WASHINGTON
2002
Sunday Morning
BY
LIZ COX
It’s
noon on a Thursday morning in July and Richard DiBella, the supervising
producer of Fox News Sunday, is laboring to lock in guests for
the 9 a.m. Sunday show. As DiBella and a colleague work the phones,
their list of first-choice guests and topics shifts with each
call.
The senator whom DiBella thought he had for a segment on Iraq
has suddenly left town to tend to an ill family member. Meanwhile,
the White House is making just one official available to the Sunday
political talk shows this week: Homeland Security Director Tom
Ridge. While domestic security is near the top of DiBella’s
topic list, if he books Ridge, he’ll be sharing him with
a competing show, CNN’s Late Edition. “We all hate sharing
guests,” DiBella says. Another option is to go with House
Majority Leader Dick Armey, who is available for the moment but,
DiBella learns, is considering an invitation to do Meet the Press.
The host of Fox News Sunday, Tony Snow, says he will “put
in a kind word” by phone as needed, to help the bookings
along. On the bright side, ABC is airing the British Open golf
tournament in This Week’s time slot. That’s one less
competitor for DiBella to worry about.
Each week, the producers of the five Sunday shows — Fox News
Sunday, ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation, NBC’s
Meet the Press, and CNN’s Late Edition — vie for guests
who can discuss, in an informed manner, whatever the two or three
hot issues happen to be. All of the shows lean toward official
government voices, meaning mostly senior members of Congress and
the Cabinet, who often appear on more than one Sunday program
a week. The producers must perform a delicate dance: if they book
guests early in the week, they are less flexible to react to late-breaking
news; if they hesitate too long, a rival show will beat them to
the booking. The producers for one show might make 100 calls in
a week to a list of thirty prospective guests.
Carin Pratt, the executive producer of Face the Nation, likens
the weekly competition to the pain of childbirth. “If you
remembered it, you’d never want to do it again,” says
Pratt, who has helped book Face the Nation’s guests for nearly
two decades. Betsy Fischer, the executive producer of Meet the
Press, seems to take the competition in stride. That may be because
she produces the oldest and highest-rated show of the five. Meet
the Press averaged nearly 4.4 million viewers a week during the
first half of 2002, while Face the Nation and This Week had about
2.9 million each. Fox News Sunday averaged 1.3 million viewers,
and Late Edition had 613,000.
Andrea DeVito, the segment producer for Fox News Sunday, compares
the process to a weeklong poker game. The players monitor each
other’s bookings all week, then reveal their hands Friday
morning in promos that air on the Washington, D.C.-based radio
station, WTOP and later in listings on the National Journal’s
Hotline Web site. “The big thing every Friday is to find
out for sure who got who,” DeVito says. “It’s like,
‘Show me your cards.’” On a Friday afternoon in
July, Richard DiBella supplemented Fox News Sunday’s hand:
following a plunge in the stock market that day, DiBella added
Neil Cavuto, Fox’s business news commentator, to the lineup,
to precede interviews with Tom Ridge, whom Late Edition also booked,
and Senator Joseph Biden.
If the booking process is a card game, the White House is top
dealer. The administration’s senior officials are among the
most sought-after guests for the Sunday talk circuit. “They’d
take Rice, Powell, or Rumsfeld every week if they could,”
says Adam Levine, an assistant White House press secretary and
the person in charge of placing Bush officials on the television
programs. “And, of course, the vice president is sort of
the Sunday matinee idol because he gives you everything in terms
of subject matter.” While Levine says he offers top White
House officials to the four broadcast networks and CNN on a rotating
basis, how strictly he adheres to the rotation is a subject of
debate among producers.
“They basically try to go with a rotation,” says Meet
the Press’s Fischer, of the Bush White House. But also, she
says, “I’m sure they think about ratings and where guests
will be seen by the most viewers.” Tammy Haddad, a veteran
television news producer who helped create Larry King Live, plays
down the notion of a White House rotation system. “They put
out who they want, when they want,” she says. “Johnny
Carson at his height could never get the guests he wanted when
he wanted, and it’s the same thing on Sunday morning shows.”
Some producers say the Bush administration keeps a looser rotation
than the Clinton White House, and makes its top officials available
more often, particularly since September 11. “The Bush administration
is more likely to want to put people out, since September, to
discuss the war effort than the Clinton administration was willing
to put people out to discuss [Clinton’s] troubles,”
says Face the Nation’s Pratt.
A rotation system aside, the programs are not all on equal footing
in the booking game. The Sunday hosts who also do daily coverage
— like Meet the Press’s Tim Russert and Face the Nation’s
Bob Schieffer — probably have a leg up going after certain
guests. “Schieffer is the chief Washington correspondent
for CBS,” says Fox News Sunday’s DiBella. “He’s
working that story every day of the week, so he gets more face
time.” A show’s format can also play in its favor, or
not. For example, CNN’s Late Edition, with its global reach,
airs last of the five Sunday programs — from noon to 3 p.m.
— giving guests a chance to respond to what happened on earlier
shows. “That makes CNN important and probably explains why
as a cable network they are included in the rotation with the
broadcast networks,” Levine says. Playing to that strength,
Late Edition bills itself as “the last word in Sunday talk.”
Face the Nation, meanwhile, runs just thirty minutes versus the
more typical one-hour Sunday show, a fact that can work against
it. “If I know there’s a show where I can have twenty-two
minutes or a show where I get twelve, if a decision has to be
made, you pick the twenty-two minutes,” Levine says.
Both the dealer and the players have their agendas. While producers
and hosts say they strive to knock guests off their talking points,
the White House still regards these shows as a prime place to
spread its message. “The Sunday show is our opportunity to
get beyond the sort of one-liner that the press is looking for
and really explain and fully articulate our positions and policies,”
Levine says. For the Sunday shows, generating news is a priority,
which, in turn, is good for ratings and good for attracting future
high-quality guests. “How much news you make is kind of like
the holy grail for Sunday morning political shows,” says
Marty Ryan, the executive producer of Fox News Sunday. The Sunday
programs make headlines at a volume that the nightly news and
weekday morning news shows can’t match. Fox News Sunday keeps
a chart of the stories it and its competitors spawn, and all five
shows are routinely referenced in top newspapers Monday morning.
To make news, of course, it is helpful to book top newsmakers.
That is part of the reason the Sunday shows almost have the feel
of a branch of government. Some producers say that this has been
an unusual year, that they have booked the White House principals
and congressional leaders more frequently since September 11.
Yet even in the first half of 2001, Sunday morning sometimes seemed
reserved for official Washington talking to itself, with the same
Cabinet officials and members of Congress making the rounds. Meet
the Press’s Betsy Fischer says, “We’re very much
at the mercy of the news and we’re always looking for guests
in positions to influence policy. Sometimes it is a limited pool
of guests. If there’s an issue we can expand outside the
typical people, we certainly try to expand on it.” As examples,
Fischer points to a program in March devoted to the Russian defense
minister, and one in June on which the Reverend Donald Cozzens,
the author of The Changing Face of the Priesthood, was a guest.
The fierce competition for the official few often leads to guests’
doing more than one program on a given Sunday, which the White
House prefers. While producers grumble that it can be more difficult
to get the coveted exclusive interview from the Bush administration,
Levine’s view is that if he is going to ask someone to give
up part of his or her Sunday, he gets more mileage by placing
that person on multiple shows. “There are very few scenarios
where exclusivity suits the president’s purposes,” Levine
says. “It serves the networks’ purposes.” On this
point, the dealer usually wins. It is still unusual, however,
for a guest to do all five shows on a single Sunday — what
producers call doing “a full Ginsburg” in honor of William
Ginsburg, Monica Lewinsky’s lawyer and the first guest to
hit all of the shows in one day.
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Liz
Cox is an assistant editor at CJR.
