Celebrity Newsmagazines
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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