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more than the news
She's serious but also glam--which it needs
By Jeff Bercovici
In rolling out "Connie Chung Tonight," CNN has sought to portray the show as an earnest bit of counter-programming—proof that CNN, unlike its competitors, is in the business of airing news, not blather.
There’s some validity to that claim.
Certainly no one expects Chung, whose debut was last night, to practice partisan opinion-mongering a la Bill O’Reilly or Phil Donahue.
But the more interesting element of strategy at work here may be the one CNN isn't trumpeting, one that has more to do with going with the flow than going against the grain.
It's the way CNN has at last surrendered to the perceived need to have celebrities delivering the news.
Up until last year, when the network picked up Paula Zahn and Aaron Brown, CNN’s philosophy was to let the news be the star.
In practice, however, that increasingly meant letting Fox News's O’Reilly be the star. In the four weeks ending June 21, "The O'Reilly Factor" on Fox averaged 1.765 million viewers in the 8-9 p.m. slot -- nearly three times as many as its CNN competition, "Live From…"
On the strength of "O'Reilly," Fox News has been beating CNN in primetime by a margin of 838,000 viewers to 728,000.
A program built around a star anchor has distinct advantages over one built around the headlines, says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
"It's much easier to promote and tease," he says. "It's more marketable, in the sense that you can build it around feature stories rather than breaking news stories and you can predict what those feature stories will be. If you're really built around the news, what you have to sell is your credibility, your reliability, your analytical ability" -- concepts that are hard to get across in a 30-second promo.
Of course, Chung, while indisputably famous and supposedly well-liked by viewers, isn't exactly a "personality" on the order of O'Reilly or Larry King. At ABC she spent most of her time in the shadow of Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer.
But although no one really knows what she stands for now, that doesn't mean she won't emerge as a new celebrity in her own right, says Rosenstiel.
"It is a fact that when some of the people who launched today's talk shows started, they were not the well-known and well-defined personas that they became," he says, citing both O'Reilly and King as examples. "To some extent, talk show hosts are made and not born."
Moreover, forget about that rumored $2 million-per-year salary CNN is said to be paying her. Personality-driven news programming is the economical way to go, says Rosenstiel.
"What CNN is doing is, in effect, imitating the less expensive style of Fox News."
Comparisons with "The O'Reilly Factor," "Larry King Live," "Hardball with Chris Matthews" and other shows can only be taken so far, however. CNN is adamant that "Connie Chung Tonight" is fundamentally a news show, not a newsmagazine or talking heads program.
"It's definitely a news program, much like the elements of 'Nightline' where you have interviews but also a lot of reporting," says a CNN spokeswoman.
Comparing it to "Nightline," one of the most respected of all news shows, is no accident; Chung has repeatedly done so herself in describing the show. It's worth noting that, earlier this year, when "Nightline" was on the verge of getting dropped by ABC in favor of David Letterman, CNN was said to be hoping to land Koppel as its new star anchor.
June 25, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
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