Do you think anything is wrong with the nightly news on the three major networks?

Many viewers do; as evidence, viewership has dropped precipitously in recent years. But many news-watchers find it difficult to articulate exactly what's wrong with the news on ABC, CBS and NBC.

Who is better able to offer a list of shortcomings than the president of one of the network news divisions? Andrew Hayward, president of CBS News, did just that when he spoke recently before a convention of news directors. He outlined what he thinks is wrong with Brokaw, Jennings and his own Rather.

His comments provide a rare insight into why lots of us are tuning away from the nightly newscasts. What he found are "seven daily sins" committed by the networks:

1. Imitation: "If you could watch only one evening news broadcast for a year and your neighbor another, how different would the experience be?...On too many nights, network news producers judge themselves by how similar they are to the competition, as if that were somehow a reassuring sign that our collective news judgment is valid."

2. Predictability: "How often are you surprised by something you see on the news?...We are afraid to try something new, to move away from what we know we know how to do."

3. Artificiality: "If we're supposed to reflect and report on reality, why are we so unreal ourselves? If you stop and really listen to how a typical television reporter tells a story, you'll hear how artificial it sounds. There's an unnatural emphasis....[and] even words...that you never hear in real life....We bleach the personality out of our newscasts....We hire the same faces and voices again and again, without paying enough attention to whether they are real reporters who understand and believe what they are saying."

4. Laziness: "We've all become lazy in our thinking, in our reluctance to dig out original stories and come up with new ways to tell them....It's a lot easier to round up the usual sound-bites and cover an incremental development on Capitol Hill or at the White House than it is to explain how policy made in Washington affects Americans outside the Beltway."

5. Oversimplification: "Our audience is smarter and more thoughtful than a lot of us think. [They] know that life is not as simple as what they see on the news: a world of heroes and villains, winners and losers, exploiters and victims. Yet that's what we show them, night after night....The world is a complicated place....There are no easy answers; and we hurt ourselves and drive our viewers and listeners away by pretending there are."

6. Hype: "Can you remember the last 'story you'll never forget?' How about the one before that?...If everything is momentous, nothing stands out....Over the years, we've exaggerated so much that we've eroded our own ability to convey what's truly significant."

7. Cynicism. "All the other daily sins...are a reflection of this one. Now more than ever, ours is a business for idealists, for true believers, not cynics....Our viewers and listeners are hungry for honest information, for help in coping with a bewildering world. We have an enormous opportunity to win our good name back."

Now that we know what's wrong, we can tune back in on occasion to see if it's been fixed.

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