Published in SBJ January 12, 2006
Sean McManus is wearing two hats these days. As President of CBS Sports since 1996, he led the acquisition (and later renegotiation) by the network of broadcast rights to the NFL and extended its broadcast rights for the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament and the PGA Tour. As newly named President of CBS News, he takes on a dual role so famously made at ABC in 1977 by Roone Arledge, with whom McManus’s father, legendary sports broadcaster Jim McKay, collaborated. That same year, McManus began his professional career at ABC Sports as a production assistant before moving to NBC two years later as associate producer and to Trans World International in 1987 as Senior VP.
Update: McManus served as President of CBS Sports and News for five years. In February 2011, he was named Chairman, CBS Sports.
Q. The French writer Rabelais wrote, “One falls to the ground in trying to sit on two stools.” How will you be able to keep your balance as president of CBS Sports and CBS News?
McManus: Probably 95 percent of my time now is being spent in the news division. I’m fortunate in that my No. 2 in sports, Tony Petitti, is more than qualified to not only maintain what we have achieved at CBS Sports but indeed to take it to the next level. I’m involved in the PGA Tour negotiations directly, but other than that I’m going to be an overseer and let Tony run the operation. So, I’m not sitting on two stools right now. I’m sitting on one stool and I’ve got my hand on another one.
Q. As you know, there is a precedent for your move. In 1977, ABC placed Roone Arledge, its top sports executive, in charge of its news division. But as Jacques Steinberg wrote in the New York Times, “Arledge operated in a time in which the networks did not have to contend with the defection of viewers to newer outlets, like Fox News and Yahoo.” What unique challenges does that additional competition present?
McManus: The competition, for the best anchorman, the correspondents, and the best personnel behind the camera, is intense. The competition for viewers is far more intense. In Roone’s day, the first opportunity most viewers had to watch national news was in the national news telecasts. Now, with Fox News and CNN and MSNBC, anybody who wants to watch news 24 hours a day obviously can. So, the challenge is to put on a news program at 6:30 that not only gives the viewer a good summary of what happened in the day, but also presents an alternative to what not only the cable stations are doing but also what the other two networks are doing. And that is an enormous challenge.
Q. The technology has also come a long way since 1977.
McManus: The production values in news when Roone took over ABC News in 1977 were minimal. Graphics and music and production techniques that were common in sports were never used in news, nor were a lot of the technologies that Roone had developed in the sports area. By transferring those over from sports to news, Roone revolutionized the news business. But we’re all doing that now. We’re all using the technology to its fullest, so that opportunity was obviously exploited by Roone.
Q. Of the time you as a youth spent with Arledge, you said, “I’d like to think some of his genius rubbed off on me.” What was his genius?
McManus: Roone’s genius was manifold. First and foremost, he understood the importance of on-air talent and building stars, whether it was a Peter Jennings or a David Brinkley or a Ted Koppel or a Jim McKay or a Howard Cosell. He understood how much of your identity really is placed in the people who are in front of the camera. That’s No. 1.
Q. And No. 2?
McManus: He understood that all good television, whether it’s sports, news, drama, or entertainment, comes down to good storytelling. And whether he was telling the story of a sporting event or of a major news event, he had the best storytelling sense of anyone I’ve ever seen in television.
Q. In any discussion of Roone Arledge, the word “storytelling” always comes up. Dick Ebersol said it the most valuable lesson he learned from Arledge, and Jim Nantz has referred to storytelling.
McManus: Yes.
Q. Who are the good storytellers, in sports and news, and what makes them good?
McManus: I don’t want to get into specific names in news or sports at the moment as far as on-air talent. That’s a tough question for me to answer, because I don’t want to mention just one or two of our guys.
Q. What is your biggest challenge?
McManus: To make CBS News the leader in this industry, both in terms of viewership and quality.
Q. How would you characterize your management style?
McManus: I’d probably want to ask other people who work for me. I would say I’m very involved in all aspects, whether its production or operations or business affairs or programming because I like all of those. I try to give the people who work for me a great deal of flexibility and liberty to do their jobs without interference, but I really want to be kept abreast of everything that is going on. I’m fiercely loyal to the people who work for me, but conversely expect just as much loyalty in return. And I want people who are working for me to really enjoy being at either CBS Sports or CBS News. I think I’ve accomplished that at CBS Sports, and I believe I will accomplish it at CBS News.
Q. What’s the best advice you received?
McManus: It was from my father, which is to be true to yourself and to be your own man. And if you do that and you’re talented enough, everything else will fall into place.
Q. Let’s talk a little about your father, Jim McKay.
McManus: I learned a lot of lessons from him also. First and foremost, when you’re on television, you can’t fool anybody. Your personality and whatever’s inside you come out. You can’t fool the American viewing public, whether you’re doing sports or doing news.
He always told me that when he was on television, he never imagined that he was talking to millions of people; he imagined that he was talking to one or two people. He wanted to talk to the audience, not at the audience. And he also firmly believed that he was not [part of] the story of an event he was covering, that the athletes and the competition were the story.
Q. A good lesson for any broadcaster.
McManus: That’s a lesson that I think is lost on a lot of the young sports commentators who are coming up through the business. You don’t want to be part of the story. You want to tell the story, you want to be a storyteller, you want to do your job well, but you want to get out of the way. He was great at doing that at the right times, and it’s a lesson that more young sportscasters should pay attention to.
Q. He went from sportscaster to newscaster without warning at the 1972 Olympics at Munich when terrorists seized and killed 11 Israeli athletes. You were there at the time. What do you recall most vividly about that day?
McManus: The surreal nature of being around a group of men I had watched produce television programs my entire life and, all of a sudden, this same group of men was producing one of the most dramatic and compelling news events in history, and the entire country was watching. I don’t think the magnitude of the event dawned on anybody until we got home a couple of weeks later and realized how big a story it was and how many people were completely reliant on my father and Roone’s production team for what happened that day.
Q. Your father got a lot of mail on that, didn’t he?
McManus: I don’t think any of us, especially my father, appreciated the magnitude of that until they got home and the hundreds and hundreds of letters and telegrams that people had sent him were waiting on his doorstep.
Q. Jim McKay was part of the New York Giants’ broadcast crew in 1963.
McManus: I went to a lot of Giants games with my father. His broadcast partner was Chris Schenkel, and I would squeeze in the little radio booth and sit between Chris and my dad and afterward go down to the locker room and see players like Sam Huff and Y.A. Tittle and Erich Barnes. They were my heroes in those days.
Q. You were at the game the weekend JFK was assassinated. The NFL games were not cancelled. What do you remember about that day?
McManus: I remember the discussion that my parents had regarding whether we should go to the game. My father had promised me that we would go, and he was trying to balance that promise with what was the right thing to do. In the end, I think he made a decision that he might have regretted, much like Pete Rozelle regretted it. He might have made the wrong decision, but he did so purely out of, I think, loyalty and affection to me because he knew how disappointed I would be. When you’re an eight-year-old boy, you might not be able to comprehend what a devastating event the assassination of a president is.
Q. What do you think has been your best career decision?
McManus: Probably in 1979 to leave ABC Sports, where I’d been given a great break because of who my father was, and go work for Don Ohlmeyer and Jeff Mason at NBC Sports, which was a little scary since I had grown up at ABC. But to make that move really enabled me to develop as Sean McManus and not as Jim McKay’s son.
Q. Where is the imagination in sports today?
McManus: It’s a lot more challenging because everyone is doing such an unbelievably good and sophisticated job, whether it’s cable or network sports television. It’s really difficult to distinguish yourself. You can try some new production techniques or new technology, but basically we’re all doing an excellent job, and it’s more and more difficult to use your imagination to come up with new ideas. A lot of the imagination is coming on putting together the best quality broadcast team that you can.
Q. For example?
McManus: It’s why we moved Greg Gumbel into the studio and Jim Nantz out to do the football games last season. That, I think, in some ways took more imagination than coming up with the next great graphic or piece of music to use. Imagination is trying to distinguish your telecast from what everyone else is doing, especially when everyone else is doing such a good job.
Q. What in sports would you not miss if it were eliminated?
McManus: That’s a good question. I would not miss any performance-enhancing drugs—an absurd phrase. I read that as cheating. It’s a stain that’s been put on the entire sports world.
Q. How do you assess the state of broadcast journalism today?
McManus: The job that reporters are doing is generally exemplary. One of the dangers, more on cable certainly than on network, is that in an effort to draw ratings, intelligent dialogue, to a large extent, has been replaced by shouting. I love good debates and I love opposite and divergent points of view being shared on television, but I think at times the rhetoric is dialed up too high just to attract more viewers. But if you look at the quality of the coverage of Hurricane Katrina, the war in Iraq, or any host of other events, I think the coverage is unbelievably good across the board.
Q. Steven Brill has referred to “the overall scream culture that is too often cable television.” CBS has always seemed more reserved, or less noisy, in its productions than the other networks. Is that an approach you strive for?
McManus: I wouldn’t say we have strived for that. It goes back to what I was saying about letting the story, whether it’s a news event or a sports event, be the important part of your telecast and not the person who is covering that story or the graphics or the music in that story. Doing the best job you can and letting the events play out as events.
If anything in the last couple of years, Tony Petitti and I have tried to make our image at CBS Sports a bit more contemporary. I think that is clearly evident in our NFL and college basketball coverage, both in terms of the music and the production values. And I think we are drastically more contemporary than we were five or six years ago. That’s on purpose and was done with a plan in mind.
Q. What about CBS News?
McManus: I think the heritage of CBS News is of great journalistic integrity, great reporting, and great newscasting. I’m not going to ignore the fact that that image has taken a hit in the last year. That is clear, and it’s one of my jobs to help with the team here to restore that image that was so pristine for so many years.
Q. You said, back in 1998, that “because television generates the lion’s share of income in most sports, sports have to balance adjusting themselves to become more attractive to television and maintaining the integrity of the sport.” Has that been difficult?
McManus: I don’t think it’s been difficult at all. I think the leagues have done a good job of accommodating television without compromising the competitive balance. I think the one issue that is probably most arguable is start times of games. That’s the one area that all of us are a bit susceptible to. But quite frankly, it comes out of pure economics. If the leagues are going to get paid the kind of rights fees they are paid, it’s incumbent upon the networks, which are in fact a business—to maximize revenue. And regrettably, sometimes maximizing revenue means starting games later than any of us would like to.
Q. Anything else?
McManus: Other than that, I can’t think of too many instances where the competitive nature or the enjoyability (if that’s a word) of a sporting event has been compromised to satisfy television. Would we like fewer commercials in our football games? I’m sure we probably would, but I think people are getting used to commercials in all sports. So, from my point of view—and I’m probably not totally objective—I don’t see that’s it’s harmed sports irreparably.
Q. You said, “It’s not whether the Evening News is relevant. It’s whether I can make it more relevant to viewers.” Isn’t news by its very definition relevant? How do you make it more relevant?
McManus: You can do a story on rising interest rates that has all the facts regarding that particular story. But unless you explain to people how it’s going to directly affect them and hit their pocketbooks, and perhaps what they can do to avoid those high interest rates, unless you do that, I’m not sure you’re really engaging your viewers.
We’ve all done stories on the Medicaid prescription benefit program, and we’ve all talked about how confusing it is and how difficult it is for senior citizens to understand it. Well, that’s half the story. The second half of the story is trying to explain to viewers what it is you can do to try to figure out this mess. That would be a much more relevant story than just saying “Here’s why this is so confusing.”
Q. To find a way to better articulate the story?
McManus: I could go down a list and any story that you do, figure out a way to make the viewer at home either be more informed or more engaged. And say, “Boy, that really does apply to me; now I understand why rising interest rates or the prescription drug benefit program really does affect me. I better do X-Y-Z to avoid this problem.”
That to me is making it more relevant. If you talk about the war in Iraq, and you report the facts of what’s happening over there, that’s very good reporting. If you explain how that might affect America, either economically or socially or militarily, then you’re making it more relevant to the person who’s watching that program.
Q. Is there a problem with the way the news is reported?
McManus: I don’t have a problem with the way anybody, including CBS, is reporting the news. I would just like to figure out a way that the person at home is better served by being told how this affects him or her directly. That’s a fine distinction, but I think it’s an important one.
Q. Everyone, from movies and television to newspapers and magazines, is after the younger audience. Les Moonves, in the Baltimore Sun, said: “For all three evening newscasts, the average age of viewers is 60 years old.” Letterman had a Top 10 list to attract younger viewers. Do you have your own list?
McManus: My primary goal is not to attract younger viewers to the Evening News. The Evening News viewers are always going to be older, and I’ve accepted that. Trying to get the 18- to-34-year olds to watch the Evening News is not a priority, and if it was, it would be an unrealistic priority. They just aren’t watching the news at 6:30. That’s not their viewing pattern. I’m trying to get a better share of the audience that is currently watching the three evening newscasts, and, secondarily, if I can lower the average age and attract some younger viewers, I’ll be satisfied.
Personal
Date & Place of birth: February 16, 1955 in New York City
Education: Duke University, 1977
Favorites
Vacation spot: The Breakers in Palm Beach and home with my family
Piece of music: “Maggie May” by Rod Stewart and “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry. My daughter’s name is Maggie, and those are my kids’ favorite two songs.
Author: Ernest Hemingway
Quote: It’s by Winston Churchill, and it’s on my desk in both News and Sports: “We make a living by what we get; we make a life by what we give.”
Sporting event: The Masters
Movie: It has to be The Godfather
Last book read: It’s going to sound like I’m making this up, but I’m not. It’s Bob Schieffer’s book, This Just In. And I just reread Roone.
Typical day off: The perfect day off for me is golf early in the morning with Tony Petitti and the afternoon with my family.
Athlete you most enjoy watching: Tiger Woods when he’s on CBS
