Word: cbs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...from the lesson Sony learned when it lost the VCR wars a decade earlier. Sony's Beta lost out to VHS because its competitors made better deals with the folks who held the intellectual- property rights -- in this case, the movie companies. That, says Neuman, is why Sony bought CBS Records and Columbia Pictures. It's also why Toshiba and Itochu bought 12.5% of Time Warner Entertainment...
Unlike that of the tightly wound anchorman hero of Network, Dan Rather's public weirdness (the mysterious assaults, his live-TV walkout) preceded the indignities imposed by the network bosses (his closest CBS colleagues purged, his story ideas slighted). But the scenario is still Chayefskian, and now there's a real-life Network II: in a goose-the-ratings gambit, the bosses oblige the battered, brave protagonist (Rather) to accept a hustling, not exactly cerebral woman (Connie Chung) as his co-anchor...
...CBS executives Eric Ober and Howard Stringer suggest, implausibly, that the co-anchorship was Rather's idea; Rather recalls that Stringer broached the notion. But even Ober, for all his gush about freeing Dan to report from the field, admits the goal is better numbers. In the 12 years since Rather took over for Walter Cronkite, the show's share of the audience has shriveled by a third. Meanwhile, Tom Brokaw's piece has shrunk only 10%, and Peter Jennings' has held steady -- heroic achievements in this twilight-of-the-networks...
With Chung and Rather going on the air together next Tuesday, there is a curiously hasty quality to the rejiggering. Stringer wanted to have the deal done before the CBS affiliates' meeting this week, and he was apparently in a fret about the competition. He may be worried that Andrew Lack, the smart new NBC News president who came from CBS (where he was Chung's executive producer), will work some sudden magic at NBC. Then there's the chance CBS may lose Ed Bradley, who is being offered millions to defect...
Most common, of course, are those ubiquitous pieces touting the "real- life" story behind whatever fact-based TV movie is airing that evening. This month, for instance, local-news viewers have met the real-life policewomen who filed a sexual-harassment suit against the Long Beach, California, police department (CBS's With Hostile Intent); a real-life near victim of convicted murderer Blanche Taylor Moore (NBC's Black Widow Murders); and the real-life South Dakota woman who bore her daughter's baby (CBS's Labor of Love: The Arlette Schweitzer Story...