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Topic: Miscellaneous items
Date/Time: 8/30/2005 3:07:33 PM
Title: Excerpts from NYT Mag's Les Moonves profile
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
 
Excerpts from Lynn Hirschberg's Sept. 4 New York Times Magazine piece ("Giving Them What They Want") on CBS chairman Les Moonves

The next challenge for Moonves will be whether his people-pleasing instincts can be applied to CBS's nightly news show. Currently in last place, "CBS Evening News" needs to be reinvented, and the problem is stark: how do you combine news with entertainment? News stories are often dark, and Moonves would like to find a way to make them light. ‘‘There's a way to fix news,’’ Moonves says confidently. "Just as there was a way to fix prime time. I never saw TV as an ailing medium. There’s no place else to get that kind of audience."
.....

Three executives and the producer of the ["60 Minutes"] news report had to be ousted "because they didn’t do their jobs," Moonves had told me earlier. "As for Andrew [Heyward, news division president], he demanded things of his lieutenants, and being a boss myself, you have to rely on people to do their jobs. I don’t think he should have been fired: he did his job; they didn’t do theirs."
.....

When Moonves read a draft of the [Memogate probe] results, ‘‘it made me crazy,’’ he said. "Memogate was awful. News screwed up big time.’’ Now that Rather is no longer the network eminence at "CBS Evening News," Moonves says he intends to completely revamp the program. In January, he even suggested that he might be willing to have Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central’s mock-news program ‘‘The Daily Show,’’ play some part on the evening news -- a sign of how drastically Moonves feels the news needs to change. Every evening, around seven million people watch ‘‘CBS Evening News,’’ which puts it in third place. The median age of the show’s viewers is 60. Moonves would like to enlarge that audience and lower its age, just as he did with CBS’s prime-time audience.

"We have to break the mold in news," Moonves had told me. ‘‘We don’t have a choice.’’ Moonves has expressed his frustration about the news division to friends and colleagues -- sometimes with intentional hyperbole. ‘‘I want to bomb the whole building’’ is one phrase he has used. Moonves genuinely likes and respects Heyward, but has said to colleagues that Heyward may not be able to ‘‘lead a revolution.’’

It might seem surprising that Moonves, given his approach to the genre of TV drama, is so taken with reinventing the news. But then he is, as usual, following his sense of what the viewers want. The audience, he imagines, would like its news to be more like his entertainment shows: better stories told by attractive personalities in exciting ways. To this end, Moonves requested in June that Heyward shoot some prototypes of nightly news shows using alternative formats. There were more than 10 meetings that followed in which Moonves pushed Heyward to be less conservative in his thinking. ‘‘The news anchor Andrew wants to use is not surprising,’’ Moonves had told me, referring to John Roberts, the chief White House correspondent for CBS and one of Heyward’s leading choices. ‘‘That’s bothering me. On the one hand, we could have a newscast like ‘The Big Breakfast’ in England, where women give the news in lingerie. Or there’s ‘Naked News,’ which is on cable in England. I saw a clip of it. It’s a woman giving the news as she’s getting undressed. And then, on the other hand, you could have two boring people behind a desk. Our newscast has to be somewhere in between.’’

At the staff meeting now, Moonves was eager for an update from Heyward. ‘‘So,’’ he said, ‘‘how’s the pilot?’’

Heyward was matter-of-fact. ‘‘We can show you something in a couple of weeks,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s more about the reporters, the feedback.’’

Moonves nodded. ‘‘It’s not ‘The Big Breakfast,’’’ he half-joked, but also half-prodded.

The finished news prototype will probably have some nontraditional features — humorous segments, conversations between reporters and the anchor, interactive elements involving the viewers. Throughout the summer, the news division solicited ideas from a variety of sources: producers of entertainment shows, MTV News and even a group of college-age interns who were working at CBS. In the end, though, Moonves will be the judge. ‘‘It’s like pornography — I’ll know it when I see it,’’ he would tell me later. "In the news business, right now is the changing of the guard. Tom Brokaw has retired, Rather has left and then the horrible death of Peter Jennings. In one eight-month period, network news has completely changed, and this is an opportunity to redefine ourselves."
......

The meeting was almost over. "We have a very interesting six months ahead of us," Moonves said as he got up to leave. ‘‘Hopefully, by then, we’ll be an independent CBS.’’ He paused, smiled and added, ‘‘And with any luck, we’ll have a naked news show."

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