Troubled ABC News may lose its head

David Bauder

Friday, Feb. 7, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

NEW YORK -- ABC News is losing in the ratings, losing in the courts and losing some key correspondents. Will it also be losing its leader?

Troubles at ABC, the longtime king of network news divisions, have led to the beginning of questions about the future of news chief Roone Arledge, a legendary TV executive.

Arledge, 65, says he has no retirement plans, but the string of bad news would make a permanent trip to the golf course tempting. According to Fortune magazine, a provision in his contract would allow his bosses to kick him upstairs in June and leave day-to-day management of the news division to someone else.

Neither Arledge nor ABC President David Westin responded to inquiries about the situation.

Arledge's headaches, in a nutshell: NBC has overtaken "World News Tonight" in the ratings; several defections have followed ABC's decision to shelve an all-news cable channel; "Good Morning America" has slipped into a regular No. 2 slot behind NBC's "Today;" and a jury's order that ABC pay Food Lion more than $5.5 million has triggered a national debate about undercover reporting.

"ABC's problems are like the Clinton scandals -- they keep dribbling out, and people expect there to be more problems," said Robert Lichter, head of the nonprofit Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington.

Arledge's stable of stars, such as Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel, Diane Sawyer, David Brinkley and Barbara Walters, helped ABC cultivate an aura of invincibility for almost a decade, and the news magazines "PrimeTime Live" and "20/20" still are going strong.

No one, however, can stay on top forever.

Ask Jennings, whose flagship "World News Tonight" has tied with or lost to NBC in the weekly ratings for seven of the past eight weeks after being virtually unchallenged since the crumbling of the Berlin Wall.

Critics lately have noticed some drift as the show -- perhaps mindful of NBC's success -- experiments with a softer approach.

But ABC executives, while admitting NBC's nightly news program has improved, blame the rating problems of "World News Tonight" on ABC's slumping entertainment lineup, which has caused many viewers to change channels.

"It's still the best newscast on the air, period," said Paul Friedman, executive vice president of ABC's news division.

ABC did score a victory Tuesday night, narrowly beating NBC in the battle for viewers during the double-barreled coverage of the O.J. Simpson verdict and President Clinton's State of the Union speech, according to preliminary results. CBS was third.

Internally, morale at ABC was dealt a blow in May when the Walt Disney Co., the network's corporate parent, postponed plans for a cable channel that was to begin operations early this year. NBC and Fox have their own cable news outlets, and CBS' Eye on People debuts next month.

Since Disney's decision, ABC White House Correspondent Brit Hume defected to Fox. So did reporter Catherine Crier. ABC's John Hockenberry took a job as host of his own show on MSNBC. "World News This Morning" anchor Thalia Assuras left to join Eye on People.

"Disney seems an honorable company that would not dismantle ABC News," Hume said. "The question is whether, in a Disney-owned atmosphere, ABC News will have the kind of opportunities for growth that it had in the past."

Not everybody's headed for the exits: ABC raided NBC to sign Deborah Roberts and Elizabeth Vargas in the past year, and also landed former presidential aide George Stephanopolous.

But Friedman acknowledged that, like the other networks, he doesn't have enough air time to satisfy everyone.

ABC's problems in the courts also have the potential to affect the public's view of how the news division operates.

They started in December when a Florida jury awarded a banker $10 million after finding that "20-20" misrepresented him. Last month, the jury in the Food Lion case criticized the network and "PrimeTime Live" for the use of undercover reporters and hidden cameras in pursuing a story that the supermarket routinely sold spoiled food.

The network has strongly defended its reporting methods, and its executives noted that a California appeals court last week overturned a $1.2 million jury verdict against the network for use of a hidden camera in an investigation of telepsychics.

"We'll take the hits for now," Friedman said. "In the long run, we know that people trust us."