Quality in the Off-Hours

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch

Television has this strange habit of doing its best in the off-hours. To culture critics denouncing TV's wasteland, the explanation is simple: whatever is aimed at mass audiences is inevitably broader, shallower and shoddier.

This may be true of car-chase dramas and comedies with laugh tracks, but network news coverage isn't shoddy. CBS, ABC and NBC each spend about a million dollars a week on their nightly news. Big budgets made possible the satellite reporting from West Beirut; large American audiences agonizing over what they saw (including one viewer in the White House) hastened the ceasefire. But if network news is indispensable, it is also inadequate. Its fatal flaw is fear of the bored viewer switching channels. Those who get their news mostly from TV, as most Americans do, end up spottily informed. Richard Nixon, who can be right some of the time, says that "television is to news what bumper stickers are to philosophy."

Perhaps this is why we are becoming a half-informed country. Gallup, testing whether the public supported Reagan in his opposition to the Soviet pipeline, discovered that only half the people had even heard of the project. The Washington Post-ABC poll finds that only four of ten Americans followed the news from Lebanon closely. To news junkies who try to keep up on events (perhaps a declining breed), TV speaks in some depth and detail only in the off-hours.

The audiences of about 4 million to 5 million Americans drawn by each of the three networks' Sunday interview shows would be an impressive number for newspapers or magazines, but not for TV. Still, such low-budget shows bring prestige to the networks and are good for their consciences.

The programs come in two kinds, orderly or contentious. CBS's Face the Nation and NBC's Meet the Press let a guest finish a sentence. On ABC's This Week with David Brinkley, questioners interrupt and badger the guest, which works well with facile and thick-skinned politicians, but can be unfair to the reflective. Sometimes these shows make headlines; their real value is to give viewers a sense of public figures they have only read about.

Without the lure of big names, the nightly The MacNeil/Lehrer Report over 270 public television stations consistently provides TV's best discussion of public affairs. Robert MacNeil, once of NBC, is a refugee from network news ("aware of its frequent triviality, its distorting brevity, its obsession with action and movement, its infantile attention span"). His was the radical idea to devote an entire program to one timely subject. He found a partner in Jim Lehrer, "the single most intelligent person I have ever worked with." On fast-breaking news, MacNeil and Lehrer do an impressive job of rounding up people knowledgeable on a subject. Network executives, seeing the program win so many awards, condescendingly praise it as worthy; it is far more than that, even though there are nights when foreign accents become too thick, or economists drone too long over their hedgings. There is now an imitator in ABC's late-night Nightline with Ted Koppel; he is well-briefed and quick-witted, but it isn't in him to be as self-effacing as MacNeil or Lehrer.

Networks that spend the livelong day assembling the biggest possible audiences to sell to advertisers find programs with lower ratings embarrassing. ABC'S Roone Arledge gave the Brinkley show a full hour of air time and a bigger budget so that it could gallivant around the world interviewing leaders. It has become the best combination of news and comment on TV, but Arledge, who would like to transfer it to Sunday-night prime time, fears it wouldn't get the ratings. Reuven Frank, president of NBC News, says: "Ninety percent of the people aren't going to watch Meet the Press, either because of its time period or area of interest.

You're not going to get twelve-year-old kids from a blue-collar family watching that show. And trying to tailor it to them, you'd be selling the serious watcher short." In so commercially competitive a world as TV, perhaps quality survives best when most people aren't being appealed to, and aren't watching.

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