Newscasting: Duel at Daybreak

For 17 years, CBS has been trying to find a worthy contender for NBC’s Today show. Veterans and beginners were thrown into the 7-9 a.m. time slot: Walter Cronkite, Dick Van Dyke, Mike Wallace, Will Rogers Jr., Jimmy Dean. The only stayer was a kiddie show, Captain Kangaroo. Finally, CBS limited itself to a half-hour Morning News, which concentrated on national and foreign affairs.

Now CBS has once again entered the lists by revamping the Morning

News. The show, for which some 168 stations have been lined up (compared with Today’s 195), now lasts a full hour and is called CBS Morning News with Joseph Benti. The format eschews such Today specialties as book plugs, chitchat among the cast, skits from upcoming musicals and reviews. It generally sticks to newscasting by Benti, offbeat stories by Hughes Rudd, interviews by Ponchitta Pierce, a comely former bureau chief for Ebony magazine. Benti, 36, and Brooklyn-born, sees his new assignment this way: “Our job is to create a new audience, or to take the old audience and make it aware of hard news in the morning.”

The “hard news” concept, the show’s basic theme, includes all the important events that have happened since the 11 p.m. newscasts of the previous night. “We won’t use hashed-over news,” Benti insists. “It is either new, or our way of approaching it is new.” One of the new approaches is a continuing series on life in the ghetto, interpreted by Correspondent John Hart. By zeroing in on a two-block area along Washington’s Columbia Road, the Bend team hopes to involve its audience in the problems and progress—or retrogression—of a small group of ghetto people.

The program is clearly still on its shakedown cruise. Benti himself is engaging and incisive, but he has yet to emerge with distinctive authority and character. Hughes Rudd, who has a growing reputation as a writer of short stories and published a 1966 collection, My Escape from the CIA and Other Improbable Events, handles the offbeat news. Ponchitta, 26, is obviously learning by doing and has awkward moments, as if suddenly numbed by awareness that the staring camera eye is on her.

In Benti, CBS has an undoubted if minor exclusive: he is the nation’s only Italian-Irish newscaster who is also a dropout from four Brooklyn high schools. After hitches in the Army and the Air Force, where he got his high school diploma, Benti in 1954 went to Indiana State Teachers’ College on the G.I. Bill, later earned his master’s at Iowa University.

While in college, Benti did part-time broadcasting, later worked at TV stations from Missouri to California. He settled down at Los Angeles KNXT, a CBS-owned-and-operated station, where he became political editor. He chaired the Western Regional Desk during the network’s election coverage in 1968, and was heard by millions as anchor man on the news reports following the murder of Senator Robert Kennedy.

Benti’s new morning program so far has caused no tremors on the Today show: its ratings (5,000,000 viewers) and revenues ($17 million annually) are at alltime highs. Today sometimes shuffles its guest line-up to keep abreast of breaking stories, but Schulberg has not meddled with what he calls “my odd ecumenical combination” of easy-going Hugh Downs, aloof Barbara Walters, gabby Sportscaster Joe Garagiola and crisply confident Frank Blair. Unlike Benti & Co., the Today people think that “hard” newscasting cannot draw morning audiences or sponsors as readily as folksier hosts.