Assessing The War Damage

By Richard Zoglin

The anchormen have come home. Star correspondents Arthur Kent and Bob McKeown are eagerly anticipating their next contract negotiations. Even for David Letterman, the end of the war brought a sense of relief. "Finally," he said, "we can go back to ignoring CNN."

Well, some of us can. For the three broadcast networks, the repercussions of the gulf war will not be shaken off so easily. Their coverage from the Persian Gulf won big audiences and, for the most part, critical acclaim. But it cost a bundle: nearly $50 million at NBC alone, including the loss of revenues from squeamish advertisers. Losses were reportedly in the same range at CBS, though "significantly less" at ABC, according to network executives. At the same time, the war gave a major boost to CNN, which won hordes of potential new devotees with its round-the-clock saturation coverage. Now that the fighting is over, the network news divisions are surveying the damage, reassessing their mission and pondering the future. And wondering whether they have one.

War's end brought a hurried retrenchment for the Big Three's news programs. After having expanded to an hour for much of the war, the evening newscasts have gone back to their old half-hour formats. America Tonight, CBS's experimental late-night entry, which was kept alive when war broke out in January, will be pulled from the schedule at the end of the month. And network executives, faced with a war-induced budget crunch, are once again embarking on a painfully familiar task: looking for ways to cut costs.

The gulf war has, moreover, reaffirmed the new competitive order in TV news. Though each of the broadcast networks had its scoops (CBS's McKeown's in Kuwait City), its stars (NBC's Pentagon whiz Fred Francis), its high points and its low moments during the war, ABC emerged as the clear and decisive overall winner. What was once a three-way race may be developing into a long- term mismatch.

Even before the war, ABC had the highest-rated evening newscast (World News Tonight), the only established late-night analysis program (Nightline) and the deepest bench of star correspondents. During the war, that army of talent simply outgunned its rivals. The network boasted the most coolly authoritative anchor (Peter Jennings), the sharpest interviewer (Ted Koppel) and the best military analysts (Tony Cordesman, General Bernard Trainor). For lucid wrap- ups of the day's events, ABC was the place to turn -- and judging from its wide lead in evening-news ratings during the most heavily watched weeks, the place most people did turn. When ABC ran a late-night rebroadcast of General Norman Schwarzkopf's victory briefing, it drew ratings that most entertainment shows would have faced Scuds for.

CBS and NBC have been reduced to battling not just for No. 2 but also for their very survival as full-service news organizations. NBC has set up a task force to find ways to make the news operation "more efficient." Translation: more cutbacks ahead. At CBS, where downsizing was going on quietly months before the war, executives have retreated to their bunkers, refusing to comment on another expected round of cutbacks. The question is where, after years of budget slashing, these new cuts will come. "They're going to have to go back to the drawing board and look for large, large chunks," says Peter Herford, a former CBS News executive who is now director of the Benton Broadcast Journalism Fellowships at the University of Chicago.

Some new money-saving ideas are gaining support. Several network executives have proposed a wider use of pools to cover routine press conferences and such events as presidential trips. Despite weeks of complaints from journalists, the pool setup in the gulf had one advantage for the networks: it cut costs. For footage of breaking news, the networks will rely increasingly on international news services and local affiliates rather than on their own reporters. "What we're trying to do is emphasize our correspondents who have expertise and experience to bring a more analytical perspective to reporting and not try to cover everything," says Don Browne, executive vice president of NBC News. "We just can't do it anymore."

The dwindling roster of overseas bureaus and reporters may dwindle further. With the rapid-deployment capability the networks demonstrated in the gulf war, says ABC News president Roone Arledge, "maybe the bureau structure is not as important as it used to be. You still have to get out and cover the story, but you don't have to be on location all the time."

As their newsgathering resources shrink, the evening telecasts are shifting from a traditional events-of-the-day approach and embracing more magazine- style elements. The NBC Nightly News, under executive producer Steve Friedman, has dressed up its broadcasts with lengthy segments each evening on health, the family and other subjects, collectively dubbed the "Daily Difference." The CBS Evening News appears headed in a similar direction. In the midst of the war, the show's executive producer and two of its most senior staffers were replaced. New boss Erik Sorenson, 35, is a graduate of local news who has spent the past 16 months running the CBS Morning News. His plans for the evening show are not yet clear, but many insiders expect that Dan Rather -- who will mark his 10th anniversary in the anchor chair this week with little fanfare -- will be shoved aside or teamed with a co-anchor within the next few months.

The evening newscasts are groping for their role in a hotly competitive environment in which viewers can see most of the day's news well before the networks get around to their nightly summary. Local stations get news footage not only from their networks but also from such independent services as Conus (a satellite-beamed cooperative with 103 member stations in the U.S.) and CNN, which, along with its cable outlets, supplies news footage to 246 broadcast stations. Early in the war, many local stations replaced their network's coverage with reports from CNN. One of them, Minneapolis' WCCO-TV, substituted CNN's dramatic Baghdad footage for CBS's coverage on the first night of the war and drew the highest ratings of any CBS affiliate in the top 25 markets. WCCO executives say they will continue to monitor their satellite feeds and pick the best. "The system that I guess was born with the gulf war is one we will now embellish and use as our frontline plan for any breaking major story," says WCCO assistant news director John Lansing.

Most local news directors still voice support for the networks as their primary supplier of national and international news. "Our ratings with the network news have never been higher," says David Lane, general manager of Dallas' WFAA-TV. "The Persian Gulf crisis underscores the importance of network news." Yet some TV news veterans contend that the money-losing evening newscasts are an endangered species. Says Sandy Socolow, a former executive producer of the CBS Evening News: "I'm betting that by the political conventions in 1992, one or two of the networks will abandon the evening newscast as we now know it." Instead, the networks could operate as glorified wire services, supplying individual stories to stations, which could then fashion the material into their own newscast. NBC in January set up a low-cost prototype for such an approach: an affiliate news service based in North Carolina, where less-expensive, nonunion employees are putting together reports from NBC correspondents and feeding them to network affiliates 24 hours a day.

Executives at all three networks insist that no radical moves like eliminating the evening news are in the cards. ABC, with the highest ratings and healthiest bottom line, seems the most committed to maintaining the traditional news-of-the-day approach. "We have tried not to go the sensational, magazine kind of way that I think some of our competitors have," says ABC's Arledge. Says Jennings: "I have been listening to people talk about the changing format of the evening news since God was a boy. There are not many ways you can change a 22-minute format and still pretend to tell any of the news of the day."

Actually, ABC's World News Tonight was one of the first to experiment with magazine-style elements, in features like its "Person of the Week." Yet the newscast hews most closely to the fading verities of network news: it pays the most attention to international affairs, seems the least enamored of show-biz gimmicks and human-interest fluff, and has the anchorman who most approximates the Cronkite-Huntley model of Olympian detachment. While CBS's Rather and NBC's Tom Brokaw jetted to the gulf for the start of the ground war, Jennings remained at his anchor post in New York City. Some viewers and critics got a charge out of watching Rather pick through Kuwaiti ammunition stocks, but as Arledge contends, "We thought Peter was better utilized here, where he could pull the story together."

There may be a bright side for viewers in this new competitive landscape. For years the network newscasts have gone about their business in pretty much the same way, like three versions of the New York Times. Now that ABC has apparently grabbed that franchise, CBS and NBC may work harder to establish different niches. The challenge for them is to settle on a new game plan before they can no longer afford to remain in the match.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Chart by Joe Lertola

CAPTION: COMBAT PERFORMANCE

With reporting by Marc Hequet/Minneapolis and William Tynan/New York