On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television THE SNOOZE NEWS WAR BY MARVIN KITMAN The first salvos in the snooze news war began last July 5, with NBC News Overnight (1:30-2:30 a.m.), starring Lloyd Dobyns and Linda Ellerbee....
...Blast it open...
...It is a sort of revival of the old Weekend, the magazine show produced by Reuven Frank starring Dobyns and later Ellerbee...
...Another unusual aspect of Overnight is its excerpts from foreign TV coverage of important events...
...They love to hear what's for sale, from the latest in Meineke Mufflers and those Ginsu knives that cut tomatoes and aluminum siding equally well, to Slim Whitman record specials...
...When Ellerbee and Dobyns began their Monday through Friday experiment, though, I was worried: They were taking the first halting steps on the dark side of the moon...
...due to begin October 26, will be hosted by Gregory Jackson and feature Phil Donahue as a regular...
...It has more comprehensive stories about the big issues of the day...
...Those who care about budgets, arms limitation treaties, foreign policy disputes, interest rates, and economic indices are usually asleep, exhausted from having worried about what they witnessed on the earlier news shows...
...The networks soon will be in the thick of the battle of late-late news vs...
...And there simply aren't thai many insomniacs...
...late-late-later million dollar news????all the news that's fit to squint at through heavy-lidded eyes...
...Most young people of my acquaintance are impatient with information...
...Another segment of the late night audience is supposedly listening to buy things...
...more political speeches (I saw enough of Governor Jerry Brown the first week to rival a Californian on pills...
...Everybody agrees that Turner, the Mouth of the South, has struck fear in the networks...
...Not me...
...Recalling his gaffe about the Presidential succession after Reagan was shot, Haig told the American Bar Association, "So I made a mistake...
...Don't hassle me...
...Supply limited...
...Their tolerance for knowledge is limited...
...They don't want to risk being exposed to something that will keep them awake...
...That necessitates a lot of scratching around, calling NBC affiliates and asking what they have...
...Right in the middle of prime time...
...Okay, they do have a few irritating tics, especially those catchwords...
...But it is effective use of television's archives...
...After the most important stories, which take up only the first 10 minutes of the show, the last 50 minutes of Dobyns and Ellerbee gives you a feeling of what is actually going on in the country...
...They even had Chet Huntley interviewing American troops in Lebanon in 1957.1 can just imagine old folks waking up and thinking they had died, and that the late Chet was the big anchorman in the sky...
...network news shows...
...Just think how insulting that is...
...Another cultural concern is the impact on movies: When will we be able to enjoy that former staple of early-morning TV, bad old movies...
...they presented the same soldier, but you saw that he was part of a whole group of soldiers holding a press conference and the piece ran for five minutes...
...I suppose I should be excited about so much news inundating viewers...
...Not to be outdone, CBS will unveil its 2:00 a.m...
...CBS already had moved him from his traditional 8:00a.m...
...Weekend made Saturday Night Live possible...
...more minor disasters that aren't earth-shaking enough to make prime time (like a silo exploding in Kansas...
...This is narrowcasting at its finest...
...The present program maneuvering has the earmarks of a network conspiracy to destroy predawn television's real enemy ????sleep...
...A few people really want news between l:0Oand7:O0A.m., Imust admit out of fairness: young Wall Street lawyers and money managers coming home to dinner, post office workers, magazine editors????The salt of the earth...
...It reminds me of the old days, when TV first discovered movies...
...They act as if they are talking to equals, almost like a friend telling a story...
...Well, Overnight is better than any news we had before at 1:30 a.m., and some nights it can be very good...
...But starting this month he will be seen only on weekends...
...Unfortunately for Turner, nobody much is watching CNN...
...and more analysis of the Kalb Brothers, Bernard and Marvin, violating the Geneva Convention on inhumane treatment of viewers...
...The best thing about this pair is their style...
...If people didn't like the show, it wouldn't be the same as someone who gets fed up with what Roger or Tom or Dan are doing on the 7 p.m...
...On the same day came E. T.????not the movie, but Early Today (6:30-7:00 a.m...
...This is olds, not news...
...Mine is how Eller-bee and Dobyns have been doing on their moon walk...
...I counted wrong...
...That, however, is their problem...
...In 1974 Frank proved there was an audience at 11:30 on Saturday nights...
...It was fascinating to compare the longer version with the edited one...
...Like Sinbad the Sailor and Robinson Crusoe, they try to create their own world...
...The night of the terrorist attack on Jo Goldenberg's restaurant in Paris, we saw Madalaine Poullaine describing the horror scene on the French state network, with English subtitles...
...Records pressed while you wait...
...position to 6:30 a.m...
...Of course, the networks have no way of knowing how many they've anesthetized and how many are really paying attention...
...This excellent shoestring news show would be even better if they ran it when it could do more good, at 9:00 or 10:00 p.m...
...One day, for instance, the earlier news programs featured an Israeli soldier delivering a devastating one-sentence attack against his government's actions in Beirut...
...Late-night viewers simply roll over and go to sleep...
...the hour kids get up, and rumor had it that he was being shifted to the 4 a.m...
...Not that NBC News Overnight comes completely out of the blue...
...In fact, it is the most interesting new news show since CBS' Sunday Morning...
...At 1:30 a.m...
...Hip TV viewers must have secretaries who do nothing except respond to these offers...
...The same night they showed a Chinese TV report on a Japanese revisionist textbook that deletes any mention of the rape of Nanking, and a BBC report from darkest New Jersey examining a Town Council ban on listening to the Sony Walkman and other electronic monsters while driving...
...late night TV used to bean escape...
...Overnight also includes a feature called "Not Ready for Prime Time News...
...The Nielsens only count the sets turned on, not the number of people dozing...
...more amusing little kickers of the kind usually seen at the end of a news show, those squibs revealing human frailties and foibles that are supposed to leave you with a smile...
...Do it today...
...Bamaby Jones works better than Sominex...
...filled the air (NBC deleted some of the subtitles on the screen, which were hard to read anyway...
...One night last month they ran a long section from a speech by Alexander M. Haig Jr., making his post-Foggy Bottom debut on the lecture circuit...
...With television now so bullish on news, NBC should stop futzing around and go after the major audience directly?then they would have viewers...
...You can't trust what the network researchers are saying, either...
...The Devil quoting scripture has nothing on network researchers quoting statistics...
...The leading casualty of 1982's great news explosion will be Captain Kangaroo...
...the new early-bird edition of NBC's Today show????and ABC News This Morning (6:00-7:00 a.m...
...Night-watch in October, the first regular four-hour, all night news show in history, with Christopher Glenn behind the desk...
...ABC's late-late news (midnight-1:00 a.m...
...Yet, who is actually going to be watching...
...There is also more file footage: The first week had long bites of Presidents Kennedy and Eisenhower discussing the issues of their day, which curiously were the same as ours (a flat rate tax for Kennedy, sending the Marines ashore in Lebanon for Ike...
...Let the other two networks have the prime time fiction field...
...The networks believe that young people will be the major part of the late night news audience...
...I'm not saying that anything was used out of context on the other shows ????simply that here we got the full picture...
...This will be followed immediately by the newly expanded three-hour CBS Morning News (without Charlie Kur-alt...
...The people usually awake at 1:30 a.m...
...don'ttend to bethe ones who would benefit from massive doses of information...
...Now you can get hits that were never sold anywhere else...
...It's enough to make me weary...
...The biggies are afraid that their affiliates will be lured into buying his Cable News Network's special news programing...
...You can almost spot Ellerbee and Dobyns nudging each other before they say, "news on a reel" or "sports on a roll"????an annoying throwback to Weekend...
...feeding...
...They could convince themselves that the audience was composed predominantly of Ukrainian window washers and Portuguese sardine factory workers with very small fingers, and they'd try to persuade us of it, too...
...Our former Secretary of State is pulling down $20,000 per speech, it was pointed out, and we were treated to roughly $3,000 worth of jokes...
...You tell some of them the time on radio stations and they're apt to mutter, "Hey man, what a drag, just play the music...
...Current events for them is Joe Franklin, ancient history is Burns and Allen, or whatever the armies of the late night are discovering and sacking while the nation snores...
...Still, there is a spirit of competition in this field that didn't exist five minutes ago...
...they prefer a soporific, like normal late-night TV...
...The proliferation of news is probably aimed at one person????Ted Turner...
...By and large they are turned off by government, institutions, real life: Their reality consists of skateboards and Sony Walkmans and video games...
...Her report vividly captured the ferocity of the French Jews' reactions as their cries of merde...
...NBC has nothing to lose...
...At times Overnight achieves greatness...
...On the whole, however, Overnight assumes there is an intelligent audience listening (or sleeping...
...The poor Captain is losing his weekday slot...
...The ones 1 know, moreover, are only interested in going to sleep...
...The essential strength of NBC's late night window on the world is that it doesn't have heaps of money to spend, so it has to use brains—quite a difference from the rest of TV news, where dollars are never in as short supply as smarts...
...The budget of Overnight for the whole week is less than a single evening of Brokaw/Mudd or Rather or ABC World News Tonight...
...anchored by Steve Bell...
Vol. 65 • September 1982 • No. 16
