The Waning of Washington Television Coverage   

Downsizing the News: Network Cutbacks in the Nation's Capital
By Penn Kimball
Woodrow Wilson Center / Johns Hopkins

Downsizing the News: Network Cutbacks in the Nation's Capital
By Penn Kimball
Woodrow Wilson Center / Johns Hopkins
182 pages; $13.95 (paperback)

It won't surprise even the most casual viewer that network television news has plunged into a slump. But Penn Kimball's book, offering one indicting exhibit after another, conjures a worse possibility. The networks' Washington coverage, at least, may be passing a point of no return, not just slumping but coming to "the end of an era in broadcast history."

How important is this change? Kimball doesn't really take on that issue, barely acknowledging that changing times may have made Washington news less relevant. His interest is in documenting the capital cutbacks. And the veteran newsman and former Columbia journalism professor has chosen a tidy and effective method for making his case. He spent two years interviewing some 75 Washington correspondents and producers at ABC, CBS and NBC. Granted anonymity, they spilled all (see Kimball's article, "N.Y. to Washington: Drop Dead," November 1992).

It's depressing, as staffer after staffer testifies about reductions in reporting and technical staffs, corporate indifference to thorough coverage, domination by marketers and packagers, and subordination of quality journalism to faddish desires to appease affiliates and pacify viewers.

"They don't even talk the language of reporting and writing anymore in New York," says one staffer. "Management speaks of 'news product.' "

Says another, "People are being judged these days by how much product they get on the air at what cost... Things that take time to dig out are simply not going to get done."

As one NBC staffer put it, "We have moved from the general cell-block to death row."

Summing up, Kimball writes that "what is going on in network television is a redefinition of news, driven by financial considerations and ratings."

If the anecdotes and interviews aren't convincing enough, Kimball also amasses plenty of other evidence.

Overall, he found the CBS and NBC Washington bureaus, which once approached 30 correspondents each, down to about 13 apiece; ABC had just eliminated seven reporters. Examining in detail the resources devoted to covering the White House, Con-gress, the Supreme Court and federal agencies, he cites examples of rife cutbacks in virtually every area.

The impact? "The ranks of general assignment reporters have been thinned. Beats such as the environment and individual federal agencies have been eliminated. Supreme Court and State Department coverage has been downgraded. The number of correspondents covering Congress has been sharply reduced."

Kimball found the networks relying more on shared pool coverage and "voiceovers," or tape shot by a freelancer or syndicate and narrated by a home-based correspondent who hadn't been to the story scene.

Ironically, these cutbacks coincide with declines in the networks' share of both viewers and advertisers and with the dramatic rise, most evident during the 1992 presidential campaign, of nonmainstream news outlets such as prime time newsmagazines, talk shows and cable programming.

Kimball makes the interesting, if speculative, point that the emergence of such secondary news sources could well reflect audience frustration with the degenerating quality of traditional news programs.

"People are very attuned to politics," one journalist tells Kimball. "They want to participate. That's why Perot was so succcessful. That's why they respond to Clinton's town meetings. They are starving for information they can't find in the media."

It's hard to argue with the direction of the evidence, but Kimball's work does have some limitations (including the fact that he misspells both the first and last name of the managing editor of this magazine).

More centrally, the book depends for much of its power on the critical comments of people with a vested interest in traditional coverage patterns.

A strong case can be made, though Kimball doesn't touch it, that Washington reporting has grown insular and irrelevant and that big government is no longer the hot story it was during the last couple of generations (see cover story). Not just in Washington, but across the nation, coverage of government is giving way to a broader understanding of news and public concerns.

Whether this is all good or bad can be argued, but it seems to be the key issue, and "Downsizing the News" fails to engage it.

The book's strength, then, isn't in analysis but in description. Kimball has convincingly demonstrated that the networks' Washington operations are in retreat, amid sagging morale and dwindling resources.

But he, and his sources, leave themselves open to the charge that they're simply pining futilely for the old days as the times change around them. Perhaps Larry King and MTV town meetings with the president will serve new generations as successfully as Murrow and Cronkite and company served the past.

I myself doubt it. But someone needs to prove the case, before it's too late to reengineer the public service mission of network TV news.