Authors: Jeannette Walls
On August 11, 1977, when an unemployed postal worker was arrested and charged with a series of shootings that had terrorized New York City for 379 days, Roone Arledge, the new head of ABC News, saw the opportunity he had been waiting for: a big news event with entertainment value. It was 3
A.M
., but Arledge, dressed in his trademark flashy but casual attire, hurried down to the police headquarters in lower Manhattan. Walking around with a glass of Scotch and a walkie-talkie, he personally directed the coverage for what he had decided would be a massive package on the story for the next
Evening News.
He summoned Barbara Walters, who a year earlier had been hired by the network amid a firestorm of controversy, to ABC headquarters to introduce the story from the site. And he assigned Geraldo Rivera, whom he had recently hired for the
Evening News
after the combustible young reporter had been fired from
Good Morning America,
to provide a high-impact “investigative” piece.
The so-called Son of Sam murders had gripped the New York City area since the evening of July 29, 1976, when an unidentified man walked up to two women sitting in a car in the Pelham Bay
section of the Bronx and shot them with a .44 pistol. By the following spring, the murderer had attacked four more times, always at night, killing three more people and wounding three others, all of them young men and women who had been talking on the front steps of their homes or kissing in cars or walking home along quiet streets in Brooklyn or Queens or the Bronx.
The murderer sometimes left notes behind referring to someone named Sam, so the New York police began calling the unknown killer “Son of Sam.” In April, the killer left a note signed “Son of Sam” beside the bodies of two more people he’d murdered. He was clearly reading—and enjoying—the hysterical tabloid coverage of his crimes. The murders occurred during a pivotal time for the news industry. In New York City, where the newspaper business was struggling for survival, the tabloids went wild over the serial murders, fanning and exploiting the hysteria with increasingly outrageous headlines that followed each development in the case. (For a more detailed discussion of how the tabloids reacted to the killings, see
Chapter 15
, “The Rise of Tabloid Television.”)
The sensational coverage was, until Arledge came on the scene, by and large confined to the tabloids. The reporting in the
New York Times
was restrained, and the producers of the network news shows, considering it a local story, had given it scant attention. But in May of that year, Leonard Goldenson, the head of ABC, had put Arledge, who’d been running the network’s spectacularly successful sports division, in charge of the ABC News division and Arledge, who had been told to raise the viewership and profile of the ABC
Evening News,
was eager to milk a story that seemed like a cop thriller come to life.
After he arrived at the news division, jokes were made about the “Wide World of News.”
Time
compared Arledge’s hiring to the satirical film
Network,
in which cynical television executives engage in shameless theatrics to boost ratings. Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel, afraid that Arledge would undermine the integrity of their broadcast with sensational reporting and vulgar gimmicks, actually asked for a meeting with ABC head Fred Pierce and tried to block Arledge’s appointment.
Arledge did indeed believe news could be snappier and more
entertaining. Shortly after his promotion, he urged his staff to study commercials, where powerful messages could be delivered in thirty seconds. The fears of Jennings and Koppel seemed confirmed. Then, at a corporate retreat for all senior producers and correspondents that was held in Montauk, Long Island shortly after taking up his new post, Arledge further alarmed many of those present by expressing his admiration for Geraldo Rivera. Even more distressing to the news veterans was Arledge’s suggestion that the
Evening News
create some sort of Washington “gossip column.” At this, a few of the senior people rose from their chairs and made passionate speeches about what correspondent Sam Donaldson would call “the integrity of the news.”
When ABC old-liners tuned in to the evening news the day after the Son of Sam arrest, their worst fears were confirmed. The usually staid half hour had been turned into a Son of Sam extravaganza. The package that night had five different Son of Sam segments and consumed nineteen-and-a-half minutes out of the twenty-two minutes broadcast. Rivera joined Walters, who was back at the anchor desk, to introduce his own piece. Much to the horror of ABC News’s old-liners, the mustachioed Geraldo, dressed in jeans and a tee-shirt and speaking off the top of his head, described Berkowitz as a “fiend,” a “beast,” a “monster,” and a “murderer,” and when he did remember to use the word
alleged,
which he didn’t always, he spoke it in a voice dripping with scorn and sarcasm. “I tripped over the world
alleged,
which we were required by our legal department to use in all criminal matters pending trial,” Geraldo later explained. “I said it with sarcasm because I wanted to remind our viewers that this butcher had essentially confessed to his crime.”
After the package, with some two minutes left on the broadcast, Walters turned to Howard Smith in Washington, who noted dryly, “There
were
some other things that happened today.”
The traditionalists at ABC News were appalled. They were particularly galled by Geraldo’s performance. “Roone later admitted to me that he had placed too much emphasis on the Son of Sam story after [David] Berkowitz’s arrest, that he had run two or three stories too many before cutting away to other news,”
Geraldo recalled. “But these were not my decisions. These were not my stories. My story was a valid sidebar looking at the circumstances of the arrest, delivered perhaps with a shade more enthusiasm than what was comfortably allowed by journalistic convention. Still, I got the blame for the entire broadcast, and I carried the Son of Sam rap for years.”
In fact, so appalled were the traditionalists that a group of them in the Washington bureau, including Brit Hume, Frank Reynolds, and Sam Donaldson, wrote a letter to Arledge in protest. The letter, while not mentioning Geraldo by name, raised concerns about the journalistic obligation to protect the rights of the accused by using words like
alleged.
It also questioned the tone of the coverage. The letter’s signers considered their declaration so sensitive that they did not even make a copy of it. They wrote it, signed it, sealed it in an envelope, and sent it to Arledge. Nonetheless, Frank Swertlow, a columnist for the
Chicago Daily News,
found out about the letter and summarized its contents in a column, which reportedly annoyed Arledge as much as actually receiving the letter did. A clear battle line seemed to have been drawn at ABC between those who believed in pure, unadorned news and those who were eager to employ flash and drama to enliven the news. Under Roone Arledge, ABC News became an aggressive pioneer in the tabloidization of network news. It was a harrowing journey, with several casualties.
Putting Arledge in charge of the news was, indeed, a drastic move, but by 1977, ABC needed something drastic. Its news division had long been the also-ran of the networks, a laughingstock among elite news gatherers.
The network was begun as an offshoot of NBC, when RCA owned what it called the Red and the Blue radio networks, but in 1943, government regulators forced RCA to sell one of them. Life Savers magnate Edward J. Noble bought the Blue network and renamed it ABC—the one RCA kept was NBC. By 1952, it was clear that television—not radio—was the wave of the future. But Noble didn’t have the money to expand into television, so he sold ABC to theater chain magnate Leonard Goldenson.
For a long time, it was a distant third in the industry. “It was
third only because there were three,” Goldenson once said. “If there were ten, it would have been tenth.” It was nicknamed the Almost Broadcasting Company, but during the 1960s and early 1970s, ABC made a name for itself in entertainment with shows like
The Untouchables
—then the most violent show on television—and
Peyton Place,
the first prime-time soap opera. The entertainment division’s success continued into the 1970s under Fred Silverman, with such hits as
Happy Days
and
Starsky and Hutch.
The sports division under Roone Arledge was also hugely profitable. The news division, however, always languished. It had gained some respect by hiring Harry Reasoner away from CBS in 1970 at the then handsome salary of $200,000, but the ratings were still anemic. Then in 1976, ABC stunned the industry by hiring Barbara Walters, for the then astronomical salary of $1 million, to co-anchor the
Evening News
along with its existing anchor, Harry Reasoner.
Walters had come a long way since working on Igor Cassini’s short-lived NBC show. The woman who had “dated” Roy Cohn had become—through default—the co-host of NBC’s immensely successful
Today Show
and, as a result of the success of her fifteen-year run there, a major force in television.
*
But Walters was seen as a product of the entertainment division, which produced the
Today Show,
and not the news division, and the decision to elevate her over all the network’s seasoned correspondents was greeted with outrage. The
Washington Post
called Walters “A Million Dollar Baby Handling 5-and-10-Cent News.” CBS’s Richard Salant asked, “Is Barbara Walters a Journalist, or Is She Cher?”
Reasoner particularly felt slighted. He complained to people that while ABC’s news department desperately needed new equipment and new staff, the network had gone out and squandered $1 million—five times Reasoner’s salary—on a woman with no hard news background. Reasoner had been lured away from CBS’s elite group of
60 Minutes
correspondents, and he had expected
to be sole anchor. It was a humiliating setback. Furthermore, his marriage, which would end in divorce a few years later, was deteriorating. He felt thwarted and unhappy at work and at home. He barely spoke to Walters off the air; on the air, the chill between them was perceptible. Reasoner looked for opportunities to slight. Once, for example, Walters commented on air, “Henry Kissinger didn’t make too bad a sex symbol.” “You would know more about that than I would,” Reasoner shot back. The quarreling between the two was so constant they became known as “the Bickersons.”
“He felt I was hired for the wrong reason. He was terribly unhappy about it,” Walters later said. “I’d walk into the studio and Harry would talk to everybody there except me. He cracked jokes with all the guys about the latest baseball scores, and he would go across the street every day to Café des Artistes [a restaurant that was a favorite of the ABC crowd] and spend an hour before the show and an hour after complaining about me. Had I known how violently opposed he was, I wouldn’t have come. It was the toughest period of my life.”
*
Resolving the anchor situation was Roone Arledge’s first big challenge. He realized quickly that it would be impossible for the two anchors ever to work together harmoniously. He also felt Walters was misused in the static role of anchor. “Barbara was great at so many things that reading the news opposite a grumpy guy who didn’t want her there was not in her best interest,” Arledge’s boss, Leonard Goldenson, said. “But there was no way
I could take Barbara off that program and keep Harry on it without leaving her tremendously damaged. So poor Harry had to go.”
Walters, however, had a clause in her contract giving her virtual veto power over a new anchor. To circumvent this, Arledge decided to dispense with the anchor system altogether and instead create a series of “desks”—headed up by Peter Jennings in London, Frank Reynolds in Washington, and Max Robinson in Chicago—who would divvy the broadcast’s introductory newsreading assignment more or less evenly. The format, which debuted on July 10, 1978, left Walters without a formal role in the nightly broadcast. Reasoner called it, “the Arledge shell game,” and went on to say, “He more or less successfully concealed from the public the fact that Barbara was no longer any kind of anchor.”
By then, however, Arledge had already launched
The Barbara Walters Specials
that would prove such a distinctive, and commercially successful, blend of entertainment and news. The first, which aired on December 14, 1976, featured Walters interviewing Barbra Streisand and her then boyfriend Jon Peters, and Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn. The critics panned it. “If this is a preview of future Walters specials,”
Variety
noted, “she may be doing irremediable damage to the reputation she’s trying to cultivate as a journalist.” The public, however, loved it. It pulled in thirty-six percent of the TV audience—a record for a show of its type. The celebrities were more popular than the politicians. “As time went on, we found that the audience didn’t want the political [guests], no matter who we did,” Walters recalled. “We had King Hussein and his wife, Queen Noor. We had Vice President [Walter] Mondale. That’s not what they wanted. They wanted television stars, movie stars.”
Arledge’s second major task was to create a news magazine. By the late 1970s,
60 Minutes
was the envy of the other networks. It received more awards than any other television show—including Emmys, Peabodys, and Polk awards. It was a source of great pride for CBS and, more important, it made money.
Taking the news-as-entertainment—very profitable entertainment—further, Arledge decided ABC needed its own
60 Minutes.
Unlike the CBS show, however, Arledge wanted ABC’s news
magazine to be younger and hipper, infused with Arledge’s signature flash and dazzle. Bob Shanks, who had worked on late-night and early-morning programming, was named executive producer of what would be
20/20.
For potential hosts, he turned to some of the biggest names in print, auditioning Ben Bradlee of the
Washington Post,
writer Pete Hamill, television critic Marvin Kitman, and Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein. Ultimately, he decided on a co-host format and chose Harold Hayes, the legendary former editor of
Esquire
magazine, and Robert Hughes, the Australian art critic for
Time
magazine. The similarity in their names—Hughes and Hayes—was confusing enough. On top of that, Hayes had no television experience. Hughes had some, but not a great deal, and his Australian accent was so thick as to be almost unintelligible to the viewers.