Power Failure

Let us Now praise Bill Moyers and Robert MacNeil. They are journalists, both of them, television journalists, to be specific, and they do not make as much money as some of their colleagues on the network news shows, nor do they have anywhere near the audiences. But they have become, in the best sense, in a society that desperately needs precisely this, among our best national voices. They form an important part of our national social life line. They have done that, ironically enough, by resisting the temptations of the far more powerful life line of network television.

Let us start with MacNeil. He was once a correspondent for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, and a very good one at (continued on page 262)Power Failure(continued from page 169) that. He is intelligent, witty, composed and thoughtful. He went from CBC to NBC, where he did well but, like many of his colleagues, felt extremely frustrated. He eventually went from there to the Public Broadcasting Service, where he did a variety of reporting and anchoring. He finally became the cohost of a program called The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, one of the most civilized programs on television. The MacNeil/Lehrer Report is unique: It believes that the SALT talks and the future of South Africa and other serious issues of our day cannot be reported and explained in a minute and 30 seconds. So each night, it devotes all of its 30 minutes to one issue. At the heart of this is a belief that many issues are so important and so complicated, that to deal with them in a minute or two, as the networks do ("putting The New York Times on a postage stamp," in the immortal words of producer Fred W. Friendly), does not always clarify them. Rather, it may, in fact, confuse viewers. This has long been a problem, this tendency to trivialize the news with such cannibalized reporting, and it bothers some network officials, but not so much that they will put on an hour news show.

The MacNeil/Lehrer Report is special in that it genuinely explains issues and presents an intelligent, balanced view. It makes issues more understandable and, in so doing, it makes the world around us more believable, and more interesting and less frightening. That which we do not understand alternately either frightens us or bores us. That which we can at least partially understand can interest and excite us. On this show, MacNeil, like his colleague Jim Lehrer, has been very good; he is thoughtful and tolerant and interested and he never, as so many network television interviewers do, lapses into hokey, faked interest. Most remarkable of all, he actually seems to be listening to his guests.

Enter now Roone Arledge, he of ABC, a network that overnight has a lot of money and precious little public-affairs tradition. Arledge had been the boy wonder at ABC Sports (he had helped invent something called NFL Monday Night Football, the ultimate media event, the essential thesis of which is that which happens in the broadcasting booth is more important than that which is taking place on the field).

Arledge had anchor-person problems and ratings problems. The first generation of anchor people plucked from other networks had not worked out terribly well. Harry Reasoner seemed to lack energy and became petulant when Barbara Walters, a girl, not only was hired to share his anchor but was paid more than he was. Miss Walters, plucked from NBC, where her energy and drive had worked well on the Today show, turned out to be a disappointment as an anchor, her talents seriously misused. The ratings did not rise. So Arledge wanted to redo the show. Some people thought the anchor wave of the future was one anchor: Walter Cronkite was one anchor and he worked well. Some thought it was two anchors--either two boys (David and Chet, John and David) or a boy and a girl--but Arledge thought it should be four anchors. One here, one there, one somewhere else, and one more as well. ABC then turned to MacNeil and offered him one fourth of an anchor. He was intrigued, he was flattered: The size of the audience--ten times larger than that of PBS--was attractive and he thought ABC, on the upswing, with all its resources, might be doing some interesting things. But he was also wary. He had played the network game before and he was wary of the potential impotence of being a semianchor. An anchor was not enough. Cronkite was more than just an anchor. MacNeil would come aboard, he said, but he also wanted to be executive editor of the show. That meant that in addition to being an anchor, he would play a major role in determining the show's daily format and context. The negotiations dragged on. A lot of money was mentioned, perhaps three times as much as MacNeil was then making. Finally, ABC refused him even partial control of the show, and he, in turn, turned the network down. He stayed at PBS. We are the better for it.

•

Which takes us to the case of his colleague at PBS, Bill Moyers. Moyers, the former press secretary to Lyndon Johnson, had published Newsday for a time before proving too liberal for Harry Guggenheim. After leaving Newsday, he had become a national correspondent for PBS. There he did truly distinguished work; he had intelligence and subtlety and, unlike his colleagues on the networks, he had enough regular air time for his better qualities to emerge. In addition, he had one special quality that distinguished him: an instinctive sense of history rather than a sense of news, which allowed him to sense what was truly important about American life and thus to concentrate on the larger rather than the peripheral issues confronting his fellow citizens. (Janet Murrow, for one, thought that during Watergate, Moyers was the commentator who most resembled Ed.) But, as Moyers had always been restless in the past, he was restless at PBS. He always seemed to be caught in the powerful forces swirling about him--an intense moral sense and an immense, driving ambition. As such, he was always playing Hamlet, caught between conflicting desires and job offers: What did he really want to be when he grew up? President of the United States? Secretary of State? Cronkite? His television reporting for PBS was quite striking, and he had immediately created a true national constituency that needed and valued him, serious people in thousands of small towns who felt themselves lonely and cut off from knowledge and debate over great issues. Not surprisingly, CBS coveted what it did not have, and it made Moyers an offer to come to work in its documentaries unit. Moyers, intrigued by the difference in platforms and the size of the audiences, and also aware of the dangers ahead, pondered the offer, played Hamlet for a time and accepted it.

His tour at CBS turned out to be surprisingly short. Two years. The platform, as he had suspected, was awesome, but it was also remarkably difficult to attain. Air time was elusive. He found himself working with highly professional people who were also very clearly the stepchildren of the corporation. That which they did they did very well, but it was also clear that no one at the higher reaches of the network cared very much about documentaries. Documentaries had low ratings and caused lots of trouble. Moyers soon found himself far more frustrated at CBS than he had been at PBS: At PBS, the frustrations had been over old and faulty equipment and too little money; at CBS, it was a different problem, one that was almost spiritual, a feeling that the people he worked for thought that what he was doing did not really matter.

Yet the network did care about Moyers himself. Not necessarily Moyers and his documentaries, but Moyers the human asset. He was a star. He was what network-television executives dream about, someone so smart, so intuitive and yet so subtle, his own interior safeguards so sure, that he could deal with the most (continued on page 322)Power Failure(continued from page 262) explosive and emotional of subjects without tearing the place apart and causing financial ruin to the company. Bill Moyers had charmed older men in the past, and now William Paley quickly became enamored of him. Paley liked and admired his work and knew that Moyers was the CBS type because he was so naturally classy. But, sadly, none of that kept Moyers from being restless and unhappy at CBS and he soon began to think fondly of the grubby days at PBS when there was never enough money but there was always enough care and passion and air time. Soon he was in touch with PBS again. The executives of CBS, including Paley, were appalled. No one whom CBS wanted had ever left for PBS. If people had left in the past, they were people whom CBS was finished with. The word went out to hold Moyers at all costs. They promised him everything they could think of. He could be the next Eric Sevareid when Eric soon retired. He did not want to be the next Eric Sevareid. Perhaps he did not even want to be the first Eric Sevareid. There was talk of Richard Salant's job as president of the news division when Salant soon retired. There was talk of money, large sums of money, perhaps even $1,000,000. There was even a quick mention of Cronkite's job someday in the future.

But Moyers did not bend. He liked the people at CBS and the talent he worked with; he had just finished a documentary on the CIA's policy in Cuba that was probably the best public-affairs program of recent years, but finally he did not like the system. He felt that his audience could no longer find him, could not count on knowing where he was. His appearances were too irregular. Yet the CBS offers kept coming. There was one last meeting with Paley. The chairman was at his most persuasive and charming, which is very persuasive and charming, indeed, and he talked about the future of the company and its crucial role in a free society and how badly it needed someone like Moyers for the future. Finally, Paley asked what it would take to keep Moyers there.

"A regular prime-time show," answered Moyers, who had learned very quickly. "Much like Murrow had, on a regular schedule, with a set prime-time hour."

Now, CBS has scores of talented public-relations people, all of them smart and all of them highly paid, a large part of whose job it is to point out that things are better than ever at CBS and that there is more freedom and more access to air time than ever before. But that day, they weren't around. So Paley looked at Moyers and shook his head. "I'm sorry," Paley said. "I can't do it anymore. The minute is worth too much now." So it was that Moyers went back to PBS. We are the better for it.

•

One of the big stories of the new season that was not a story was the non-arrival of the one-hour news broadcast.

The position of the networks on the hour news show is an interesting one. They have the resources and the talent, they are almost criminally rich, they know it should be done and they argue regularly in defending their other, less attractive actions and interests about the First Amendment and the public's right to know. Yet they do nothing about it. They are like a newspaper publisher who prints one page of news and nine pages of advertising and summons the First Amendment whenever his policies are questioned by critics.

For the networks are against Government restriction. They are against the Congress' being closed off to television coverage. The executive reaches of all network presidents abound with writers skilled at writing freedom-of-the-press, public's-right-to-know speeches. Yet, in truth, nothing restricts the public's right to know so severely as the networks themselves in keeping to the half-hour news show. It brutalizes and trivializes most issues, it means that the best reporters on the networks have to report in a new language, a kind of networkese or news-speak, and it means that all subtlety and nuance are dropped from stories. In particular, it means that reporting is infinitely less intelligent than it might be if there were time. The networks periodically claim that they are interested in the hour news show, but nothing ever happens. There is always an excuse. Currently, it is the affiliates: The networks themselves claim they would like to go to the hour show but the affiliates won't relinquish that half hour. Salant, the outgoing president of CBS News, made a suggestion within the company that would easily bypass the affiliates. He suggested broadcasting an hour of news during prime time every night. So far, no one has rushed to take him up on it.

•

John Chancellor is one of the two anchor men at NBC. He is a genuinely distinguished journalist and, of the major television personalities, he is probably the favorite of senior print reporters because he is so clearly a working journalist, because he cares about the language and because he worries about the ferocious impact of the instrument he uses. Chancellor is witty, graceful and urbane, though it does not necessarily show night after night in the tight, airless format that the news shows now demand. If NBC went to an hour news show, Chancellor would clearly be the main beneficiary; his touch flourishes and his special qualities come to the surface on occasions when the news team stays on live, such as conventions and elections. To working reporters, there is something reassuring about Chancellor at work, with his combination of civility and intelligence. He is a man of comity in an explosive medium.

Herbert Schlosser, by contrast, knows nothing about news nor is there any evidence that he cares about it. He was for a time the president and chief executive officer of NBC. One should not speak ill of those who were once mighty and powerful and who have since seen their limousines returned to Carey. Those whose memory of Schlosser is vague will probably remember him best for his annual world-series appearances seated next to Bowie Kuhn. The NBC cameras slowed lovingly as they passed those two great Americans. Schlosser in his tour as the head of NBC became a celebrity and it was not surprising that he met many equally celebrated people and liked them very much. Nothing confirms fame, which is so fleeting in contemporary America, more than being around others who are famous, no matter how fleeting their fame. In particular, Schlosser liked being around Henry Kissinger, then at the height of his fame.

Schlosser, however, world-series tickets or no, was by 1977 a man in serious trouble. He was not a man of broadcasting; he had risen as a lawyer. It was said within the company that his job had been to maximize the profits at NBC and that he had been very good at it. Perhaps too good. Perhaps NBC, in his years, had been eating the seed grain and not investing enough resources in new creative ideas. Thus, the profits were good but the ratings were bad. That placed Schlosser in jeopardy. He was making a very great deal of money for NBC, but clearly not enough. He needed a gimmick, something exciting.

Shortly after both Kissinger and Jerry Ford became (involuntarily) retired, Schlosser signed them to multimillion-dollar deals for NBC. They would appear as special commentators on NBC news. They would do analysis. There would be specials about them. They would certainly become rich. Richard C. Wald, then president of NBC News, was (quite properly) appalled. It was a shocking decision, it cast doubt about NBC's political and journalistic independence, it insulted all the NBC reporters who had been used and manipulated by Kissinger--their own network was now rewarding the very man who had on so many occasions played games with them and the truth. It was the breaching of a sacred line, in terms of the news division's integrity. That is one thing Schlosser will be remembered for.

The second thing he will be remembered for is his attempt to separate Chancellor from his anchor. It was not that Schlosser thought Chancellor an unworthy journalist; it was simply that the ratings on the show were not good enough. The affiliate stations were becoming restless and had to be pacified. ABC was looming large on the horizon, rounding up wayward affiliates. There was no talk about what was wrong with the substance of the NBC show. A scapegoat was needed. Schlosser, naturally enough, preferred a scapegoat named Chancellor to a scapegoat named Schlosser. So, as he felt himself squeezed, he squeezed Chancellor. Chancellor would be the scapegoat. He would be replaced, perhaps, by someone livelier, such as Tom Snyder, who was, indeed, livelier, or by someone more handsome, such as Tom Brokaw, who was certifiably more handsome. The quality of the show was not mentioned. That was too bad, because at that time, NBC was producing what was the best and most imaginative of the three evening news shows. Each night it was running a special report called "Segment 3," which was much longer than the usual segment, sometimes five or six minutes, often strikingly illuminating, and it allowed the NBC reporters to break out of their format and made the show infinitely less predictable. By contrast, the Cronkite show, though steady and solid, had become far less imaginative and far more predictable.

That did not help Chancellor, who was going through the singularly unpleasant process of giving up his anchor while trying to look as if he were not being demoted. It was announced that he would become a special roving reporter for NBC, which was what he wanted to be, though, of course, he liked being an anchor man, too. It did not help Wald, either, that he not only had objected to the Kissinger shows but also was objecting to Snyder's becoming an anchor. It speeded Wald's own departure as head of NBC News: He was fired. He was out at NBC News and Kissinger, so to speak, was in.

•

NBC did not get a lot for its Kissinger money. There was, in the late winter of 1978, one dreadful hourlong show in which Kissinger was interviewed about European communism. It was an appalling show, on an important subject, and Kissinger, whose affection for and adherence to the truth had never been one of his stronger qualities (indeed, his disrespect for it may have been one of his great strengths), put on an offensive, tricky performance, turning a world of gray into a world of black and white.

A good, tough, well-prepared interviewer might have prevented him from doing this. But the interviewer was David Brinkley, about whom two things should be said. First, he is not a particularly good interviewer. Second, he had given one of the main farewell parties for Kissinger when he had left Washington.

It was, given the nature of Kissinger's NBC salary, a very expensive, very bad show. It turned out to be even more expensive when the ratings proved it to be 64th lowest of the 64 shows rated for that week on any network.

None of that helped Schlosser and, as he had been ready to fire Chancellor, he was soon fired himself. His ratings were not high enough and NBC wanted Fred Silverman to take over.

•

Fred Silverman was so good at making money for whatever network he worked for that when it was announced that lie was going to NBC, the stock immediately shot up. That made his acquisition an immediate success. He had been a success at ABC, too, and had helped program such shows as Starsky & Hutch, which was perhaps the most exploitive show on television, and Charlie's Angels, which was certainly the silliest. That had helped make ABC almost overnight the most successful commercial network. ABC in Silverman's reign had become better at putting on successful dreadful series than CBS, which had pioneered in the field. All that CBS could do in retaliation was put on a show called The Incredible Hulk about a monster who in moments of crisis emerged from the clothes of a perfectly nice young man (always ripping his shirt but never his pants). The monster disposed of varying oppressors and then, his good deeds accomplished, returned to street clothes.

•

The news of Silverman's coming spread good cheer throughout NBC News. The thinking, oft expressed there, was that he had in the past been so good at doing the truly dreadful things on television that he would now want to do some good things, and become a statesman as well. He made several statements praising NBC News. For the moment, Chancellor seemed to retain his anchor. He was in, Schlosser was out and Wald was in a holding pattern at the Los Angeles Times, soon to return to television, this time to ABC News.

ABC, having lost Silverman, needed new programing. It also had a lot of money to spend. Hearing that CBS' 60 Minutes was an excellent public-affairs show and a profitable one as well, ABC decided to create a comparable program of its own, called 20/20. It was put together very quickly. The first program (the others were not much better) was one of the worst public-affairs programs I have ever seen on any network. Its prime feature was Geraldo Rivera, clearly Arledge's favorite reporter, showcased as an investigative reporter. That particular report happened to be about men who used rabbits to train greyhounds for racing. A messy, nasty business. But the particular smarmy style of reporting, the exploitive use of film, some segments run and rerun, finally cast ABC not as the defender of rabbits but as an exploiter of them. The entire show was terrible. Early hosts were dropped. Hugh Downs was asked to stop selling cars in commercials long enough to host the show. His lack of real involvement in the program seemed almost painful. Each week, after a correspondent was finished reporting, Downs would ask a friendly question about what it all meant. Downs seemed to have no connection to the substance of the program and, indeed, appeared to have wandered in from another set where he was doing something else. Such as selling cars.

•

Howard Cosell remained on NFL Monday Night Football. Last season, Cosell established a record for NFL Monday Night Football for citing in the fourth quarter accurate predictions and forecasts made by Cosell in the first quarter. That gave Cosell the Annual As We Said at the Top of the Show Award. With one game added to the schedule this year, many authorities believed Cosell would be able to break last year's record.

•

NBC did a miniseries on the Holocaust. It immediately became intensely controversial. Holocaust survivors debated its validity. Some thought it too much of a soap opera. Some thought it too serious. There were debates about whether the ratings were high (for a serious program) or low (for the amount of time used). Many Americans under the age of 30 who watched the programs were astonished by what was portrayed. Their main memory of Nazi Germany, after all, since television was their main source of history, had come from a series called Hogan's Heroes. That show, run and rerun endlessly, takes the most brutal and inhumane political machine of this century and portrays it as a bunch of bumblers and buffoons all essentially harmless. I think it is the single most offensive show ever placed on television; its subliminal portrait of an entire era is shocking. Sometimes I think there must be a special place in hell for the people who were responsible for the Third Reich, with a smaller place nearby for those who trivialize it and do not respect it.

•

Alexander Solzhenitsyn should be warned. Someday someone at one of the networks will read Gulag and see an immediate sitcom: Ivan and the Terribles. About some friendly but clumsy Russian guards at a Siberian prison. One or two of the guards can be despotic; most of the prisoners are ordinary Russians, one of them unaccountably is an American and one of them a pretty young girl. It will feature attempts to smuggle in bottles of vodka.

•

ABC this year is featuring Battlestar Galactica. It is about survivors of a lost civilization looking for a far, far better place. They are pursued by bad guys, the Cylons. Galactica stars Lorne Greene. So far, it is no worse than Bonanza in spaceships. It does not necessarily widen the range of human understanding.

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CBS, not to be outdone, has a new show called People. It is about all the people in America you have always wanted to know more about. According to TV Guide, that means Farrah Fawcett-Majors, Margaux Hemingway, Liza Minnelli, Bianca Jagger, Margaret Trudeau, Cheryl Tiegs, Suzanne Somers and Halston. In the past, we have heard of art imitating life and life imitating art, but this is the first example of plastic imitating plastic.

•

This fall, Mike Wallace did a takeout for 60 Minutes on the ratings game. His show pointed out that for the past year, the ABC television network had made a reported pretax profit of $165,000,000, CBS a pretax profit of $139,000,000 and NBC a mere $102,000,000. Wallace, as part of his show, tried to interview the CBS executive in charge of programing. His request was turned down.

•

On the same show, Wallace interviewed an attractive young woman named Lin Bolen. Ms. Bolen is said to be the prototype for the Faye Dunaway character in Network and she is now the architect of a new show, W.E.B., about television executives who are even more amoral than those in Network. Mike asked her a question about who was responsible for the low level of television programing. She said it was finally the fault of the audience, which could always turn off the set. I turned off the television.

•

Some network executives find this hard to believe, but the educational level in this country is going up all the time, which means that there are more and more people who are (A) outraged by the general level of television, (B) discouraged by it or (C) bored by it. Category A has produced a rising number of serious, intelligent, well-informed citizen groups determined to raise the level of seriousness and humanity in network programing. It is a terrifying idea: People are angry, protests have been mounted, sponsors have been reached. Sears, Roebuck pulled back its advertising from Starsky & Hutch and many of their friends. Network executives were appalled. Is this really the American way? Some network executives talked about a new McCarthyism. Robert E. Mulholland, the president of NBC-TV, is quoted as saying that "television must never become a medium controlled by special interests." Well said, well said, I agree, but what does television respond to now if not special interest? For, above all else, it responds to Wall Street, and for most Americans, Wall Street classically represents a special interest, a desire for intense relentless profit far beyond their own mild expectations. For the truth is that the people who run the networks do not really control their own shows anymore. It is all too big, the pressure for ratings is so great that any true control, any true decision making on what kind of balanced programing they will present is beyond them. The market watches too closely and cares too much. They're no longer architects of broadcasting but, rather, extensions of the market, men who translate Wall Street's appetite, for ever higher ratings, into programing results. As such, there is precious little pluralism on the networks; it costs too much to be good and honorable--as Paley told Moyers, the minute is worth too much now. The people who run the networks are technician-middlemen. Somewhere along the way, as they grew more and more prosperous, they abdicated both responsibility and control.

The network people, of course, deny this. They have skilled public-relations departments and when people like me write things like this, they always claim that we are outsiders, that we do not understand television. They always come up with some show that they did in the past that proves how public-spirited they really are, how much more they give to the public arena. Which takes me, finally, to the Short Happy Life of Peter Derow at CBS, a final fable for our time.

The rise of ABC under Silverman had left CBS a troubled network. That which had always worked so well no longer worked. It was a curiously rudderless ship run by an old, talented, willful and often erratic man, and it was filled with executives who did not know what they wanted or what they should do, other than gain high ratings and keep Paley happy. Arthur Taylor had just been abruptly fired. CBS had been for almost 30 years the leader in programing and now it was slipping. In some desperation, it was decided to bring a very bright young man named Peter Derow over from Newsweek. There, at the astonishingly young age of 36, he had become president of Newsweek and his skills and seriousness had attracted broad attention in the world of communications. He had already created a reputation as perhaps the best and most serious of the new managerial breed in media. He was surprisingly popular with many of the young editorial people at Newsweek because they sensed that he appreciated their excellence as much as he did his own bottom line. His sympathies, in fact, seemed to be with the editorial side: He had gone to Harvard, where he had been on the Harvard Crimson, and he had worked for a year with the London Economist, and then he had gone on to Harvard Business School. He was a firm believer that it was vitally important for major national publications to have modern, sound financial bases, that that could strengthen rather than, in the traditional journalistic view, weaken those institutions. The shakier they were on the business side, the shakier they were bound to be editorially. Therefore, he saw his own career not so much gaining pure material success and making Katharine Graham happy as, in part at least, one of genuine social obligation. He had been happy and fulfilled at Newsweek and he had been one of the main forces behind Newsweek's challenge to Time in the late Sixties and early Seventies. In 1976, he was named president of the magazine. When CBS went looking for Derow in 1977, its representatives told him it was because he had created a reputation as someone who could make money but who also had a social sense and strong values. Derow, with some misgiving, took the offer from CBS. He was content at Newsweek, but the challenge was too great, a television network was potentially so much more influential an institution than a weekly magazine.

He went over there in 1977 as senior vice-president. He was to report directly to John D. Backe, the president of CBS, and to be Backe's idea man. There was some talk that if things panned out as people hoped, he might one day end up as head of the network. Alas, that was not to be. It did not take Derow long to become disillusioned. No one at CBS seemed to know where it was going. After a while, he began to think of it as a radar screen. That which troubled him was at first like little blips on the radar, and then he began to realize that they were not just blips on the radar; they were the radar. The problems he was encountering were not isolated short-lived phenomena; they were, instead, the given. It was a company, he began to decide, without any value system, and without any true vision of itself. He thought the news division was at the center of the company's role and that was one of the main reasons he had gone over to CBS; he was appalled to find that Backe barely knew Salant and had little intention of knowing him better. It took Derow's intervention to get Salant together with Backe for more than the monthly group president luncheons. He did not think that most of the people in charge had any sense of their larger obligations, in contrast to Newsweek, where he believed that Katharine Graham and her family had imbued the organization with some sense of continuity and social obligation. All they wanted to be was number one instead of number two. They wanted to repeat what worked even if they did not know what worked. They had no sense of balance in broadcasting, of putting together different programs for different audiences on a given evening. The ratings, Derow quickly discovered, were the sole Truth. Suppose, he asked some of his superiors, the winner of the ratings were not really the winner. Perhaps winning simply made you even more the prisoner of a system that had long ago been diverted from its original purpose. Perhaps, he suggested, being a little smaller and a little more selective and trying to broaden the nature of the programs could bring a new kind of victory, victory in quality, and, on occasion, victory in numbers as well. Wouldn't that be liberating for the network?

Derow mentioned his experiences at Newsweek, where it was not necessarily in the magazine's interest to raise its circulation constantly, where the numbers could on occasion backfire. It was a mistake, he said, to think of this country as just an audience. There were many audiences out there, and there was a good deal of money to be made in reaching all of them. He suggested that CBS try to change, that it tell its stockholders, in effect: "Look, we're going to go for higher quality and we're going to change our programing philosophy and for a year or two, it's going to cost us some money, but in the long run, we'll make more money and we'll be a better, sounder network for it." No one heard him. No one, he felt, seemed to understand what he was saying. The problem with the ratings, he thought, was the way in which they listened to Nielsen. Instead of emphasizing different segments of the audience and finding different constituencies, they emphasized only the over-all numbers, therefore confirming the existing value system. There were different audiences there, but they refused to find them. Derow suggested trying to find different audiences, so that they could create different programs. No one seemed interested in what he was suggesting.

Derow became increasingly frustrated. He soon decided that the situation was hopeless. He thought that the network people he met were living in the past, imprisoned by old, increasingly invalid experiences, while the country changed in front of them. The audiences were becoming smarter. The executives did not see the larger society becoming more aware, more critical, more restive. They thought the U.S. Senate would always produce good friends such as John Pastore who would always be easy to deal with and who would always ask only the wrong questions of them. Derow thought that Frank Stanton, who had been something of a genius at bringing the networks good public relations, had probably bought CBS an extra five or six years in terms of good public relations, but that everyone on the outside was catching up.

After only six months at CBS, totally disillusioned, Derow decided to leave and go back to Newsweek. He had come to like Paley very much and thought him an immensely talented, extraordinarily cultivated man, someone of great style and accomplishment. Paley had treated him with great courtesy and affection, behaving not like a father but, given the difference in ages, more like a grandfather. They shared many interests in the world of art and Derow had talked easily with Paley. When Derow, after so brief a time, said he was leaving, Paley was shocked and personally wounded. He said that Derow had betrayed him and that his leaving was an immoral act. Derow said that it was perhaps ungracious and perhaps improper but it was not immoral. "You can't really call me immoral," he said. Paley laughed and agreed, but he was very wounded. Those who know him well suspected that within a week, Bill Paley had forgotten completely about Peter Derow.

"Moyers had immediately created a true national constituency that needed and valued him."

"In truth, nothing restricts the public's right to know so severely as the networks themselves."