‘Serious News’ Remains A Priority For Rather, Cbs
The question for the “CBS Evening News” last Monday was whether to chase the tabloids on the tale of a Manhattan woman jilted by the groom at her $65,000 wedding.
When some executives argued against it, one CBS staffer said, “Are you out of your mind?” But CBS passed on the abandoned bride, who wound up on “NBC Nightly News,” to make room for a Bob Simon report from South Africa and a Rita Braver investigation of security problems at a Colorado nuclear plant.
During his years in the ratings cellar, Dan Rather told anyone who would listen that he remains committed to hard news. Now, with the broadcast inching up in the Nielsens, Rather & Co. are feeling vindicated.
“I don’t understand the ratings. I never have,” Rather admits. But, he says, “we want a core audience that cares about serious news. We want to be as close as we can to a broadcast of record. …”
Two weeks ago, CBS slipped past ABC’s “World News Tonight” into second place, just three-tenths of a ratings point behind front-running “NBC Nightly News.” Last week, CBS slid back to third, but only half a point separated the three newscasts. In the season to date, CBS is up 6 percent, NBC up 4 percent and ABC down 6 percent.
NBC, the most feature-oriented of the Big Three, has “broken the mold,” as anchor Tom Brokaw put it, by playing down dull Washington and foreign stories. CBS and ABC produce more traditional newscasts.
“A year or so ago, we were looking at the success of NBC in the wake of the O.J. Simpson trial, and we made the mistake of temporarily going in that direction,” says ABC anchor Peter Jennings. “We decided we were going to be more populist, to put it politely. I don’t think it helped us at all. It blurred our identity.”
Now, Jennings says, “we are closer to our roots than we have been over the last year. … We’re much more inclined to run from the JonBenet Ramsey story.” He calls CBS’ claim to the hard-news crown “eyewash.”
NBC Vice President Bill Wheatley says the differences are “at the margins. We cover the day’s most important news developments, and when there’s discretion, we try to select stories that are most relevant to our audience.”
According to media analyst Andrew Tyndall, CBS this year has had the most Washington coverage and the most crime coverage and trailed ABC only slightly for the most foreign stories. NBC led in coverage of health, the economy, and sex and the family.