How News Became Entertainment
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television How News Became Entertainment By Reuven Frank No PART of broadcasting is in as parlous a state as news. While rightthinking people decry the most secretive Administration...
...and other subjects chosen for their "entertainment value" marched across America's TV screens...
...Several weaker stations around the country have decided that maintaining a news organization is not justified by the revenue it produces...
...The network news divisions will in effect become video wire services for their stations...
...There is a third cable competitor, MSNBC...
...That reality is that the pioneer among cable news networks often betrays its origins these days as it tries to fight off—or catch up with—Fox' successful confrontational, abrasive, and personality-centered style...
...Its medical drama, Marcus Welby...
...ABC scheduled a second showing of the original twohour film, paying another half million...
...When the shuttle Columbia blew up, many more people tuned in to CNN than to the Fox News Channel...
...No longer threatened by regulatory standards or enforcement, they have stopped presenting news entirely...
...Interspersed among the newsmaker panel shows of the "Sunday ghetto" were half-hours presided over by commentators such as Joseph C. Harsch and Eric Sevareid...
...He has narrowed his nose and whitened his complexion through so much cosmetic surgery that the New Yorker has called his face a "medical marvel...
...He did not care, he said, if winning meant showing clowns jumping out of airplanes...
...It had two experienced correspondents, Mike Wallace and Harry Reasoner...
...NBC's Dateline earned unwelcome attention when a reporter investigating why some General Motors trucks caught fire set one himself in orderto film it...
...A big hit in Britain, it was furiously sought by the American network magazines...
...This left ABC dominating Tuesday night with entertainment...
...For two or three hours each weekday they accommodate some minutes of the overnight news, perhaps an interview with a "newsmaker," segments about cooking or sewing or gardening, a jolly weatherman whose stardom derives more from jolly than from meteorology, plus show business celebrities, rock bands and other entertainment...
...Late in the 1970s, ABCcheckedin with 20/20, whose first episode was so widely criticized there almost wasn't a second...
...The hour following the Jackson special was given over to an interview of the reporter who had interviewed him, and that too got a healthy rating...
...A CNN correspondent and crew were in the Houston Space Center waiting for the shuttle to land, as has been the case for every shuttle landing...
...As a result, CNN had its own pictures of the disintegrating spacecraft dragging its soft white contrails across a cloudless blue sky...
...His friends include Elizabeth Taylor and a rabbi who writes about sex...
...Fox rarely has good ratings on Saturday, they point out, and the CNN audience, after reaching well over 2 million early that fateful day, dropped steadily as the hours wore on and—the curse of all-news cable—there were precious few minor details to add...
...They also reflect the rule of the conglomerates, for now not only the entire enterprise must show a profit, but every separate function must pay its own way...
...But the fact remains that this time CNN attracted more viewers than Fox, and even as both audiences dwindled through the day, still led at the end...
...They are exceptions, however...
...According to Don Hewitt himself, however, 60 Minutes did something very destructive to television news by making a lot of money...
...It is thus left to CNN and Fox to battle for cable news leadership...
...Meanwhile, a prize-winning «50 Minutes correspondent parked outside the locked gate of Jackson's Neverland Ranch vainly sought an interview...
...In January 1969, NBC inaugurated a two-hour monthly magazine program called First Tuesday...
...Matthews' initial liberalism faded as he learned from Fox that in high decibel interviewing the Right-wing wins the eyeballs...
...It should be said for MSNBC, though, that when the nation hung on every bulletin and every picture in that stressful time between Election Day 2000 and the Supreme Court decision in Gore v. Bush, it showed how good it could be by providing quick, accurate, dramatic information...
...GE's problem is that NBC is making a lot of money but two of its cable properties are not...
...Surveys throw around such numbers as 25 per cent of people in this age bracket or that now look to the Internet for their news, or at least for bulletins...
...One can only speculate what this means for newspapers or for news...
...Parachuting clowns may or may not save MSNBC...
...The first broadcast of 60 Minutes was in September 1968...
...Network news, and the products of network news divisions, are on much shakier ground...
...What it provides is not so much news as about news...
...Ventura and Brown would seem to be the alpha and omega of sophistication...
...In the United States, the first TV newsmagazine of consequence was not 60 Minutes...
...M.D., was that season's runaway hit...
...Working in a palatial two-story set, newcomers to TV Harold Hayes, legendary editor of Esquire magazine, and Robert Hughes, Australian-born art critic for Time magazine, hosted a hodgepodge that had as its main feature a daring expose by the redoubtable Geraldo Rivera of the sad lot of the rabbits chased by the dogs in greyhound racing...
...This has been going on for several years, and the number of users has increased exponentially...
...For a preceding Thursday, ABC had long ago announced a drama eulogizing the work of the National Transportation Safety Board...
...In most stronger stations local news programs, typically at the supper hour and before bedtime, are the primary moneymakers...
...Otherwise, Internet news may pass by default to those willing to pay for it from their own pockets: dilettantes and hobbyists, plus zealots, polemicists and ideologues...
...The cry was that events around the world could not be covered in 15 minutes...
...Perhaps liberals are more likely to be readers...
...Fox finally pulled ahead of CNN less than two years ago, and the gap had been widening ever since, most recently by an astounding 60 per cent...
...In the '60s, when the network news staffs were agitating for more time on the air, Walter Cronkite famously showed how tiny a quarter-hour script looked against a New York Times front page...
...CBS similarly moved 60 Minutes around until it finally landed at 7 P.M...
...When the declining income line meets the rising cost line, the evening news period will be turned over to the stations...
...It drew the month's biggest audience, 27 million, although not nearly the number who watched Barbara Walters' interview with Monica Lewinsky, also on 20/20...
...Will advertising on newspaper Internet sites ever reach magnitudes that enable newspapers to meet their costs and provide news without charging consumers for it...
...CBS aired 60 Minutes every other Tuesday...
...Most American newspapers now replicate almost all their content on the Web...
...At almost the same time, CNBC, the financial news cable network owned by NBC and operated by NBC News, hired Tina Brown, who has edited the New Yorker, Vanity Fair and her own ill-fated Talk magazine, to host a talk show...
...The British program was subsequently repeated fourtimes on the VH-1 cable network...
...Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters took over, and did well enough for ABC to venture again into the field of magazines...
...The FCC had reserved the 7-8 p.m...
...Drastic changes saved 20/20...
...They are fighting among themselves for audience, and seeking Nielsen gold by chasing one another down market...
...The latest communiqué from this frenzied battlefront has radio talk show host Michael Savage, a conservative in the mold of Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, bringing his Savage Nation to MSNBC Saturday afternoons...
...It is not being deserted for cable news, as once seemed certain, but for the Internet, whose involvement in journalism has a built-in flaw that has yet to be satisfactorily addressed...
...Broadcast news—which despite the early fears of owners and publishers never displaced newspapers—may be superseded by Internet news but will not be adequately replaced by it...
...With characteristic reliance on star power, ABC built around Diane Sawyer and Sam Donaldson a program first called Prime Time Live Thursday, then Prime Time Live Friday, then Prime Time Live, and finally just Prime Time...
...After the Columbia disaster, it was deemed wise to cancel that show...
...It was a magazine emphasizing wrongdoing, especially of the official kind, that constantly got the corporation in trouble with Parliament...
...Fox' success is rooted in its imitating radio talk shows, rather than concentrating on providing a news service...
...Although no one will say so out loud, it seems that the nightly network newscasts will be allowed to slowly fade away, for none has lured younger viewers...
...He had little patience for the traditions of journalism...
...His last album, which had done poorly when first issued, started selling again...
...It looks the same as it did before three networks grew to six, the number of TV stations multiplied, and cable offered if not a challenge then at least a distraction...
...It may even be that local TV news will be the last form of broadcast journalism to survive...
...It just so happened that in early February a reporter for a British commercial network, the one who interviewed the late Princess Diana and got her to admit extramarital affairs, presented his two-hour program about spending eight months with Jackson...
...At the other two networks, the program planners and sales staffs began eyeing their colleagues in the news divisions with fishy stares...
...it is dramatically less ready to pay for the privilege...
...But thejournalistic negatives did not outweigh the economic positives...
...The latest attempt has involved hiring as a talk show host Jesse Ventura, the former professional wrestler and new ex-Governor of Minnesota...
...The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had a program called This Hour Has Seven Days...
...Sob stories, reunions of long separated twins, medical warnings on the level of "Your baby could die of heat rash...
...For those of you who tuned in late, Michael Jackson is a 40ish pop singer of astonishing popularity who has been a professional entertainer since he was eight...
...He has married and had three children, one of them with a surrogate, who all seem to be Caucasian...
...ABC's 20/20 won, paying almost $6 million, and scheduled it for one of its regular Friday night broadcasts that month...
...Will things descend to the point where the culture elite eventually demands a "public" Internet news service with snooty attitudes, solemn presentation and intrusive fund drives...
...He still can sing and dance, but he is mostly famous for being famous...
...It wants cyberspace to be true to its origins as a kind of Arcadia where everyone contributed, everyone partook, and there was no such thing as money...
...After several false starts, NBC joined the fray with Dateline...
...It was the stated purpose of the producer and originator, Don Hewitt, to build the program around its correspondents by presenting them to the public as heroes, and, wherever possible, righters of wrongs...
...It might therefore appear that CNN's reputation for news above all is not eroding as fast as its reality...
...As news magazine programs increased, standards eroded...
...Savage is an especially vocal critic of liberal media, so presumably MSNBC will no longer be one of those...
...Yes, but...
...It has become an institution, a preferred venue for public figures needing exposure, like Bill and Hillary Clinton when the Paula Jones scandal threatened to derail their 1992 Presidential campaign...
...In fact, they became perfect bookkeepers' journalism, as dramatically illustrated recently in the contagion of network programs about Michael Jackson...
...Its most popular program is a Fox-style shouting head named Chris Matthews, a former aide to the late Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill...
...The subjects varied from the serious to the trivial, from the Cold War to show business...
...Whether it is the news division that brings in the money or the local stations matters little at the top of a conglomerate...
...CBS then made a regular weekly hour out of the occasional 48 Hours, and has even tried to duplicate its principal success with 60 Minutes II...
...Except for specialized publications like the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal, newspapers have failed to make "subscribers" buy the service...
...Some of the newer magazines began to operate by the rules of supermarket tabloids...
...This will benefit the networks, since each of them owns about three dozen stations and profits are fungible...
...While rightthinking people decry the most secretive Administration in memory or the Federal Communications Commission's pending vitiation of the media concentration rules, the press reports regularly how the audience for network television news is aging and shrinking...
...As for CNBC, it attracts an acceptably small but affluent following, which meant fat advertising income in the boom days...
...If the morning programs share their primacy at all, it is with the news magazine programs...
...His every step is chronicled by the paparazzi of the supermarket tabloid press...
...A major California daily set what seemed a reasonable fee and saw its Web audience slip from tens of thousands to mere hundreds...
...ABC lost a lawsuit because a Prime Time reporter investigating bad meat pretended to be somebody else...
...Fox paid $5 million in outbidding NBC for that one...
...As new business-oriented owners took over networks, station groups and the American media generally, and as their mission moved from making things to sell to enhancing share price, they were intoxicated by the thought that a journalistic activity could be remunerative...
...Part of its diet consists of standard news presentations, produced with competence rather than distinction...
...In December Dateline loudly announced that it would devote a whole hour to the evolution of Michael Jackson's face...
...Cable's many talk show impresarios scoured their Rolodexes for anything Jackson—a lawyer, a neighbor, a casual acquaintance, a disgruntled ex-employee...
...ABC and NBC chose to go for the children, and 60 Minutes had the adults to itself, especially young adultmales, who for 18 or20 weeks a year had been watching the professional football games that preceded it...
...It used its Prime Time rubric to put on yet another hour...
...that honor belongs to See It Now, featuring Edward R. Murrow and produced by Fred W. Friendly...
...For the first few years after its inauguration in November 1951, See It Now presented several topics on each program...
...Fox built its program out of Jackson's tapes and an interview with his wife, mother of the two children not borne by the surrogate...
...It would seem that for a truly major event like the shuttle tragedy, CNN's reputation for reporting—"News Is the Star"— overcame almost two years of decline...
...American network television was then three-and-a-half years old, and those watching were awed by its versatility and promise...
...American news staffs envied both...
...It went back to giving itself away...
...Also, once the broadcast networks joined the story and the star anchors one by one assumed their exalted seats, the defection from the cable services was palpable...
...It has since done little of note and its small audience keeps getting smaller...
...He started as the youngest and cutest of five AfricanAmerican brothers, then went out on his own to draw hundreds of thousands to his concerts and sell records in the millions...
...The highest paid television journalist in the country, perhaps the world, is Katie Couric, the coanchor of NBC's Today...
...The program would be aired during the February sweeps, a month when Nielsen ratings are taken from samples in more than a hundred cities so stations can set rates for local commercials...
...Then came the Columbia disaster...
...Journalism recognizes no inappropriate topics, but there are, by consensus, inappropriate treatments...
...To honor ABC's corporate parent, the Walt Disney Company, Tom Shales of the Washrngton Post has dubbed it Disnews...
...Nor, according to what we know now, will the all-news cable channels...
...The chairman of General Electric, which owns NBC, descended to MSNBC headquarters in Secaucus, New Jersey, to berate the executives and urge them to greater achievement...
...Four decades later, it is a good day when the half-hour newscast actually includes 15 minutes of hard news...
...The president of Microsoft, the silent half-owner of MSNBC, has said publicly that the company would not make such an investment mistake again...
...That is the model of commercial broadcasting and it may be possible, but that example of what might happen to the nature and quality of the news presented is not encouraging...
...By contrast, over-the-air television seems to be ignoring the need for changing the way it presents news...
...Their history reflects the changes in broadcast news since its beginnings as a "'public service," intended to earn prestige and lull the watchdogs of the FCC...
...This is significant because CNN, where more than a decade ago Ted Turner launched all news all the time, had been steadily losing ground to Rupert Murdoch's Fox Channel...
...Except for Mike Wallace, the roster of correspondents has gone through changes, but the formula remains the same: the heroic reporter, the injustice exposed, the inner thoughts of a movie queen or a rock musician, sometimes a politician...
...The networks, especially NBC, learned that these programs could always be moved into a hole left by a failed drama or a comedy no one laughed at, attract a respectable audience, and earn good money...
...Jackson, who was upset by how he was depicted on British TV and ABC, went into the outtakes to put together his own portrait...
...Altogether, more than a dozen network prime time hours were devoted to one subject during a sweeps month, a veritable Michael Jackson festival...
...hour Sunday evenings for public affairs or children's programs...
...NBC moved First Tuesday back and forth on the evening schedule until it duly expired...
...Networks oblige the stations during the sweeps by serving up "blockbuster" fare aimed at hyping audiences...
...They will continue to supply videotapes of events, speeches and the like, plus completed and edited reports by network correspondents, out of which affiliates will make their own newscasts...
...If they are thwarted from reemerging on the Internet, and are limited to their old newsprint formats, they could suffer the fate, say, of foreign language newspapers...
...They looked to 60 Minutes not for its biting consumer reports, its star interviews or its international insights, but for its contribution to the bottom line...
...Also, like most thriving radio talk shows, it is angrily Rightwing...
...The so-called "objective" news the American audience insists it is used to—a much more recent phenomenon than most lay people are aware of— will disappear...
...The model at the networks was the BBC's Panorama, a weekly hour with its own staff, worldwide coverage and lavish resources...
...The public is willing to log in, register a password and click on...
...It relies on the substantial journalistic resources of NBC News, but has never been quite sure what it intends to be...
...SINCE THEN 60 Minutes has been on the air every Sunday, and is arguably the most profitable program in the history of network television...
...The program engaged audiences and advertisers well enough for it to go from one hour a week to two, to three, sometimes four...
...Then it shifted to a single subject and became the documentary series now remembered...
...In the earliest days, the networks and some stations produced weekly news reviews that often allowed this kind of treatment...
...There are those in the business who insist not too much can be made of this...
...His wealth has bought him a huge estate containing his own private zoo and a mansion where he sometimes houses boys, whom he denies molesting...
...Jackson spread over American television like a raging virus...
...Everyone involved in the early 15-minute newscasts longed for somewhere to give news reports more room, more complexity and more background...
...The idea of a "magazine"—that is, of covering more than a single subject in depth—is as old as television...
...Eastern time) Sunday...
...Dan Perkins, the Tom Tomorrow cartoonist, has observed that just as radio carries few liberal talk show hosts, newspapers present few conservative editorial cartoonists...
...The prospects for the newspapers aren't good either...
...MSNBC keeps adjusting and readjusting its presentation, trying, vainly so far, to reverse its steady decline in audience and its apparently permanent hold on third place...
...PRIMACY in network news divisions has devolved to the morning programs...
...Now, unfortunately, its advertisers have been pauperized by the very news it reports...
...As English-speaking generations succeeded their parents and grandparents, the foreign language press slowly sank from sight...
...One reason is that despite all the noble denials, the network nightly newscast, as rigid in format as a sonnet, persists in favoring soft news, feel-good features, and rapt attention to what is new in medicine, because that's the kind of stuff old folks like...
...The two-hour Michael Jackson special was moved into the vacated Thursday time slot...
...NBC, having not yet run its program, went back to the editing room and expanded it to two hours...
...Over his shoulder two monitors could be seen, one showing a live picture of the Atlantic Ocean, and the other a live picture of the Pacific...
...Television had come a long way since that Sunday afternoon in November 1951 when a relatively small audience tuned in to a black and white picture of Edward R. Murrow seated in a control room, wreathed in cigarette smoke...
Vol. 86 • March 2003 • No. 2
