On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television ANCHORS AWRY BY MARVIN KITMAN The hottest weapon in the network news wars this summer has been the exciting new studio-newsroom on the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. You would be...
...CBS has more stories about earthshattering meteorological developments—a snowstorm in Denver, fog in Seattle...
...CBS retorted that the apparent difference was the fault of studio lighting...
...For instance, Dan could have come.down his elevator wearing a hat with a press card in the band—like Walter Winchell used to wear on the radio...
...We saw his Dan Blather side...
...The viewer at home can't tell how exciting it is because the camera comes in so tight that mostly you see Dan on the tube...
...These are not happy times on West 57th Street...
...There were weeks this summer when he was third in the three-man race...
...Imagine walking into your boss' office and crying that you just can't get by on 2 point 5 mill...
...Rather started looking different at the beginning of July...
...They do that with people, too...
...Some of the excuses can only be described as ingenious...
...Maybe the guys in the control room are giving him orders through his earpiece: Lighten up, think happy thoughts...
...At any rate, the dye hasn't done the job the sweater did for Rather...
...What did he have to smile about...
...l the smile the answer to what is wrong with the CBS Evening News...
...When my repair person told me the problem was with Dan, I decided it must be one of those physiological things...
...Moreover, the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather is still the best at telling it the way it is...
...They have an excuse for everything at this network...
...So relax, Dan, and stop trying to ingratiate yourself with us...
...You couldn't learn that kind of pretension, '' an executive at another network commented...
...It's like buying a new apartment and showing friends a picture of it that consists mainly of your head...
...Actually, the set was finished for some time before they finally decided to use it...
...virtually overnight...
...According to an inside source, they have a special book—it's blue, has 28,000 listings and is called The CBS News Excuse Book...
...a computer-assisted statistical analysis measured it at .007...
...There is also an overhead flying camera, costing half a million, that permits us an occasional view of the top of Dan's head, which is or is not graying...
...they order something, pay for it, then decide it's no good...
...Also bottles of hair dye preparation, apparently...
...They wanted to be able to say, "We didn't win the ratings last week because of that set design...
...A lot of people in Cleveland were watching the Wheel that week...
...It has too many chairs...
...Nixon's smiles were programed, and Dan's look to be too...
...Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings, who had been strung out behind him like perennial losers in a six-day bike race, were now clambering all over him...
...So who dyes his hair ends up being crucial...
...In person, the studio is massive and bizarre—kind of an erector set that blew up...
...It is like seeing the Mount Rushmore face of Washington suddenly crack...
...Why, indeed, did CBS News need the set...
...As it happened, the abrupt mutation in Rather's hair color came just a week after a drop in the CBS Evening News ratings...
...If Rather's hair ratings continue to be bad, USA Today will soon be telling us he's going to Scavullo for a re-do, no doubt including false eyelashes...
...That's because the shows don't differ in content...
...What they were really looking for was something to blame when the ratings slump...
...It's the same sort of thinking that once attributed the show's success to the fact that it's louder than the other network news shows...
...a sincere sweater...
...And there was the small matter of a billion dollars worth of debt to beat down Ted Turner...
...No, the fallacy is to suppose that it is unnatural for Dan not to be Number One...
...His hair is gray...
...EST...
...What has he done for TV anchor-ism, other thanset the recordas the highest paid person in the history of Western Civilization to read news over the air...
...Dan has the option of descending from the second floor, news in hand, like Moses with the latest commandments...
...The idea makes me laugh...
...There were signs of teetering, however, at the very start of June...
...Instead, Rather started to smile...
...And of the network's position between the sun and the moon...
...he would have looked like a real jerk, especially in the South...
...Think abouthowyou're making more each week than the GNP of some Third World nations...
...One source explained the shock: "Guys see him in the hall, the washroom, five or six times a day...
...When CBS first lost the evening news ratings race at the end of June, theyblamed basketball: We slipped because we had basketball on that week...
...Other than to provide full employment for its creators, the answer is—the ratings...
...It wasn't any old sweater...
...This is somewhat clever: By not showing the Studio 47/Newsroom the network avoids criticism...
...CBS has been giving Rather smiling gas, anditisveryjarring...
...Tough break...
...Of course, no one at CBS is foolish enough to have thought new trappings would actually boost the ratings...
...Maalox sales around the corner from the CBS Broadcast Center have been skyrocketing...
...Information from my sources has enabled me to roughly reconstruct the events that have resulted in the all-new, improved, dyed Rather...
...Not that Rather is any worse than Brokaw at NBC and Jennings at ABC...
...The next time the trouble was that a Cleveland station had Wheel of Fortune on opposite Dan Rather's slot...
...The name of the game in the network evening news race is getting attention— whether by building a silly studio, wearing a sweater or using cosmetics...
...But they have to look at him on TV to tell his hair is gray...
...He must have learned to do it in his glory days as a TV j ournalist during Watergate, by watching Richard Nixon...
...But, hey, if you' re the kind of guy who tries to buy the company's news division—as Dan, together with Don Hewitt, tried to do earlier this year— it takes a certain paycheck to finance your lifestyle...
...They have this tendency to change their minds...
...They had meetings about picking out just the right one...
...Dan seems to be losing his self-confidence, wondering what to do next...
...Think about your paycheck...
...The minutes may one day show that it was a battle between the crew neck and the V-neck cardigan...
...True, they might have made the air-conditioning or the cameras their scapegoat...
...So he put on a sweater...
...You would be amazed how many people have stopped me on the street since the set was unveiled August 17 to say, "Hey, what a studio...
...And a recent Columbia Journalism Review study found that CBS made more puns...
...I thought my set needed adjusting...
...Clearly, worry was responsible for Darn's hair going from gray to black...
...The weskit gave way to suspenders, but they didn't hold up the ratings either...
...You had to keep in mind that CBS has run basketball in the past, and Wheel of Fortune has been on for a while...
...Studio 47/Newsroom, as it is officially called at the CBS Broadcast Center on West 57 th Street in Manhattan, even has a built-in elevator...
...Yet Dan couldn't go back to the sweater in the summer...
...They don't just invent them on the spot, either...
...Amiable at White House news conferences...
...He didn't get where he is by the color of his hair or by being Mr...
...I have the feeling CBS took about 27 years to build the thing...
...Such things, alas, are imperceptible to most normal people...
...You havetobeborn with it...
...I think I'll watch Dan Rather now...
...It seems someone at CBS looked at the show one night, and the next day the following conversation took place: "What happened to Rather...
...Rather does have other recent achievements tohiscreditbesides raising anchor compensation to new heights...
...Everyone was in a lather over Dan, but the ratings went down...
...Television news is into hair...
...Anchors use enough hairspray to damage the ozone layer...
...But CBS' trick is not that clever: If that is all they planned to do, they could have achieved the same result for considerably less than the $8 million they spent...
...The "before" USA Today got free from CBS publicity...
...He puts on grins as though they were written into the script ("grin here...
...On Memorial Day, Rather had doffed his jacket to reveal a yellow weskit, a vest-like thing you see in England...
...Dan is not good at smiling...
...Studio 47/Newsroom is the Spruce Goose of TV journalism...
...Network protestations notwithstanding, your TV set (unless it's black and white) isn't lying: Dan has been hitting the bottle...
...For the first time in a zillion weeks it wasn't Number One at 7 p.m...
...No...
...I forgot about it...
...You know how a man's hair can change from gray to black...
...The drop was only a tenth of a point...
...He did, after all, cover the overthrow of Marcos in the Philippines all the way from South Dakota—explaining all the while how this was good journalism...
...What you did was okay...
...That mystified me...
...Oh sure, there's a little variation...
...CBS News' massive layoffs, in which everyone not nailed down seemed on the verge of being swept away, were laid to the economy—disinflation, reinflation...
...Once the decision was made, Dan climbed to the top of the ratings...
...Yet to the people who run the network news, a drop of as little as a hundredth of a point is like having a rusty knife plunged through the heart, and turned...
...He even had the gall to renegotiate his contract nine months or so ago...
...Remember when he ascended to the chair held by Uncle Walter Cronkite for 57 years...
...Not since the 1948 controversy over John Cameron Swayze's wig, or toupee, has there been such a hairy issue in broadcasting...
...the "after" it had to buy from UPI...
...The papers showed more interest...
...Graver problems get graver excuses...
...USA Today—the first national Technicolor daily—carried a picture exclusive: Rather before (the ratings declined) and after...
...At a place like CBS News, though, they have probably already blamed all the obvious things...
...They turn up the volume at CBS to shout the news at you, as if it were a commercial...
...Well, CBS News hates it...
...The network experts should have tried another sartorial gimmick...
...What do you mean...
...If the matter of the new studio seems terribly important, it is a trifle compared to the big topic of TV journalism earlier in the summer: Does Dan or doesn't he (dye his hair...
...Asked why later, he said Americans didn't want to see him in a jacket on such a warm day...
...My own feeling is that he should stick to his guns...
Vol. 69 • September 1986 • No. 12
