On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television Eliminating the Elderly By Reuven Frank I'm a realist and I know that if you had aprogram on Nightline and the series on the eastern Congo, for example, up against West Wing or...
...That's exactly what Nielsen says...
...Now even television news is news, originating usually as hearsay, building to minor scandal, and subsiding...
...No one tells Koppel...
...Koppel's income soared well into seven digits...
...But there have never been so many elderly...
...At first the news report was entitled The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage...
...We'd like it to be somewhere around 44, 45 to 50...
...This year, though, analysts expect ABC to lose a quarter of a billion dollars...
...This would allow the entertainment executives to plan their next offering...
...And Louis Rukeyser's loss of his PBS program after 32 years exposed ethical and organizational flaws in the rarely critically examined public television system...
...Who will succeed Rather and Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw...
...How much would ABC offer Letterman...
...The unspeakable Matt Drudge says CBS has a plan to replace Letterman with the unspeakable Howard Stern...
...Ted Koppel "I got ambushed...
...All management, except ABC News', was moved to California to be close to the top...
...Conglomeration has trapped commercial television in what pop sociology has taught us to recognize as a clash of cultures...
...Wall Street Week, he said, cost $2 million a year to produce yet garnered $6 million in corporate underwriting...
...Imagine Horace Greeley reporting to P.T Barnum, also by present definition a communicator, but with different priorities...
...Maybe we are on the brink of a profound social change...
...The revelation that ABC was ready to sacrifice Koppel's weeknight news halfhour to lure David Letterman's talk and comedy act away from CBS confirmed fears about the status of network news: Originally considered an obligation for broadcasters, the gathering and presenting of news, having already become no more than a commodity, was being treated as a luxury not every network believes it can afford...
...It is something to resent...
...I want to assure our viewers—and the underwriters who have supported us over the years— that Louis Rukeyser will still very much be around...
...We may be seeing the birth of a political movement directed against the elderly and retired, who have done their sowing and now only reap...
...Iger flies East to make nice...
...Rather has occupied the anchor's chair longer than Cronkite, longer than NBC's Chet Huntley-David Brinkley partnership, and longer than Edward R. Murrow at CBS with See It Now and his other documentaries...
...News, the pain in the neck, became news, the surefire moneymaker...
...If youth must be served, how long will the evening news endure...
...Louis Rukeyser Television itself is now so often a news topic, it is hard to imagine those early days when networks hired elaborate publicity staffs to plant mentions in the press...
...Appearing as scheduled the following night, he told his viewers he planned to start his own TV show and urged them to write and howl in protest against his removal...
...Now, over two decades later, ABC again has serious money trouble...
...some folks apparently think they can do Wall Street Week without Louis Rukeyser...
...But after the gossip writers flit to other topics, a residue remains...
...All three anchors are in their 60s...
...As for the commercial broadcasters, the hypocrisy of their claim to public service was illustrated again when Disney's Eisner bragged about Nightline to a Senate committee just days before the Letterman story broke...
...These are mourners' words, speaking nothing but good of the dead...
...Probably nobody...
...CBS' Dan Rather is, at 69, four years older than Walter Cronkite was when he was invited to retire...
...That turn of events coincided with the swallowing of the networks by conglomerates...
...S ince everyone is an expert on the subject of television, there is much talk in newspapers, living rooms and bars about the reasons for all this...
...Roone Arledge, then president of ABC News, did what news division presidents are supposed to do: He saw an opportunity to get more air time and grabbed it...
...Older people have more money, the New Yorker thunders, and they are neither set in their ways nor immune to advertising...
...Newspaper writers inventory ABC's other recent slights to its news division: moving 20/20 from Friday to Wednesday to let the network favor a well-regarded drama...
...After CBS' 60 Minutes, to everyone's surprise, set the cash register ringing, the three networks began spreading news "magazine" shows across their schedules...
...The first news of his ouster (on the Web site CBS MarketWatch, 5:44 P.M...
...each division must be profitable, including news...
...The Koppel and Rukeyser incidents could be symptoms of something new in society...
...Journalists in all media feel stabbed to the heart...
...Because so many advertisers are claiming extra commercial spots to compensate forunfulfilled audience guarantees, ABC has actually started to pay some of them off in cash...
...What happened to the $4 million surplus...
...Soon the program started covering news beyond Iran, it became a fixture, and Koppel was a national figure...
...The New Yorker dusts off a 1995 American Demographics survey that found "the average corporate ad rep is 31, and the average ad agency account executive is 28...
...Meanwhile, failed movies and reduced leisure spending in the wake of September 11 have added to Disney's financial problems...
...No one tells Arledge's successor as president of ABC News, David Westin, who finds out only when a reporter asks him for comment...
...How insensitive...
...Since Carson's retirement, both NBC—with Jay Leno—and CBS have done well in the 11:30 p.m...
...Most of Rukeyser's two dozen or so regular panelists opted not to appear with his successors...
...Fortune magazine would share production responsibility and supply anchors from its staff...
...it has the same two "underwriters' who backed the PBS effort...
...The BBC is supported by the fees Britons pay for owning TV sets...
...He would appear on CNBC, the business news cable channel owned by NBC,at8:30p.M.ESTFridays, thereby keeping his old time period and competing with his former program...
...On Television Eliminating the Elderly By Reuven Frank I'm a realist and I know that if you had aprogram on Nightline and the series on the eastern Congo, for example, up against West Wing or ER or whatever ehe is hot in programming right now...
...Over at CBS, David Letterman's contract is due to expire...
...Might Letterman be persuaded to switch to ABC...
...Louis Rukeyser is also 69...
...Many refuse to accept on faith the conventional wisdom that old viewers are less desirable than young ones...
...they would kick our butts...
...It is no longer enough that a network show a profit...
...But there may be a larger conclusion here...
...March 22 was his last Wall Street Week...
...Eisner, who hates the press, is in France opening another theme park...
...The money department reckons Letterman could mean $40 million in annual profits, five times Koppel's pull...
...CBS did well enough with old movies...
...Even the BBC, mother church of all public broadcasting, heeds ratings, despite its not being directly dependent on them for income...
...In 1995 the broadcasters who owned ABC sold it to the Walt Disney Company, where it vies for executive attention and resources with theme parks, movie studios and cruise ships...
...Ratings have fallen a fifth from last year...
...even without new facts, there is always speculation...
...This would hurt the old more than merely not advertising to them...
...That is how far the argument traveled from the future of Letterman, who in the end re-signed with CBS, and of Koppel, who has forever been branded "irrelevant" by those who employ him...
...It is not a matter of editors filling up space at a slow time...
...engaging a Hollywood producer for a nonfiction series about soldiers in Afghanistan...
...Rukeyser refused to take it lying down...
...Although eventually Koppel's show was given a two-year reprieve andRukeyserfoundanopen ing on cable at CNBC, their experiences raised significant and enduring concerns...
...This was not an instance of news being elbowed out of the commercial broadcasting universe...
...Nice folks agree it is immoral of ABC to scheme to supplant Nightline for mere money...
...They begrudge the "greedy geezers" who pay half fare on the bus and discount prices at the movies...
...He assures the news staff it is still loved...
...Where Koppel was merely insulted and diminished, Rukeyser was made to walk the plank...
...Albuquerque sensed a decline in pledges...
...When an unexpected throng attended the funeral for Harry Cohn, maharajah of Columbia Pictures, Groucho Marx reportedly said it showed that to attract a crowd you need only give people what they want...
...How gross...
...At that point "late night" network programming, starting at 11:30 p.m...
...The new creation does not have advertisers either...
...The emphasis on youth is decried as a self-serving cabal by a gang of kindergarteners...
...During the Parliamentary debate to establish those fees, members often question funding the BBC when the private channels have bigger audiences...
...Or Walter Lippmann to Darryl Zanuck, or James Reston to Louis B. Mayer...
...Furthermore, how dare ABC replace news, such serious and responsible news, with comedy...
...The AARP's magazine, Modern Maturity, called him "the odd-looking man with the molasses voice and the mop of redgray hair") Butthehostagecrisislasted444 days and ABC Entertainment never got its time back...
...But if Nightline is a luxury, what of the networks' suppertime newscasts...
...For 32 years Rukeyser presided over Wall Street Week...
...But cable's limited reach would hardly provide the celebrity needed to sustain an estimated $20 million annual take from a newsletter, speeches and cruise ship appearances...
...If all who are angered by the Social Security bite from their paychecks were mobilized, they could pass a law, for example, abolishing benefits to anyone beyond a certain age...
...Traditionally, they vote in greater proportion than the general populace, giving them the power to allot themselves benefits from the public wealth...
...His audience is about the same size as Koppel's, but far younger, and that is what advertisers buy...
...leaking to reporters that Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts were being replaced on This Week, ABC's Sunday talkorama...
...How much would CBS counteroffer...
...The program's corporate underwriters were peppered with complaints too...
...Unheard of...
...Much has changed since 1979...
...Koppel, like the mighty Achilles, sulks in his tent...
...Letterman's show biz fame bloats the press attention...
...There were newspapers so leery of the new medium they did not print program listings (hence the founding of TV Guide...
...But in Hollywood it's always done this way...
...These attracted younger audiences than the regular evening newscasts and contributed more to the bottom line...
...True, there has never been an American political movement leveled at the elderly...
...Thejobofhostingthe program—20minutes long initially, then expanded to 30— went to State Department correspondent Ted Koppel, a solemn, assiduous journalist who might not normally have been considered for an anchor chair...
...Every PBS producing entity has been asked to re-examine, brighten up and modernize their offerings...
...ABC had failed at a series of imitations of the Carson format, presided over by a parade of possibles like comedian Joey Bishop...
...When Ted Koppel almost lost Nightline, his predicament validated widely expressed predictions of what would happen once conglomerates ingested commercial broadcasting...
...Negotiations begin...
...there is plenty of real news, both here and abroad...
...And now blindsiding Koppel...
...Something to remember for the next fund drive...
...Unverified reports have Koppel going to CNN or another of the cable news channels...
...EST, March 21,2002) referred to him as "venerable" and an MPT spokesman labeled him an "icon...
...Granted, ABC News turns a healthy profit with Good Morning, America and three prime-time magazine programs a week...
...So ABC News was allowed to have the time period, presumably for a few weeks...
...Renamed Nightline, it evolved into less a newscast than an examination of, usually, a single topic in the news— with prominent guests, its own filming crew, a repertory company of reporters, and a place in the hierarchy...
...Americans are living ever longer and many of the younger ones can't abide it...
...EST), was dominated by NBC's fabulously profitable Johnny Carson show...
...His indiscretion allowed MPT to play the aggrieved party: Rukeyser had committed a breach of faith and confidence, and for that he would be unseated not in June but immediately...
...The New York Times quotes an unnamed ABC executive who calls Nightline "irrelevant" in an age of round-the-clock cable news...
...An uproar follows...
...What Rukeyser ended up with was a sort of compromise...
...He told the Los Angeles Times that MPT had confiscated his photographs, shut down his Web site and fired his producer...
...The general manager of the Sacramento affiliate told USA Today it was a "debacle...
...Rukeyser was told, one day before it was publicly announced, that his tenure at Wall Street Week would end in June...
...ABC and Disney still have their economic worries...
...It is a question with ramifications beyond a half-hour of a Friday evening...
...they drive Lexus cars, drink Starbucks coffee, shop at Target stores, and take Aleve for headaches...
...Brow-knitting introspection about the state of American journalism is, of course, one of the timeless trademarks of American journalism," opines the Guardian (London...
...While he made the rounds with his reputation largely intact and his Rolodex under his arm, the expectable rumors about Rukeyser's dealings with various cable networks surfaced...
...The program would continue without him, MPT executives declared...
...Yet just as commercial television's advertisers are looking for younger viewers, so too are public TV's underwriters...
...They welcome the new...
...Perhaps Rukeyser has learned what many of us already knew: However much it may be deplored, public television apes commercial television, not the other way around...
...slot using similarly constructed programs...
...Around the country PBS stations received record numbers of angry telephone calls and emails...
...In the heat of the occasion, he also aired some dirty PBS linen...
...After each episode is broadcast on CNBC, it is being made available to any public TV station wanting to air it later...
...The discussion reaches to England...
...At Walt's old Hollywood office, as if in a Disney cartoon, the flowing red ink prompts Chairman Michael Eisner and President Robert Iger to take up long, sharp knives and slaveringly settle on Nighlline as the lamb to sacrifice...
...Rather, it was a grim example of how public television providers—portrayed as public-spirited, nonprofit and aspiring—can be as crude and graceless as any Hollywood mogul...
...Produced by Maryland Public Television (MPT), the weekly discussion of equities and investment matters was distributed by PBS, in the decentralized way things are done in public TV It was PBS' 12th most popular program, with a steady audience of more than 2 million...
...At least they didn't change the locks on his door...
...But a celebrity is a celebrity...
...And lo...
...Nightline had its beginnings during Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's 1979 Islamist revolution in Iran, when his young followers seized 66 diplomats and employees of the American embassy in Teheran and held them hostage...
...In the United States, as in most industrialized countries, Social Security checks come from the payroll deductions of those currently working...
...A PBS senior vice president explained to the Baltimore Sun that "the median age of PBS' audience is 56 years...
Vol. 85 • May 2002 • No. 3
