Word: cbs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Here's a game to play while watching the onslaught of new situation comedies being offered by the networks this fall. Try to imagine the original meeting between the shows' creators and the network executives. For CBS's Princesses, for example, it must have gone something like this...
THREE BLIND MICE: HOW THE TV NETWORKS LOST THEIR WAY by Ken Auletta (Random House; $25). It's no secret that CBS, NBC and ABC began hitting the skids in the mid-1980s; this long book reports the high-level pratfalls in meticulous and sometimes gossipy detail...
...whipped into shape. (Why, Welch wondered, was there so much agonizing over layoffs at NBC when hundreds of people were getting axed at GE's turbines division? "You think they're happy?" he snapped.) Tisch, the Loews chairman who had never fired an employee before taking over CBS in 1986, is portrayed as a Wall Street trader with no strategic vision and few management skills. Tom Murphy, who engineered Capital Cities Communications' 1985 acquisition of ABC, is the hero of this tale by default. Though Cap Cities' no-frills style caused a rude culture shock at ABC, eventually Murphy proved...
...book publishing. To be sure, Auletta's 600-plus-page account could use trimming. But his writing is never less than serviceable, and usually quite lucid. A bigger problem lies in the subject itself. Each of the episodes Auletta recounts -- Tisch's fight to gain control of the CBS board, ABC News president Roone Arledge's battle to keep 20/20 on Thursdays at 10 p.m. -- was once a hot topic in media circles. Today they seem more like questions for a 1980s edition of Trivial Pursuit. In his zest for detail, Auletta trudges dutifully through events that are now just...
Then there are the financial realities of modern journalism. Monstrous as the Moscow extravaganza was -- the TV networks couldn't resist sending their anchors, and CBS dispatched seven camera crews -- many news executives have concluded that they can no longer afford saturation coverage of all presidential trips. (The overall cost of just the press centers in Moscow and Kiev was $250,000.) The Associated Press sent 11 staff members on the trip, a third less than the number that covered the Reagan-Gorbachev summit...