Serving Two Masters
HERMAN, GEORGE
Serving Two Masters Bad News at Black Rock: The Sell-Out of CBS News By Peter McCabe Arbor House. 302 pp. $17.95. Reviewed by George Herman Former CBS News correspondent, writer and...
...Reviewed by George Herman Former CBS News correspondent, writer and editor To be interested enough to finish this book you have to believe several improbable things before breakfast...
...You also get an idea of Dan Rather's impact on the Morning News and on CBS News in general—both the harm he wreaked and the success he brought...
...People turned on their sets to find out from Edward R. Murrow, William L. Shirer, Howard K. Smith and the like whether civilization had survived another day...
...It is a response to an outside force: the preferences of the audience, the wants of the consumer...
...Bad News is a diary of what happens when the dull important stuff is packaged as entertainment...
...Yet Katz had been an old-line print journalist, schooled in straight-forward "conventional" news...
...The huge younger audience so beloved by advertisers wasn't watching...
...You have to believe that watching television in the morning is more important than reading a newspaper...
...Network news is in an uncertain phase at the moment...
...They were immensely valuable to the public, and they began as sustaining broadcasts— no income, just outflow...
...You see the infighting, the backbiting, the dominating attitude of small people given a moment of power —knowing they will soon be fired or moved aside for some other flash in the pan...
...Take Van Gordon Sauter, then president of CBS News: " [The viewer] seeks entertaining information and consistently found us too businesslike, too serious, too interested in conventional news stories...
...And what shall we say about that audience, about people who don't watch or listen to or read the news because it's too "businesslike, serious, conventional...
...Early on, Paley had said, in effect, "Damn the ratings, full speed ahead with what we think is right, what we think the American electorate ought to know...
...But Paley and his fellow board members worried about the future of radio and communications, too...
...It is not enough to blame a few villains for the Morning News debacle and stop there...
...The answer, ultimately, is that broadcasting in these United States is a free and, fortunately, profit-making enterprise...
...Who now remembers CBS Hytron vacuum tubes...
...So get bigger audiences...
...The work is devastating in its sharp portrayals of the men and women who took over the show and what they said and did...
...Why not find the common denominator that draws the biggest audience, no matter how low that denominator might be...
...Even the New York Yankees lost money under CBS ownership...
...The Federal Radio Commission, set up in 1927 under Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, stipulated that stations devote a certain fraction of their broadcast time to public service, which included news...
...On the other hand, they have to keep their enterprise afloat financially...
...But to this just retired 42-year veteran of CBS News and member of that shadowy group referred to as "Murrow's Ghosts" by several persons in the book, there is too much petty detail and too little of the Big Picture...
...Publishers found they couldn't sell papers with a foreign news headline unless it was calamitous...
...But it is not a consequence of "inherent vice," to borrow a phrase from the insurance people...
...The revenue from commercials followed suit...
...News departments were not, of course, originally created to enhance earnings...
...Katz wanted plenty of sugar coating on what he saw as the tasteless pill of serious reporting...
...Murrow used to say: "The worst thing that ever happened to broadcast journalism was that it started to make a profit...
...that changes adulterating The CBS Morning News endanger the American body politic...
...CBS Columbia stereos...
...Vietnam came and went...
...Profitability, though, requires some catering to what the public wants...
...That brings us to the dilemma McCabe's book largely ignores...
...Once the news ceased to be thought of as a money-losing public service, the question immediately arose: Why not maximize profits...
...In this country, when people change their institutions have to show some give...
...We "Murrow's ghosts" were brought up in that school...
...If they don't care enough to bother learning who William Webster or Michael Deaver is, perhaps we shouldn't place all the blame at the door of the news producer shouting "Where's the glitz...
...Fortunately" because if it were not, we would have a government-dominated broadcasting system...
...The spectacle is disheartening, sometimes disgusting...
...Newspapers put their giant type away, to be taken out only rarely...
...All serious journalists must, on the one hand, try to fulfill the obligation so powerfully implied by the First Amendment: to help protect the people from those who govern them by supplying needed information about policies and officials...
...Or Susan Winston, brought in as producer of the Morning News early in 1986 (only to be sacked later in the year): "I will do anything, anything, to get ratings...
...Nor was it so eagerly sought by the public, now that the Apocalypse had receded...
...Bad News at Black Rock tells what happened to The CBS Morning News between the time McCabe joined it as senior producer way back in the spring of 1985 andthetimeheleftitin mid-1986, and offers a fair summary of subsequent developments...
...A kind of neoisolationism set in...
...More accurately, he was coming straight from the offices of his bosses, relaying their orders in his own style...
...Network news was no longer mandatory...
...We kept doing our thing, and our aging audience kept dying off...
...But the War ended, and Greece and Turkey were rescued...
...Higher profits are achieved through bigger audiences for advertisements...
...McCabe provides a clear and accurate accounting of the day-to-day things that go wrong in any organization that has lost its bearings, or what Jeb Magruder of Watergate fame called its "moral compass...
...Moreover, in the grim days of the Depression and of Adolf Hitler, it drew large audiences...
...Why was he, of all people, suddenly demanding "glitz...
...McCabe notes that The CBS Morning News appealed mostly to older viewers, relics of the time when news was a vital part of people's lives...
...McCabe correctly records that in the old days CBS Chairman William S. Paley told his news directors not to worry about ratings...
...His repeated question was "Where's the glitz in this segment...
...Although the mandated news programing was initially a money drain, it was welcomed by the broadcasting industry as a way of keeping the regulators at bay...
...Those orders were simple: News must generate higher profits...
...Meanwhile the Carter Administration was accelerating the deregulation process, and the Federal Communications Commission weakened network control of affiliates' programing time...
...Clearly there was something at work here besides the treachery, backbiting and wrongheadedness of the producers...
...Thus CBS started diversifying into other lines, many of them financially disastrous...
...Generations of journalists have tried to balance these two obligations...
...It does no good to have a Watergate-size scoop if you have no forum to publish it in, or if too few people are paying attention...
...That's where Van Gordon Sauter was coming from...
...What shall we say about the young, upwardly mobile adults who buy what the commercials sell and don't know which side Ronald Reagan supports in Nicaragua...
...TV newscasters, still having large blocks of time to fill, began offering five-part series on everything from teenage sex to the problems of aging singles...
...Perhaps McCabe will tell us the direction it might take in his next book, now that he has beat the batch of "bad news" at CBS books heading toward the presses...
...He himself returned from service as deputy chief of a psychological warfare division during World War II with two noncommercial ideas for the department: a weekly news roundup, and a weekly summary of what foreign papers and radio stations were saying about the United States...
...When the news is red hot ("Hitler Invades") it's not that hard to do...
...Consider John Katz, a massive and commanding figure on the Morning News for much of the period covered by McCabe'sbook...
...So was Korea...
...The world seemed at peace compared with the era that gave birth to broadcast journalism...
...and that a long list of people who are described one-dimensionally and, for the most part, quickly forgotten (they do not even merit the book's having an index) are worth caring about...
...when the news is dull yet important ("Fed Decides on New Criteria for Money Regulation") the Biblical injunction against serving two masters starts to apply...
...And the toast-and-coffee crowd began deserting CBS' comparatively hard news morning broadcast for NBC's restructured Today show and ABC's Good Morning America, hosted by a successful Hollywood actor...
...In these circumstances, profits became important to Paley and his people...
Vol. 70 • May 1987 • No. 7
