The Magazining of TV News

By Richard Zoglin

Looking for hard-hitting drama, classic battles between good and evil, stories that make your skin crawl and your blood boil? Prime time has plenty to offer. In the space of one week, you could visit a psychiatric hospital that (so the story claimed) confines teenage patients with fraudulent diagnoses so it can rake in the insurance money; watch an undercover investigator expose a sleazy gas-station operator who has been cheating customers; glimpse the glittery world of two bogus Hollywood producers charged with bilking investors; and meet a creepy forensic pathologist who is accused of falsifying autopsy reports and who keeps blood samples in his refrigerator alongside the mustard.

These aren't story lines from L.A. Law or the CBS Sunday Movie. This, folks, is the news. Or what TV news is evolving into. Each of the above stories was featured on one of the network magazine shows that have spread to every night of the week. Within the past month, two new shows have debuted (Front Page, a zippy entry from the Fox network, and CBS's Eye to Eye with Connie Chung) and two more have returned from hiatus (ABC's Day One, switched from Sunday to Monday night, and CBS's Street Stories). NBC will introduce another, Here & Now, in August, bringing the number of prime-time news hours to a record 10. Still another show, ABC's Moment of Crisis, is promised for early next year.

Amazingly, viewers aren't sated. In the latest Nielsen ratings, four magazine shows ranked in the top 10, and seven were in the top 25. Because the networks own these shows outright (unlike most entertainment shows), prime- time magazines are the best thing to happen to network news since Huntley and Brinkley. Says CBS's Andrew Heyward, executive producer of Chung's show: "They have kept the news divisions viable and healthy at a time when economic pressures are enormous."

Prime-time shows are drawing network attention and resources away from the evening news. Already they are taking over some roles of the daily newscasts: giving expanded coverage to major breaking stories and landing big interviews (Chung's recent chat with Roger Clinton) -- besides, insiders say, attracting the best reporters, producers and technical people. Paul Friedman, executive vice president of ABC News, insists that "the main resources of the news division still go to World News Tonight and Nightline." But he laments, "There's a sense on the part of the people who work here that the magazine programs are the glamorous place to be." Notes NBC anchor Tom Brokaw: "It's getting harder and harder to find people coming into the business who want to cover daily news. They all want to be magazine reporters." Indeed they do: Brokaw himself will be a co-anchor (with Katie Couric) of NBC's new show.

With a couple of exceptions (48 Hours, with its cinema verite immediacy, and the style-setting 60 Minutes), most of these shows seem interchangeable. Efforts to find gimmicks (a live studio audience on PrimeTime Live, for one regrettable example) have been mostly jettisoned in favor of the tried-and- true 60 Minutes formula. Before the March debut of Day One, executive producer Tom Yellin promised that the show would feature some longer stories and a mold-breaking format: "If our program is three pieces of the same length and then a light, short piece at the end, then we will have failed." After early shows drew criticism from ABC News executives for being too downbeat and tabloid-like (example: a whole show on serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer), the program was retooled. Last week's show featured three main stories and a light, short piece at the end on the New York Mets.

News executives now tend to discount the drive to be different. "We're not reinventing the wheel here," says Here & Now executive producer Jeff Zucker. "The secret is to go with what has worked." (He does, however, promise more live segments.) Andrew Lack, the new president of NBC News, contends, "The public doesn't care about format. They care about whether it's a good story or not."

And everyone in magazineland seems to agree on what the good stories are: consumer rip-offs, miscarriages of justice, teary tales of people victimized by bad doctors or trampled on by insensitive government agencies. Like the one-hour dramas they have replaced on the prime-time schedule, the magazines serve up morality tales of black hats vs. white hats, with the reporter as avenging U.S. marshal. Instead of a six-gun, his or her weapons are a hidden camera (for the inevitable undercover expose) and a hand-held mike, thrust at reluctant witnesses before they slam the car door. It's "Gotcha!" journalism.

Pursuing these high-impact, hot-button stories can pose dangers. For one thing, there is the tendency to overdramatize and oversimplify. The most notorious example was the rigged crash test of a GM truck on Dateline NBC. Though many network executives dismiss the incident as an aberration, it is symptomatic of the pressure to make stories that sizzle. "The constant race for ideas leads to a tendency to sensationalize and blow things out of proportion," says Everette Dennis, executive director of the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center.

The competition for stories, moreover, is growing more fierce. No fewer than five network magazine shows have explored doing a story on Maggie Hadleigh- West, a New York City woman who took a video camera onto the streets to record instances of sexual harassment. Four of the shows, according to Hadleigh-West, offered her money as inducement; she eventually picked CBS's Eye to Eye with Connie Chung. Executive producer Heyward says the payment is strictly for use of her video footage -- "standard practice in the business" -- and asserts that CBS's long-standing policy has not changed: "We do not pay for news."

Not yet, perhaps, but the temptations at all three networks are growing. "With the tabloid shows and the daytime talk shows proliferating, a lot of those shows are going out and paying for interviews," says NBC's Lack. "The network news divisions as I have always known them are not crossing the line. But we've been asked a lot. There's a vulnerability there that I worry about." And so should everyone.

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With reporting by William Tynan/New York