Don't Tell Us What to Think

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch

The big change among the network evening news shows is not the expensive chair rotations between the anchormen. The real shift is the injection of more opinion in the news, and this raises questions.

Sometimes Bill Moyers as commentator sits at Dan Rather's elbow; a few nights later he can be doing a stand-up broadcast in a Warsaw square, newly arrived but confident and omniscient as ever. Over at NBC, John Chancellor, no longer at the anchorman's desk but sitting to one side, talks with pictures and maps, and seems happier as a commentator than as a news reader. Temperamentally, he has always been an explainer. These appearances are a long way from the days of Eric Sevareid, looking handsomely lugubrious and furrowed, as he made a few rueful but neutral remarks about events.

With audiences of 13 million, the evening news does have to be more temperate than late-night talk shows. Chancellor wants to do "lawyer's briefs, tightly reasoned, not opinionated." He aims to "open up the not-fully-made-up mind."

Moyers, given unprecedented leeway at CBS, is a different matter. Bright, ambitious and articulate, he set out to be a Baptist preacher, became Lyndon Johnson's press secretary, and has built up a considerable television following, almost a cult, for his documentaries. At 47, he is on the way to becoming a formidable asset for CBS, but riskily so in ways that he and CBS may not realize. His documentary 3 1/2 weeks ago, on Reagan's poverty victims, was powerful stuff and drew a Reagan demand for a half-hour reply. CBS refused. Critics have sought to discredit Moyers for having been Johnson's press secretary. But this is to obscure a larger point that applies equally to CBS's Diane Sawyer, who worked for Nixon, or ABC's Pierre Salinger, who worked for Kennedy: at one time in their careers all were morally at ease in putting out the news in such a way as to further the career of, or limit the damage to, a President they worked for. "I'm not a New Deal liberal," Moyers says. "I've done nothing partisan since 1967.1 think you can be born again professionally. I can escape my past though some people don't want me to. I have escaped it."

What frustrates him most, he says, is that in 1 min. 45 sec. it is difficult with a complex matter to "build a case for the point you make." Once when Rather gave him five minutes to talk about an Alaska pipeline bill, Moyers concluded: "On this bill, the two-party system was not up for grabs. It was up for sale." Strong stuff. Delighted, Ralph Nader's reformers sent every Congressman a copy. But listen to the CBS code of standards: The analyst's "function is to help the listener to understand, to weigh, and to judge, but not to do the judging for him." Moyers says: "I try to stay on this side of advocacy, but it's a dancing line, and sometimes I've been accidentally across that line."

There is a restlessness about Moyers' career, a sense of peaks unsealed but longed for. Is it the political urge, which has tempted him several times? Moyers denies it: "I have taken the vow. When I finish all this, I hope to go teach." But he knows that people can get confused by his various styles of commentary--as advocate (Alaska pipeline story), as impressionistic reporter (Poland, El Salvador), or doing "straight-into-the-camera essays," sometimes punctuated by pictures.

Maybe a central problem, for Chancellor as for Moyers, is that illustrated commentary blurs the distinction between news and opinion. The difficulty is television's strange mismatch of eye and ear: the ear often skeptically disputes what it is told, but the eye accepts as reality the picture before it. Words that might seem bland on an Op-Ed page can take on unexpected and unpredictable force when matched with pictures. Perhaps this is why, in a libel case in Cleveland, a federal judge refused to admit the typed transcript of a broadcast as evidence, ruling that the jury would have to decide on the "spoken words and images."

Fred W Friendly, a pioneer of television journalism, knows the power of the combination: "Pictures can so create a climate that at the last moment a comment can be just a raised eyebrow." But, he adds, commentary is self-defeating if the viewer says, "Now that I know how it came out, I know how they chose their pictures." With all three networks gussying up, or glitching up, their news, they need to reconsider whether analysis becomes opinionated show biz instead of a momentary oasis of reflective comment.

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