On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television BRAND NAME NEWS BY REUVEN FRANK DIANE SAWYER is a former Junior Miss America who worked for Ron Ziegler in the Nixon White House press office, followed Richard M. Nixon into exile...
...then the DA interviewed them and found them useless as witnesses...
...The networks "offer any celebrity or newsmaker huge exposure, a famous host like Dan Rather or Barbara Walters, and a publicity blitz...
...Within a couple of years they were in turn copied by the network news magazines...
...It is not probable...
...they are also becoming—in terms of content and in the public mind—hard to tell apart from the syndicated tabloid shows, the daytime talk embarrassments, even the nightly news programs...
...Judgment is distorted...
...four nights a week...
...Those of us who were in England in uniform would hoot at Sunday-only papers like News of the World, full of tales of debauchery and perversion culled from court records, which are publishable under British rules...
...Newsweek and Electronic Media, a trade paper, had Peter Jennings at $7 million a year, Ted Koppel at $6 million, Dan Rather at more than $3 million, Connie Chung and Tom Brokaw at $2 million...
...took up more than half its hour with Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer and cannibal...
...This February, as her ABC contract was expiring, the four networks fought over her, offering her millions of dollars...
...In the latest competition, Fox was reportedly ready to shell out $10 million...
...It had to turn to sex, sex, sex as ammunition in its circulation wars...
...It is a sterile question, like asking if school janitors are worth more than teachers...
...I sought out people who might know more than gossip...
...In a recent week, Dateline: NBC (Tuesdays, 10 p.m...
...As Sawyer's contract wound down, with the other networks pursuing her, ABC replaced the executive producer of Prime Time Live...
...Both publications said that Barbara Walters now gets $10 million a year...
...Experience becomes irrelevant...
...For not only are the news magazines otherwise indistinguishable from one another...
...Dan Rather profiled a serial murderer for an hour...
...Because Diane Sawyer is a "brand name...
...Television news is a group effort...
...Sometimes the only way we can compete is to offer payment...
...According to surveys, viewers remember her...
...As for Sawyer, when she shifted to ABC she received a rumored $1.6 million...
...and the producer of Diane Sawyer's special on the Menendez brothers started at the National Enquirer...
...A species let loose in a foreign ecology where it has no natural enemies, it multiplies and smothers life around it...
...When one member of the group earns more than all the others combined it gives him—or her —editorial weight...
...Sometimes even more money than exclusive interviews...
...Besides, in a field of public performance, a practitioner is paid by how he or she draws at the box office...
...Fox proposed that she anchor an hour-long news magazine to follow its newly acquired National Football League games...
...For reference, they also printed what other anchors were supposedly paid...
...The Sawyer affair means more money for him, because NBC has no obvious replacement...
...By press consensus, her last contract was for $3 million...
...The key decisions in all news undertakings are the same: what to cover...
...Long ago, a network news executive sided with the executive producer and fired the anchor...
...who should cover it...
...ABC would continue her on Prime Time Live and accord her additional presence on two other magazine shows...
...During the days it took the Sawyer saga to play out, by coincidence, PBS aired a program on Frontline (Tuesdays, 9 p.m...
...Moreover, people who have worked with her say she is diligent, conscientious, considerate of colleagues, but not brilliant or unusual—a Nancy Kerrigan of news...
...It did so well that imitators soon followed—Hard Copy, Inside Edition, American Journal...
...To date, network magazines have not been known to pay for news the way tabloids do...
...It made the papers...
...So why the big deal...
...The men followed —the anchormen, that is—each insisting that not being paid in seven figures diminished his manhood...
...Unfortified by anything like our First Amendment, hemmed in by onerous libel and contempt of court laws, the British popular press could not expose crooked politicians and vicious cops...
...Granted, news knows no inappropriate topics, only inappropriate treatments, but...
...In today's news, that matters most...
...Bill O'Reilly, the anchor of Inside Edition, argued February 26 on the New York Times Op-Ed page that the tabloids have no choice...
...It never happened again...
...Tonya Harding is reported to have received $600,000...
...Well, perhaps there is one reason...
...Fact is redefined to include the fact that someone made a scurrilous charge...
...Hidden cameras record unspeakable acts the eye cannot quite discern...
...Leaving aside the metaphysical question of whether she is worth it, who is she that all those swains contended for her...
...Ten million...
...how to present it...
...None of the slime and grime of the tabloids there...
...It is possible that the anchor, though picked for other qualities, is the person in the group best able to make those decisions...
...On Television BRAND NAME NEWS BY REUVEN FRANK DIANE SAWYER is a former Junior Miss America who worked for Ron Ziegler in the Nixon White House press office, followed Richard M. Nixon into exile to help with his memoirs, re-entered society as co-anchor on the CBS Morning News, moved to 60 Minutes as its first female correspondent, and in 1989 left CBS for ABC, having been seduced by the co-anchor spot on Prime Time Live (Thursdays, 10 p.m...
...It is interesting, too, how many of the big press magnates have been Canadians or Australians—Lord Beaverbrook, Roy Thompson, Rupert Murdoch, Conrad Black, and others, who grew up relatively class-free and were therefore adept at manipulating a class system...
...Sawyer stayed at ABC—for $7 million a year and more prime time exposure than anyone else in network news...
...No longer seven figures...
...So, either way, I couldn't lose...
...eight figures...
...Tens of thousands are said to have gone to various former employees of Michael Jackson, tying them up and keeping them from police until after they had been on television...
...and on the latest ABC magazine, Turning Point (Wednesdays, 10 p.m...
...Fox started A Current Affair, the first daily syndicated tabloid program, a mere seven years ago...
...While the network magazines still may not have to pay for their stories, they do hire producers from the tabloid programs...
...Perhaps these peculiarities of the British popular press have their roots in the class system...
...They share the hunger for celebrities and for exotic crimes, and getting both in one story is best...
...My sources thought $10 million was an underestimate...
...This particular pest is from Britain, the leader in sex-obsessed journalism...
...Whether it was Michael Jackson allegedly renting children to molest, or the Menendez brothers, or Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, or the deconstruction of John Bobbitt, the TV tabloids and magazines and news programs covered them all...
...The most important remaining difference is that the network magazine shows are brought to us by star personalities...
...To put the argument in moral terms is to put yourself out of business...
...Although network news is, not unfairly, seen as unfriendly to women, it was a woman who broke its million-dollar barrier...
...To promise that, the president of NBC News had to get the president of NBC—and even the chairman of General Electric—to muscle the president of NBC Entertainment into giving up some of his choicest hours...
...At the time, and since, many wondered openly whether Barbara Walters, or anyone, was "worth" so much money...
...Everything about the Sawyer Stakes made the daily papers and the major news magazines and the trade press, just as everything about Barbara Walters had 18 years before...
...and other ABC News programs, but the four times yearly celebrity interviews she does for ABC Entertainment, including the one preceding the Academy Awards, are programs she "owns" and sells to ABC for sums no one can be sure of because there are so many variables, such as how much the commercials fetch...
...The bidding continued a trend that began in the spring of 1976 when, for a million dollars a year, Barbara Walters went from NBC to ABC...
...Murdoch, whose holdings today include News of the World and other tabloids, such as the Sun, Britain's largest circulation daily, loosed British tabloid journalism on American television...
...on CBS' 48 Hours (Wednesdays, 10 p.m...
...Anchors always win, because they get paid in millions...
...Step by step, the basic proposition has been reinforced: If polls now find viewers lumping together daily news and magazine and tabloid shows regardless of their distinctions, then the need for the brand name anchor is worth whatever price...
...And star personalities cost money...
...Tabloid television is an imported pest, like rabbits in Australia or the gypsy moth in the northeastern United States...
...CBS offered a one-topic program, like ABC's Nightline, five days a week after the Dan Rather-Connie Chung CBS Evening News...
...A week later, Entertainment Weekly magazine made the point with different details...
...the others, including ABC, which dearly wanted to keep her, were bunched between $5 million and $7 million...
...The work is no longer collegial...
...Even some who mocked Walters' news credentials and giggled at how she interviewed the powerful were not embarrassed to follow her one digit to the left...
...The brand names are what differentiates them...
...NBC was the most ambitious, with a detailed plan to have her anchor an hour-long magazine at 10 p.m...
...about tabloid television...
...Meanwhile, Hollywood's self-declared "creative community" bemoaned the loss of air time for its dramas and sitcoms...
...A senior producer for the TV tabloid Hard Copy told Frontline about the Michael Jackson story: "It was either going to be superstar being falsely accused, or it was going to be superstar perhaps guilty of one of the most heinous crimes we know...
...They called the figure impossible to verify...
...It showed especially how blurred the line has become between network magazines and syndicated tabloids—how they pay the same "finder's fees" to tipster services, report the same stories, compete for the same interviews...
...EST) plus high-profile stints substituting for Peter Jennings on World News Tonight and Ted Koppel on Nightline...
...Brokaw's contract is almost up...
...The British elite reads very different newspapers that are generally quite respectable and always well-written...
...What his newspapers did in London, his network did in the United States...
...Diane Sawyer in her first outing under her new contract devoted an hour to the murderer Charles Manson and his female associates, or "family...
...Sawyer is blonde and attractive, yet that alone can hardly explain the fervor, the excesses, the money...
...There is no reason a television news anchor should be paid less than a basketball player or a stock finagler or Arnold Schwarzenegger...
...Anchors fight with executive producers—the ones who are hired for their skill in making the key decisions—about theories of journalism or out of sheer hatred...
...All four promised to create new programs for her...
...She is paid for 20/20 (Fridays, 10 p.m...
...There are nine virtually identical network news magazines out there every week, with more planned...
Vol. 77 • March 1994 • No. 3
