On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
OnTelevision UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES BY REUVEN FRANK IN AUGUST the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) repealed its 25-year-old Prime Time Access Rule. The decision consigned to the dustbin...
...In the beginning, they peddled their wares on one floor of the hotel housing the yearly meeting of the National Association of Broadcasters...
...reenact events as described, oreven surmised...
...This enabled a shaky 60 Minutes to move from its opening Tuesday night spot to Sunday after NFL football, where it became the most profitable prime time program in the history of CBS...
...Some solved half their problem by placing their network's nightly news program at 7 o'clock...
...Given the elaborate cotillion of commissioners, lawyers, legislators, and clerks that is the regulatory process, formulating the Rule required years of discussion...
...The FCC's desire to further weaken the Big Three networks' hold by paving the way for a fourth clearly helped the media baron...
...By August 1996 the Prime Time Access Rule must disappear...
...John s Passion by Bach...
...During its hour, besides the commercials, each talk show displays an 800- or 900- number and trolls for future participants with questions like: "Is your mother sleeping with your boyfriend...
...Everyone attends: station operators who come to sample the wares...
...Imitators—Hard Copy, American Journal and Inside Edition—soon followed...
...Once the syndicators became rich and secure enough to set about developing new forms, material was at hand to attract audiences and keep the commercials apart...
...Never bite the hand that votes your budget...
...Sufficient syndicated product is available to fill their schedule, profitably...
...Investment money poured into the independents...
...They were joined by a host of new hosts, dealers in the lower depths, who encourage guests to have at each other physically and are blamed for at least one murder...
...Fewer and fewer watch network newscasts, perhaps because they're not entertaining enough...
...In particular, while they were forbidden to syndicate, Fox was free to engage in unlimited program syndication...
...At the minimum, guests get air travel to New-York, Los Angeles or Chicago, a night in a hotel, with room service, and a limousine to the studio...
...Many viewers seem not to care, either, whether the offal dispensed by the talk shows, Geraldo and Sally Jessy and the rest, is true or not...
...A later exception allowed each network one additional weekend hour foreitherchildren's or news programs...
...They like the 15 hours of entertainment each week, and they worship the NFL football...
...But the Commission's ability to rein in the latter derives chiefly from its control of the licensees they own?often their most valuable assets...
...Worse, the networks try to change them so that they are...
...They branched out into formula entertainment for the rest of the day...
...the FCC's commissioners and staff looked upon networks as insidious monopolies...
...Meanwhile, those who had already taken the plunge gradually moved their special access time programs into less valuable slots (even 5 a.m...
...Two 30-minute programs, however, could hardly satisfy the demand from 600 network affiliates...
...As the Commission clearly stated, it sought only to strengthen the syn-dicators so that local stations might have "quality" programs without relying exclusively on the networks...
...It and Jeopardy dominated access time for several years...
...Presiding over what several writers have called our national freak show are Ricki Lake, Jenny Jones, Sally Jessy Raphael, Tempestt Bledsoe, Montel Williams, Jerry Springer, Camie Wilson, Charles Perez, and others—up to one-time Emmy Award-winning journalist Geraldo Rivera...
...The networks may then program all hours...
...Rupert Murdoch's Fox network led the way by itself creating the syndicated tabloid...
...The other networks used that Sunday spot for what they called children's shows, although the pretense wore thinner every year...
...perhaps in al I of television...
...Polls have shown many Americans do not know where news starts or stops, whether the stuff of Hard Copy ox Inside Edition is more or less reliable than the verifiable stories reported by Peter Jennings on ABC or Dan Rather on CBS...
...Next, the Commission ruled that since Fox programmed only until 10 p.m...
...It means the networks themselves will do them...
...That does not mean an end to scabrous tabloids or degrading talk shows...
...network chieftains who come to watch their affiliates size up the wares...
...These "news" shows pay witnesses in criminal cases for interviews before they speak to the District Attorney...
...This roseate prospect affords a sardonic matrix for what actually happened, but it was never a serious possibility...
...The decision consigned to the dustbin of history, as of next August, a regulation that changed the face of programming in the United States—first more or less the way the FCC intended, then in ways it could not have anticipated and might have deplored if it had...
...Applying to the airwaves the practice of Australian tabloid newspaper journalism, which is like that of English tabloid newspaper journalism but less elegant, Murdoch brought forth A Current Affair, America's original TV tabloid...
...They see no need for a Fox nightly news show...
...At each he would get a drink from a young woman in bathing attire and proceed into a second room where a noisy projector unreeled Felix the Cat cartoons or episodes of grainy jungle adventures, while in the corner a bald man in shirtsleeves and handpainted tie was on the telephone speaking loud enough for everyone to hear him over the soundtrack...
...First, he was allowed to buy stations in the largest cities to build a nucleus...
...show videotapes of random killings that have no news value other than shock...
...They simply want to be entertained...
...and stalk celebrities in an effort to get pictures of acts of infidelity, drug abuse, pedophilia, or a little nude bathing...
...The most important immediate result of the void was the rapid growth of the syndicators, who shortly were maj or players alongside the networks, stations and advertisers...
...Fox keeps talking about launching its own daily network news program...
...The Prime Time Access Rule was an example of limiting network predominance...
...So far, after more than a decade, it has none...
...A few station managers started once- or twice-weekly public affairs programs that examined local problems and included interviews with local leaders...
...But many more who were seized by an onrush of public spirit paused, took a deep breath and reversed course...
...In the interim, a number of journalists who write about television, facing slow days without shows to review or stars' pec-cadilloes to expose, touched on the debate...
...In other words, forbidding network monopolization of the peak viewing period would provide creative and economic incentives for other producers to supply "quality" programs...
...Exceptions were made for live news coverage, runovers of sporting events and candidates' political broadcasts...
...They hinted at marvels of localism —for instance, the Little Theater's new production of A Doll's House, orthe Choral Society's rendition of St...
...Is Your Child Underaged...
...THE 1970 promulgation of the Prime Time Access Rule also was responsible for a stunning increase in independent (non-network) stations...
...But nothing ever happens...
...Every few months there is an announcement about Fox hiring some big name to bring it into regular network news presentation, once considered a basic network responsibility...
...and used just 15 hours a week of prime time against the Big Three's 22, it was not really a network and could do things they might not...
...Maury Povich, who as the first anchor of A Current Affair was a TV tabloid pioneer, has similarly gone off on his own to enter the ranks of the daytime talkers...
...Olympian heads of motion pictures studios whose goodies are among those on display...
...A visitor to that floor would go from one half-lit "junior suite" to another...
...It has grown exponentially every year and become an important industry event...
...Nor can they discern the line between the tabloids and, say, Entertainment Tonight or the networks' own gutter-seeking weekly magazine programs...
...Initially, talk shows such as Phil Donahue's or Oprah Winfrey's dealt with the hard problems of human adjustment and avoided titillation, except during ratings periods...
...Andjournalists—show business journalists, business journalists, lifestyle journalists—all the chroniclers of civilization at its crossroads du jour...
...Today, the syndicators hold their own annual convention in Las Vegas...
...Not all the producers think it critical that a guest be telling the truth...
...Deliberations were salted with a residual Jeffer-sonianism that favored those closest to the yeomanry, the local stations the FCC licenses, over the medium's distant royalty, the New York-based networks it does not license...
...From the emergence of commercial television in the 1940s...
...So the FCC looked at what its antimo-nopoly rule had wrought and concluded a quarter century was enough...
...on Sundays...
...The first syndicated programs to fill what came to be called "access time" were game and quiz shows—mainly former network daytime offerings that had either run their course or defected to the new distribution opportunity...
...Their expansion, wealth and status can easily be gauged by what has happened to their annual sales convention...
...Oversexed and Out of Control...
...The Rule dictated that networks could program only three of television's four most watched hours, from 7 to 11 p.m...
...Does your homosexual lifestyle embarrass your family...
...Then the television syndication arm of one of the big movie studios came up with the idea of applying TVjournalism's visual andaural cliches to a daily show business news program entitled Entertainment Tonight...
...Fox' affiliated stations don't want such a broadcast...
...The syndicators, moreover, did not limit their horizons to access time...
...It said: "A healthy syndication industry composed of independent producers capable of producing quality prime time programs must have an adequate base of [outlets] to use its product...
Vol. 78 • October 1995 • No. 8
