20 Questions for CBS News' Chief

By Rory O'Connor, AlterNet. Posted December 20, 2006.

Sean McManus was named president, CBS News, in October 2005. For the past decade, he has also been the head of CBS Sports. McManus is only the second person ever to lead simultaneously both the news and sports divisions of an American television network. The late Roone Arledge, who held both positions at ABC in the late 1970s and '80s, was the first.

During his nine-year tenure as president of the sports division, CBS became a leader in network sports. McManus now hopes to duplicate that success in news, where CBS, with a few exceptions, has long languished in the ratings.

McManus is the son of legendary sports broadcaster Jim McKay. He was graduated cum laude from Duke University in 1977 with a degree in English and history, and began his broadcast career as a production assistant and associate producer at ABC Sports later that same year -- just as Arledge became head of ABC News.

This is the latest in an ongoing series of question-and-answer sessions between Rory O'Connor and leading American media executives. Previous conversations have featured CNN chief Jonathan Klein, Fox News head John Moody, Time magazine editor Richard Stengel, and others.

ROC: Is it true you are the living reincarnation of Roone Arledge?

SM: If I can somehow approach the accomplishments Roone had in news -- because I feel very good about the sports side -- if I can somehow come within spitting distance, I will consider myself a big success. But the kind of opportunities he had to really revolutionize the industry unfortunately doesn't exist today. Let's face it, with Fox, CNN, and CNBC, it's a lot harder to distinguish yourself today, especially when we are limited to 22 minutes a night of news coverage. It's really hard. It makes it more challenging, and when you do something big and important, it stands out even more.

You've come from sports and added news to your brief -- are the skill sets similar?

The biggest surprise and disappointment I got coming to news was when someone told me on the first day I got the job that I couldn't buy exclusive rights to the elections -- because we were able to buy the Final Four and the Super Bowl and the Masters, but we couldn't buy the elections! That's the biggest difference -- you are competing on every story that you do, not only with two other networks, but also three or four very viable cable networks. That's a huge difference. Second, I can tell you today what time we're kicking off the Super Bowl -- which we're doing on February 4th, at 6:27 approximately -- but nobody can tell you when the next crisis or the next big news story is going to happen. So it's much more relentless, much more day-to-day, much more always being on your toes and being afraid of missing something frankly, of not being in position to do a story. My biggest fear now when the phone rings is that we're not in position to cover the story.

But there are also a lot of similarities. The same basic programming skills -- good story-telling, good reporting, identifying good on-air broadcasters and developing them … you know, there is the next Bob Schieffer out there somewhere, there is the next Mike Wallace, although both of those gentlemen are difficult to replace. There is not the next Ed Bradley, but there is someone who can have a similar impact on the industry. It's just finding and developing him or her -- that's one of the good and toughest challenges of this job.

What are your top three challenges today in CBS News?

I'm not at all concerned or focused on the ratings. In many ways, the media has set up a set of expectations that we never had at CBS News. We said the day we hired Katie Couric, it's not going to happen overnight. We're going to get an initial surge, then it's probably going to fall back to what it was, and then it's going to hopefully grow over months and years. You know, no new anchors come in and increase ratings. Katie's under way more scrutiny, way more pressure, and we're quite patient. We have a long-term deal with Katie.

Listen, do I want to be No. 3? Absolutely not. Do we hate being No. 3? Can't stand it. It's a terrible feeling, but it's where we're expected to be. It's just going to take time. To get people to physically change their channel if you are an ABC or NBC viewer, it's really hard to do, harder than anybody understands. And when you have the kind of built-in disadvantage of roughly around a 10 to 12 percent disadvantage of your national lead in -- you know, we don't have Oprah, we don't have Wheel of Fortune, we don't have some of the major markets … you know, in some ways Katie is ten yards behind the start line when we come on the air at 6:30. Dan Rather used to say, "Give me Oprah before me, and give me Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy after me, and I'll be No. 1 also." And I feel the same way about Katie. You give us Oprah, and our big stations around the country leading into our local news, and she would be a lot better in her ratings than she is now. But that's been true for many years.

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Filmmaker and journalist Rory O'Connor writes the Media Is A Plural blog.

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