From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
CBS Needs a Fresh Eye
Prized young viewers are bored stiff by network newscasts.
Free advice, as they say, often is worth what it costs. Les Moonves, who runs CBS, has been getting a lot of it on what he should do to resurrect the "CBS Evening News."
The positive is that all this attention to the evening news--advice appearing even in serious newspapers, no less--is yet another sign of its continued importance, despite the splintering of the audience among broadcasters, cable outlets and the Internet. The evening news still has a major role to play in this democracy; it can survive and even thrive if it develops new ways of serving the public.
The negative is that most of the free advice is, in fact, worth what it costs.
Mr. Moonves and his news division president, Andrew Heyward, face complicated problems that will not be easily solved. Some are beyond their control: More competition, weak audience flow from preceding programs, and changes in commuting, work patterns and lifestyles are among the things the CBS team cannot influence. And it doesn't help that despite what is arguably the proudest tradition in television news, CBS may have lost the knack for winning after too many rounds of pre-Viacom budget cuts and too many years of running last in the evening news ratings. Think of CBS News without "60 Minutes." It's grim.
That knack for winning may be more important than any specific ideas for a new evening news program. It will take confidence and even swagger to take advantage of the opportunity Mr. Moonves and everyone else sees to make the adventurous big changes that are needed. It will take the willingness to make mistakes and correct them; despite all the research and focus groups, you never really know what will work until you try it. It will take guts to stand by your decisions when chunks of your existing audience hate them and abandon you, before new audiences are attracted to what you're doing.
With so much money at stake, this is not easy--and it is not a good sign that CBS has failed to move quickly. It is not a good sign that CBS is allowing Brian Williams to settle in with the audience handed to him at NBC by Tom Brokaw. Bob Schieffer is terrific as a temporary replacement for Dan Rather, and he and his producer are playing at the edges of change, but--as Mr. Schieffer would be the first to say--he is not the future.
Some things are clear and should allow CBS to move: It cannot win by doing the same old thing as the other networks, it has less to lose than the other networks, and it still has very talented people who can accomplish change. More important, it is in the position to do the strategically right thing by doing the right thing. This is not a matter of wallowing in the "tradition of Edward R. Murrow" and the "Tiffany network." This is about earning ratings and money by attracting an audience that wants more than endless repetition of "breaking news," even as most media outlets go down-market.
Especially in the new, splintered universe of news, there are enough people out there to serve--people who crave more than they're getting and will reward sponsors for bringing it to them. And a lot of those people are the prized viewers in their 20s and 30s who are bored to tears by most of what they see on television newscasts, and have come to distrust much of it.
Once you believe in and commit to a newscast that gives people something to chew on, in a different style, the specifics are not hard.
• Summarize the news of the day in five minutes or so; figure that most people have heard it or read it anyway, and basically need reassurance they haven't missed anything. Don't waste time and resources to illustrate the same stories everyone has. Use anchors or featured reporters in New York, Washington, Los Angeles and London to do quick summaries. Use them to update the news throughout the evening, so people not living in the Eastern time zone aren't neglected.
• Spend a big chunk of time--10 minutes or so--on covering one really good story; insist that your best reporters and cameramen and editors and graphics designers take the skills they now lavish on the magazine show/tabloid story of the day, and devote the same attention to telling and explaining stories that matter to people. From many angles and from different points of view, cover health care and education and money and religion and, yes, even foreign news. Do it right, and people will watch. And don't ignore steroids and Michael Jackson trials and movies and television and other parts of the popular culture, but don't do them unless you can go beyond the headlines everyone else has.
• Give people even more to think about by ending with opinion. Not the usual suspects, but a full range. Why is Tucker Carlson relegated to a small cable audience? Why are the sensibilities of the Onion seen only on the Web and on piles of papers stacked on college campuses and a few city corners? Why not use animation and puppet caricatures to convey opinion? Why not allow Jon Stewart a weekly shot at the news on the news? And why, with all the talk about the Web and interactivity, is it so unusual to find "ordinary" citizens with something to say on television?
All of the above may well be additional proof of worth of free advice. Suggestions are not hard to find. What's hard is making the committment to move quickly down a different path--to a revitalized evening news, and a better-informed public.
Mr. Friedman was for 10 years the executive producer of ABC's "World News Tonight With Peter Jennings." He now produces "The Journal Editorial Report" on PBS.
