“We’ve had our trial by fire, and it didn’t sink us,” “Dateline NBC” anchor Jane Pauley said, cringing at her own pun.
It has been 19 months since “Dateline” ran its story on the alleged fire hazards of certain General Motors trucks, and 15 months since Pauley and co-anchor Stone Phillips apologized on the air for the compromised integrity of that report.
With “Dateline” settling into a twice-weekly schedule (9 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday, WMAQ-Ch. 5) it will continue through the start of the new fall television season, however, the incident and its considerable fallout stand more as a measure of how far the NBC newsmagazine has come than anything else.
There are indications all is forgiven, if not forgotten.
“Even when we weren’t the darlings of the media, we still were doing very well in the (ratings) numbers,” Pauley said. “Enough that my colleagues in Burbank, who are loathe to give away hours of prime-time programming to news, were persuaded to give us another one. That is the most incredible validation to me, that we won over Burbank.”
The acquiescence of NBC’s West Coast entertainment executives and their embrace of “Dateline”-a product of an East Coast-based news division that had failed to mount a successful weekly prime-time show in more than a dozen tries over more than 20 years-comes as the Burbank suits have been stripped of whatever input they once had in the program, according to Phillips.
“A very large wall went up that should have been there from the beginning, between the West Coast and the East Coast,” Phillips said. “This show was launched with the idea that there could be a healthy and appropriate collaboration between the entertainment division on whose schedule we were placed and the news division producing the broadcast. And I think it was a very uncomfortable mix.”
Gone are the days in which an exclusive interview with the president would get second-billing on the program because it wasn’t deemed sexy enough.
Under executive producer Neal Shapiro, one of several people brought in to repair the damage from the GM mess, gone, too, are the lax standards and practices that enabled a flawed story such as the truck piece to go unchecked.
Additionally, the second hour each week should afford “Dateline” the chance to do stories that run over two programs, or devote an entire hour to one topic, knowing there is a second hour in the week to cover other subjects.
“A lack of time is always the enemy,” Phillips said. “If we don’t take advantage of that and do more satisfying and more thoughtful pieces, then we’ve squandered the opportunity.”
It’s an opportunity for which “Dateline” is at least partly indebted to ABC News’ Diane Sawyer. When NBC was trying to woo Sawyer a few months back, it dangled the prospect of a prime-time news program for her that would run over several nights.
“Once Diane left the picture, that idea was still there,” Pauley said.
Had Sawyer accepted, it might have imperiled “Dateline.” But Pauley again was the beneficiary of the good fortune that has marked her career through newscasting jobs in Indianapolis and Chicago, her replacement of Barbara Walters on NBC’s “Today” show at age 25, and her departure from that show upon a tide of public sentiment after 13 years in 1989.
Good luck, though, only partially explains the endurance of either Pauley or “Dateline.”
“Longevity in this business is not a gift,” Pauley, 43, said. “There are just too many people who are also good, who are right nearby, who maybe would work a little cheaper, whatever. So, it’s not a gift and, to the degree that I’m still standing, I’m still a player, all right, maybe I did something right.”
Pauley admits some of the troubles “Dateline” has encountered in finding its niche in prime time over the last two years may have cost her some of the considerable “goodwill capital” she has enjoyed with viewers.
“The `Today’ show thing was related to the intimacy that viewers had with that TV lady who was there for 13 years,” said Pauley, wife of “Doonesbury” cartoonist Garry Trudeau. “There was a a personal connection. It was a phenomenon that I’ve never seen the likes of. The `Dateline’ thing was more industry fodder.
“Generally, in the public’s mind, it was a mistake, almost a generic mistake that `those news magazines’ made, which, by the way, was an accurate interpretation. In fact, what we got nailed for, rightly, were offenses that had been committed elsewhere in the industry and for which people have Emmys on their desks-shiny Emmys.”
Pauley, whose own shiny Emmy sits behind her desk, said that when she and Phillips apologized for the GM story-admitted the lapses in disclosure, attribution and technique-she thought that would be the end of it. The criticism, sometimes unfair, endured for months, however.
“I was fairly angry at that point,” Pauley said. “There seemed to be a spasm (of cheap shots) where you would open up a women’s magazine. It would talk about mistakes-`and speaking of mistakes…’
There was a new wave of bad press for a March edition of “Dateline” in which Pauley interviewed figure skater Nancy Kerrigan and Phillips spoke to mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer. The “beauty and the beast” combo generated the program’s best ratings to date, and renewed criticism of “Dateline.”
“Once again, we get this knee-jerk reaction from our brethren in the print medium,” said Phillips, 38, who came to NBC after 12 years at ABC News. “They take us to task for putting serial killers on in prime time, but I’m proud of that piece. . . . There aren’t many serial killers that talk or have that level of awareness about what they did, and so that was a solid, legitimate, strong piece of journalism, I thought.
“I also thought it had some redeeming values, in terms of a message for the public. Jeffrey Dahmer sat there in that interview and said: “Don’t blame my parents. Don’t blame my teachers. Those were my dark impulses and my dark fantasies, and I belong right where I am, in prison.’ “
Surviving may be the best revenge, though it is clear that there always will be misconceptions about what “Dateline” was, is and what it wants to be.
“A lot of critics are still judging us by the show we were a year ago, or even six months ago,” Phillips said. “This is a very different show.”
