Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way
Ken Auletta
Language: English
Pages: 656
ISBN: 0679741356
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
What happened to network television in the 1980s? How did CBS, NBC, and ABC lose a third of their audience and more than half of their annual profits?
Ken Auletta, author of Greed and Glory on Wall Street, tells the gripping story of the decline of the networks in this epically scaled work of journalism. He chronicles the takeovers and executive coups that turned ABC and NBC into assets of two mega-corporations and CBS into the fiefdom of one man, Larry Tisch, whose obsession with the bottom line could be both bracing and appalling.
Auletta takes us inside the CBS newsroom on the night that Dan Rather went off-camera for six deadly minutes; into the screening rooms where NBC programming wunderkind Brandon Tartikoff watched two of his brightest prospects for new series thud disastrously to earth; and into the boardrooms where the three networks were trying to decide whether television is a public trust or a cash cow.
Rich in anecdote and gossip, scalpel-sharp in its perceptions, Three Blind Mice chronicles a revolution in American business and popular culture, one that is changing the world on both sides of the television screen.
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several hundred thousand viewers—separated Rather, Brokaw, and Jennings. And then came Dan Rather’s very odd behavior in Miami. The news division was quarreling with Sports, whose games sometimes ran long, particularly on weekends. This robbed Rather of precious minutes or preempted entire newscasts, as happened during the basketball playoffs in the spring. Rather worried about the affiliates, since nearly half the CBS stations now aired his newscast earlier, and ran syndicated shows at 7 P.M.
felt quite strongly.” January 1985 was the beginning of a siege that lasted almost a year. The Helms onslaught was followed, in February, by reports that arbitrageur Ivan Boesky and a group of investors had quietly purchased 8.7 percent of CBS stock.* CBS initiated a legal attack, and outmaneuvered Boesky as it had outwitted Helms. But around the time of the March announcement of the merger between ABC and Cap Cities, CBS was forced back on the defensive by a Ted Turner blitzkrieg, which began
chi-chi” for network TV. A network programmer has an unwritten list of things that don’t play with mass audiences—like psychiatric therapy sessions, spoofs which viewers might not know how to interpret, downbeat shows, and thick ethnic accents. All were no-no’s, like Cuban bandleaders playing a lead—before Desi Arnaz came along. Despite slight misgivings, Tartikoff was convinced Tattinger’s would improve because “there is no better writing group working in television than those guys.” One last
With a full salary, provisions for an office and secretary for a year, plus bonus, plus GE stock and a sweetened lump-sum retirement benefit, he would have financial security. “To me it was very sad, but a great relief,” said Grossman. Within twenty-four hours the story that he was fired leaked. Anonymous quotes disparaged his leadership of NBC News. All that was missing was the name of his successor. Grossman felt awful. Welch felt the leak stripped him of his prerogatives as chairman. One of
CHAPTER 24 This Page: While Spelling chivalrously denied that his friend Suzanne Pleshette asked to be a Nightingale, I trusted the veracity of the anecdote because it came from a then-senior Spelling executive, Ilene Chaiken, who said Spelling told her of the incident, and because it was told to me at the time it happened, and with humor rather than malice. Ilene Chaiken interview, Sept. 29, 1988. This Page: A. C. Nielsen Media Research, “1989 Nielsen Report on Television.” This Page: