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...arose under the once impassive gaze of the three major networks. For three decades they ruled television news without serious threat and smugly claimed that no one else could put together the resources to compete. Ted Turner has challenged them at their own game, and made them flinch. Suddenly ABC, CBS and NBC are providing or planning
...alternative energy sources." Turner happily pays the bills for CNN's seven domestic bureaus and five foreign bureaus (Rome, London, Tel Aviv, Cairo and Tokyo). Total cost of running CNN: a substantial $51 million a year. But then, TV news is always an expensive business. ABC, NBC and CBS decline to reveal their news budgets, but industry sources say each spends about $150 million a year. A single installment of the weekday evening news costs at minimum about $200,000 and can range far higher; one report from Lebanon consumes about $4,000, not counting travel, editing and courier...
...economic news, followed by half an hour of sports, and then two hours of world and national reports. "A newspaper you can watch" is the way Turner describes it. The format for the rest of the day is much like an extended version of NBC's Today or ABC's Good Morning America: sober and almost impersonal in the hourly news summaries, folksy in such soft segments as Arden Zinn's exercise class and Dr. Steve Kritsick's advice on pet care, downright gossipy in the late-night hour of Hollywood chitchat by longtime
...grudging respect of senior news executives at all three major networks. Says Van Gordon Sauter, president of CBS News: "We see CNN as a very good service . . . but not of network quality." Adds Richard Wald, senior vice president for news at ABC: "CNN does a nice, straightforward, basic rendition of the news very competently." Outside analysts are more generous. Anthony Hoffmann, a cable analyst for Warburg Paribas Becker Securities, observes, "People talking to a CNN reporter do not seem to think they are talking to the whole world and so they say things they will not say to the networks...
...years, he has resisted tempting network offers to return, including the chance to anchor ABC News in the late 1970s. During this time, MacNeil concedes that the networks have improved their product somewhat, providing more thorough, analytic coverage. He compares network news to the American auto industry: lacking competition it produced poor merchandise. Threatened today by cable news and improving local operations, the networks have been forced into doing a better...