Television: The Most Intimate Medium

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films are given to leather-jacketed couriers who hop on motorcycles and rush to the studio while the reporter chases down the next subject for camera and sound crews. By the time the reporter himself gets back to the studio he sometimes finds that the producer has put his story together in a surprising manner. After being told that he will be given 10 seconds in which to mouth an introduction to a 20-second slice of film, with perhaps 15 seconds of narrative later on, the reporter is likely to explode: "Yeah, but when do I get to tell what else happened?"

Cold-Eyed Calculation. Holding equal sway with the tyranny of time, is the tyranny of pictures. To the TV reporter, his producer is a man who dotes on "fender-bender footage": auto crashes, fires, demonstrations, fights.

The more striking the pictures, the greater the chance that they will get on the air. "This is the boy-oh-boy, look-at-the-people-riot syndrome," says one CBS correspondent. A correspondent's response to the syndrome is understandable. Getting on the air is the name of the game—especially if the reporter himself is visible on film while supplying comment; under the TV fee system, he earns at least $50 extra every time he appears on-camera.

Then there is the matter of money. The expense of flying film from Viet Nam, for example, developing it on the West Coast and then leasing a line for $3,000 an hour to transmit the pictures to New York for inclusion in a program, is likely to have an overbearing effect on news judgment. Even if the pictures do not live up to the raves cabled in by the man in the field (who probably had not seen them and was depending on his photographer's word), they may price their way onto the program.

It is that same sort of cold-eyed calculation that keeps the network news programs where they are on the TV schedule—always on the unhappy edge of "prime time," which runs generally from 7:30 p.m. to 11 p.m. Nobody in the management end of the business wants them on prime time because their low Nielsen ratings (generally around 14) would presumably keep people from dialing in any high-rating entertainment show (Nielsen rating: 21) that followed. And no local stations want a network news program at 11 p.m.—which is where Cronkite would like to be—because they can make twice the money at that time with local spot ads on their own local news show. So Cronkite goes on at 7 p.m. in the New York area, just when the average commuter has arrived home to concentrate on his first martini. In Chicago, he is broadcast at 5:30, in San Francisco at 6:30 and in Los Angeles at 7. A large share of his potential audience is inevitably lost.

Old Objectivity. Of almost equal importance is the tyranny of advertisers. Though the newsmen, with good reason, proclaim their freedom, the sponsor's influence is still apparent. Commercials, the newsmen occasionally boast, are restricted to a small percentage of a news program's time, far less than the percentage of space given over to ads in successful newspapers. But it is also true that those commercials appear right in the middle of the electronic front page. Few newspapers give their advertisers such considerate treatment.

And network executives are notoriously timid about antagonizing anyone —particularly the people who pay their bills. Which