Yale Bulletin and Calendar

February 14, 2003|Volume 31, Number 18

CBS News president Andrew Heyward

CBS executive talks about TV news
in 'a world of infinite choice'

The competition over ratings now has many television news programs locked in a struggle that can best be described as "survival of the same-est," said CBS News president Andrew Heyward during a Feb. 6 talk on campus.

Heyward's address, "One Hand Zapping: How You Are Changing News and Why You Should Care," was the Gary G. Fryer Lecture of the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism.

New technologies have transformed how television news is both produced and consumed, Heyward told the audience gathered at Linsly-Chittenden Hall for his talk.

One of the most significant of these technologies, he asserted,. is the remote control for the television. "Think about what your life would be like if whenever you had to address somebody, he or she had a device that allowed him or her to press a button and zap you into oblivion, perhaps never to return," he said.

"Come to think of it," he quipped. "I'm probably lucky they don't hand out remotes at the Gary Fryer Lecture," adding that the remote "has transformed all of television and certainly television news in a way that is ultimately important for society."

Once, there was a "comfortable oligopoly of network news" among the three major networks -- CBS, NBC and ABC -- and the anchors on their news shows wielded considerable influence, said Heyward. He recalled the time that CBS anchor Walter Cronkite came back from a trip to Vietnam and spoke out against the U.S. war effort there.

"The president of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, said to his press aide after seeing that broadcast, 'If I've lost Walter Cronkite, I've lost Middle America,'" said the news executive, noting that it was, in part, because of that broadcast that Johnson decided not to run for re-election.

"That couldn't possibly happen today," he told the audience. "There's nothing that Dan Rather or Tom Brokaw or Peter Jennings could say that would so move the president that he would actually change his mind about something."

In the years since, he said, the popularity of cable television and the Internet have introduced "an explosion of choice in how we get our news" which has, in turn, led to a "fragmentation of the marketplace" -- what Heyward described as "an embarrassment of niches."

The trend among news providers is to target "smaller and smaller audiences," he explained. "The Internet has the potential to make every audience a niche of one, with a totally customized universe, where all the news you get is only the news that you want."

This competition for audiences has led to a "paradox" in the marketplace, contended Heyward. "[Y]ou'd think that the intensity of the competition would provoke distinctiveness ... but it had actually had the opposite effect." This is especially true for the 24-hour news networks, he said, which have become "increasingly generic and interchangeable."

This "same-ness" among news providers is exacerbated by the "bizarre conflation of genres" in recent years, explained the news executive. "If you look at the way [television] dramas have changed, they've become more like news magazines, and news magazines have become more like dramas. ... That tends to blur the line in a way that makes the networks even less distinctive and unique."

While CBS, NBC and ABC boast a significantly smaller share of the marketplace than they did 30 years ago, the three networks still have an "unbelievable reach" among older viewers, Heyward said. One of the biggest challenges they face will be attracting the news consumers of the future -- the 12- to 18-year-olds who have grown up with a multitude of media options, he noted.

"There are profound differences in how young people use media," he said. Not only are they "very familiar users of the Internet," they grow up playing video games "which allows them to manipulate reality in a way that we didn't have in my generation," said the CBS president, adding that their motto tends to be "I want what I want when I want it."

"When you grow up with cable, as so many kids do now, CBS, NBC and ABC are just choices on the box. They have no primacy. They have no hierarchical authority over the others. They are just choices, no more valid than MTV or Comedy Central," noted Heyward, adding that young people today generally "get news by osmosis ... They often stumble on news while looking for something else."

"We obviously have to find ways to engage young people without patronizing or pandering or without becoming cynical about it," he said. Heyward predicts that news anchors of the future will be "more accessible, more like MTV anchors" and that networks will have to "find ways to make more news available on demand."

The news executive noted, "We're going to have to aggregate enough viewers from all these different places to be able to afford to do good programming. Programs like 'Sixty Minutes' are expensive, and you have to get enough people to watch to justify the cost of production. ...

"And that's good news for everybody in this room because it means the marketplace is working to your benefit," he said, adding, "In a world of infinite choice, I do think that quality will rise to the top. I think people will be looking for brands, providers that they can trust and rely on, and that means that those with integrity are going to continue to survive and even thrive."

Established by Nelson Poynter '27 M.A., the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism brings to campus reporters, editors and others who have made important contributions to the media. The annual Fryer Lecture honors the late Gary G. Fryer, who was Yale's director of public affairs and special assistant to the president and directed the Poynter Fellowship from 1994 until his death in 1997. Information about the Poynter Fellowship is available online at www.yale.edu/opa/news/poynter.html.

-- By LuAnn Bishop

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