At the end of today’s Good Morning America story on Gaddafi’s tent, anchor Diane Sawyer observed, “I’ve been in Gaddafi’s tent. In Libya. And it’s perfumed, you should know.”
I guess that’s why we pay her the big bucks. And perhaps that’s what’s wrong with television news, says Michael Massing:
While doing some recent research on the news business, I came upon this remarkable fact: Katie Couric’s annual salary is more than the entire annual budgets of NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered combined. Couric’s salary comes to an estimated $15 million a year; NPR spends $6 million a year on its morning show and $5 million on its afternoon one. NPR has seventeen foreign bureaus (which costs it another $9.4 million a year); CBS has twelve. Few figures, I think, better capture the absurd financial structure of the network news.
This is not a new development, of course. It’s been unfolding since 1986, when billionaire Laurence Tisch bought CBS and eviscerated its news division in order to boost profits. (For a sharp, first-hand account of this process, see Bad News: The Decline of Reporting, The Business of News, and the Danger to Us All, by former CBS correspondent Tom Fenton.) But the issue seems worth revisiting in light of the recent naming of Diane Sawyer to replace Charlie Gibson as the anchor of ABC’s World News. We don’t yet know how much Sawyer is going to be paid, but it will no doubt surpass Gibson’s current estimated salary of $8 million. Sawyer will thus be perpetuating the corrosive, top-heavy system of the network news.
Back when Couric rose to her anchor slot, I had high hopes. She’s a talented woman. I quoted former ABC News producer Paul Friedman’s call for CBS News execs to take advantage of those talents and change the evening news format:
Summarize the news of the day in five minutes or so; spend a big chunk of time—10 minutes or so—on covering one really good story; and give people even more to think about by ending with opinion.
Not only did those CBS execs not listen, when Friedman went on to become Couric’s boss, he ignored his own advice!
But that’s not the focus of Massing’s story. While in passing he mentions that “the networks are in a death spiral, yet they keep airing the same tired product,” his subtitled main concern is Why can’t the print press treat TV news as news?
With that he runs through the fawning celebrity treatment our esteemed print media is giving Sawyer’s impending ascension to the anchor chair. It’s an insightful skewering of how self-important market-driven journalism can blithely fail to ask the right questions:
At a time when the obscene executive pay levels at places like Goldman Sachs and AIG are stoking anger, shouldn’t the same be true for ABC, CBS, and NBC?
Yes!
Here I detail why I don’t want or need big media as it is constructed today. Here my answer to how the newspaper can will survive. When the broadcast networks go down in flames, as they surely will, don’t look to me for crying. (Instead I may dread the phoenix that rises from those ashes.) They all do the same stories in the same way at the same time… and spend a wasteful fortune on it.
As for Sawyer — like Couric, incredibly talented — Jack Shafer suggested in Slate:
If you really want to improve World News, if you really want to make an indelible mark on journalism, turn down the job and persuade ABC News to divert the millions it ordinarily pays its anchor and spend it on 50 or 80 additional reporters to break stories.
Her celebrity has eclipsed her journalism.
Via Romenesko. For those of you who clicked the headline looking for more on Katie, here we learn that for her salary CBS “could hire 100 reporters and producers to, you know, report the news.”