CBS Evening News is undergoing a quiet transformation and so far not the radical change that had been contemplated in the past year.
Another part of the shift began Monday as 60 Minutes veteran Rome Hartman took over as executive producer of the number three newscast, replacing Jim Murphy, who left before Christmas.
But Hartman and anchor Bob Schieffer say they aren't going to make wholesale changes to the house that Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather built.
"I'm going to try from the very start to raise the bar of our storytelling, reporting," Hartman said in a recent interview. "I want to break news, I want our reporting to be relentlessly original. But it's not going to be a radically different broadcast."
Hartman said there won't be different graphics or other eye-catching changes.
"You're not going to see anything radically different," Hartman said. "This is a good broadcast. It's been a good broadcast, and we're going to make it better."
Long an also-ran in the nightly newscasts, CBS has had more and more reasons for cheer recently at its West 57th Street Broadcast Center. After a serious wound from "Memogate"--the flawed report about President George W. Bush's Vietnam service--and Rather's departure after 24 years as anchor, Schieffer and the rest of the team have, since March, been righting the ship and launching the future of the news division. Ratings are up, as is morale.
Even as CBS News conducts its not-always-secret wooing of Today cohost Katie Couric, Hartman and Schieffer aren't treating the current CBS Evening News as temporary. The fate of the newscast, in one respect, has been in doubt for more than a year because Schieffer initially was a temporary anchor. And though CBS chief Leslie Moonves had been unimpressed with former CBS News president Andrew Heyward's efforts to remake the evening news, he's happy with what Schieffer has done.
Schieffer opened up the newscast and made it less stiff since he started in March. In an interview, Schieffer said he considers himself more of a "player-coach" who is trying to spotlight the next generation of CBS News. That's Lara Logan, Trish Regan, Sharon Alfonsi, and Lee Cowan, among others, as well as such other established correspondents as Gloria Borger, Bob Orr, and Jim Axelrod.
"These are people you can build a news department around. That's what we're going to do. My job is to make sure these people get on television," Schieffer said. He added: "You've got to have a good mix of veterans and younger people. I'm not the one that gets the news here. They're the ones who get the news."
While still firmly in third place, CBS is the only nightly newscast season-to-date to see an increase in total viewers (up 216,000 through January 1, compared with about 600,000 declines at ABC and NBC). That improvement is due in no small measure to Murphy, whose six-year tenure was the longest of any executive producer in CBS Evening News history.
"We could not have done this without him," Schieffer said.
Schieffer's own future? He said he's having fun and enjoying himself but knows the assignment isn't permanent.
"It depends on Katie," Schieffer said of the options Couric is said to be weighing as her contract at NBC News expires. "I hope we can get her here."
Source: Reuters via Yahoo! News
1 comment:
No radical changes = continued bias.
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