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THE NIGHTLY NEWS

Networks under Attack

The news divisions of the Big Three networks were immediately on the defensive as the 1980s began: in June 1980 maverick communications entrepreneur Ted Turner launched his Cable News Network, a twenty-four-hour news channel that posed the first real challenge ever to the major networks' near monopoly on broadcast journalism. Over the next several years CNN scored a number of successes against its larger rivals, for example suing successfully in 1981 for the right to use White House press pool footage that had previously been the exclusive property of the three networks. CNN used young, nonunion employees and small domestic and foreign bureaus to save costs, and it established agreements with local television stations for the rights to use their footage of breaking stories. All of these factors shook an industry that had become complacent in many ways.

SNC

Executives at ABC, deciding that the best defense is a good offense, linked the resources of their news department with Group W, one of the largest partnerships of local stations, to form the Satellite News Channel (SNC) in June 1982. With the experience, personnel, and financial backing behind the SNC, the new network "[should] certainly…outgun Turner if they have a mind to," as Broadcasting magazine observed at the time. But Turner simply outmaneuvered the media giant with a variety of strategies, most notably by quickly launching a new channel, CNN Headline News, which condensed CNN's reports into a more conventional half-hour format. Faced with lawsuits, significant losses, and grumbling stockholders, ABC/Group W closed the doors on the SNC in 1983 after sixteen months of operation and sold the network to Turner.

Late-Night News

Another response to the success of CNN was to expand the amount of programming time devoted to the news. NBC added Overnight to its schedule in 1982 and NBC News at Sunrise the next year. CBS debuted Nightwatch, which ran from 2:00 to 6:00 A.M. ABC added an early show, World News This Morning, before Good Morning, America and lengthened its late-night discussion show, Nightline. In 1984, however, the authority of the major networks was further shaken by a new cable endeavor, the Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network (C-SPAN), which brought to 40 million cable subscribers unedited coverage of congressional hearings, conferences, speeches by public officials, demonstrations, and almost any other variety of political activity occurring in the nation's capital, as well as British parliamentary debates and the evening news from Moscow. Clearly, cable was offering increasing opportunities for television viewers to bypass the networks in their quest for news.

Jolting the Status Quo

Many industry observers thought that the challenge from cable was good for the Big Three, jolting them out of their complacency as television's sole providers of information on the day's events. The news divisions of the major networks were traditionally financial sinkholes, but they were also shielded from budgetary considerations because of the public trust involved—the networks had a civic responsibility not to hinder their news reporters with mundane matters like cost. CNN's success, however, suggested that the major-network news divisions were overblown, inefficient, and overly expensive, particularly when it came to paying superstar salaries to its anchorpeople. After the major networks were in turn bought up by larger corporations in 1985, this question of civic duty versus fiscal responsibility was argued repeatedly between the network news divisions and their new owners.

Cutting Costs

Some network newspeople welcomed publicly the streamlining efforts of the corporate owners. Tom Brokaw, for example, anchor of NBC Nightly News, who earned an annual salary of __BODY__.8 million, praised General Electric's charge to the news division to cut their budget by 5 percent: "I think it's a useful exercise he's [Robert Wright, the GE-appointed president of NBC] putting everyone through." Still, costs in the NBC news department rose every year in the 1980s, even though Nightly News was two minutes shorter and aired almost a thousand fewer stones in 1987 compared to the news-casts in 1977. Further, salaries for NBC News personnel had risen astronomically since the beginning of the decade: the average NBC correspondent, for example, was paid $84,000 in 1981 and $174,000 in 1986. The message was inescapable: NBC News was paying much more for less. The realignment effort at NBC involved trimming the news staff from 110 correspondents to 70 and culminated in 1987 with the firing of NBC News president Larry Grossman, reportedly spurred by Brokaw.

CBS

The CBS news division was even more embattled during the decade due to internal conflicts and pressure from its new owner, Loews Corporation president Laurence Tisch. Within the division, anchorman Dan Rather argued for the network's tradition of journalistic excellence, which began with Edward R. Murrow and extended through the years when anchor Walter Cronkite was considered the most trusted man in America. Representing the other pole of the debate was news division president Gordon Van Sauter, whose penchant for "soft" news, some claimed, had ruined the division. Van Sauter lost his position in a series of firings that seemed like a bloodbath compared to NBC's cutbacks: Tisch mandated that CBS News slash its budget by 10 percent and lay off more than two hundred employees. The result was nothing short of mutiny. Popular 60 Minutes columnist Andy Rooney condemned Tisch in his syndicated newspaper column; anchorman Rather joined the picket lines and wrote an editorial against Tisch in The New York Times.

Dan Rather

Dan Rather was indisputably the most powerful man in the CBS news division and therefore arguably the most powerful in network journalism. He was not only the anchorman of the CBS Evening News but its managing editor. Yet he also suffered from credibility problems during the decade as well. In 1986 Rather was involved in a bizarre incident when he was violently assaulted on the street by a man who asked him, "Kenneth, what's the frequency?" The mysterious attacker was never caught, and Rather was unable to account for what had happened. In September 1987 the notorious "six-minute gap" occurred when Rather walked off the set to protest the fact that coverage of a tennis match had cut into the Evening News time slot. When CBS Sports switched to Miami, where Rather was covering Pope John Paul II's visit, the anchorman was not in front of the camera. The network went completely black for six minutes. A few months later, in January 1988, viewers were surprised by an angry exchange between Rather and Vice President George Bush over the Iran-Contra affair. Bush, looking to toughen his image for his presidential race that year, snapped his responses to Rather's questions and at one point made reference to the six minutes of dead air.

Diane Sawyer

Another of the stars of CBS's news division was Diane Sawyer, who for much of the decade was an object of bidding wars between the networks for her talents. Sawyer's case is indicative of the generous salaries the Big Three were willing to pay their news stars. ABC news director Roone Arledge finally lured Sawyer away in 1989 by offering her a five-year contract with an annual salary of __BODY__.7 million, considerably more than Peter Jennings, the ABC anchorman, was making. Jennings had first anchored the evening news in the mid 1960s, at age 27 the youngest man to hold that position; his first stint at anchor was a failure, however, and he asked to be reassigned. In the late 1970s he became one of three hosts of ABC World News Tonight along with Frank Reynolds and Max Robinson. In 1983, upon Reynolds's death of cancer, Jennings was offered the solo anchor spot. Although hesitant because of his first failed effort, he agreed to take the anchor's desk and soon was fighting hard for control over the evening news. With Jennings as anchor World News Tonight began to climb in the ratings. In 1988 he was named Best Anchor by the Washington Journalism Review, and that same year a Gallup poll listed his believablity rating among viewers at 90 percent.

Change

For all the pressures from outside and inside, network news actually changed in appearance little during the 1980s. Brokaw, Rather, and Jennings, all of whom became anchors in the first half of the decade, were already familiar to most viewers of the news; the nightly news broadcast was still the cornerstone of the Big Three news divisions. What did change was its content and the expectations of its corporate owners.