Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies

by Dave Itzkoff

  In fact, it has already happened. And it is with only the slightest exaggeration that a contemporary screenwriter such as Aaron Sorkin can say, “No predictor of the future—not even Orwell—has ever been as right as Chayefsky was when he wrote Network.”

  So how did it happen?

  “Chayefsky’s warning was made to people who knew everything he said was true, but they felt powerless to stop it,” said Peggy Noonan, the Wall Street Journal columnist and former speechwriter to presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, who in the late 1970s was a producer for CBS Radio. “It was as if a young doctor came into a great teaching hospital in nineteenth-century France and announced, ‘I’ve figured it out, if we wash our hands before operating there will be fewer infections!’ And the other doctors look at him and say, ‘Yes, but we’re not going to start washing our hands for a long time.’ We’re on an irrevocable slide in that department.”

  To a generation of television news professionals who came of age in the post-Network era, the film does not play as a radical comedy so much as a straightforward, that’s-the-way-it-is statement of fact. Short of witnessing the assassination of an on-air personality, “I have seen everything in that movie come true, or it’s happened to me,” said Keith Olbermann, the former anchor of ESPN’s SportsCenter and MSNBC’s Countdown. “There have been enough broadcasters killed—it’s just that we haven’t gotten around to any of them being killed for bad ratings.”

  To Olbermann and many of his peers, whatever sanctity their industry still possessed was lost only a few years after Chayefsky’s death. First came the 1986 maneuvering by the sibling corporate titans Robert Preston Tisch and Laurence A. Tisch that gave their Loews Corporation a substantial stake in CBS—at the time, the nation’s second-place network, behind NBC—and helped put Laurence Tisch in charge of a broadcasting company saddled with $1 billion in debt. Next came the dark day in March 1987 when CBS fired 215 employees from its news department, despite an offer by CBS anchor Dan Rather and others to reduce their own salaries if it would save the jobs of some colleagues.

  Before that day, the notion that news divisions were supposed to be self-supporting profit centers for their networks was broadcasting heresy. “They lost thirty million dollars a year,” said Olbermann, “when thirty million dollars a year was not the price of the highest-paid baseball player—thirty million dollars bought you maybe sixty Walter Cronkites. It was essentially the charitable contribution that those three networks paid to be allowed to dump everything else on TV in the audience’s mind.” But, he added, “once news got out from under the sacrosanct umbrella of public service, of a commitment that the FCC demanded of the individual stations, it would become part of entertainment.”

  There is a self-admitted tendency in the news business to remember the broadcast industry’s golden age as more pristine and objective than it actually was: even in its formative days, even before television was the dominant medium, Edward R. Murrow was delivering radio broadcasts from the London Blitz that, in their stark factuality, were also meant to encourage American intervention in World War II; later, on TV, he was making his “urbane small talk” with Samuel Goldwyn, Eva Gabor, and Groucho Marx on Person to Person while addressing the impact of McCarthyism on See It Now. Walter Cronkite wiped his watery eyes as he reported the assassination of John F. Kennedy and cheered the moon landing and editorialized against the Vietnam War, but he jostled privately with colleagues, chased ratings fervently, and made no secret of his liberal leanings. “God Almighty,” he declared at a 1988 dinner honoring the Democratic congresswoman Barbara Jordan, “we’ve got to shout these truths in which we believe from the rooftops, like that scene in the movie Network. We’ve got to throw open our windows and shout these truths to the streets and to the heavens.”

  But something changed forever in the 1980s, as the networks and their news divisions were absorbed into larger conglomerates and wrung for every penny they could produce; and those journalists who kept their lucrative jobs were left, as 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt would later write, “in no position to join the chorus” of criticism against these troubling consolidations. “Why aren’t we broadcast journalists hollering about it?” Hewitt asked. “Because we want it both ways. We want the companies we work for to put back the wall the pioneers erected to separate news from entertainment, but we are not above climbing over the rubble each week to take an entertainment-size paycheck for broadcasting news.”

  In that same era, the Federal Communications Commission in 1987 abolished its long-standing Fairness Doctrine, which was supposed to ensure that broadcasters covered crucial public issues with impartiality and balance, and rules were relaxed that had prevented the concentration and cross-ownership of media companies in the hands of only a few parent corporations. When journalists entered the industry after this point, they joined up accepting certain fundamental truths that would have horrified previous generations.

  “It was everyone’s basic understanding—and never necessarily even spoken of as a problem, just a basic, tacit understanding—that the information business was a business,” said Bill Wolff, the vice president of programming at MSNBC and executive producer of The Rachel Maddow Show, who began his career at ESPN in 1989. “You were responsible to be profitable. It was true in sports in 1989, and it’s true across the board today.”

  The proliferation of cable television channels, which barely registered a blip in Chayefsky’s day, has added hundreds of UBS-style networks to the programming grid, all scrambling to fill their airtime with content that will deliver maximum returns on minimum investments, including a whole new breed of channels reporting the news for increasingly narrow slivers of niche viewerships and aiming their coverage at partisan audiences.

  “There’s a segment of the viewing population which likes to either have their opinion validated, or watch somebody they disagree with, and connect with them in that way,” said Anderson Cooper, CNN anchor and 60 Minutes correspondent.

  And where these news channels have found devoted audiences, there has simultaneously arisen a new category of anchors who see it as their purpose to articulate their rage for them. “As a viewer, I watch some people and I think, is that person really angry, or is this just part of their shtick?” Cooper said. “Is this just what they do? They get their veins pulsating and they’re yelling. I can’t imagine they’re that angry all day long. They’ve got to be gearing themselves up for it and then putting on a show.”

  The cable channels and their on-air talent do not necessarily consider themselves as having political biases or identifying with specific ideologies or parties. But the concern and the sense of immediacy they say they feel are real. “As far as I’m concerned,” said Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News personality and host of its top-rated show, The O’Reilly Factor, “I do my job, and I do it in an authentic way. If I’m mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, I’m going to say that. But it’s not because of the movie—it’s just because that’s the way I feel.”

  O’Reilly sees himself as a successor to journalists such as John Chancellor, Eric Sevareid, and David Brinkley, who provided televised commentary and editorials but who “did it in a much more traditional, button-down way.” “Today,” O’Reilly said, “they’d never even get on the air. It’s a different society—you have to raise the level of urgency and the level of presentation so that people will watch. There’s just simply too many choices.”

  With this hypercompetitive broadcasting environment, O’Reilly said, comes the mandate not only to inform viewers but also to entertain them, even if it comes at the cost of overlooking important stories of the day. “We think our mission is basically to look out for the folks, to be a watchdog crew, an ombudsman sometimes,” he said. “But to put on an entertaining program, it has to be entertaining, no doubt. I think Syria’s an important story, but I can’t cover it. Nobody’s going to watch, and I know that. That’s the limitations of my job.”

  Other contemporary newscasters have m
ade it a virtue to wear their passions and emotions on their sleeve and cite Network sincerely as an inspiration for their work. Glenn Beck, the former CNN Headline News and Fox News commentator who now oversees his own satellite and Internet TV service, TheBlaze, has claimed Howard Beale as an influence and said that he identifies with the character’s alienated, apocalyptic furor. “I think that’s the way people feel,” he has said. “That’s the way I feel.”

  Popular frustration with events as well as with broadcasting—in both its traditional network mode and its excitable cable incarnations—has created opportunities for jesters such as Jon Stewart, who has become a reliable source of the news even as he mocks it on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show; and his 2.0 upgrade Stephen Colbert, who, as the host of The Colbert Report, has turned news satire into a full-time act of performance art, creating an on-air alter ego who emulates the theatrical style of a partisan cable host while simultaneously illuminating the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and ignorance of such personalities. After hearing Glenn Beck observe that his influences included not only Howard Beale but Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr., Colbert said, “I thought, wow, none of those stories end well.”

  The real-life Colbert calls Network his favorite movie, though he does not consider the film to be a direct inspiration for his vainglorious Stephen Colbert character. Howard Beale, Colbert said, is “a hopeless character who ultimately does not succeed in what he wants to do, and is killed. He’s not a messianic figure.”

  But having studied his share of modern-day Beales, Colbert said that what Network correctly anticipated was an attitude these broadcasters share, which is, he said, “‘I will tell you what to think.’ That’s what it prefigures most of all. ‘I will tell you what to think and how to feel.’” When Howard Beale is preaching to his flock, at least he “is doing it in a quasi-benevolent way—‘I’m going to remind you that you’re being anaesthetized right now.’” What Network got right, Colbert said, “is a great bulk of what happens with news now. And not just the nighttime people that I’m sort of a parody of, not just the opinion-making people. But even what is left of straight news, that a long time ago became about how to dramatize the situation.”

  The fragmentation of the television news marketplace need not be an entirely negative development. One point on which broadcasters such as Bill O’Reilly and Anderson Cooper see eye to eye is that a wider array of choices has allowed more news, and more kinds of news presenters, to get on the air. “Back in Cronkite’s day,” Cooper said, “it was three white, middle-aged guys saying what the news was, and obviously there was a lot more going on. You didn’t see people of color, you didn’t see diversity on the screen, you didn’t see a great diversity of people and stories. It was not representative of the United States.” Today, O’Reilly concurred, “You have so many good options to get information and that’s very, very healthy. Whereas twenty, twenty-five years ago, you were being told, hey, this is the way you should think and this is the way we see it—because all the networks pretty much see it the same, even today.”

  But not all their industry peers agree with the assessment that more avenues of information have created more diversity. “I don’t know what diversity there is,” said Gwen Ifill, senior correspondent of PBS’s NewsHour and the moderator and managing editor of Washington Week. “You mean, other than me? I think that’s where we’ve actually fallen down.”

  Ifill added that true diversity in news broadcasting is not necessarily measured on-screen, by “the people reading the news,” but has to happen behind the scenes, based upon “who’s in the room making the decisions about the news that does and does not get covered.” “If you went and took a tour of most newsroom morning meetings, where the decisions are made,” she said, “you’d still find mostly white male faces, maybe white female if you’re lucky. And the higher you go in the news business, more Ivy League, more people who come from a pretty closed environment and upbringing. I think that’s actually one of our great failures, is that we haven’t figured out how to incorporate diversity of thinking—thought and experience and background.”

  She cautioned that trends in cable news did not reflect the state of play at the broadcast networks or on public television. “I don’t see any sign that the cable networks are setting the tone,” Ifill said. “They’re functioning and thriving, to the extent that they thrive at all, on a completely different kind of journalism. To the extent that it is journalism.”

  Yet even in their decline, the network news broadcasts still command audiences larger than their cable television counterparts. At the end of 2012, each of the three network programs drew between 6.9 million and 9.4 million viewers a night. These are numbers that the cable competition simply cannot touch: in a comparable period, The O’Reilly Factor was watched by an average of 3.52 million viewers, while The Rachel Maddow Show was seen by 1.69 million, and Anderson Cooper 360 drew 913,000.

  What concerns broadcast journalists on both sides of the divide is that, as surely as the distinctions between the network news and entertainment have gradually eroded, the proverbial firewall between acceptably overheated cable news commentary and genteel network news objectivity will someday be annihilated—most likely when it makes good business sense for these channels’ parent companies.

  In his tenure at MSNBC, Keith Olbermann—who was known to dress up in the soggy raincoat of Howard Beale and impersonate the character on his show from time to time—said he resisted efforts to make his pointed political commentaries a permanent element of his Countdown program, but went along with experiments to air his cable news show on its sibling broadcast network. “We ran Countdown several times on NBC, up against 60 Minutes, to see basically if the universe would melt,” he said. “And it didn’t.”

  What such trials inevitably portend, Olbermann said, is the broadcast networks’ gradual incorporation of more partisan content and entertainment-style formats first developed in the laboratories of their cable channels. “If you told the heads of ABC, CBS, and NBC News,” he said, “that they could prolong the life of these cash cows at six thirty”—that is, their evening news shows—“by adding Keith Olbermann commentary every night or Bill O’Reilly commentary every night or Glenn Beck commentary every night, I don’t know what the outcome would be. But eventually one of them would say yes. And certainly there’d be people saying yes right now.”

  Even without adding politically polarized commentary to its flagship evening news show, a network such as NBC already undermines its own integrity by simultaneously operating news shows, hard and soft, neutral and partisan, all under the same corporate banner. “What do you do,” Olbermann asked, “when your brand is on so-called pure news, and on something like The Today Show and on MSNBC? Can you have that logo represented by Brian Williams, Katie Couric, and Keith Olbermann? It becomes a juggling act.”

  Bill Wolff of MSNBC said he expected that cable-style news would continue to coexist with its rival media and would not cannibalize traditional print, radio, and network television offerings. But to the extent that such news outlets continue to exist, he said, they validated a blunt Chayefskyian lesson in capitalist economics. “There is still a tremendous appetite for straight, sober information,” said Wolff. “The reason it’s there is that there is demand for it.”

  It is a lesson that Wolff said applies in his corner of the industry, too. “If no one were watching Rachel Maddow, there wouldn’t be a Rachel Maddow Show,” he said. “But people are, because there’s demand for it. She’s intellectually rigorous and she’s extremely ethical, so she’s to the good. And the reason she gets to be on TV is that a big company makes a lot of money because people watch her.”

  But when such a responsibility is taken away from broadcasters themselves and yielded to the phantom forces of the market, what remains is the reality that it is up to viewers to decide for themselves who is truthful and reliable and who is providing them with information that is accurate—a conclusion that O’Reilly said is the mor
al he took away from Network.

  “The movie, I thought, was about the audience more than the presenters,” he said. “And that the audience was demanding more and more craziness and stimulation from the news presentation.” A careful viewing of Network, O’Reilly said, shows that “Chayefsky is chiding the audience more than he is chiding the people like Howard Beale, and that, I think, is a legitimate concern. The audience, in many, many cases, is going for the lowest common denominator.”

  Still, even broadcast journalists have their guilty viewing pleasures. For Anderson Cooper it is Walter Mercado, the astrologer who gave daily readings on the Univision news show Primer Impacto. “He looks like Liberace, in capes and everything, and he would have two cameras,” Cooper said. “And he’d look at one camera and he’d be like, ‘Tauro,’ and then he’d give the horoscope for Taurus; then he’d do a very dramatic turn on the other camera and be, ‘Gemini,’ and then he would give the Gemini forecast for the day.”

  There won’t be soothsayers soon; they are already here.

  * * *

  Network is ultimately just a movie. But it is a movie that accomplished something truly remarkable and even radical: it used the money and the means of production of the Hollywood motion picture industry to criticize not only a rival medium but the entire field of mass communication, the vast system of corporations nested within corporations that contained it, and a distinctly American way of life that these institutions dictated. The film starred several of the top actors of its era and was made with one of its most celebrated directors at the helm; it was designed to reach the widest possible swath of moviegoers, and it succeeded in selling tickets by the millions, gaining critical acclaim, and winning approbation at the Academy Awards. It did this all while awakening its viewers to ugly and unflattering truths about their lives and the world they inhabited, and it did not communicate its messages in a subtle or soft-spoken manner: it put its most urgent and passionate ideas in the mouth of a man who at times is literally screaming them at his audience, commanding them to go to their windows and scream their dissatisfaction themselves.