How Low Can TV News Go?

 Most weekdays, the lobby of Chicago's elegantly muscular NBC Tower fills with college kids and curious housewives waiting in line to take part in a ritual of public titillation and opprobrium. There, in studios they rent from WMAQ-TV, Jerry Springer and Jenny Jones tape two of the nation's least high-minded syndicated talk shows, presiding over such appetizing fare as "I Strip with My Family" and "I'm 12 and I Take Care of My 680-Pound Mom." The people who file inside through the metal detector play their parts to perfection: taking behavioral cues from the smirking hosts and harried producers, they applaud in affirmation of conventional morality and hiss at philanderers and frauds.

 The studios of the NBC-owned station also, of course, play host to six live local news programs each weekday, and the general idea among the newsroom's squeezed editorial staff has been to produce broadcasts that offer, as much as possible, more thoughtful news amid the paper-thin health reports and the live shots from murder scenes and snow-dusted side streets.

 As May and another quarterly ratings sweeps period approached, the station's general manager tossed together the two worlds under his purview - the budget-battered newscasts and the festivals of dysfunction his tenants run. He decided to court controversy and attention by bringing Jerry Springer onto the news set to deliver nightly commentaries about local issues on WMAQ's number-two-rated 10 p.m. news program.

 The result was a clash of symbols that quickly escaped the station's control. It resonated among a Chicago audience that appeared surprisingly eager to register a vote for responsible news programs. It also drew the attention of a national media pack that could not resist the high-profile embodiment of some meaty broadcasting issues.

 There was the cheapening of news generally, and television news in particular. There was the place of the tabloid talk-show host in American life. There was even a convincing villain in the person of Joel Cheatwood, WMAQ's vice president of news since February, who had become a news-business star by punching up crime, sex, and glitz on local broadcasts in Miami and Boston.

 When the noise stopped, the station's respected anchor pair of Carol Marin and Ron Magers had quit on principle, the ratings for WMAQ's newscast had slipped significantly, the bright careers of its two top managers were tainted, and, with help from a crisis-management team brought in to aid Cheatwood and Lyle Banks, WMAQ's president and general manager, the station had put a vigorous damage-control plan into effect.

 Springer, meanwhile, had resigned in haste and - after the obligatory round of appearances on talk programs more sober than his own - retreated back to his haven. He was apparently stunned to learn that a hefty portion of the general public viewed him with the same esteem that his audiences demonstrate for ne'er-do-well guests.

 The entire saga seemed to play out with what might be called a journalism-school version of the simple morality of a Jerry Springer show. A station that tried a cheap stunt to draw viewers during sweeps got a comeuppance. A news anchor with a record of fighting against her medium's steady debasement received an outpouring of public support. A management team that had begun the sweeps period dropping a hand grenade onto its news set ended it taking out full-page newspaper ads pledging allegiance to traditional journalistic values.

 It looked like a lesson, but it also looked like one that contradicted years of doomsaying about viewers and their readiness to be manipulated. Was the WMAQ brouhaha something that could happen only in Chicago, where local news outlets clung to their long tradition of committing journalism even as most other cities' newscasts were going show-biz? Or was it a sign of a more general dissatisfaction among news audiences?

 "Maybe I'm naive because I'm now in the reform business," said Tom Rosenstiel, the former Los Angeles Times media critic who heads the new Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism. "But it shows that audiences do care, and they do get it. Marin clearly helped undo Springer by raising people's awareness to the whole thing and what the stakes were. She made it emblematic and people voted with their feet. It's an important election."

 "I hate it when I'm on the side of the moralists," said John Callaway, host of a public-affairs show on the city's main PBS affiliate and one of the most astute observers of the Chicago broadcast scene. But, he said, he could find no other turf to occupy.

 "I can certainly, for better or worse, respect a management team saying, 'Hey, look, it's our toy shop now. Play ball with us.' But anybody walking into that shop ought to have said, 'Oh my God, I've got Ron Magers, probably the best local anchor in America. And I've got Carol Marin, probably the super-sourced reporter. Now I can go to work on the other stuff,'" said Callaway, founding director of the William Benton Fellowships in Broadcast Journalism at the University of Chicago.

 "I don't get it. I just don't get it."

 In the current national climate of local television news, what happened at WMAQ was perhaps inevitable. Even the network newscasts, notably NBC's, are drawing fire for veering toward the fluffy. To bemoan the work done on their local counterparts is like finally getting upset about the Challenger disaster. As far back as 1977, in his book The Newscasters, Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago television critic Ron Powers wrote, "TV journalism in this country - local TV journalism, in particular - is drifting into the sphere of entertainment."

 Two decades later - with a few celebrated exceptions - the drift is nearly complete, and it takes something as shocking as Jerry Springer on the nighttime news to wake people from their mute acceptance of that fact.

 At about the time the Springer situation was beginning its public life in Chicago, a Denver watchdog group, Rocky Mountain Media Watch, completed its third comprehensive survey of one hundred local newscasts across the nation. Taken on the last day of the February sweeps, the snapshot showed that fifty-nine of the lead stories were about crime and another thirteen were about disasters. Some 43 percent of all the news airtime - factoring out sports and weather - was devoted to crime, disaster, war, or terrorism. Among the nineteen topics given less than 2.5 percent each of the total news time: education, arts, science, children, poverty, civil rights - the kinds of things that mean more to a community's long-term health than one night's killing or one day's mudslide.

 Fifteen of the one hundred newscasts had more commercials than they had news, in terms of airtime," said Paul Klite, the group's executive director. "We're being manipulated, and the ideal of an informed public is being sacrificed."
 The culprits are well known by now: budget choppers, ratings pressure, carpetbagging journalists and managers, a public that lacks time to seek more thorough sources of information, and an overreliance by stations on outside consultants and their market research.
 Chicago had maintained its reputation as the exception to the nationwide homogenization, corporatization, and simplification of the television news product, probably for longer than it deserved. But when WMAQ hired "the godfather of 'all crime, all the time,'" in Rosenstiel's phrase, that reputation seemed sullied for good.

 Cheatwood had first strutted his stuff as news director of WSVN in Miami. When the station lost its NBC affiliation in 1989, it still had a network-quality news department. Cheatwood's solution to the programming void was to throw up as much news as the station could produce, and to throw it up fast and alluring. Attractive, young female anchors delivered it, music and graphics punched it up, and crime was its bread and butter. In 1993, when Cheatwood also took on a corporate sibling, WHDH in Boston, he offered viewers a more muted - but by Boston standards still shocking - version of his Miami Vice style.

 And the tactics seemed to work. WSVN, which signed on with Fox, climbed from third to second in the ratings, and the 11 p.m. newscast at WHDH, which switched affiliations to the ratings leader NBC, rose from third to first place.

 Well before Cheatwood's arrival from Boston, some of Chicago's newscasts had already begun to tiptoe down the national path toward fluff. But what made the Springer imbroglio truly surprising was that a network-owned station had already lived through a disastrous experiment with sensationalism.
 In 1991, WBBM, the CBS-owned station with the proudest journalism heritage among the network trio, looked at its flagging ratings and decided to take a stab at a tabloid newscast. It modeled itself closely on Cheatwood's Miami efforts and hired many people from WSVN. In came the flashy graphics, the shortened stories, the fascination with unremarkable murders, the signature growling voice that staffers called "the scary announcer," and, especially, the relentless promotional assault.

 "The weakest part of the whole thing was the promotion," said Bill Kurtis, the longtime WBBM newsman who left in November to focus on his documentary programs for PBS and cable. "We'd actually try and trick viewers with some cute or clever phrase to get them to watch, and then not pay off. The viewer felt, 'I've been had.'"

 Although the newscast tied for first in the February 1993 sweeps period, the viewers who came to sample this shocking new style failed to stick around. Ratings sagged, and the station pulled back from the lurid edge. When the alienated former viewers did not return, WBBM fell into the distant third-place hole it has occupied ever since.

 Second-ranked WMAQ, meanwhile, was trying to overtake the ratings leader, ABC's WLS-TV, especially at 10 p.m., the primary news battleground and a main economic engine for the stations. WLS's newscast was visually stodgy and its anchors enjoyed nothing more than a good chuckle on air, but it also delivered a fairly solid, meat-and-potatoes brand of news. Given the cyclical nature of viewer preferences, the ABC station had a remarkable streak going: the news operation had been in first place in all time periods since 1986.

 At the NBC station, the lead anchor team of Marin and Magers had been together since 1985, and their no-nonsense style made them especially popular among more educated viewers. Marin was a reporter as well as an anchor, winning national and regional Emmys and often scooping the papers on such news as impending indictments for another batch of city aldermen. Magers, while ever awake to irony, also radiated respect for the role of conveying information. They weren't the anchors you'd find in a promotional spot trimming a Christmas tree with the sports and weather guys.

 Even though it rated second, Chicago news insiders say WMAQ was probably making nearly as much money on news as WLS, because advertisers look first at who is watching. WMAQ's demographics were strong, essentially tied with WLS in key areas such as the 18-to-49 and 25-to-54-year-old population.

 The station certainly was making hefty profits, said Danice Kern, who quit as WMAQ's acting news director in January after fifteen years there. A station owned and operated by one of the Big Three networks in a city the size of Chicago could well earn profit margins in the vicinity of 50 percent, she said. But at the same time, Kern noted, "stories were being killed on the basis of a photographer's overtime. There was no reinvestment in the product."

 But in the eyes of Lyle Banks, now forty-one, the new station head brought on in the spring of 1995 from the network's affiliate in the Norfolk, Virginia, area, the station was underperforming. NBC's prime-time fare was gaining a bigger chunk of the audience (the network would rise to number one in the ratings for the next two seasons), and WMAQ should be able to take advantage of that dedicated viewership to climb past WLS.

 Yet Banks's new ideas rubbed WMAQ staffers the wrong way long before he hired Jerry Springer. He brought in as vice president of news Mark Antonitis, who had been with the consulting industry's best-known firm, Frank N. Magid Associates. Carol Marin publicly expressed her disappointment with the choice of someone from a profession more tuned to market research than news values.

 Banks upped the story count, from thirteen items in a half-hour broadcast, he calculated, to twenty or twenty-five. Susan Kennedy, a newswriter who lost her job in a recent cutback, said the increase meant the standard voice-over story dropped from thirty seconds to fifteen, roughly three written sentences: "'The President was in Bosnia today. He met with this person. And now he's going to Japan,'" she said. "Is that worth it? I don't think it is."
 Banks initiated a station slogan, "Committed to Chicago," an umbrella label that included an aggressive series of community-outreach projects that he also pitched to advertisers as a way to partner with the station's news operation.

 In a tape made last year and targeted to advertisers, Banks talks about the civic value of WMAQ projects, including a coat drive for the needy and a homework help hotline, and says he seeks to "enlist a few civic-minded companies and combine our resources for positive change." For a co-sponsor of a local celebrity golf tournament, he says, "on-air drawings [of contest winners] . . . can feature a c.e.o. or other members of your corporation."

 Carol Marin tried to fight these muddied lines. In the fall of 1995, she refused to read a couple of news items she saw as advertiser-driven - telling viewers at the end of a fire-safety report, for instance, that they could pick up free fire-safety brochures at specific area stores that had sponsored the report, or noting that local hospitals and drug stores were sponsoring a screening project for thyroid disease. Banks suspended her from the 6 p.m. broadcast for three nights.

 "We can do a million stories on fire prevention without joining with companies that sell smoke detectors," Marin said. "When you start joining with advertisers to provide information it is an infomercial. That's a more serious and more insidious problem than any Jerry Springer appearance. The so-called community projects were in my judgment only cynically disguised commercial ventures."

 The actual events that turned the station's news operation into news unfolded rapidly. In early February, Cheatwood came on board. "That's when I saw Carol's eyes glaze over, like she was thinking: 'Uh-oh,'" said one newsroom insider. "'These clowns are serious about really making this difficult.'"

 Even before Cheatwood started, the Chicago Sun-Times reported a rumor that the station was considering a news role for Springer, who is fifty-three. It wasn't as outlandish as it immediately seemed: from 1977 to 1981 Springer had been mayor of Cincinnati and then had spent a decade there as a news anchor and news commentator, for which he won seven regional Emmy awards.

 Both Magers and Marin say they went to Banks immediately to protest the idea. They argued that whatever credibility Springer may once have had was long since sacrificed to his show, which not only exults in parading tawdry misbehaviors but also has been accused of failing to meet basic journalistic standards. A number of guests have charged producers lied to get them to appear or knowingly bought into the guests' own hoaxes, charges the show denies.

 "Lyle now says Jerry Springer was a mistake," Magers said. "Jerry Springer wasn't a mistake. It was something he wanted to do. The first thing he told me about Jerry Springer was, 'This will get us a national splash.' And I said, 'It will be for all the wrong reasons, and we will all be stained by it.' And he was laughing. Lyle was laughing at me, saying 'Hey, man, this'll be great.'"

 Marin, too, said Springer was the last straw. Her lawyer went to management in March to try to extricate her from her contract. For Banks and Cheatwood, the change was probably not unwelcome. It wasn't just Marin's challenges to Banks's community projects that rankled. She was also earning a reported $1 million a year, she enjoyed strong loyalty among her coworkers and freedom to pursue her own reporting agenda, and she was a forty-eight-year-old woman in a business where those are rare.

 But on April 25, she said, the station exercised an option in her contract that would keep her on through the end of the year.

 Two days earlier, management had publicly dropped the Springer bombshell: he would do brief news commentaries on the 10 p.m. newscast from May 5 through the end of the month. When Marin publicly labeled that a slap in the face to staffers and viewers, Banks responded, "I don't really see the big deal. It's not like Jerry is hired to be the new manager."
 Banks later would explain the move as an attempt to bring the proud tradition of commentary back to the newscast - in a manner that would draw attention to the role. His regret, he said once the damage-control hoses were out, was that Springer's appearance allowed people to think the newscast was going tabloid.

 Springer fueled the uproar with attacks on the very idea of a newscast. He told one reporter that news anchoring was only reading from a TelePrompTer, another that a newscast was traffic, weather, and "who got shot the night before."

 After Springer's hiring was announced, Magers, fifty-two, went to management, too, and asked to be let out of his contract. Insiders say the station was less disposed to let him go: the May-December romance, with older male and younger female, is the model for anchor desk partnerships nationwide, and Magers's was the kind of presence that could lend continuity as Cheatwood's most visible changes in the newscast, scheduled to start in mid-June, were launched.

 After it had all gone wrong, WMAQ would contend that Marin's departure had been unfairly linked to Springer's arrival. But the station, despite the late-April contractual move to keep her on, decided to free Marin to resign less than a week later, on May 1, the Thursday before Springer was to start. It was a move widely interpreted as an attempt to maximize publicity.
 Her resignation caused even more shockwaves than had the news of Springer's hiring. Both Chicago dailies played it on page one.

 "What made this a really big story," said Tom Rosenstiel, the journalism think-tank head, "was not hiring Jerry Springer, but Carol Marin quitting. The news here, at least in part, was somebody in local TV getting up and saying, 'I want to disassociate myself from this.'"

 "Carol was responsible for articulating the issue and framing it," said Danice Kern, the former acting news director at WMAQ. "What might those front pages have read? They might have said, 'Marin quits in contractual dispute' . . . . Carol made it very clear that her departure was linked to Jerry Springer, but it went far deeper than that. Jerry Springer was the symptom, she said, and she said it consistently and clearly."

 The day Marin's resignation hit the papers, switchboard lines at NBC Tower were so jammed that newsroom staffers had to conduct their business by cellular phone. By the time Springer did his first commentary, public opinion was already running against him. A popular local morning-radio shock jock aggressively took his side, and some Chicagoans argued that Springer at least deserved a hearing, but few were ready to speak in favor of the idea.

 The seven days in May between Marin's resignation and Springer's were the saga's most bizarre stretch: Springer's tenure on WMAQ news would consist of two nights of commentary and then two long news stories about Springer and his commentaries.

 A long introduction on the first day, May 5, by thirty-four-year-old Allison Rosati, who would become Marin's replacement, almost apologized for the feature before it started. She explained, for the first time, that Springer was only the inaugurator of a regular commentary slot. Ron Magers neither introduced Springer nor appeared in the same camera shot with him; sources say the anchor had by then negotiated a contract exit whose terms included keeping him apart from the talk-show host until he left the station in the summer.

 In so heated an atmosphere Springer might have won points for himself by doing the kind of thoughtful piece that had led John Kiesewetter, the Cincinnati Enquirer's TV critic, to lament the loss of his "eloquent," liberal-minded on-air essays when he departed from the newsroom there.

 He didn't. In his maiden commentary, the embattled Springer invoked the Holocaust to criticize the popular Carol Marin. During his term as mayor of Cincinnati, he said, he had had to decide whether to give a parade permit to a group of neo-Nazis. He asked his parents, who had lost family members in the Holocaust, whether he should allow the march. Yes, said his parents; that is what America is about. But now, said Springer, "the anchor [who] quit" - he didn't have to mention Marin by name - was saying no, trying to shut him up and deny him his First Amendment rights. He called her "elitist" and a "Walter Cronkite wannabe." His only defense of his talk show was that it was "admittedly wild and crazy."

 The phones lit up. Before and after the segment, the station invited viewer response. One early snapshot of public reaction had more than 1,300 calls pro-Marin and fewer than 70 pro-Springer. Thousands more calls came in and there were no late-reporting precincts for Springer. Ratings, too, were surprisingly weak: despite the extraordinary publicity, the newscast failed to beat WLS, although it had done so the previous Monday.

 The next day, Springer tried a tamer message, a muddled homily about why America and its freedoms make it difficult for churches to enforce doctrine. It was pegged to the installation of the city's new Catholic archbishop the next day, but people weren't listening. The ratings were down more than 30 percent compared with the previous Tuesday.

 On Wednesday, TheCincinnati Post ran a story headlined today's springer: talk show hosts who fib. The paper reported that during his first commentary Springer had exaggerated his role in granting the permit to the neo-Nazis. Cincinnati's mayor was largely a figurehead, the Post story said, and parade permits were someone else's responsibility.

 In a statement and interviews Wednesday, Springer responded that he had offered the essential truth: he had taken part in meetings with the relevant officials about whether to grant the permit, and he had been prepared to resign if his parents said no to the march.

 That night, in lieu of a Springer commentary, WMAQ offered a report on the Post's allegations, but ended with a quote from Banks accepting Springer's explanation and announcing that the commentator would be back on Thursday to talk about Dennis Rodman of the Chicago Bulls. What started as the right news impulse - to cover the controversy - declined into a promo, a desperate attempt to salvage a disaster by invoking Chicago's most powerful viewer magnet.

 Chicago would never learn what Springer thought of Rodman. Sometime after the news Wednesday - which saw another week-to-week viewership drop of more than 30 percent - Springer broached the topic of his resignation and Banks and Cheatwood accepted. But Springer was still destined to appear one more time.
 In one of the station's longest single reports in memory - and certainly its most surreal - it spent six-plus minutes, roughly one-quarter of Thursday's 10 p.m. newscast, covering the news of Springer's resignation. Banks, interviewed by one of his reporters, acknowledged he would not hire Springer again, though he seemed bothered as much by the harm that had been done to the talk-show host as to his station. The following week saw a visit from a damage-control team from New York, including John Rohrbeck, the president of NBC television stations, who said he was there to support his managers.

 Their plan included announcing that four station veterans would be members of the new anchor teams for the 10 p.m. and early-evening newscasts; buying full-page ads in local newspapers featuring the new team and pledging "to provide you with the fairest, most accurate and balanced news coverage possible"; and releasing Magers from his contract earlier than planned.
 A statement to the media stressed the station's commitment to solid journalism, while also mentioning, in a quote attributed to Cheatwood, that "we're the only Chicago news organization with two helicopters used exclusively for breaking news and traffic."

 Magers's final day would be May 21, the final day of the sweeps ratings period. The timing was not coincidental: WMAQ's highest-rated 10 p.m. newscast of the period had come the night Marin delivered her on-air farewell to viewers. With virtually no advance publicity - the resignation had come in the afternoon - that program drew some 27 percent of all TV-owning households in the area, a number 50 percent better than the previous Thursday.

 At the end of the May sweeps, the period that is crucial to determining advertising rates through November, the losses for WMAQ were substantial. The NBC station remained in second place among local 10 p.m. newscasts, but its average viewership had dropped some 14 percent after Marin's departure. And WLS, the station WMAQ is bent on besting for first place, ended the period by bragging it had won the largest margin of victory at 10 p.m. in a May sweeps since 1978.

 Whether such trends will continue or the station will recover is anyone's guess. Cheatwood had not exhausted his bag of tricks; his redesign of the news set and graphics was to make its debut this summer, along with a new label for the station's news: "NewsChannel 5."

 But if Marin and Magers do sign on with another Chicago station - they both have said they want to stay in town - they will serve as a nagging reminder of how WMAQ tried to jolt viewers into watching by bringing a tabloid talk host onto a news set.

 "I'm a bit uncomfortable with the number of people who have placed this on some higher moral plane," said Ron Magers. "This isn't about saving television. Jerry Springer is still going to be on television. This is simply about two journalists making separate decisions that they couldn't work for people who thought this was a good idea.

 "We all make compromises along the way. We'd all like to carry our flag a little higher. We all hope that at the end of our career we aren't that beaten-down sot who will do or write anything for anybody. The timing just conspired that Carol and I were able to say, 'We won't do this.'"

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