Posted on 11/30/2004 6:43:05 PM PST by jdm
(Variety) — NEW YORK -- CBS is considering multiple newscasters to replace Dan Rather in the anchor's chair when he steps down in March.
Viacom co-prexy-co-chief operating officer Leslie Moonves said an anchor partnership is being considered as part of a broad rethinking of the "CBS Evening News" franchise, and that no candidates have been ruled out.
"We are exploring every possibility right now," Moonves said. "After the first of the year, we are going to come to a decision and, by the way, it could be more than one person."
The possibility of a second or even a third chair on the "CBS Evening News" set throws a new angle into the anchor-heir handicapping, but it also brings back some sour memories at CBS of the failed partnering of Rather and Connie Chung in 1994, a year before Moonves joined the network.
Anchor duos have produced some of TV journalism's finest moments, such as NBC's Chet Huntley-David Brinkley partnership, which lasted more than a decade, and some of its biggest flops, including Tom Brokaw and Roger Mudd in the early '80s and the Barbara Walters-Harry Reasoner debacle in 1976.
Moonves said even though "Evening News" is a distant third among evening newscasts, the net has a unique opportunity to execute a turnaround with the transition at NBC from Brokaw to Brian Williams.
"It will give us an opportunity to look at what we're doing right and what we're doing wrong and proceed with the future in a different way," Moonves said.
The only aspect of the "Evening News" not negotiable is the 6:30 timeslot and half-hour duration, he said.
While audiences for all three evening newscasts have dwindled nearly 30% over the past decade, they still reach an estimated 25.8 million viewers a night, according to Nielsen Media Research.
CBS News is awaiting a final report from an independent committee investigating a story on President Bush (news - web sites)'s service in the Texas Air National Guard that was sourced, in part, with documents that were found to have been forged.
Moonves said he's confident that any level of negligence found in the decision to air the documents would not prevent Rather from continuing as an investigative reporter for "60 Minutes."
Didn't this fail miserably once with Danny boy and Connie Chung? It was right before they briefly had Dan standing up for the newscast, which failed miserably, likewise.
My vote...Franken and Clift. Has a nice ring to it. Rolls off the tongue easy...Frankenclift.
Yep, Dan Rather and Connie Chung were co-anchors for a short time, it was miserable. Every body have fun tonight, everybody Whang Chung tonight....:)
I don't know, those DNC faxes, from Kinkos, can be pretty suspect.
A second thought. How about bringing back Edward Morrow. According to Rather, Morrow is still around.
FGS
I, for one am glad to see this. It seems like such an obvious opportunity to come up with something new and different. I thought Viacom might rise to the challenge. There must be lots of ideas floating around.
Text readers, not prima donnas, sounds good to me. (:>)
It makes sense to me to have more than one talking head on the nat'l news. All of the local newscasts everywhere have more than one and usually three.
When I first moved here there was one white man who was the local anchor. Then with the minorities screaming about no minority newscasters they hired, over the years, a black, a female, an Hispanic, etc.....until now the head local anchor is a black female with an Hispanic male and the lone white guy who is still with the station is the token white guy.
As I see it, Viacom's challenge is a lot larger than putting a real live newshound in the anchor chair if they really want to make some changes at cbs news. Their whole operation revolves around embedded libthink types. From the top down apparently. There would have to be a massive restructuring and pink slips wholesale for them to actually change direction.
Now, there may still be some synapse(s) firing within Viacom management, but institutional "buckwheats" will preclude them taking any substantive action. More of the same is the easy way out for them, and I'm willing to bet they take the easy way out. I hope I dead wrong.
FGS
I'm surprised this article didn't mention the triple anchor format which had Frank Reynolds and Max Robinson and Peter Jennings in the early 80s. Reynolds died of cancer in 83 and Robinson had a drinking problem so that is how Jennings became the anchor for his second go round at ABC.
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