effective."

But no sooner does Auletta build up a head of steam than he's off describing how networks sell advertising, or how they deal with affiliates, or how Brandon Tartikoff schedules prime-time shows by moving little magnetized cards around on a metal board. It's probably unfair to criticize an author for being too ambitious, but at times Three Blind Mice bites off more than even the most ardent reader may want to chew.

Tartikoff, the boy wonder who has since departed for Paramount Pictures, provides some of the most colorful scenes as he struggles to pick prime-time winners for NBC. Much of this is entertaining, as when producer Aaron Spelling makes the following pitch:

"Student nurses in Dallas in the summer and the air conditioning doesn't work so they sweat a lot!" Spelling says.

"It's a 40 share! Let's do it!" exclaims Tartikoff. This elevated concept become The Nightingale, a program so embarrassingly bad that it lasts only a few weeks.

News is treated with roughly the same respect. ABC bumps 20/20 for The Dolly Parton Show (which bombs), and moves up World News Tonight half an hour to make room for Jeopardy! (which ends up helping Peter Jennings).

Other anecdotes make for disturbing reading. Tisch, a staunch supporter of Israel, was so enraged by a 60 Minutes report on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that he refused to talk to Mike Wallace, and, at a dinner party, is reported to have said that television cameras should be banned from the occupied West Bank because they incited Palestinian riots and cast Israel policies in a bad light. The danger is not so much that Tisch would meddle directly with Middle East coverage but that his subordinates might censor themselves, as when Today killed a report critical of the bolt that GE used in some engines (NBC revived the story after the incident was publicized).

While there is much recreated dialogue here -- part of the current novelistic fashion in which everyone reconstructs exactly what they said at a dinner party five years ago -- Auletta deserves a truth-in-packaging award for putting some of the quotes in italics when he's not sure of the exact wording. And he's such a scrupulous reporter that he shares conflicting versions with the reader, rather than posing as omniscient. When Tisch, in the process of taking over CBS, tries to force board chairman Wyman's resignation, he says he told him: "Tom, if you ever left CBS I'm sure the board would be generous." But Wyman remembers it as: "Financially, I don't have to tell you, Tom, if ever you left CBS you wouldn't have to work another day in your life."

The larger lesson in this drama is that the networks are like American auto manufacturers of the 1970s, happily churning out schlock products while cable, syndicated shows, VCRs, and other forms of entertainment steadily erode their market share. The great broadcasters of the past made their fortunes by investing in what they thought the public wanted: a Larry Tisch or Jack Welch, by their own account, thinks first of holding down costs. Ken Auletta has painted a vivid portrait of these money-minded men and their bruising management style, but those interested in the future of television news will wish that he had descended from the executive penthouse and spent a bit more time in the journalistic trenches.

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