Word: cbs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...three-buttoned news executives. Arledge was celebrated for zippy sports coverage, instant replays, constant chatter (including the grating homilies of Howard Cosell) and ceaseless hype. Was he going to bring the same show-biz techniques to the serious business of news broadcasting? The man most worried was CBS News President Richard S. Salant, a dedicated keeper of the flame of news integrity against not only the advertising side, but also the entertainment side...
Salant left CBS this year upon reaching its mandatory retirement age of 65, but NBC quickly hired him as vice chair man for news. A lawyer by trade, he is breezy, tough and smart - and responsible. He was disturbed when ABC made Barbara Walters an anchorwoman; he was even more offended when Arledge began hyping up ABC News - a process that reached a nadir with the tabloid-style coverage of the "Son of Sam" murder case in 1977. Unable to match Cronkite's authority and popularity, Arledge countered with the gimmickry of three anchormen, "tossing" the news from Washington...
...ratings, a trend that will take time to reverse. Salant sounds like a football coach after a bad loss: "NBC has got to get its pride back. I can't stand this 'you win some, you lose some' attitude." Salant has hired Bill Small, a top CBS executive, to shake up NBC News. "They say morale's bad, wondering what kind of changes are coming here," says Salant. "They ought to be worried." But Salant still refuses to jazz up the news. Just before he arrived at NBC the network made an admirably Salantesque gesture...
...texts in front of the pictures, and a computer called the Quantel-a marvelous machine that Roone Arledge first used for some of his tricky sports effects-sucking in, widening out or moving around pictures on the screen. "Zapping the cornea," ABC's style has been called. (CBS and NBC have the gadgets too, but don't let them take over.) ABC's impressive technological wizardry, alas, is not matched by a comparable effort to assess the content of the day's news or reflect upon it, though World News Tonight is a lively illustrated headline...
...that the more conventional CBS and NBC coverage is all that free of theater. Why should correspondents have to place themselves outside the White House or the Capitol in the sun or the wind to speak their piece when it would be easier and cheaper to get into a cab and broadcast right from the studio? At least all three network news shows are no longer lookalikes. One of them overworks the eye in the interest of excitement. The other two spend vast sums photographing events but don't let pictures distract from the serious business of dispensing information...