Waking Up To The News Morning News Shows Have Always Favored Entertainment Over Hard News, But That Formula Is Changing

You have to get up pretty early in the morning to see the future of broadcast news: 7 a.m., to be precise.

Never have the three major networks more aggressively tweaked the over-easy hash of hard news and homespun features on “Today,” “Good Morning America” and “This Morning.”

And never has it mattered as much, given viewing trends. Tom Brokaw may win headlines for ending a decade of ratings dominance by Peter Jennings at dinner time, but Brokaw’s “NBC Nightly News” ratings so far this season are flat compared with last year. Meanwhile, NBC’s “Today” viewership is up 9 percent.

As viewership for prime-time entertainment shows and evening newscasts continues its chronic decline, morning shows are offering the potential for real growth.

When “Today” began, in 1952, viewers of the first network morning-news program shared breakfast with Dave Garroway, who was known for his relaxed, conversational manner. A year later, “Today” added chimps J. Fred Muggs and Phoebe B. Beebe - and the show became a popular and financial success.

That legacy of favoring entertainment over news in the morning continues. The networks see 7 a.m. as a time when “viewers are watching in their boxer shorts, with a toothbrush in their mouth, paste dribbling,” says Jeff Zucker, executive producer of NBC’s “Today.”

But suddenly, the morning and evening approaches to news don’t seem so different after all. The turning point: O.J. Simpson’s criminal trial.

“Late-breaking developments on the West Coast sometimes left the morning shows (as) the networks’ first opportunity to report,” says Andrew Tyndall, whose Tyndall Report tracks network news trends for the broadcast industry.

The lesson wasn’t forgotten in last year’s election, or for such stories as the late-night crash of TWA Flight 800. The Heaven’s Gate mass suicide in Southern California again showcased the morning shows as a breaking-news service.

Meanwhile, evening newscasts are moving more toward features and shorter stories that presume viewers increasingly watch those newscasts just as they always have in the morning - in snippets, with shortened attention spans dictated by the need or wish to be someplace else.

But the morning shows aren’t about to abandon their warm-and-fuzzy approach. And with their two-hour daily airtime - far more than any other newscast - they have increasing importance in network news that goes beyond the $400 million they collectively gross for the networks each year.

The morning shows are now kitchen sinks, sometimes setting the network’s news agenda for the day with interviews - as Sunday-morning shows like “Meet the Press” have done for decades - and repeating bits of the previous night’s newscasts, while promoting what’s going to air on that night’s shows. Did you miss Diane Sawyer’s interview of Mark Fuhrman on “PrimeTime Live”? You could catch several minutes of excerpts on the next morning’s “Good Morning America.”

Recent headlines suggest that network news divisions are in round-the-clock upheaval. Bryant Gumbel just bolted NBC for CBS. ABC News president Roone Arledge was kicked upstairs, and big changes loom at that network’s news division. These developments have most immediately affected the breakfast shows. Consider:

In the two months since co-host Gumbel signed off, “Today” is spotlighting the softer chemistry of co-hosts Katie Couric and Matt Lauer. It’s working: Ratings are higher than ever.

A continuing series called “Our Favorite Things” force-feeds viewers the pop-culture tastes of the show’s new lineup of personalities. As a result, fans now know that “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” is Katie’s favorite movie, while “Raiders of the Lost Ark” is weatherman Al Roker’s. Matt wouldn’t mind having supermodel Christy Turlington over for dinner, along with FDR and Winston Churchill. And “My Favorite Things,” from “The Sound of Music,” is newsreader Ann Curry’s favorite song (“It just lifts me up,” she said).

CBS has given up trying to compete with NBC and ABC in personalities. “This Morning,” which last summer booted co-hosts Paula Zahn and Harry Smith for newcomer Jose Diaz-Balart and former newsreader Jane Robelot (plus weatherman/entertainment editor Mark McEwen), has devolved into a rote news service that has more in common with CNN’s Airport Channel than with its broadcast rivals.

ABC’s “Good Morning America,” two years ago the leader of the pack, “clearly needs to be fixed, and we’re doing that,” Arledge told TV Guide, adding that he intends to look at every aspect of the show. The touchiest is the replacement of veteran co-host Charles Gibson. ABC fears a repeat of the 1989 ratings collapse at “Today,” when NBC replaced popular co-host Jane Pauley with Deborah Norville.

Joan Lunden, Gibson’s co-host, just renewed her contract and isn’t being blamed for the ratings drop. Her omnipresence on the covers of checkout-counter magazines and in self-help book racks is considered a public-relations asset - and one reason the show’s ratings aren’t even worse. A recent week in which Lunden was on vacation left Gibson and co-host Cynthia McFadden dully anchoring a show that came to life only with more TV-savvy guests, such as “Judge Judy” Sheindlin, of the syndicated courtroom show.

But the emphasis on names over news goes beyond the stars of these shows. What appears to be a healthy debate about an issue or personality often winds up as an entertaining promotion for a future segment, often highlighting a network coup such as landing “Shine” pianist David Helfgott or Simpson-case pariah Fuhrman.

“These days, the point at the shows seems to be more getting guests than reporting,” says Tyndall. And when the shows land a whopper, of course, the interview can conveniently be excerpted on that night’s newscast.

News hasn’t been entirely forgotten on these shows, but it has changed. Over the past year, “Today” has increased the number of stories in the most-watched first half-hour to three or four, instead of two. “I wanted to give people more of a taste of the world,” Zucker says, “the feeling that if they didn’t like this segment, stick around, and in 4-1/2 minutes there’d be another topic. It’s quicker-paced. There are more stories in there, more segments, and perhaps it’s more lively as a result.”

It also puts undue time pressure on the opponents in those first-segment debates on “Today,” which have become less illuminating and increasingly chaotic of late.

“You two will have to finish this conversation over a cup of coffee,” Couric admonished two debaters who couldn’t shut up the other day. Although the morning shows have long aired such debates between guests (a gimmick as old as ABC’s “Nightline”), they’ve become more frequent since the Simpson trial, which accentuated the trend of daily pitting prosecution and defense attorneys against each other. Cable shows such as CNBC’s “Rivera Live” quickly picked up and amplified the gimmick.

Even news headlines, read by a Robelot or Curry or Elizabeth Vargas (on “Good Morning America”), have taken a subtle turn in the morning. An emphasis on crime news in the first half-hour is yet another legacy of the morning shows’ O.J. success, especially on “Today.” Thus, murder victims JonBenet Ramsey and Ennis Cosby, and the chilling footage of the recent L.A. shootout between police and robbers, have begun to bump some of the drier national and foreign news.

Still, the bottom line remains the same. In the words of Lane Vennardos, a CBS News vice president: “We’ve got to give people the single most important thing they want to know about, which is, is the world still there and what’s the weather going to be.”