Interview with Peter Jennings, ABC News
© 1996 Hedrick Smith Productions, Inc.
The Race for Ratings and Readers: How it Drives Mainstream News Coverage
SMITH:Where do you divide the line? Where do yo set the line dividing
legitimate news from news that's too tabloid or below your standards?
JENNINGS: I don't think there's any rule. I think it comes up every day.
My own most infamous example around here is the Gennifer Flowers story.
On the day the Gennifer Flowers story broke in the "Star," I did
all the things I'd been brought up to do, which is to say, let's check the
tapes. Let's hear the tapes, ourselves. Let's try to find out more about
her. Let's see if we can get some verification on this. And with any luck,
if we go hell bent for leather we'll have it on the air tomorrow. People
looked at me and said, "Tomorrow?" And I said, "Yeah, maybe
we'll be lucky tomorrow."
They said, do you realize that every ABC affiliate all around the country
will have the Gennifer Flowers story on the air today. They'll all turn
around when they turn on "World News Tonight" and say, "What's
the matter with Jennings?"
SMITH: Is that a case where the tabloids drove the mainstream and the mainstream
dropped its standards?
JENNINGS: I think we all recognize, yourself included, that we now live
in a vastly more competitive world, that the universe for information has
just become greater, that we are all struggling with how to retain audiences,
either listeners, viewers or readers, and that we're being pulled back and
forth all the time. So if the establishment's standards slip a little on
a Tuesday, it doesn't mean they stay down there on Wednesday, Thursday and
Friday.
JENNINGS: Yes. I would say, first of all, I don't think that the networks
think of CNN as competition with their evening newscast. And if you look
at CNN's viewership, at those times of night, they are not serious competition
to the evening newscasts.
What's competition to the evening newscast is just that there are that many
more channels available at that particular time of day, and people have
many more choices, most of which are non-news. And some people take
those choices and therefore, the overall news audience has declined over
the years.
In some respects, the toughest competition comes from our affiliates, to
which we contribute, because we have daily electronic news gathering systems,
which we provide for our affiliates around the country and we often give
them at least the video and sometimes the reporting on a major story before
we come along.
So there's an ambiguity sometimes for the viewer between the local television
coverage and the network coverage. By the way, the viewer can't always tell
the difference.
So we at the network level have to acknowledge the fact that the local station
is going to be doing some of the national news and even some of the international
news before we come along. That has changed us.
Rush to Judgment: Opinion, and Interpretation
in News Coverage
JENNINGS: I think it's a struggle every day to keep the horse race nature
of politics and the issues of legislation in some kind of balance, and that's
very true in the course of a political year and it's very true in the course
of a debate about health care reform. And I suppose there are occasions
when we do err on the side of "who's ahead" coverage. I think
journalism, historically, has liked the competition and likes the conflict.
We don't go to airports and watch planes land safely, as you know. And so
there's probably an erring on the side of the competitive nature of legislation.
But to suggest that we demean or dismiss the substantive nature of it I
think is just not correct, at least in our own case.
JENNINGS: What I sometimes have to remind my colleagues and myself is, that
we are engrossed by the competition, whether newspapers, television, radio
journalism -- we are just overwhelmed by the whole notion of competition,
on occasion. And I sometimes remind people that folks don't sit at home
with three televisions, that tonight, the people watching your broadcast
are not watching the guy on either side of you. And so if NBC and CBS do
a story, which we have in the works, there's no reason on Earth why we should
stop doing the story. But sometimes in all three network news divisions
people will turn off on a story because the competition has done it. I think
that's taking competition to its foolish ends.