On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television CONNIE CHUNG AT THE CIRCUS BY REUVEN FRANK ON THE SAME recent weekend, fate dealt unkindly with Patrick Ewing and Connie Chung. Ewing, an authentic sports hero, tried in the...
...This is not about the First Amendment...
...When I was doing my time as a network executive, I was repeatedly advised by station managers to improve my news ratings as they had: "Give them a good-looking girl to look at...
...When his last-second basket won an earlier game in the series, he said, "That's what they pay me for...
...The coverage the affair elicited is a sure sign that Rather and Chung are not the traditional ink-stained wretches of the working press...
...Producers call them a "cast," as in a play...
...It was a slow day in the news business...
...The Daily News said this was the gist: "Connie Chung did not seem well-informed, failed to convey reporting excellence and lacked the ability to ad lib...
...There is a lot of "spontaneous" chitchat...
...If true, this is new...
...Huntley and Brinkley were both intelligent, attractive men, accomplished and involved writers, and seasoned journalists as well as broadcasters...
...It is bad when they do that...
...Granted, in local news it works...
...The bottom line is that anchors are paid many times their worth as working journalists because they attract viewers...
...Yes, but she was not fired for losing ratings...
...those in command at CBS and CBS News made her Dan Rather's co-anchor to up the Evening News ratings...
...What that says about the present state of TVjournalism is another matter...
...A viewer seeing Brinkley knew the subject was Washington, or hearing Huntley that it was not...
...It was beyond our comprehension...
...The most comprehensive of these appeared in the New York Observer a month before the denouement...
...About salaries, yes...
...1 can understand basketball...
...We really try to run a journalistic meritocracy...
...I don't understand it...
...The purpose was to allow AT&T technicians, on hearing either word, to switch the origin of the network from New York to Washington, or vice versa...
...But news assignments...
...We were doing too well for me to object, but it seemed nonsense...
...That problem, of course, was caused by the network's weak entertainment schedule, the defection of NFL football to Rupert Murdoch's Fox network and the departure, along with football, of many of CBS' strongest affiliates...
...I have experience with the dual anchor system because, as an NBC News producer, I put Chet Huntley and David Brinkley together to anchor the network's 1956 political convention coverage...
...One can only guess why...
...In 1993, less than two years ago...
...Brokaw and Mudd were usually in New York and Washington, respectively, but on successive days often exchanged reading news about the same big international story...
...Peter Jennings' eminence, for example, is the gift of Oprah Winfrey...
...But that would explain only a news program worth watching, not our staggering audience figures...
...her agent was pressing CBS News to have her replace him on election nights: his agent was complaining to CBS News executives about her undermining him...
...The best nonanchor TV journalists receive a fraction of the $2 million a year Chung is paid, or the $7 million Diane Sawyer is paid—or the $10 million Barbara Walters is said to get...
...But if you take the big money, you must deliver...
...they sat side by side and talked to each other...
...Ewing, an authentic sports hero, tried in the closing seconds of the climactic seventh game of pro basketball's Eastern Conference semifinals to save his New York Knicks from the Indiana Pacers...
...Have things changed that much...
...I also began, and for almost a decade produced—that is, edited and published?The Huntley-Brinkley Report...
...What looks like crass, cruel treatment of human beings is justified this way: Although network anchors must be experienced journalists, their pay does not rise or fall because of thequalityof their work...
...On the other hand, although she is ambitious and pushed hard, she did not pick herself and is not solely to blame for her failure...
...So, when Chung was named Rather's co-anchor I wrote in this space that it seemed like a local station sort of idea...
...But I don't know what it is...
...CBS might have acted with more class, but it is not obliged to keep an anchor who fails to attract an audience...
...Brinkley covered Washington and Huntley, from New York, covered everything else...
...Chet," when he finished...
...Sexism got her the job...
...The parlance for Chung's inability to boost Rather's ratings is "bad chemistry," named after a subject once taught in all high schools and remembered for dripping faucets and bad smells...
...When ABC lured Walters from NBC, she became the co-anchor of the evening news with Harry Reasoner...
...Now, that's sexist...
...it was not those who picked her but their successors who dumped her...
...It simply didn't work...
...From the beginning we decided that each would have his own assignment and never do what the other did, except during vacations...
...the Daily News supported management, calling her a "cunning back stabber...
...Expensive consultants call them a "family" and value rapport more than the news...
...Never mind that network news ratings depend mostly on preceding programs...
...the rest failed because they did, in fact, talk to each other...
...One never talked to agents about assignments...
...The only conversation was Huntley saying, "David," when he finished...
...she was fired for not raising them...
...Two of the New York tabloids gave it their full front pages: The Post sided with Chung, headlining her claim that she was "the fall guy...
...In both instances viewers were decidedly unen-chanted...
...In this business you read or you die...
...She was chosen by executives of CBS, and they are at least as much to blame...
...NBC, seeking to recapture ancient glory, combined Tom Brokaw and Roger Mudd, who tried to appear to converse...
...The day before, Connie Chung was fired as Dan Rather's co-anchor on the CBS Evening News...
...97-95, and the semifinals...
...If Ewing takes his aching joints and tired tendons into retirement, his departure will follow a decade of leading his team, of physical achievement, of more prowess than subtlety but total dedication...
...Part of the reason may be that local news programs usually are longer...
...No network nightly news program since has achieved as wide a reach...
...The difference was that Huntley and Brinkley were not really co-anchors, two people sharing the same chores...
...But they did not talk to each other on the nightly news, I said...
...The drama ended as a battle of fishwives...
...Many of these self-selected guardians of journalism's Holy Grail have never themselves covered a fire, uncovered a scandal or attempted to explain a complicated strike...
...I do not mean to deny that she is an established journalist with more than 20 years' experience...
...And Brinkley saying...
...I cannot imagine Huntley or Brinkley acting in a similar manner...
...Less than two years is a long time in television...
...Chung complained of sexism, yet no male journalist makes as much as Walters...
...Item after item told of agents lobbying executives about news assignments...
...In short, Huntley and Brinkley had "good chemistry" because their talking to each other was an illusion...
...The Pacers won the game...
...their minds wander...
...A relevant footnote: In 1958, when CBS News canceled Edward R. Mur-row's See It Now series, no newspaper considered the story worthy of the front page...
...We were enormously successful...
...Also, there are others on the set besides the anchors—a weather person, a sports person, a specialist reviewing movies or advising consumers to be wary...
...Still, even though she is no Dorothy Thompson, Chung did not deserve the pompous moralizing and attitudinizing she was subjected to by some who write about television for newspapers...
...Viewers, I was told, saw this as conversation, as friendliness, a homelike atmosphere, and so on...
...is ajoke, a Saturday Night Live sketch...
...It didn't happen...
...Chung's firing was preceded by a drumbeat of inspired newspaper reports...
...His shot rimmed the hoop...
...But they gave / 'affaire Chung their front pages again on Tuesday, whipping up the fight between two famous people—network anchors are charter members of today's celebrity culture...
...Whatever the take, whatever the excessive self-justifications, press leaks, noble poses, and unseemly cat fights, there is only one fact: They paid her to boost the ratings, she didn't, so they dumped her...
...Or working conditions...
...In the heyday of network news, we regularly attracted more than half the news viewers, double our closest rival...
...None of us understood why—not the two anchors, not 1, not the people we worked for...
...Chung complained of being made to take the fall for CBS' generally falling ratings...
...They were gentlemen...
...Without the story, Monday's tabs would have had to put the loss of the basketball game on the front page...
...As for Rather, the senior fishwife, on the air he wished Chung "good luck and Godspeed...
...She did what she was asked to do...
...Never on the news...
...Once I dealt with a star anchor's agent about his client's desire for a private bathroom...
...NOW THE VIEWER has spoken: Having anchors sit side by side, alternately reading news items off the same Tele-PrompTer...
...Finally, I should confess that I thought I would use / 'affaire Chung as an occasion to explain the peculiar role of the network news anchor in American society...
...Even we graying, retired news purists do not propose corporate suicide...
...Chung's is the story of an unrealized expectation...
...The bigger the audience—or, more accurately, the bigger the expected audience—the more the anchor is paid...
...More puzzling is the role of the anchors' agents in the affair...
...Here I hesitantly lapse into the first person...
...All this hurt Dave Letterman as much as it hurt the CBS Evening News, Chung protested...
...Connie Chung has been a star in a different firmament...
...Subsequent events proved me correct...
...Off the air, hepersonally summoned reporters to feed them lines like: "Two trips to the Mideast do not make you a foreign correspondent...
...Every newspaper featured the story...
...If I'm right, then Chung was chosen co-anchor because she is an attractive woman and her charge of sexism stands on its head...
...Then someone from the network research department, where former statistics majors analyze Nielsen ratings the way the scientists in Gulliver s Travels analyzed human ordure, told me that viewers liked the way Huntley and Brink-ley talked to each other...
...But that is not why she was picked...
...Viewers must have wondered what was going on...
...It said Connie had aced Dan out of covering the Oklahoma bombing...
...They did that while broadcasting at conventions, or on election night, or at space shots...
Vol. 78 • May 1995 • No. 4
