American Television News: The Media Marketplace and the Public Interest

The Media Marketplace and the Public Interest

Steve M. Barkin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780765609236
• eBook ISBN: 9781315290911
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This concise history of the news broadcasting industry will appeal to both students and general readers. Stretching from the "radio days" of the 1920s and 1930s and the early era of television after World War II through to the present, the book shows how commercial interests, regulatory matters, and financial considerations have long shaped the broadcasting business. The network dominance of the 1950s ushered in the new prominence of the "anchorman," a distinctly American development, and gave birth to the "golden age" of TV broadcasting, which featured hard-hitting news and documentaries epitomized by the reports by CBS's Edward R. Murrow. Financial pressures and advertising concerns in the 1960s led the networks to veer away from their commitment to serve the public interest, and "tabloid" television - celebrity, gossip-driven "soft news" - and news "magazines" became increasingly widespread. In the 1980s cable news further transformed broadcasting, igniting intense competition for viewers in the media marketplace. Focusing on both national and local news, this stimulating volume examines the evolution of broadcast journalism. It also considers how new electronic technologies will affect news delivery in the 21st century, and whether television news can still both serve the public interest and maintain an audience.

I

BROADCASTING AND THE CULTURE OF NEWS

— 1 —

Electronic Journalism in a New Era

On June 1, 1980, a forty-one-year-old champion sailor and former owner of a struggling sign company began a twenty-four-hour-a-day cable television news network in studios set up in a building that had once been a Jewish country club in Atlanta, Georgia. Less than eight months later, on a brisk and biting Washington morning, a sixty-nine-year-old former actor, pitchman, and governor of California became the fortieth president of the United States.

With the passage of time, Robert Edward “Ted” Turner III and Ronald Wilson Reagan would come to be thought of as emblematic of the 1980s. Both men were disciples of individual will and entrepreneurial spirit. Yet their modest educational accomplishments and checkered family histories did not suggest the scope of their ambition or eventual success. Together, it would be argued, they revitalized the “can-do” American ethos in a decade in which a popular movie offered the credo that “greed is good.”¹ Both men had been intimately tied to broadcasting for years. Turner, the owner of a barely watched UHF station, was canny, indeed brilliant, in his ability to recognize that the emerging technologies of cable television and satellite transmission could be fused into an entirely new form of television, a “super station” that theoretically could be viewed in every corner of America (and by implication in every corner of the world).

Ronald Reagan had grown up deeply influenced by radio, had worked as an announcer, and through television had achieved his widest recognition. His notion of free enterprise—industry unfettered by government bureaucracy—would lead in the 1990s to the historic deregulation of radio and television, displacing the regulatory apparatus that had been law since 1934.

For electronic communication in general, and television news specifically, Turner and Reagan were truly revolutionary figures. Forces set in motion in the 1980s would, in the next two decades, turn television and television news upside down. As a result, the television news viewer of 1980 might scarcely recognize today’s TV marketplace:

• The news services of the three principal commercial networks have been joined by a number of other national news-and-information networks on cable television. These include C-SPAN, a cooperative service funded by cable systems around the country; CNBC, a financial-news and talk network owned by General Electric; Fox News, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.; MSNBC, a coventure of NBC and Microsoft; and Ted Turner’s CNN news services, now owned by AOL Time Warner. Headline News and the Cable News Network are a presence in virtually every corner of the globe. The General Electric-owned CNBC provides Wall Street reporting from opening bell to well after the close of trading. Sports news is provided by, among others, Fox Sports Net and the extraordinarily successful ESPN, owned by the Walt Disney Company and valued at well over $2 billion.

• Fewer than ten global conglomerates have consolidated media power on a scale never seen before, virtually turning the communications industry into an oligopoly, similar to the airline and automobile industries, in which power is vested mainly in a few enormous companies. The most powerful media corporations have combined their international reach with a presence in Internet communication, cable television and broadcasting, home video, radio, newspapers, magazines, and book publication. (The Walt Disney Company, for example, is the world’s largest publisher of children’s books and magazines, with total annual sales of 375 million copies.)²

• The combined share of the viewing audience claimed by ABC, CBS, and NBC has dwindled from the 90 percent range to a number well under 50 percent. The network audience has scattered to cable channels, independent stations, to viewing films and other programs on videocassettes, and occasionally to public television. Ratings for each of the three traditional networks’ evening newscasts are now typically in the 5 to 7 range (meaning 5 or 7 percent of those homes with television sets). In the 1970s, CBS’s top-rated newscast often averaged a rating of 16 or 17. Today it is not at all unusual for the combined network rating for the three newscasts to be less than that of the 1970s CBS by itself. The combined share of the audience for the evening newscasts (the percentage of those people actually viewing at a particular time) is often well below 30.

• The national newscasts themselves face competition from expanded local newscasts that report extensively on national and international news. Local stations cover major events all over the world with their own personnel. In larger markets, “local” news blocks of two or three hours early in the morning and during each afternoon and evening are not uncommon. The anchors of these newscasts can be expected to interact with each other on the air, conveying warmth and camaraderie; to the degree that network news programs are presented in the same colloquial and collegial spirit, local stations have set a standard for national TV news formats.

• Another source of competition for the networks is the programming of syndicated news magazine shows such as Inside Edition and Extra, which are widely regarded as practitioners of tabloid journalism for their choice of sensational subjects and their questionable methods of reporting (such as paying sources) and news presentation.

• News has become a staple of prime-time programming. By the 1990s, the four major commercial networks (including the Fox network, owned by media baron Murdoch) offered about a dozen prime-time programs that could be called news magazine shows. 60 Minutes was the first news magazine to achieve notable ratings success, in the early 1970s; ABC’s 20/20 premiered in 1978, struggled at first, and eventually became a solid performer in the ratings. An onslaught of such programs did not occur until the 1993–94 television season. Now ABC, CBS, and NBC all have prime-time news magazine programs from two to occasionally four nights a week.

• At the institutional level, the expectation of regular, substantial profits from news has become shared by every network news division. The ownership of ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN changed hands, in some cases more than once, in the mid-1980s and 1990s, as a new breed of managers took the reins of network news. One result was a heightened attention to production and payroll costs and, subsequently, a painful process of job eliminations, the closing of foreign bureaus, and a new, stricter financial accountability for reporters, editors, and producers.

***

Taken as a whole, the changes in the news environment are profound, and their implications still are being sorted out. The vast, provocative television coverage of the O.J. Simpson murder case in 1994 and the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the second term of the Clinton administration illustrated some of the new realities in vivid detail. The thorough blending of news and entertainment that characterizes much of television journalism has raised ethical questions at every turn, in virtually every news report, during a mind-numbing series of scandals covered extensively on the networks and on cable news outlets—Robert Blake, Chandra Levy, Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, Jon-Benet Ramsey, Michael Jackson, Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco, the Menendez brothers, William Kennedy Smith, John and Lorena Bobbitt, and other figures too numerous to mention. The genre of entertainment news sprouts new programs every year, with Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, and E! News enjoying growing audiences.

To be sure, the proliferation of news programs has a positive side. Accomplished, long-form documentaries can be seen on CNN, MSNBC, PBS, the Discovery Channel, the Learning Channel, the History Channel, the Arts and Entertainment network, and elsewhere. Every news-magazine program has covered more than a few important stories. National Public Radio and its affiliate stations produce, at the local and national levels, many programs of distinction.

Paradoxically, though, an era of program diversity in news and public affairs has yielded a substantial degree of program convergence: many programs presented under the banner of journalism or at least “nonfiction television” are at best similar and at worst clones of one another. The prime-time news magazines owe much to the network morning programs (not coin-cidentally, Katie Couric, Barbara Walters, Tom Brokaw, Charles Gibson, Diane Sawyer, and Jane Pauley are all veterans of both prime-time magazine shows and the early-morning wars). The story of O.J. Simpson belonged just as much to Dateline NBC as to Inside Edition. 20/20 covers stories that might just as easily be seen on the confessional daytime talk shows.

When Tonya Harding traveled to the 1994 Winter Olympics in Norway, she was accompanied by a crew from the tabloid news program Inside Edition, which had paid a substantial sum for the privilege of interviewing her. A few seats away on the plane sat Connie Chung, coanchor of the CBS Evening News. Symbolically, the trip to Lillehammer marked a new destination for CBS News and its flagship broadcast—after decades of representing the best of broadcast journalism, of riding in first class, they had become close to their tabloid competitors in more ways than one.

It is unarguable that a broader range of news and information programs, including all-news programming, daytime talk, prime-time news magazines, and quasi-journalistic tabloid shows and reality-based offerings (usually about crime and police work), is now available to the television audience. American Television News is an examination of the broad-based changes in television news now occurring in an unprecedented era of program diversity brought on by fundamental alterations in the corporate and technological climate.

The Cultural Role of TV News

Since its earliest days, television journalism has had a dual personality. When CBS pioneer Edward R. Murrow was at the height of his power and prestige, he was as readily recognized for his celebrity interview program Person to Person as for his controversial investigative reporting. Critics occasionally spoke of the “Higher Murrow” and the “Lower Murrow.” That early dichotomy has evolved into a range of television news programs, from relatively conventional to clearly sensational, that makes a reconsideration of the character of television news particularly timely.

Journalism, print and otherwise, has its roots in the art of narrative: television news is a form of visual storytelling that adheres to the requisites of plot and character development and the attainment of dramatic unity. Journalism by definition entertains us as it offers compelling portrayals of reality, thus engaging our senses as well as our intellects. Distinctions between “news” and “entertainment” are never easy from the point of view of the audience member, who is likely to be “entertained” at some level by any story that is well-told; distinctions in the content of news are perhaps as problematic. Does television news dwell on sensational and extraordinary events at the expense of substantive news? The question is increasingly at the heart of a continuing national debate.

For at least thirty years, television and TV news have been the frequent targets of pointed critiques of mass culture. The intellectual argument of such critics is that television fosters shallowness, simplistic views of society, and a sense of unreality by virtue of its commercial and technical nature. Many intellectuals and social critics find in television news a “lowest common denominator” mentality that reduces information to raw experience and trivializes serious discourse.

Ironically, one of network television’s most vocal detractors has been CBS’s star anchor Dan Rather. In an address to the national convention of the Radio and Television News Directors Association in Miami, Rather lamented “complacency” and “cowardice” on the part of television journalists, charging that the promise of television had been “squandered and cheapened.” The “thoughtful analysis” of the earlier period had been replaced with “live pops” urged by market analysts and others driven by ratings.³

Later, in a talk at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, Rather expressed the fear that journalism—especially broadcast news—was succumbing to entertainment, to “what I call Hollywoodation,” in lieu of “its role in the governmental system, its checks and balances … and [it’s role in] public service.”⁴

Despite Rather’s protestations, news and entertainment are as solidly linked on network “news” programs as they have ever been. If that battle for the soul of television in fact was ever waged, it is certainly over by now. A more pressing problem today may be the blurred distinction between mainstream programming and what is widely referred to as “tabloid television.”

Reality-based programs that feature crime, sensationalism, sexuality in all its manifestations, and an obsessive interest in celebrity run the gamut from network news magazines in prime time to daytime and late-night talk shows to programs based on newscast formats such as Inside Edition. Producers have argued that the overwhelming success and subsequent spread of tabloid news programs can be attributed to the American audience’s boredom with fictional television and “hard news.”⁵

Such nonfiction television has proved a formula for achieving great success at comparatively low cost. The tabloid programs usually cost between 25 and 50 percent less to produce than Hollywood sit-coms or police shows. Geraldo Rivera, host of his own talk shows, defended the tabloid style he used and that of similar shows at the time. “Non-fiction TV has become more diversified and more democratic,” he said.

Face it, the old-style network news documentaries had become boring. Yes, they were critical darlings, but the television audience got tired of being lectured down to by reporters sitting up on a journalistic Mount Olympus… . At some point, even the ivory tower elite will recognize that an audience numbering in the tens of millions is not a lunatic fr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I. Broadcasting and the Culture of News
• Part II. Seismic Shifts in Television News
• Part III. Public Service in the Digital Age
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author