On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television YESTERDAY'S SURE THING BY REUVEN FRANK Currently there are seven weekly network TV news magazines on the air. By the end of the year there will be more than a dozen. Network...
...Antithesis...
...Americans used to get their world and national news from their local newspapers, so why not their local TV station...
...To those who write the news this was a dull, technical event...
...Crowned the "Scud stud" by People magazine and others, he was the handsome reporter whose Gulf War coverage drew more attention for his looks than its content...
...They will still be cheaper to produce than entertainment programs and earn just as much from advertising revenue, but they will not earn the secondary profits that are a bright gleam in network executives' eyes...
...then 7 p.m...
...That is what the best mainstream journalism has always tried to do, along with making money, and is probably as much as anyone can reasonably ask of it.' This generality becomes less benign in the face of the specific...
...For years entertainment executives, who controlled both the production of promotions and their allotment of air time, virtually froze out news...
...The FCC has now agreed and given them most of what they wanted...
...They do have their defenders, though...
...The entertainment division's promotion staff decides how to promote each Dateline segment, proposes promotional material, and decides how much promotion each segment gets during prime time...
...It survived...
...All three ABC magazines made Nielsen's top 20 that week...
...Its second time out Day One got down to business...
...For the more than a dozen magazines that will be on the air by year's end the prospects seem suddenly dimmer...
...Every local station can buy the news it wants from many sources to use as it sees fit—from its network, from services abroad, from regional cooperatives...
...CBS' 60 Minutes began that fall, filling an hour on alternate Tuesdays...
...Since TV magazines have achieved the status conferred by profit, they do get promos now...
...So much for "excesses and shortcomings," as the Times called them...
...The retelling, for which a noted foreign correspondent was brought home and to which an award-winning producer-director was assigned, offered nothing new—no insights, no analysis, no attempt to find the flaws in the system that let this happen...
...Even friends inside NBC News found it hard to take his complaint seriously...
...NBC hoped to make him a star by naming him one of the Dateline correspondents...
...The arrangement makes them easy to fire, and in any case reduces benefit outlays...
...Thus entertainment programs have become more attractive...
...Panorama was a major influence during television's early days, and people like myself in American TV envied it...
...After duly noting it, they went back to focusing on the magazines as though nothing had changed...
...Even with their excesses and shortcomings," the Times concluded, television news magazines "draw attention to abuses of the weak or the trusting by the strong or the crooked...
...In addition to supervising the production of all segments, [Executive Producer Jeff] Diamond discusses these promotion decisions with executives in the entertainment division...
...But in April the Federal Communications Commission issued a ruling that may well result in TV news magazines losing their economic advantage...
...The three-network monopoly on world and national TV news pictures has been shattered...
...The importance to a news magazine of those 10- and 20-second commercials networks use to advertise their own wares cannot be overestimated...
...All true...
...Only titillation...
...it became the most profitable program in the history of network television, and is about to celebrate its 25th anniversary...
...Its reports could be longer than those in daily news programs, it had room for "softer" subjects not bound by the strictures of breaking stories that were still clearly journalism, and it enjoyed the luxury of enough time to shoot film well...
...The company president himself had to be importuned to order the entertainment bureaucracy to accommodate an announcement for a documentary that represented a year's work, or an exclusive interview with a world figure, or a cure for cancer...
...it grew...
...Most of the hour was given over to a story that has been around a number of years, about male guards at a Georgia women's prison who forced themselves on the pris-oners...
...For despite the attention they are receiving, TV magazines are not new and used to be pretty classy...
...There will be learned discussion of its influence, but its biggest influence was showing executives how to make a lot of money...
...their longevity is threatened...
...England's BBC, the first of the world's television services to move from experiment and hobby to providing a general medium of news and entertainment, developed the form with Panorama...
...When the rule was introduced in 1970, its purpose was to prevent three of them from wielding too great a monopoly—from favoring their own product over that of independents and otherwise restraining trade...
...Dateline made headlines initially when Arthur Kent quit and charged bitterly that his pieces were shelved because the promotion department did not judge them promotable...
...This gives them veto power over the choice of topics in news division programs...
...Otherwise, viewers would not know what was in a news division program unless they accidentally started watching it...
...Once, all this would have been a stunning indictment...
...That's all cash," an executive enthused...
...Unlike its imitators, it is still held in high regard...
...Several weeks ago, ABC added Day One (Sundays, 8 p.m., EST) to 20/20 and Prime Time Live...
...But the nabobs of entertainment continue to determine what will be hyped...
...Although every Sunday it pre-tended to be a review of the week's events, actually it was iconoclastic, muckraking, witty, and an embarrassment to the government...
...It's a zero-sum game...
...The independent lawyers' findings in the truck burning incident, however, put a very different light on the Kent affair too...
...they depend too heavily on "dramatic pictures...
...It's sound business...
...The bulk of what is written about TV magazines is negative: They are difficult to tell apart...
...No one very high will openly say the evening news broadcasts are doomed, but there has been griping for years about the cost of their infrastructure and of having bureaus around the globe...
...Network managers, for their part, have continued to develop them like generals preparing to fight the last war...
...Synthesis...
...At neither NBC nor CBS did the entertainment panjandrums who control the schedule look kindly on the news magazine...
...The networks have been arguing for a decade that competition from cable television, video cassette recorders and stronger independent stations has eliminated any monopoly...
...news magazines less attractive...
...Press and public were polite in their welcome for the first edition, a routine disease report plus an essay by Jeff Greenfield that tried for a little wit and a hint of style...
...The staff boasted that they caused questions to be raised in Parliament practically every Monday...
...What became the accepted news magazine format in the United States was launched in the 1968-69 season...
...Thesis...
...Network managers favor these programs not out of any commitment to informing the public, but because they can be produced for about half the cost of an entertainment show and earn just as much in advertising revenue...
...CBS was less drastic, moving 60 Minutes to a Sunday slot no one wanted, first 6 p.m...
...CNN does more news cheaper...
...Even Dateline NBC, the runt of the litter that faked the burning of a General Motors pickup truck it wanted to prove unsafe, expects a $20 million profit its first season...
...Ratings for First Tuesday were better than for 60 Minutes, but they were not good enough, and it was killed off...
...they have tended toward the level of the syndicated tabloids, such as A Current Affair and Hard Copy...
...A recent Sunday New York Times essay, for example, compared them to the mass-circulation print magazines "from Collier's to Coronet" that every pre-baby-boom American surely remembers...
...Indeed network leaders have decided that the best thing their news divisions can do is produce magazines and make money...
...With that competition ABC's Tuesday night soap opera, Marcus Welby, M.D., emerged as one of the major hits in the annals of TV...
...NBC delayed its entry until January, when it unveiled a monthly two-hour program csdled First Tuesday...
...The consequences...
...In Canada, the CBC launched several, the most notable being This Hour Has Seven Days...
...But the FCC decision to relax its rule forbidding the networks to own and syndicate the prime-time programs they broadcast may have put a crack in that golden egg...
...Almost every country introducing television imitated the BBC by establishing a news magazine fairly soon...
...I have talked to some who go so far as to contend that the network evening news program, previously accepted as the basic mandate, is outmoded...
...A smart executive producer will pick up topics likely to appeal to West Coast show business executives with their conflicting priorities...
...At the magazines, by contrast, camera crews and some correspondents work on short-term contracts, rather than as "staff members...
...This will affect the magazine programs...
...Meanwhile, at both NBC and CBS various half-hours trying to be magazines ap-peared in the cerebral "Sunday ghetto" that was shortly displaced by professional football...
...Edward R. Murrow's See It Now started as a "Sunday ghetto" effort in November 1951...
...It rescinded a large part of the quarter-century-old prohibition against networks owning the entertainment programs they broadcast...
...Its picture of a muscular sort of journalism for the masses, sometimes overstepping constraints, yet doing good overall, further fades a bit in the shadow of the following largely ignored paragraph from a 71-page report by the outside lawyers NBC engaged to investigate the truck burning: "Dateline is part of the news division at NBC, but it must also work with the entertainment division headquartered in Burbank, California...
Vol. 76 • May 1993 • No. 6
