Quo vadis CBS News? Whither goest the erstwhile Tiffany network's once-proud juggernaut of a news division? It's an issue - part perception, part reality - that hangs in the air like a dark nimbus over the network of Paley, Stanton, Murrow, Cronkite, and Friendly. A survey in September of the nation's TV and radio news directors dramatized the perception: 51 percent consider NBC News the strongest broadcast news organization; 29 percent think ABC News is best, and CNN is top-rated by 16 percent. Four percent voted for CBS News.

 Then there's the reality. In the 1996-97 broadcast year that ended in September, the CBS Evening News had its lowest rating since 1951, though it competed much more strongly in the closing months of 1997. This Morning, in successive incarnations over many years, has never been more than a feeble, hapless, hard-luck challenger to the Today show and Good Morning America. The Sunday morning Face the Nation half-hour interview program is a distant also-ran against its more comprehensive hour-long competitors, NBC's Meet the Press and ABC's This Week. 48 Hours is hardly more than a sacrificial lamb to NBC's mega-hit hospital series ER, the top-rated show in prime time. Bryant Gumbel - enticed away from NBC with a reported seven-year, $35 million contract - gets lower ratings with his Public Eye newsmagazine than fading sitcoms like Ellen and Third Rock from the Sun. The network's fledgling cable channel, Eye on People, so far hasn't reached nearly enough households to be successful, and may never. Dan Rather, the news division's only indispensable man, is 66, within sight of retirement, but without an heir on CBS News's depleted players' bench.

 The twenty-nine-year-old 60 Minutes is still the most successful program - of any sort - in television history, but its founder and still-helmsman Don Hewitt is 75, and then there's Mike Wallace, 79, Andy Rooney, 79, and Morley Safer, 66 - with no comparable murderers' row in sight. And its audience, with a median age of 57.3, is the oldest for any prime time program on any network. Susan Molinari was the first congressperson to march straight from Capitol Hill to TV news without stopping at Go, but her performance on Saturday Morning has left most observers, inside and outside the network, persuaded once and for all that politicians make dreadful TV newspersons.

 Taken together, CBS News's problems constitute a cautionary tale about the fate of a renowned news organization whose corporate overseers debilitated it by cutting muscle and bone in the effort to boost profitability - but lost an aura of greatness that may never be recovered.

 Land mines mark the perilous terrain through which CBS News is navigating. All of the network's owned-and-operated TV stations (14) and radio stations (175) are now the domain of 53-year-old Mel Karmazin, a fabled dynamo in the radio business. He's a member of the CBS board and also CBS's largest stockholder, with ten million shares worth about $300 million, or 1.7 percent of the total. His reputation as a tough, take-no-prisoners budget slasher is well-established. Media analysts muse that the street-smart Karmazin is swinging bats in the on-deck circle waiting to replace CBS chairman Michael Jordan when Jordan reaches mandatory retirement age of sixty-five four years from now - if not before. That might presage one more cycle of convulsive budget cuts at CBS News, which already is in tatters following the reckless, scorched earth rollbacks of former CBS owner Laurence Tisch, who left in his wake the rag and bone shop that was once the most renowned broadcast news organization in broadcast history. CBS Newbureaus at home and abroad have been shuttered in serial rounds of retrenchment.

 But CBS News is not fully the master of its own fate. In December 1993, the network lost National Football League games when Tisch declined to outbid Rupert Murdoch for a sport that had drawn millions of viewers to the web for decades. Then in April 1994, as part of a half-billion-dollar deal between Murdoch and entrepreneur Ron Perlman's New World Television, nine of CBS's most important affiliates switched to Murdoch's Fox Network. That double-barreled catastrophe wounded the network's sinew, and it has never recovered.

 For the news division, the misfortune meant that some important big-city stations - in Dallas, Atlanta, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Detroit, elsewhere - were no longer receiving CBS News's output or providing coverage to the network of fast-breaking news in their markets. In Detroit, the current CBS-owned station, WWJ, is a puny UHF (Channel 62) with no news department at all. That means that an air disaster or terrorist bombing in Detroit probably won't get on CBS's air until a TV news team from the Grand Rapids affiliate, or farther, shows up to feed the network - almost surely making CBS the last with the least. "That's one of those micro-problems that should have been addressed a long time ago," says one midwest affiliate manager. "With good planning and execution, they wouldn't find themselves in this position."

 By far the most public and regrettable display of CBS News's systemic weakness happened on Saturday night, August 30, when the network was hours later than every other broadcaster in offering live coverage of the events surrounding Princess Diana's death in Paris. CBS News president Andrew Heyward was at a Westchester County dinner party on that Labor Day weekend (supposedly, his beeper did not operate in that geographic "black hole"). And nobody else - fearful, perhaps, of taking responsibility for expensive coverage - gave the order to swarm the story. Bewildered affiliate managers phoned CBS demanding to know what was wrong. The crash had occurred at 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time, and it was past midnight, after Diana's death, when Heyward got the word. But CBS still did not preempt pro wrestling matches running on many affiliates. It was 1:15 a.m. when Heyward opted to use coverage from Britain's Sky TV satellite service, and CBS News itself didn't get on the air until 9:00 a.m. "It was a complete meltdown at ery level," said one station executive later. CBS News had suffered its worst black eye in years. Heyward assumed the blame, then deposed longtime vice president Lane Venardos, installed London bureau chief Marcy McGinnis as the boss of hard news coverage in New York, and imposed procedures aimed at preventing future such calamities.

 In its program decisions, CBS News has often displayed a tin ear. One of its most spectacular flame-outs was the awkward harnessing of Dan Rather and Connie Chung as co-anchors of the Evening News, a union that lasted only two years, 1993 to 1995, and was widely seen as the dumbest idea since ABC News briefly tried the same thing with Harry Reasoner and Barbara Walters back in 1976. In a recent effort to jazz up 60 Minutes, a Greek chorus of Stanley Crouch, Molly Ivens, and P.J. O'Rourke was hired to rotate as commentators, but the feature misfired badly and was junked after only six weeks. In October, CBS News offered newspaper reporters, nationwide, "finders' fees" of $500 to $1,000 for tips leading to stories that make it onto CBS News's programs. But print editors warned their staffs that any reporter who fed tips to CBS without offering them to their paper first would quickly be looking for a new job.

 As a partial antidote to its current deficiencies, CBS News has conferred with CNN about merging some of their operations. Such an extraordinary tactic would quickly give CBS a desirable 24-hour outlet for its news (like NBC's CNBC and MSNBC), and access to CNN's impressive string of thirty-four news bureaus abroad - far more extensive than CBS's own eleven. Does such a marriage make sense? CBS chairman Jordan appears to think so. In an interview with students at New York University in October, the tall, soft-spoken, vaguely rumpled Jordan (a former Pepsico executive with only twenty-six months' acquaintanceship with television) acknowledged that there had indeed been contact between the two news organizations. "Everybody has looked for ways to amortize the cost of newsgathering," he said, "to spread the infrastructure costs," and to "crack the nut" of the high price tag of covering news for television. "We will see more initiatives in that direction," he added.
 Jordan also noted that TV news across the board "is a business with decreasing audiences." For the 1996-97 broadcast year that ended September 30, viewership of the three-network evening newscasts continued to decline - down another 3 percent, or about 650,000 households. Overall, the three-network share of the audience for early evening news has plummeted about twenty points in twenty years, to 55 percent of tuned-in households.

 For any TV news division, that dinner-hour news program is its signature and showcase. And the biggest predictor of its ratings success is: how hefty an audience do its affiliates deliver as a lead-in. At CBS, the owned-and-operated television stations are underachievers, most conspicuously in the crucial New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles markets. CBS's flagship station in New York, WCBS, lags well behind WABC and WNBC. Thus, when Dan Rather's face appears on CBS at 6:30 in New York, a large percentage of his potential audience is tuned to other stations, and there's precious little he can do about it no matter how good his broadcast is. In fact, it's regularly as good as - and often more enlightening and better crafted than - those of Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings.

 There's an opposite side to that coin. CBS's prime time entertainment schedule has long attracted an older audience than that of the other broadcast networks. That fact rankles many local station managers, whose 11:00 p.m. newscasts inherit that less desirable viewership. " We have to live with that every day when we look at our eleven o'clock news numbers," says a major CBS affiliate station manager who requested anonymity. "If the demographics aren't there, then our advertising rates are lower." So one of the biggest negative effects of CBS on local news operations is something that CBS News can't control - the network's audience overall is too old, at least for many advertisers who prefer the more ardent buying habits of younger folk.

 That same executive says that CBS is several years late in launching its Eye on People cable channel, for which CBS News will supply most of the content - much of it from the division's stockpile of old documentaries and news features. "Look what a smart move NBC made in creating MSNBC. It's a great vehicle to promote and showcase their news talent." He's still a great booster of CBS, the executive said, and there are still some "quality people" throughout the organization. "But it's sad to see the infrastructure so rickety, almost as though it could crumble at any moment." That's dramatically apparent on stories like Diana, he claims. "You can say, 'This person was out of touch' or 'That person didn't do his or her job,' but if you're going to have a news organization, you must have tough procedures to handle crisis news. I don't think I'm oversimplifying to say that some of those procedures just don't seem to be in place at CBS News."

 Bench strength is yet another challenge. In Washington, for example, only the solid and authoritative Bob Schieffer can be thought a household name, while ABC boasts Ted Koppel, Cokie Roberts, Sam Donaldson, and Chris Wallace; NBC has Tim Russert, Andrea Mitchell, Lisa Myers, and Brian Williams. And while reporter John Roberts is sometimes seen as a possible heir to the Evening News anchor desk, his experience isn't a patch on Rather's, and most affiliates are hoping for more star power when the terrible moment of Rather's departure arrives.

 Many newspersons outside CBS declare themselves amazed that CBS News competes as well as it does, given its anemia in the last dozen years induced by budgetary bloodletting - staff reductions, bureau closings, travel restrictions, salary cuts. Its onscreen talent, producers, and support staff regularly "do the impossible" with what they have to work with, and "that has tended to compensate for a shortage of resources," says former CBS News Washington bureau chief Barbara Cochran, now president of the Radio-Television News Directors Association. Still, grumbling in the ranks has been the favorite indoor sport at CBS News's West Fifty-seventh Street headquarters for many years, usually directed at whoever is sitting in the president's office. For the last three years, that's been the forty-seven-year-old, bandito-mustachioed, fast-talking Andrew Heyward. Straight out of college (Harvard, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) he landed a job as a production assistant at New York's Channel 5, an independent station,nd at 23 was producer of its late news. He moved to WCBS as a news writer and in 1978 became head of its six o'clock news program. He went to CBS as a field producer for the Evening News in 1981 - the year Walter Cronkite turned over to Dan Rather the anchor chair from which he had dominated the network news business for a decade. (Cronkite's departure was the beginning of the end of CBS News's ascendancy.) Heyward created in 1987 48 Hours, a series that has earned a shelf full of awards (Peabody, Ohio State, Overseas Press Club) while never approaching the profitability or popularity of 60 Minutes. He ran Eye to Eye with Connie Chung for a year, then took over the evening news broadcast before assuming the news presidency in January 1996. He owns eleven national Emmy Awards.

 Howard Kennedy, chairman of the CBS-TV affiliates board and general manager of KMTV in Omaha, says that staffers and various keepers of the flame who nostalgically recall the great days of CBS News's hegemony can have one of two attitudes. "Either they can moan, 'Woe is me,' 'Things are rotten,' 'I remember when . . . .' Or they can say, 'We need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and go kick some ass.'" At a CBS affiliates meeting in October, Kennedy and his fellows gave the beleaguered Heyward a vote of confidence, advised him not to develop a "bunker mentality," and suggested he be "aggressive and thoughtful and all the things he's been in the past."

 Even some topmost CBS News executives regularly express dismay with the way things are going, not least Don Hewitt, the creator and still boss of the exorbitantly successful 60 Minutes, which contributes a large percentage of the CBS network's total revenue. His complaint? Nobody at the network asks his advice. "We have sat here, available for meetings, for consultations, but not once in thirty years - through all the magazine shows they've put on the air - has anybody ever asked me, or Mike or Morley or Ed Bradley, for guidance. It flabbergasts me."

 That's especially weird, Hewitt says, since the network has, right there in its own shop, "not only the most prestigious program in the history of broadcasting but the most profitable." Still, 60 Minutes has had an unintended negative effect on TV news, says Hewitt. "I was the first guy to prove that TV news can make money, and the minute that happened, the networks didn't want to let any news programs on the air that didn't make a profit. We wrecked it for everybody. We've got a lot to answer for."
 Hewitt's top aide, Phil Scheffler, spoke in September at a panel sponsored by the Pew Center for Civic Journalism called "Liars, Incompetents, Distorters: Who Believes Journalists Anymore?" Amassing huge audiences is now "the most important activity in television news," he said, and the only goal is money. He knows for a fact, said Scheffler, that the networks use audience research and focus groups to find out what interests specific demographic groups, and then tailor stories to appeal to them. 60 Minutes doesn't do that yet, said Scheffler, but if the program's audience and income slump "I wouldn't bet that it won't happen to us. If I sound pessimistic, I am."

 Vocal unrest at CBS News extends to camera operators, sound recordists, and other technical folk among the 1,300 members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers employed at the network whose contract at this moment is being renegotiated. CBS's initial proposals arrived with an ominous cover letter from James F. Sirmons, the network's chief negotiator. "Some of you will be shocked by the nature and extent of these proposals," he warned. "The networks, all of us, have a major problem with diminished audience and increased costs. Making a profit on the entertainment side is virtually unheard of . . . . We fully appreciate the extreme nature of these proposals. We hope you understand [they] are serious . . . ."

 In a flyer bearing the insignia of the Unity Committee of the four IBEW locals (New York, Chicago, Washington, and Los Angeles), an anonymous cameraman responded to CBS this way:

 I love this job . . . . Even though I've been pelted with rocks, bottles, bags full of garbage; held up at gun point, been threatened and shoved countless times, breathed toxic fumes and been radiated [while covering news stories] . . . . Even though I chased down a guy who grabbed the camera from between my feet . . . . Even though I've stood like a pretzel under CBS's camera for nineteen years with a herniated disc or two . . . . Even though I now spend five nights a week at physical therapy (that is, when there's nothing more to shoot and I'm allowed to leave) . . . . Even though I spend an increasing amount of my time compensating for the shortcomings of many non-technical CBS employees . . . . Now, after nineteen years, I still love this job . . . . but the job is not the Company, and from what I could see of the contract proposals, the Company, I regret, is no longer worthy even of respect.

 Also in renegotiation, as this issue of cjr goes to press, is CBS's contract with the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists, which represents about eighty-five on-air journalists at the network (and others at ABC and NBC). The issues this time around are especially complex, says Kim Roberts, a veteran AFTRA negotiator, because of the "absolutely staggering" recent changes in the landscape of electronic news: the rise of the Internet, more all-news cable channels, new equipment, automation. TV and radio newspersons know their industry is volatile, says Roberts, but journalism "is a public trust," and its practitioners deserve a level of security that will free them to "fairly, accurately, competently, and with integrity, gather, write, and report the news to the American public." That requirement, she notes, adds another layer of complexity to the negotiations.

 Several AFTRA members on the CBS Radio side are outspoken about their unhappiness. Radio anchorman Bill Lynch, with twenty years of CBS News service, says there's a "great deal of fear and loathing about what the future holds" at the network. He's facing, he says, what could be a 29 percent drop in income, mostly from salary and benefits reductions. Meanwhile, the CBS-owned radio stations are by far the largest generators of cash in the radio industry, with $565 million in cash flow for 1997 and a billion predicted for 1999. "I think what they're doing," says Lynch, "is taking those millions and gobbling up more radio stations, and handsomely compensating Mel Karmazin and the company." In an internal memo circulated in late October, employees got the bad news that matching contributions to the company's 401-K plan will no longer be automatic, but will be tied to CBS's financial performance. "We have come to view these benefits as additional forms of compensation, not an entitlement," the missive stated. "Thcompany's ability to offer and subsidize benefit programs depends on successful financial results." Similar unwelcome changes in the pension plan were said to be in the hopper.

 Washington-based radio anchorman Rob Armstrong, who'll be leaving in April ("involuntarily," as he puts it), says that the company he joined in 1974 doesn't exist anymore. In Washington alone during the1970s, Armstrong says, "we had a depth of talent that no other network could touch" - Roger Mudd, Bruce Morton, Dan Rather, Marvin and Bernard Kalb, and others. CBS's "back bench was better than everybody else's front bench." That's all gone, he says. "I'm sad that CBS has chosen to reward loyalty and service - not only my own - with cutbacks and terminations. It's a sad commentary."
 Despite such widespread sentiment inside CBS News, the radio network is perceived by many of its 545 affiliated stations as having improved in the last year from being "stale," "stodgy," "stiff," and "out of touch" (in the words of a sampling of affiliate news directors canvassed by cjr) to becoming quick off the mark in the live coverage of breaking news. Mel Karmazin is widely credited with jump-starting that momentum; he installed a pair of veteran radio newsmen at the helm - Scott Herman as senior vice president and Harvey Nagler as general manager. A few of their early initiatives were unpropitious: salary reductions for some radio anchors, reporters and producers; increased on-air time for anchors in order to get by with fewer of them; and putting correspondents at the New York headquarters into bullpens instead of offices to save $100,000 in rent. As the dust settled, though, radio station people around the country began seeing big improvements in what CBS Radio News was sending them. "I'm very encouged by the recent changes." says Mark Miller, news director of WBAL, Baltimore. "Herman and Nagler understand the needs of local stations. They're responsive. When you offer a suggestion, it's accepted very genuinely. I've heard the horror stories about Mel Karmazin but I haven't seen any negative impact at CBS. In fact, their product is better, more contemporary than before." Says Dan Shelley, news director of WTMJ, Milwaukee: "Since the leadership change, I've noticed dramatic improvement in their ability to provide comprehensive crisis coverage, and in the quality and amount of news they're sending to affiliates." James Farley, program director of WTOP, Washington, says Karmizan is demonstrating that it's possible to cut costs and still improve your product.

 What's the secret of Scott Herman's apparent success? "Basically, I'm trying to instill an affiliate-friendly attitude at the radio network," he says. That means feeding the stations stories of specific interest to their regions and making correspondents available for one-on-one interviews with local radio anchors. It also means "crisis coverage that gets on the air first and stays on for a long time." About the budget cutting, he says: "We're just trying to put all our money into newsgathering - reapportioning to get the most bang for the buck." Reducing the costs of office space, he says, allowed him to add a morning correspondent. "Listeners don't know from office space. Listeners know from live coverage and on-the-scene reports, and that's where I believe the money needs to be spent." Neal Gladner, chairman of the CBS Radio affiliate board and vice president of KARN, Little Rock, Arkansas, agrees that the Karmazin strategy, as enforced by Herman, is working. "Mel is not just a slasher. He puts money bacinto the product. We're watching him pretty closely, but he hasn't done anything yet that scares us."

 Nonetheless, Karmazin is the wild card in CBS's long-term corporate strategy, his future role a subject for bemused speculation in the industry. He came to CBS as part of the company's $4.7 billion acquisition in December 1996 of Infinity Broadcasting, which Karmazin had turned into a colossally successful radio empire. Son of a New York taxi driver, Karmazin became a wildly successful radio advertising salesman. Scott Muni, a veteran disc jockey, has said admiringly, "Mel was Sammy Glick reincarnated," comparing him to the virulently ambitious hustler of Budd Schulberg's 1941 novel What Makes Sammy Run? Infinity owned only six radio stations when Karmazin went to work there in 1981. When he hooked up with Michael Jordan at CBS, he brought with him forty-four stations having an annual revenue of roughly a half-billion dollars. Karmazin's rough-hewn people skills are the subject of mordant jokes in the industry. "He'll never stab you in the back," a competitor declares. "He'll stab you in the chest. But you know where you stand."

 In a series of reportedly "stormy meetings" in May, Karmazin persuaded Jordan to give him control of CBS's owned television stations (as well as the radio stations), stripping them from CBS president Peter Lund, who promptly resigned. Thus, Jordan's fortunes are yoked to Karmazin, whose considerable appetite for control is legendary, and who may take the reins at CBS should Jordan falter. Jordan, in fact, recently answered "yes" when asked if Karmazin is a possibility for the CBS chairmanship, adding that he is "a terrific leader" and "has done a good job" running the CBS TV and radio stations. Dan Rather met recently with Karmazin and says he was "heartened" by "a most encouraging conversation." He found Karmazin "direct, to the point, and aching to win every bit as badly as we want to win." Karmazin is also committed to hard news, Rather feels sure. "I told him a news program is not a mattress. It's supposed to be hard." (Karmazin declined to be interviewed for this article.)

 Still, many of the knottiest problems remain. The network dodged a bullet in November when CBS had to give Rather a prodigious raise (to a reported $7 million) and early renewal of his contract (which would have expired in 1999) to avoid the horrendous prospect of losing him at this crucial moment in the news division's history. CNN had been in hot pursuit of Rather with a tempting offer. The new contract guarantees him the anchor chair until 2000.
 Jordan is an enthusiastic admirer of Rather's aggressive reportorial style. Some think "Dan is stiff and very stern" behind an anchor desk, Jordan says, but "give him a bush jacket and microphone and send him to almost any awful place in the world" and he's a happy man. "Whenever there's a hurricane, we have to chain him to his desk" because he wants to rush out and cover the devastation. He's the "greatest field reporter in the world today," says the chairman.

 Rather's immediate boss, Andrew Heyward, sits in the hottest seat in television news, facing more daunting repair chores than either of his counterparts at ABC or NBC. "One of the challenges of my job is that we have to move on many fronts at once," he says gamely. His main priority is to make the network's two hard news programs, morning and evening, more competitive. In the last few months, as little as a tenth of a rating point has separated the Big Three dinner-hour newscasts. He's proud that on his watch the news division has expanded into two new time periods - Bryant Gumbel's Wednesday night newsmagazine and the Susan Molinari/Russ Mitchell Saturday morning program. Hiring Molinari - the keynote speaker at the 1996 Republican National Convention - was a " bold and controversial" step, says Heyward. It outraged many CBS newspersons and brought thunderbolts from media critics and competitors. (Hiring politicians to do TV news is a "journalistic obscenity," said one former CBS newsman.) Heyward still thks she has all the "pizzazz and smarts" to do the job, but the program is performing indifferently against NBC's and ABC's Saturday morning schedules.
 Then there's the newly-minted service called CBS MarketWatch, a fifty-fifty joint venture with Data Broadcasting Corporation, a major provider of online financial and market information. It's offering stock prices, business news, and analysis online to homes and businesses on both an advertiser-supported and subscription basis. Another online service called CBS Now has national and world news from CBS and local news from network affiliates around the country. There's also CBS Telenoticias, a three-year-old, 24-hour all-news Spanish language channel that serves mostly Latin America and Europe and competes head-to-head with CNN's comparable channel. The Eye on People cable channel has been gaining ground, though slowly, with most of its content coming from the news division. There's even the occasional debate inside CBS about creating a second, week-night edition of 60 Minutes. "For years, we stood still and let our competitors move ahead," Heyward says, "and now we're making up for lost time. I have the sense that things are starting to come together."

 There is, in fact, one potentially major shift in its fortunes that will make CBS News unique among its brethren at NBC and ABC - which are wholly owned, respectively, by the behemoths General Electric and Disney. On December 1, Westinghouse Electric, CBS's owner since November 1995, changed its name to CBS Corp., and is selling off all its industrial operations - from home appliances to nuclear power plants - to concentrate solely on broadcasting. That means CBS News is happily free of any further conflict of interest concerns over the corporate interests of a (potentially) disapproving parent. NBC News and ABC News continue to look surreptitiously over their shoulders to gauge the mood of GE and Disney.

 Nonetheless, Reuven Frank, former president of NBC News, still thinks Heyward has "the worst job in television." His two basic news programs morning and evening have lagged behind the leaders "so he has to fight his way back up." Frank says his corporate bosses, like those at the other networks, are less devoted to the notion that "at least some of your broadcasting effort has to be done for reasons other than the bottom line." Heyward has one thing going for him, adds Frank. "They can't eliminate his job. Somebody's got to be president of CBS News," even if broadcast news shifts entirely to cable and the Internet. "There used to be reasons for doing nightly news on the broadcast networks," Frank says. "Most of them are now gone."

 A few longtime TV news experts think CBS News, in its current deflated state, might consider a drastic rejiggering of its role. Marvin Kalb, a CBS News correspondent for twenty-four years and now director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, suggests that the third-ranked network "ought to do something old in order to seem new." If you're third, he offers, why not be a proud third instead of a frightened third. Worry less about the customary yardstick of TV news success, namely ratings, and "do what CBS used to do better than anybody else - serious, substantive, analytic news." Rather and Heyward would love to do just that, he is sure, and CBS News, even with its depleted stable, "still has the horses to run in that race." It would be risky, he admits; audience numbers and ad revenue for the news division might dip at first, but then rebound as viewers discerned the value of well-wrought and perceptive news programs. And it would win CBS the "respect and honor it derves as a great news organization that has come upon hard times," as well as help CBS News "recapture the esprit and the tradition that made it so distinctive for so many years."

 Reuven Frank puts it even more strongly. "I'm a romantic," he declares. Conventional TV wisdom says that if audiences are spurning a network's news broadcasts, then go for the gut with mass appeal stories on sex, crime, mayhem, self-help, disease, money, and celebrities. "I say go upmarket instead. Stick your nose in the air and pretend you're better than everybody else! Be a snob!" There's no way a mainstream news program can compete for the downmarket trade, says Frank, "because shows like Hard Copy and American Journal got there before you. You can't match them. There's no place to go but up."
 Dan Rather has a simple strategy. "I'm a hard news person, have been, am, will be. On the evening news, we will continue to be the hardest of the three broadcasts. We are not going to go 'news lite.' We currently lead in quality, we do not lead in ratings. We want to lead on both scores. We cover more international news and we cover it better than either of our competitors - quite a bit better than one of them, which has said they don't think the public is interested in that." (He means NBC.)

 CBS News would lead the ratings, says Rather, if the big-city stations owned by CBS had more popular shows, thereby giving the Evening News stronger lead-ins and lead-outs. That is Karmazin's biggest challenge. "Give me Oprah in front of me and Wheel of Fortune behind me, and I'll win for you," Rather says. He'd love it if news were immune from the ratings system, and "not judged by profits, but these are the nineteen-nineties and this is the way network news is today."

 Nonetheless, he says, "We have survived. Next we will flourish." Tough problems remain, but "the needle is pointing up." Some days, says Rather, he looks at Andrew Heyward and thinks that above his office door there ought to be one of those signs sometimes seen in the saloons of West Texas towns: "Please don't shoot the piano player. He's doing the best he can."

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