Category: State of the Fourth Estate



By George Merlis

Television news at both the network and local levels is in a state of flux -- and the flow seems to be to be going in the direction of less news. News managers are desperately chasing a dwindling audience and that chase, thus far totally fruitless, is exacting a grievous price on coverage of real news.

Two cases in point, one national the other local: The Stars vs. the Grunts and
Real Housewives of KNBC News.

Stars vs. Grunts

I was doing a media training workshop for an executive in a Euro zone country and learned from him that in the zone it is considered bad form for a CEO to earn more than 20 times the average wage of his workers. Here in the U.S. CEOs typically earn 100 to 200 times the salary of the average worker.

In the world of television news, the earnings disparity between the stars who read the news and the grunts who actually commit journalism and gather it has been growing for a very long time and has reached 100-to-one in the most egregious case: Katie Couric’s $15 million contract to anchor the CBS Evening News.


CBS's Couric has a lot to smile about

When I joined CBS News in 1982 I was stunned to find that the so-called Tiffany network was outgunned and outmanned on every front by my alma mater, ABC News. ABC devoted more and more advanced resources to news coverage than CBS. Soon after I got there CBS underwent an economic contraction and the already-skimpy news division suffered large cuts. I was told to slash the budget of the CBS Morning News by ten percent; I could cut anything except the multi-million dollar salaries of my two anchors. I managed shave ten percent out of the budget without firing anybody by cutting back on the number of field stories I would do and booking more in-studio interviews, reducing satellite time and eliminating some studio time and tape facilities. But the president of CBS News, referring to the famous CBS skyscraper headquarters building, told me: “Black Rock wants to see blood -- fire somebody.” I fired someone bearing the name of a famous media company, figuring she would find new employment in one of her family’s many outlets. She did. But I could have achieved the ten percent saving without losing a soul and without compromising the journalism of my show if I had been able to shave a million or so from the anchors’ salaries. The way I see it, after your first two or three million in salary, do your really need more? Especially if you come to work at 4:30 a.m. and leave at 4:30 p.m. You don’t have time to spend your money.

The epidemic of inflated anchor salaries began when ABC News lured Barbara Walters from NBC News in 1976, paying her network news’ very first million-dollar salary. At the time, I was at ABC, producing Good Morning America, and was stunned that Walters was being paid about as much money as my entire on-air team combined and twice the salary then paid the President of the United States. I asked myself how could someone reading news about the President be worth twice as much as the President? Walters was also paid about three times the salary of her co-anchor, Harry Reasoner. Up until the Walters deal, network news stars generally earned about seven or eight times the salary of the news-gathering grunts. Walters’ seven-figure salary put an end to all that.

CBS’s Couric, is the highest-paid newscaster in history. Her salary sucks the journalistic oxygen out of CBS News. While she continues collecting her full paycheck for anchoring a news show that has been consistently mired in third place, CBS is firing about 120 news staffers.

Over at ABC no one makes that kind of money, but there is a bench full of high-priced anchor talents -- Good Morning America, the Evening News, Nightline -- and ABC is firing some 400 real news-gatherers, a quarter of its staff. Adding insult to injury, shortly after announcing its newsroom massacre, ABC News hired yet another costly star for its stable: Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s globe-trotting foreign correspondent.


Christiane Amanpour: Out of the cold and into ABC's fold.

Amanpour signed on to replace George Stephanopoulos as the host of the Sunday morning “This Week” program. So the network is taking a real reporter, paying her much more money and then having her NOT report. Instead she will preside over ABC’s weekly presentation of politicians delivering well-rehearsed talking points. Talk is cheaper than journalism. And as long as the networks pay a disproportionate amount of money to their anchors, we’re probably going to be getting a lot more talk and a lot less news.

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The Real Housewives of KNBC

KNBC, the NBC owned and operated station in Los Angeles, produces a dismal newscast. In the past, I’ve devoted a blog entry to one lapse and written to the FCC to (fruitlessly) complain about its shoddy journalism. Finally I stopped watching, which is probably a good thing for my blood pressure because it meant I missed a recent miscarriage of journalism. It seems the station, had one of the women from the Bravo network's “reality” show “Real Housewives of Orange County” “report” a story about credit cards.


"Real" housewife Vicki Gunvalson, KNBC's reporter in a staged news segment on credit card regulations.

This high jink had consequences. (I’m assuming jink is the singular of jinx, although I can’t find justification for that usage in the dictionary.) Steve Lange, Vice President for Content, the minor-mind of the misadventure, was sacked for not living up to KNBC’s journalistic standards. KNBC’s journalistic standards are a joke; the bar is set so low the disgraced Jayson Blair, the New York Times faker of news stories, could meet KNBC’s standards. The Los Angeles Times ran an excellent account about Lange’s lapse.

Did you notice Lange’s former title? “Vice President, Content.” Used to be, the person who ran the news operation at a TV station was called a news director. Now he’s a content provider. Just the title speaks reams about the state of the fourth estate at NBC’s owned and operated stations. Maybe KNBC’s next “content provider” can add some news to the “content” mix. Don’t hold your breath for that.

Final note: Jayson Blair is now a “life coach.” His web site promotes his credentials but conveniently omits his embarrassing New York Times career. Bottom line: He still can’t report the facts!

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