On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television When News Was the Star By Reuven Frank IN a better world, all-news cable TV channels would come on when there was news and stay dark when there wasn't. That way viewers...
...Starting with Fox, all three spent more and more hours on talk shows and fewer on actual reporting...
...Some journalists were seen more than others, became better known, but there were no stars...
...There was a fashion show every weekend, a daily hour devoted to politics, and each evening Larry King's buttery celebrity interviews, always the most watched hour of the CNN schedule...
...CNN does some of this...
...Earlier than most, he understood what cable was and grasped its potential...
...Consumers of print news were regaled with this for days...
...Her eyes were notmesmenzing, but seemed unobjectionable...
...USA Today hailed her freshened eyes...
...Van Susteren is a lawyer who came to public attention as CNN's expert legal commentator on the O.J...
...He is not alone, though, in this shtick— MSNBC, for example, has Chris Matthews, former aide to the late House Speaker Tip O'Neill...
...Trae, yet not entirely...
...Van Susteren groused that CNN had not secured her an invitation to the White House Christmas party, an event she considered important for making contacts...
...Zahn, Mr...
...In July, seeking to regain the initiative, the powers at AOL Time Warner moved Walter Isaacson, the editorial director of Time Inc., to the post of chairman and CEO of CNN News...
...King, but not her...
...This is widely remarked on by newspaper writers who have their own blank spaces to fill...
...A number of those operations were owned by states that were not very nice...
...There is still news on the all-news channels, even some noteworthy public service...
...and Warner Brothers) had acquired Turner Broadcasting, and before long was itself taken over by cybergiant America Online, forming AOL Time Warner...
...Brown and Mr...
...no coverage of tribal elders in the city of Hardehar pledging to support their historic democratic institutions...
...Her salary was reported to be in the "low seven figures...
...Fox has indeed found a new audience...
...Its presentation was awkward and frequently amateurish, its personnel a mixture of low-paid beginners and other broadcasters who had not quite made it...
...That adds up to following the Fox News and MSNBC formula of producing identifiable programs that are perforce built around anchor persons...
...Virtually unnoticed in the turmoil of the days following 9/11, CNN gained a similar leading presence by recruiting ABC News' Aaron Brown, an accomplished, skilled and stylish broadcaster...
...He tapped the profits from this marvelously successful enterprise to sustain CNN...
...MSNBC currently comes closest to the dream of television's early visionaries, like Pat Weaver, to open "windows on the world...
...More people watch his show now than CNN's Lany King Live...
...Within a year Turner founded a second entity, Headline News, that summarized the world's news, sports and business in an endlessly repeated half-hour...
...DESPITE that bravado, CNN was still the Chicken Noodle Network...
...Their antics supplied gossip columnists for almost a month...
...He recently told a trade newspaper: "One of the things we've done...
...Paula Zahn, mentioned by Isaacson, was once co-host of CBS' morning program...
...The principal exemplar of its ethos is a man named Bill O'Reilly...
...A headline in the New York Daily News called her "a foxy babe...
...She stayed with the network, most recently hosting a public opinion program that had the studio audience and guest specialists analyze current events...
...is take an organization that for 20 years was based on pure news-gathering and then just putting that news on the air as a lot of rolling newscasts, and instead we're trying to build CNN around specific programs...
...Then, the crowning accolade, her remade face was the cover of People magazine...
...the idea was anathema...
...It was CNN's motto, or, as we now say, its mantra...
...Like overthe-air broadcasting, the fledgling underground venture needed a news service to legitimize it in the eyes of the public, the press and legislators...
...Continuing to pursue "personalities,' CNN took Connie Chung from ABC, which forgave the last year of her contact...
...On radio Rush Limbaugh had a few words...
...Turner said...
...As a result, the first airing of her evening show at Fox drew an audience that was larger by half a million viewers—a big number in cable television—than it had been when Paula Zahn occupied that time...
...As it is, what all-news cable provides whennothingmuchishappening is whatever can pass for news, of which there is more than enough to keep the commercials apart...
...The three cable networks were heroic during the agonizing weeks after Election Day 2000...
...She said she was only trying to help...
...Not yet 50, she was of stolid appearance, composed in her delivery, and reasonably popular for the cable news business...
...That way viewers would not be subjected to journalists dressed as big game hunters reporting from wind-swept hillsides every time a detachment of U.S...
...This soon subsided...
...As CNN did more of this, the networks could rationalize doing less...
...Why burn precious commercial time when anyone truly interested could find the material elsewhere...
...But in the incestuous society of media professionals, CNN was a kind of joke (as television news had been earlier, and radio news before that...
...The ? 'Reilly Factor is an interview show...
...If you believe the newspaper accounts, she called and complained...
...In network newsrooms they dubbed CNN the Chicken Noodle Network...
...The newcomers, MSNBC and Fox News, aimed at a more youthful audience to attract advertising...
...sometimes news was squeezed out...
...Often clumsy, it now employed many experienced reporters whose experience was all in print...
...In 1996 Rupert Murdoch—whose constantly growing empire included a strong worldwide television news operation that reached most of the Eastern Hemisphere by satellite—entered the all-news cable field with Fox News...
...He had turned his Atlanta TV outfit into the first "superstation," transmitting the games of the city's major league baseball team, which he also owned, to cable systems all over the country...
...Particularly when he has two or more at once, the sparring can be raucous...
...Similarly, his colleague Ashleigh Banfield has captured the physical context of major news stories in such places as Tehran, Gaza and Cairo...
...In fact, with O'Reilly's help Fox News finally achieved a higher average day-long audience than CNN this past January—and took out a full-page ad in the New York Times to say so...
...Its conservative bent, confrontational tone and disputatious populism seem to be resonating...
...He set up bureaus in every significant capital...
...The bottom line, though, is that all the celebritizing, the replacing of news with talk, and the clumsy obeisance to youthcult can make one nostalgic for the Chicken Noodle Network...
...Newspapers cannot do that, nor can radio...
...A weekend program wrapped up strange and exotic reports that nterested few Americans, and include i some barely disguised propaganda in behalf of nasty dictatorships...
...Written on Van Susteren's behalf by her husband and lawyer, John Coale, it voiced the complaint that her program, The Point, was not adequately promoted...
...It made reciprocal deals with foreign television news sendees, securing sources of breaking news pictures, especially of disasters like floods, earthquakes and volcanoes...
...That made three allnews cable services, with no indication of a parallel increase in interested viewers...
...When American military advisers went to the Philippines in January, MSNBC's Forrest Sawyer used his videophone camera to show the audience what that country's jungle looked like as one hacked through it...
...It attracted fewer local cable outlets than CNN but seemed to be available in every hotel room on earth...
...Now nearly 22 years old, allnews cable television is established, mature (in the economists' sense) and institutionalized...
...MSNBC used some established NBC News figures, like Tim Russert, but relied more on presentation techniques such as electronic graphics...
...They went out of their way to hire ever younger-looking reporters and anchors...
...He spent time at ABC and CBS, and since doing a spell at the Kennedy School, proclaims frequently that he has been at Harvard...
...News was the star...
...She moved from there to Fox and later was lured to CNN...
...A few hours of each day were organized into what even network people had to recognize as programs, discrete units of presented information with their own themes and characteristics...
...Nothing if not brash, in his third year Turner separately approached both CBS and NBC, offering to buy them...
...They used to brag about it...
...Twenty years ago, news was the star...
...Its host's stock in trade is interrupting and overriding his guests...
...Other differences began to appear as well...
...they were neither skilled nor comfortable with speaking on the air...
...heads rolled...
...By the mid-'90s network folks still looked askance at CNN, but less so...
...On the tube they were topics for Regis Philbin and for Barbara Walters' morning kaffeeklatsch...
...What set the gossip mongers a-flutter was not Van Susteren's defection but the revelation that in the weeks between her last CNN appearance and her first at Fox, she had undergone cosmetic surgery to remove the bags from under her eyes...
...Next, NBC, building on a broadcast news organization almost three-quarters of a century old, joined the fray with MSNBC...
...But CNN had lots and lots of news, an endless river of it...
...The three providers have assumed the worst evils of the old networks, even to raiding one another's staffs...
...Often there was little news to mourn...
...According to the New York Times, the missive "expressed her distress that general network promotions featured Ms...
...Then competition arrived...
...It has become personality-driven, youth-driven, ratings-driven, and publicity-driven...
...In January CNN's promotion office put together an on-air house ad proclaiming her virtues, ending with the suggestion that she is "a little sexy...
...Simpson murder trial...
...Like all the non-news programs that have come to dominate all-news cable...
...For many viewers, it was the station to turn to when major news was breaking...
...September 11] helped us create a show around Paula Zahn that made her one of the world's premier news anchors...
...It was where you could be sure to find live coverage of an important Congressional hearing, a major speech, military action in the West Bank, a Gulf War briefing in Riyadh...
...And the ladies of cable news have become celebrities, recognizable in the supermarkets, on a par with Madonna, Britney Spears and Nicole Kidman...
...One network's news division president smirked: "I keep seeing all the people I fired...
...Isaacson was furious...
...Inexorably, Ted Turner was pushed aside—rich beyond imagining, but grumpy and frustrated— to tend to his philanthropy and his buffalo herd...
...Special Forces searched a cave in the Tohu Bohu mountains and found three computer disks, some tattered old clothing and a street map of downtown Albuquerque, Nor would they, in turn, be followed by a studio piece, ostentatiously labeled "LIVE," featuring a retired general with a pointer animadverting on just how rugged rugged terrain can be—something he learned not during his years of command, but in Army courses teaching outgoing generals how to supplement their pensions...
...It is an ability unique to television that is exercised too rarely and is too little appreciated when it is...
...And it wasn't Greta Van Susteren's cosmetic procedure that pointed this up most...
...he is his network's number one star...
...Fox' principal anchor is the experienced Washington newsman Brit Hume, and MSNBC's is Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw's putative successor...
...after they had secretly carved up the local wealth and landscape the previous midnight...
...Fox News less...
...But when she had the bags removed, it was copy from the Washington Post to the Los Angeles Times...
...It began as the vision of one man...
...Hollywoodfilm production, entertainment TV, and the vanguard of the Information Age...
...Network wise guys said it was like having an Associated Press ticker in your kitchen—one update breaking into another, nobody putting the information together, ordering it, making sense of it...
...Most local cable operators, who decide which channels to offer their subscribers, signed on eagerly to CNN...
...In other words, Atlanta-born CNN, once the unchallenged all-news television operation, became a very small part of an entertainment and communications behemoth whose bloodlines stemmed from magazine publishing...
...Fox increasingly built its programming around personalities, rather than the notion of furnishing as much news as possible...
...Next Fox got Greta Van Susteren to come over from CNN, and again the ink flowed...
...But O'Reilly is the most successful...
...But Turner, the eccentric, rambunctious Atlantan who started it all, withstood the worst of times and persevered...
...It was her supposedly confidential departure letter to CNN's top managers, which mysteriously reached the hands of the press...
...On June 1, 1980, exactly 32 years and one month after the introduction of American commercial network television, the competing phenomenon called cable TV welcomed Ted Turner's Cable News Network...
...People who knew TV production were hired, and the rest learned...
...no telephone call-in shows for the disembodied voices of prairie Clausewitzes to express their considered judgments on where United States troops should invade next...
...International from day one, CNN was said to be always on in the world's chanceries, and in the private offices of presidents and prime ministers...
...It ran once...
...Much of its cost was absorbed by a partner, Microsoft, because Bill Gates wanted to expand into providing content for his machines and devices...
...Serving up news only when there was news to serve up would have meant no breathless bulletins about the locations where Mullah Omar was not found...
...Meantime, Time Warner (the amalgam of Time Inc...
...She tried to disguise her petulance with the general charge that the CNN staff was not sufficiently diverse...
...But all-news cable has quickly gone the whole hog...
Vol. 85 • March 2002 • No. 2
