TV Dogs Learning New Tricks

"I hate to jinx it by saying it aloud," Bob Schieffer told viewers of the "CBS Evening News" Thursday, but "all of a sudden there's some pretty good news" in declining U.S. casualties in Iraq.

"Bob, I tell you," correspondent Byron Pitts said from Baghdad, "you'll be hard pressed to find any U.S. commander thumping his chest." And given the danger, Pitts said, "I'm praying the whole time we're out there."

As the interim replacement for Dan Rather, Schieffer has managed to change the rigid formula of the nightly newscast. He is delivering the news in a conversational style, rather than with voice-of-God solemnity, interjecting his own views and encouraging CBS reporters to do the same. Often, instead of doing taped reports followed by a standup, the correspondents -- who tease their own stories at the top of the broadcast -- just chat with Schieffer.

"I'm telling them, throw away the scripts," Schieffer says. "I don't want to do a rehearsed question and rehearsed answer, because people see through that. What I want to hear is what they would tell me in the newsroom, all within FCC obscenity guidelines, of course."

After a report on prosecutors' setbacks at the Michael Jackson trial, Schieffer said: "I think they're going to have a hard time proving this case." When Anthony Mason reported on Bernard Ebbers's conviction in the WorldCom fraud, he told Schieffer: "I would not want to be Ken Lay right now. . . . He may want to rethink his strategy after seeing that it did not save Bernie Ebbers." White House correspondent John Roberts, after recounting the ethics allegations against House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, told Schieffer: "My bet is that DeLay will survive this unless, of course, that Texas prosecutor decides to indict him."

Executive producer Jim Murphy, who helped devise the approach, says Schieffer "is a gumshoe who asks tons of good questions like a normal person would ask them. He'll call reporters in the field and say, 'Tell me what's not in your piece.'" After Schieffer's debut, Murphy got a typewritten note from veteran Andy Rooney that said in red letters: "WOW."

Schieffer, who devised the new approach with executive producer Jim Murphy, likens the style to newspaper sidebars or online chats. "It's just kind of my way, and maybe it's because I've been doing 'Face the Nation' for so long," Schieffer says. "We're trying to deliver the news in the way people talk."

While early ratings are sketchy since Schieffer took over March 10, the broadcast is still mired in third place. But on the five nights Schieffer has anchored without being preempted in part of the country for the NCAA playoffs, he is down 1 percent from Rather's last four full weeks, while the NBC and ABC newscasts are down 6 and 5 percent, respectively.

Schieffer says he doesn't want the job permanently but hasn't ruled it out, despite the weekly commute from Washington to New York. "My wife said if this goes on for very long we're going to have to renegotiate our contract."

As television keeps trying to reinvent itself, other hosts and hotshots are doing the same. Consider, for instance, the format of CNBC's new 6 p.m. show: A guy in shirtsleeves paces the set, ranting and raving, flailing and gesturing, bellowing about the stocks he loves and hates.

"Cramer said CMGI was a buy on Monday -- now it's through the roof!" a promo spot says. "Stick with Cramer!"

Not since the dot-com boom has a program so aggressively promised to help viewers get rich, but "Jim Cramer's Mad Money" on CNBC reflects the manic persona of the former Wall Street trader.

"It's got all the fun of the hedge fun without the pressure of clients screaming at me," Cramer says. "I'll never have David Geffen screaming at me while I'm on an Israeli vacation about what an idiot I am for owning Intel."

Cramer says he told CNBC to stop running ads about his best market calls. "I win some and lose some," he says of his predictions. "When I screw up, I'm going to mention it. I know I'm going to make a lot of mistakes. I said Nike looked okay, then Nike's down."

To anyone who saw him in his Wall Street days, constantly throwing tantrums as he placed multimillion-dollar stock bets, the 6 p.m. show captures Cramer's crazed style, minus the obscenities. He says he gets more satisfaction from the show than spending his life "trying to make rich people richer."

Cramer admits he felt constrained on his previous CNBC program, with economist Lawrence Kudlow, because it also dealt with politics and because "I am a terrible reader of other people's stuff" off the TelePrompTer. "I just love talking about stocks. This is my ESPN."

To avoid conflicts, Cramer has put most of his assets in government securities and real estate, and set up a charitable trust that he uses to trade stocks. He can't trade any stock he mentions on the air for five days, and all the profits go to charity. But he thinks it's important to stay in the game.

The show has few guests, with the host mostly taking calls. One night, the phone system broke down. "I didn't get ballistic," Cramer says, as if that would be the normal response. Had that happened when he worked on Wall Street, he says, "I would have taken the keyboard and thrown it."

In the month since CNN's Headline News replaced its news updates with prime-time talk shows, Nancy Grace has pumped up both ratings and controversy. Ask Grace how she picks the stories for the legal program that bears her name and she launches into the tale of how her fiance was murdered 25 years ago, propelling her to law school, a job as a Georgia prosecutor and life as a victims' rights advocate. "Nothing has ever been the same since then," she says.

"I've been portrayed so many times as simply out for a conviction, always siding with the state, thinking everyone's guilty, I don't even listen any more. I have never, ever pretended to be impartial, never. Frankly, I have no interest in being a robot that reads a prompter."

Grace's sympathies could not be clearer. When Robert Blake was acquitted of killing his wife, she said: "But where is the anger? Was the victim victimized again at trial? . . . In my mind it's a very dark day." When Scott Peterson was convicted of murdering his wife, she declared "there is justice for Laci and Conner."

Grace has boosted ratings in her 8 p.m. time slot by 126 percent over last year through a steady diet of gory and sensational cases. "Nancy Grace" has covered the Peterson trial, Michael Jackson, the Blake trial, the Atlanta courthouse shootings, the death of 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford, Miss Savannah 2003 being charged with murder, a gunman who killed seven people in a Milwaukee church, a Colorado man who murdered his three children after his wife got a restraining order against him, and a 16-year-old Idaho girl tried in the shooting deaths of her parents.

The New Republic, noting that Grace sometimes casts doubt on suspects who turn out to be innocent, called her the "leading practitioner" of the "legal shout-fest." Grace says she rarely raises her voice, which off camera is a more syrupy Macon drawl. "If critics believe the show is tabloid, maybe they've never been in a courtroom. The justice system is tabloid too. It's nasty, it's mean, it's hand-to-hand combat."

Asked about her heavy diet of ratings-friendly celebrity cases, Grace says they help educate the public. "The Jackson case to me symbolizes child molestation and the downfall of a music icon I followed growing up." As for Peterson, whom the media turned into the villain of a national soap opera, she says: "I'm grateful the American public embraced Laci and embraced the case. I wish they would embrace every other murder victim the same way. . . . We also cover cases that others don't cover -- ordinary people, not stars, not celebrities, not A-listers."

Grace, who remains a Court TV anchor--a job she took in 1997 after the quick demise of her show with ex-O.J. lawyer Johnnie Cochran--insists she knows little about television. "There's really nothing I can do about what my critics say, because I'm not going to change what I do," Grace says. "I am a trial lawyer. I'm not a journalist."

Footnote: Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria breaks into the television game Friday with a new half-hour show, "Foreign Exchange," on 100 PBS stations. He interviews Egyptian dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim, interviews the author of a book on Europe's social-welfare states and runs a freelancer's piece about environmental protection in Russia. "I'm hoping to avoid the 'Crossfire'-type format," Zakaria says, but "I don't want the show to have the pacing of a French movie."

On to the you-know-what story. David Frum says in his National Review blog that the polls can be misleading:

"Polls on an issue like the Schiavo case are not all that useful in predicting what voters will actually do. Incredible as it may seem, all over America at this very moment there are people who do not care very much about Terri Schiavo. Politically, it doesn't much matter if 70% of these people say they support the right to die. The crucial political question is: How do the people who do care divide? And there I bet the pro-life side has a handsome majority.

"The Schiavo case presents a great moral dilemma. But it's also a fascinating soap opera -- a story of a terrible dispute between a woman's husband and her parents, involving money and sex. By now, most of the television audience is much less interested in the question, 'When does life end?' and much more interested in the question, 'What kind of guy is Michael Schiavo?' There may be a 70% majority in favor of letting a loving, caring husband remove a feeding tube from a vegetative wife. But let American women get the idea that Schiavo cared a lot more about his $700,000 malpractice award than he did about Terri -- and that majority will flip fast."

I would argue that the public is in not much better position to judge Michael Schiavo and what he's been through than to make medical judgments about his wife.

The Nation's David Corn concentrates on ripping the GOP:

"Will the exploiters of Terri Schiavo admit they went overboard?

"Her parents will not give up their battle to restore the feeding tube to their brain-damaged daughter. No one can fault them for holding on to hope in this tragic case and doing everything they can. But the Republicans who pushed through emergency legislation to 'save' Schiavo and their allies in the media issued a variety of disingenuous claims. Senate majority leader Bill Frist, a heart doctor, suggested that he could diagnose Schiavo (by examining years-old videos) better than the several neurologists who have studied her in person and have found she is in a persistent vegetative state."

The Republicans, says Corn, "did not seek to change a law; they sought to change one decision they did not like. In doing so, they made claims that were not true. Moreover religious right crusaders and other backers of the Schiavo legislation demonized Michael Schiavo, Terri's husband. Conservative columnist Linda Chavez, for instance, maintained that Michael had betrayed Terri by having a relationship with another woman. Yet the 2003 report written by [Dr. Jay] Wolfson--Jeb Bush's expert!--noted that Terri's parents had encouraged Michael to seek another relationship and that Michael had spent years seeking therapies and treatments for Terri before concluding further action was hopeless."

Here is John Gibson at foxnews.com: Just to burnish my reputation as a bomb thrower, I think Jeb Bush should give serious thought to storming the Bastille.

By that I mean he should think about telling his cops to go over to Terri Schiavo's (search) hospice, go inside, put her on a gurney and load her into an ambulance. They could take her to a hospital, revive her, and reattach her feeding tube. It wouldn't save Terri exactly; she'd still be in the same rotten shape she was in before they disconnected the feeding tube.

Fred Barnes picks up on the question of whether the media are trafficking in a bogus document:

"Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist never saw it. Neither did the Senate Republican whip, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. The number three Republican in the Senate, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, didn't get a copy. Nor did the senator with the closest relationship with President Bush, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire. And the senator with the familiar Republican last name, Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, didn't see it or read it. The same is true of Senator Mel Martinez, the rookie Republican from Florida.

"Yet the infamous memo that argued Republicans stood to gain politically by saving the life of Terri Schiavo was characterized by ABC News as consisting of 'GOP Talking Points.' True, a few paragraphs were of Republican origin. They had been lifted, word for word, from a Martinez press release outlining the provisions of his legislative proposal, 'The Incapacitated Person's Legal Protection Act.' This was the inoffensive part of the memo. The offensive part--it didn't come from Martinez--left the strong impression that Republicans are callous and cynical in their attempt to save Schiavo's life, ill-motivated in the extreme.

"Two paragraphs were the problem. One contended Republicans should save the disabled Schiavo's life because 'this is a great political issue' that could lead to the defeat of Democratic senator Bill Nelson of Florida in 2006. The other said dwelling on the Schiavo issue would excite pro-lifers, a key Republican constituency.

"Supposedly the memo was distributed only to Republicans on the Senate floor. Ergo, it was a Republican document. ABC correspondent Linda Douglass first reported its existence on March 18, saying the network 'has obtained talking points circulated among Republican senators, explaining why they should vote to intervene in the Schiavo case.' She mentioned the two offensive passages, and the memo was shown on the screen. The ABC website was explicit about the source of the memo: These were "GOP talking points on Terri Schiavo." Two days later, the Washington Post referred to it as 'an unsigned one-page memo, distributed to Republican senators.'

"There wasn't a hint in these reports the memo could have any other source but Republicans. Yet there was no evidence it had come from Republicans. It was unsigned and had no letterhead or date. Nothing indicated it came from the Republican leadership or the House or Senate campaign committee or from the Republican National Committee or even from a stray Republican staffer."

How are things going in Iraq? Better than the press might lead you to believe, suggests Lawrence Kaplan in the New Republic:

"At what point does the press report a trend? The question comes to mind because, over the past month, the news from Iraq has been unusually good. Depending on which military official you ask, insurgent attacks have dropped by either a third or nearly half. The number of Americans killed in action has declined. Civilians have begun killing terrorists. Over the past week alone, U.S. forces have killed scores of insurgents in lopsided battles--in the latest, Iraqi forces spearheaded the offensive. Does this mean America has turned a corner? Can we see a light at the end of the tunnel? Does it mean anything at all?

"At least to judge by the amount of press coverage devoted to the past weeks' progress in Iraq, the answer would seem to be no. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have both featured pieces on the relative quiet that has descended on Haifa Street, the once-murderous artery near the Green Zone. Nearly every news outlet has reported the toll U.S. forces inflicted on insurgents this week in Samarra and Salman Pak. Yet remarkably few articles have put the pieces together to report a trend, which, even if it doesn't last, surely amounts to a trend nonetheless. . . .

"When and if things turn out well in Iraq, will journalists even be able to recognize it? I'm not so sure."

Amid the chatter about the paucity of women on op-ed pages and in the blogosphere, the liberal group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting takes the debate to TV:

"FAIR looked at Sunday morning talkshow panels, where two to four journalists (political reporters as well as columnists) often join the shows' hosts to discuss the week's big political stories. The study examined six months (9/1/04-2/28/05) of NBC's Chris Matthews Show and Meet the Press, ABC's This Week and Fox News Sunday. (CBS had no consistent panel feature on analogous shows.) "Surprisingly, NBC's Chris Matthews Show came out almost exactly even on gender, with 51 men and 49 women. Unfortunately, the show is unique in its gender balance: This Week and Fox News Sunday hewed more closely to the print media's unspoken 'quota of one' for female pundits, featuring 22 percent and 25 percent women respectively. Meet the Press -- which occasionally included more than one woman per panel and once (2/20/05) even filled its panel with four -- had 39 percent women . . .

"But which women get to speak? Certainly not women of color. While the Chris Matthews Show did well on gender parity, every one of its 49 female panelists was white. The only two appearances by non-white women in the six months studied were PBS's Gwen Ifill (Meet the Press, 10/24/04) and Democratic strategist Donna Brazile (This Week, 2/27/05). . . .

"Most of the shows have either a regular or semi-regular non-white male panelist (Juan Williams on Fox News Sunday, Fareed Zakaria on This Week, Clarence Page on the Chris Matthews Show) -- once again, essentially a quota of one."