Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 2, Summer 2002 | Page 59

Celebrity Newsmagazines 55 had purchased a package of feature films to air on Tuesday nights, but they did not have enough to fill the entire season. The News Division was asked to cover the difference (Frank 308). ABC’s entry in the newsmagazine competition in 1978, 20/20, presented a different temperament, compared to the traditional journalism of CBS and NBC news. Its weeknight viewers, network executives believed, wanted more entertaining information and less of a serious tone (Westin, 1982, 197). By the mid-1980s, network documentaries had not disappeared. There were 15 in 1985 and 17 in 1986. But the standing documentary units, which previously could spend months researching and producing a single in-depth hour, were threatened. Near the end of 1986, NBC canceled its newsmagazine, called 1986, hosted by Roger Mudd and Connie Chung. This freed financial and human resources for other news programs, so the network announced it would air 15 documentaries in 1987. The other networks also promised to raise their outputs. But network news executives were experimenting throughout the 1980s with hour-long programs that would be cheaper to produce and reach a larger audience. CBS sent a camera crew to cover 48 Hours on Crack Street in 1986, the pilot for the current series. In 1987 the network also produced a two-hour special on glasnost in the Soviet Union, which promoted their big-name correspondents, including Dan Rather, Ed Bradley, and Diane Sawyer, as much as it did the opening of Soviet life. At ABC, the distinguished Close-Up documentary unit was struggling to stay alive, as that network began airing a series of Jennings/Koppel Reports^ and single theme magazines, containing several discrete segments related to the same topic and laced together by a prominent anchor. ABC also tried airing several three-hour documentaries, filling prime time for an entire night in an attempt to have greater impact. NBC had the highest documentary output for 1987, at 13, which included a mix of traditional in-depth serious investigations on national defense, the airline industry, the Middle East, and juvenile crime along with several reports on American life styles: babies. Wall Street, AIDS, Catholicism, and the two subjects that seem to appeal to the most American television viewers, sex and diets (See Table, “Commercial Network Television Documentaries— 1987,” Mascaro 1988). Ratings for network documentaries in 1987 demonstrated that traditional indepth reports based on the classic documentary model could attract one-fifth of the viewers watching television and still compete with the emerging trend called “parachute journalism.” Two NBC reports, one on national defense and another on juvenile crime, which were based on months of research by a documentary unit, g arnered 19 and 21 percent of the audience, respectively. This compares to an