How the News Was Made
HERMAN, GEORGE E .
How the News Was Made Out of Thin Air: The Brief Wonderful Life of Network News By Reuven S. Frank Simon and Schuster. 429 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by George E. Herman Former CBS News...
...Frank presents graphic examples of the different personal influences at NBC and CBS...
...in particular, his contempt for Sylvester "Pat" Weaver, former program chief at NBC, oozes through the pages...
...Worse, a number of the new executives were lawyers, for whom he has a special distaste: "A lawyer thinks a television program is the same as its transcript...
...He argues that under pressure from corporate bean-counters, network news divisions gave up their superb staffs of newsgatherers...
...The law says: 'Broad casting shall be in the public interest, convenience and necessity.' " Summarizing the commercial transformation of the networks, Frank laments: "Like all American companies and later than most, broadcasting had moved from supplying customers to maximizing stock prices and their managers' bonuses...
...The new bosses he saw coming up were increasingly word oriented, and could not understand the need for so many camera crews...
...In the early days of TV, the author demonstrates, almost anything went...
...Candor, of course, cannot prevent an occasional error...
...The bigger the audience, the more they pay...
...He also says that Edward R. Murrow's year-end roundup show featuring foreign correspondents began in 1956, a considerable surprise to this reader since I narrowly missed being on the program in 1951 as Far East correspondent, and did make it on in 1952...
...Imagine that happening to a show backed by William S. Paley at CBS...
...Joe" —and therefore fail to fully appreciate one of Frank's descriptions of how network officials regard their news departments, that's your problem...
...I say this not to discourage anyone from reading his valuable book, but to illustrate a point about Frank and his work...
...Some of Frank's are as odd as they are trivial...
...as the host of radio's $64 Question...
...He is an independent, inner-directed man, with his own splendid views of what news is and ought to be...
...Frank repeatedly and eloquently maintains that pictures can tell the news better than words...
...he was fired the second time, during an era that saw the decline of network news...
...His determination in that eternal conflict twice took him in and out of the presidency of NBC News...
...was still responding to the announcer's cry of "I have a lady in the balcony, Doctor...
...He has earned the right to have his say about the business that benefited greatly from his considerable talents as a writer, producer and top administrator...
...Should you be unaware, for instance, that "Tommy Atkins" was World War I (and earlier) slang for a British soldier —somewhat akin to our own "G.I...
...At the time, Dr...
...Heads would have rolled...
...If you have trouble following his occasional recondite allusions, you are part of an audience he does not especially care about...
...On the subject of exactly what constitutes "news," Frank offers a variety of expositions...
...He is, in short, not one to easily knuckle under to the entertainment division's ideas of what the news department should do for the greater profit of the network and its stockholders...
...No box of Snickers to Frank on that one...
...But the most serious, even if most obvious, of Frank's criticisms concerns the current tendency to favor business principles over First Amendment principles...
...The terseness is typical of Reuven Frank's prose...
...He quit the first time...
...What [advertisers] buy, what they pay for, is audience, people to heed their messages...
...You have to read closely to get out of this book everything he has sneaked into it...
...Such minor slips, though, have no bearing on the burden of the narrative...
...Even when General David Sarnoff, head of RCA and NBC, liked a film program his news division had whipped up, it took almost a year to push it through the bureaucracy, and then it was aired at a poor time without the aid of the promotion or publicity departments...
...Journalists had told how it happened to others but were unprepared for it happening to them...
...He reminds us that those days were not so long ago with a hilarious account of how NBC allowed Life magazine not only to sponsor but actually to run the coverage of the 1948 political conventions, the first to be telecast by the infant TV networks...
...Out of Thin Air is not a straightforward history, like Edward Bliss Jr.'s Now the News...
...Eventually, he wryly observes, convention coverage became so successful that politicians stopped having the type of conventions worth watching—where decisions were made on the floor, not weeks in advance out of sight of the cameras and reporters, as is the case today...
...Its subtitle, "The Brief Wonderful Life of Network News,'' may seem a little too all-inclusive for a work that revolves around the life and times of Reuven Frank...
...As for the people who won the positions, they relished their progress from "I am Sir Oracle" to "History begins when I get there...
...Much of the initial news film was supplied by foreign companies, and as he freely admits, "If the information sheets or translated scripts that came with the film were inadequate, we made it up...
...We were not without arrogance...
...Thus seen, programs are the machinery, that which makes the product...
...Yet in truth, his story is a crucial part of the industry's history...
...Instead of relying on reporters who lived in specific areas and closely covered events there, the newscast producer developed a new concept: "His competitive weapon became his anchorman, his million-dollar baby in his (increasingly) five-and-ten-cents store...
...Rather, it provides an inside look at the foibles and motivations of the creators and destroyers of the Golden Years...
...He adds atouch of grim irony: "But what says the law...
...Reviewed by George E. Herman Former CBS News correspondent Reuven Frank, as all of us who have worked in the news industry know, does not suffer fools gladly...
...For us, the old craft rules, handed down mostly by oral tradition, were still good enough...
...Although he concedes that some news consists of ideas and concepts that cannot be photographed, he bemoans the increasing dearth of TV newspeople with any visual sense: "Perhaps it could not have been prevented, but it denied television news its one unique capacity, showing things happening...
...He mistakes the quizmaster "Dr...
...But with a characteristic honesty that is one of the major strengths of this book, he finally says: "For us, news was whatever we were interested in...
...Frank writes of his dealings with the great and the awful in the network hierarchies...
...Says Frank:"I learned that the product of commercial television is not programs...
...The people in the news industry must constantly struggle to balance the need to make money in a free enterprise economy with their constitutional responsibility to inform the public (which frequently does not want to know) of transgressions by governments, businesses and individuals, not to mention other unpleasant occurrences...
...In fact, he doesn't suffer them much at all...
...Out of Thin Air is essentially an account of the evolution of TV news from the perspective of one highly idiosyncratic and very important individual...
...He doesn't beat things to death...
Vol. 75 • January 1992 • No. 1
