Newscasting: Filling the Front Page

A sobbing woman in a soot-stained house dress picks through the burned-out ruins of her house. A mud-caked G.I. wearily slumps into his foxhole and mutters that war is hell. A phalanx of policemen plows into a mob of shouting demonstrators and drags them off to the patrol wagons.

These scenes, flashed into the living rooms of more than 30 million Americans last week, were notable for the fact that they could be seen in near carbon-copy similarity on any one of the three TV networks’ newscasts. The tendency to cover the news in triplicate is less attributable to a lack of imagination than it is to the limitations unique to TV journalism. Since TV is so much a visual medium, the networks are prone to judge a news story solely on its pictorial value. Thus, in covering fires, wars and riots, all the cameras point in the same direction—toward where the action is. What could give the coverage distinction is an analysis of the action, but as servants of the tyranny of time, newscasters are compelled to explain only what can be crammed into a few scant minutes.

Baby Howitzers. Nowhere are these problems more critical than in Viet Nam. “This is really TV’s first war,” explains Edward Fouhy, head of CBS’s Saigon bureau. “Men are fighting, getting wounded and dying. That has tremendous impact; but transmitted right into the living room, it can be quite out of context with the whole picture here. We’re still trying to find the best way to cover it.” In many cases, important stories that do not readily lend themselves to pictorial treatment—such as the economic and social rehabilitation of South Viet Nam—get little or no air time. “You can spend several days digging out a difficult story,” complains one TV correspondent, “then lose out on play to a bloody action story with no meaning or message.” The result—war brought into U.S. living rooms every night—helps explain why it is that so many Americans are so frustrated over Viet Nam. One network staffer there says: “Why should I miss the big shows by explaining too much? We hit hard with the visuals and leave the broader explanations to the press.”

Equally nettlesome is the problem of keeping up with the action while lugging around 100 Ibs. of cameras, amplifiers, power packs, recorders, lights and film—in addition to full field gear. The cameras, which look like baby howitzers on stilts, were designed in the 1930s for Hollywood studio use; they are not worth much in the paddies, but they do make good targets: at least eight TV newsmen have been wounded in the past year. Says Dick Rosenbaum, ABC’s Saigon bureau chief: “If our crew goes out the right side of a chopper, it may get no action. If the competition goes out the left side and finds action, how do you get over to that side under fire? Sometimes you can best describe getting good combat footage as luck.”

Mocking Mock-Up. On the domestic front, it is sometimes the newsmen who make the combat. The sight of a TV camera’s hot eye dollying in on a protest picket line can be the spark that ignites a riot. All too aware of this, the networks now instruct their film crews to travel in unmarked cars, dispense with floodlights, and keep their lenses capped until there is something to film. Still, it is often too obvious that demonstrators screaming slogans at the cops are also performing for the cameras. The networks, always fearful that they will be scooped by the competition, cover many insignificant demonstrations, lending the impression that if a man wants to appear on the 7 p.m. news all he has to do is get a sign and march around for a while.

No one is more aware of these shortcomings than the TV newsmen themselves. Mindful that perhaps two-thirds of the U.S. public looks to the tube as its primary source of news, they are constantly seeking to improve their product. The latest emphasis is on expanded coverage. CBS recently made up a dummy of the New York Times’s front page filled with all the words read by Walter Cronkite on a single newscast. The shocker was not the content but the size: Cronkite’s piece filled only six of the Times’s eight columns. The self-mocking mock-up was the work of CBS News President Richard Salant, and its message was clear: CBS news, as well as the news departments of other networks, wants—indeed needs—to fill out its electronic front page with a full hour of news instead of the 30-minute evening program.

Gut Feeling. Breaking the 30-minute barrier is not just a matter of wishful thinking. In an effort to expand its coverage, NBC has already begun experimenting with the format of the Huntley-Brinkley Report. Instead of hop-scotching through a long list of news items, the dulcet duo now devote more time to fewer stories—much as they would do on an hour show. One evening last week, for example, Cronkite covered 18 stories while Huntley and Brinkley ran only twelve, eight of them brief. The major four consisted of an extended report on the forest fires in California, a talk piece on the annual Governors’ Conference, a roundup of antidraft demonstrations and—considering that H.B. have a news hole of only 23 minutes—an innovative ten-minute analysis of an East German film on U.S. prisoners in North Viet Nam.* The show has also initiated in formal discussions on the day’s events with Correspondents Sander Vanocur and John Chancellor in Washington, Douglas Kiker in New York, and Jack Perkins in Los Angeles. Many newsmen feel that the best time period for this new kind of format would be at 10 or 10:30 p.m. “We have a gut feeling,” says Chet Huntley, “that if they give us a late-evening slot we can come up with higher ratings than some of the entertainment shows.”

Only an attempt by the networks can test Huntley’s feeling. It may be that viewers simply will not want to sit through an hour’s session—at least not until TV news presentation has made even further improvements in technique, style and content.

*Such are the pressures of TV economics that NBC devoted a lot of time to the film probably to justify the $12,000 that it paid for it.