The Connie Chung situation remains unresolved but the “CBS Evening News” isn’t looking back.
Freed from the energy-and-attention-sapping distraction of an incompatible anchor team, senior staff members are now working to structure the broadcast around what might be called Team Rather: a cadre of experienced, knowledgeable correspondents who will appear frequently on the air to interpret and analyze hard-news stories with anchor Dan Rather and, in the process, distinguish CBS’ broadcast from those of its ABC and NBC rivals.
“We’d already been doing some of this,” said Andrew Heyward, “Evening News” executive producer since last fall. “But it had been overshadowed by you-know-what. For the past few months, all the attention paid to the broadcast from the outside has been about the anchor relationship and who covers what,” he said.
On the Chung front, by the way, haggling continues over questions of compensation and the timing of Chung’s freedom to work elsewhere. She is now being represented both by her long-time manager, Alfred Geller, and her brother-in-law, Washington lawyer David Povich, who entered the picture shortly after Chung was removed from the “Evening News.”
“I want us to be–and I believe we are–the best hard-news outfit in the business,” said Rather. “Now I think we have the best chance we’ve had in a while to demonstrate that.”
Rather, who is also the broadcast’s managing editor, cited recent live newsmaker interviews with Sen. Robert Dole, Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, which “send a very strong signal to the viewer of what we’re trying to do, that we’re on the news.”
CBS News President Eric Ober mentioned correspondent Bob Simon as an example of the kind of “bright, smart, interesting people who write and report really well” that Team Rather was looking to get more mileage out of.
Ober also confirmed that all five of the correspondents assigned to Chung’s canceled “Eye to Eye” prime-time magazine–Bernard Goldberg, Roberta Baskin, Bill Lagattuta, Edie Magnus and Russ Mitchell–will remain at CBS.
Goldberg, for one, with his distinctive, personal and highly skeptical on-air approach, would seem to be a natural for Team Rather.
Rather–who clearly has been energized, on and off the air, by the return to his single-anchor format — said the “Evening News” also had embarked on a campaign to upgrade the quality of the writing on the broadcast. He called it “the most concentrated effort in years.”
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Heyward said the emphasis on writing goes along with a renewed emphasis on “insights and perspective, as well as hard news” that the program must develop in order to provide viewers with something “uniquely valuable.”
Satellite transmission and reception technology, he pointed out, has stripped the individuality from pictures and basic information. Whether delivered by networks, local stations or cable-news operations, these elements are essentially the same.
But experienced, well-informed correspondents with writing and analytical skills and distinctive on-camera styles appear only on the outlet that employs them.
Emphasizing the ideas that underlie the hard news, the words that carry its meaning and the correspondents who communicate it all, Heyward said, is one way that a news provider can carve out its own unique identity in an increasingly crowded field.