The 1980s gave us two significant additions to public affairs programming, Nightline and CNN. In the '70s, ABC joined the field with Good Morning America, produced by the entertainment division, and CBS abandoned hard news in the morning to try and imitate Today. NBC's Today show had pioneered such a form in the 1950s. The decade also saw the consolidation of morning news as a strongly entertainment-oriented form of programming. Each breached the barrier between news and entertainment in important ways.
In the '70s new forms appeared: the news magazine, represented first by 60 Minutes, and local news in its modern, fast-paced "happy talk" form. The last few years have seen a proliferation of new forms of "reality-based programming." If we set aside live programming and the Sunday interview shows, there were basically only two forms of public affairs television in the 1960s: the evening news and the documentary. In a sense, there is also greater diversity. In fact, there is a lot more news on television now than ever before.
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Proponents of deregulation assumed that the free market would bring forth an age of diversity in television programming. In Washington, meanwhile, the FCC was dismantling most of the regulatory framework that had been imposed on the television industry since its beginnings, especially the obligation vague, to be sure– to provide some minimum of serious public affairs programming. As outlined more fully elsewhere in this issue, this new source of competition, combined with other economic conditions, put a significant squeeze on network profits that has since come home to the news divisions in the form of an unprecedented concern with the bottom line. Its successful move into news was followed by the growth of cable, which began to erode the networks' audience share. In 1976 ABC began a successful drive to make its news division competitive with CBS and NBC. "When you mix fiction and news, you diminish the distinction between truth and fiction, and you wear down the audience's own discriminating power to judge."Ĭompetitive pressures began to impinge on network news in a serious way in the late l970s.
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'Feel like you're getting a bad deal from poker-faced TV news reporters?" asked San Francisco's KGO in one ad, "Then let the Channel 7 Gang deal you in. Often it was contrasted directly with the network news. With numbers like that, news was much "too important" to leave to journalists, and a heavily entertainment-oriented form of programming began to evolve. By the end of the '70s, news was frequently producing 60 percent of a station's profits. It was the local stations that first discovered, late in the 1960s, that news could make money– lots of money. A recent edition of the news tabloid A Current Affair, for example, ended with the tease "Coming up – sex, murder and videotape, that's next!" It may be that this is indeed the future of television news. But taken together, they raise serious questions about the future of journalism in an entertainment-dominated medium. Not all the changes of these years have been for the worse. In the 1970s and '80s, however, the barrier between news and entertainment has been increasingly eroded.
The "church" of news was to be separated from the "state" of entertainment. In the early 1960s the networks, hugely profitable but worried about their images and about regulatory pressures, expanded their news operations and largely freed them from the pressures of commercial television. The tension between journalism and commercialism goes back long before television, but it is felt with special intensity in television news today. News has always mixed the serious and the entertaining.
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