CBS HOPES TO SURVIVE POSSIBLE STRIKE WITH SURVIVOR 3 AND 4
PASADENA -- CBS TV Pres. Leslie Moonves said network had ordered new Survivor series 3 and 4 -- to follow Survivor 2, which begins its run immediately following Jan. 28 Super Bowl. Third in series will air in fall as hedge against possible strike by writers and actors. “That’s all part of the game plan,” along with extended new or expanded editions of news programming, he said at TV critics session here. Reality shows are “not union dependent,” Moonves said. “We hope the strike can be avoided, but we are ready… Obviously, everybody is going to be doing the same thing” in stockpiling reality programming in case of strike (CD Jan 9 p7). He joked that if Super Bowl were “a blowout, we may eliminate the 4th quarter and go right to Survivor… and hopefully in the near future we'll be announcing Survivor 19 and 20.” He refused to discuss prices being paid by advertisers for Survivor 2, but “obviously it’s a great deal more than they paid” for original series last summer.
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CBS News Pres. Andrew Heyward said Voter News Service (VNS) had problems and made serious mistakes in Nov. Presidential vote in Fla. He said, “it’s not appropriate for the networks to blame VNS. [But] I think there are problems with VNS [that] accrue back to the people who built it and the members [Big 4 TV networks and AP]… I think they are probably fixable. If not, we'll explore a new consortium.” Heyward stressed, however, that CBS wouldn’t “go it alone” in any effort to start new consortium.
Asked about “the insideness of political reporting,” Heyward said charge was “true to a degree… and I'm not comfortable, and I think a lot of journalists aren’t, with the coziness that’s grown up between the people who make the policy and the people who cover them.”
If Bush Administration repeals or relaxes 35% ownership cap on TV stations, “you won’t see any difference in the way the business is run now,” Moonves said. He said rule was put in place for benefit of “mom-and-pop operations. I don’t think [group owner] Hearst is a mom-and-pop operation.” Expressing hope rule would be repealed in new Administration, he said “I just think it is unfair for the government to put regulations on what you can and cannot own.” As for operations of UPN TV Network, he said: “We have nothing to do with UPN except they're our sister company and we root for them to come in 2nd.”
CBS Sports Pres. Shaun McManus told critics that XFL professional football to start in Feb. on NBC and UPN “has a lot of new ideas that might make it a successful television product… certainly on cable and on UPN… but I think it’s a great question mark… Will it be serious football or will it be WWF wrestling?.. It could be a better product for cable and for UPN than it is for NBC… It’s going to be an interesting experiment to see if you can do something really, really different.”
Diversity in employing minorities and women is “an extremely active issue and we think we have made significant progress in front of the camera, behind the camera and in the ranks of the executives” at CBS, Moonves said. Issue was very upfront at TV critics’ tour year ago and he conceded that, despite “great improvement… there’s a lot more to be done” in bringing minorities aboard.