Crossing Over:
How Celebrity Newsmagazines
Pushed Entertainment Shows
Out of Prime Time
When news correspondent Connie Chung and David Letterman both worked
for NBC in the late 1980s, the comedian often used their association as a springboard
for comedy. He might say something like, “Welcome to Late Night with David
Letterman on NBC—the network that brings you ‘hard-hitting documentaries’ hke
Life in the Fat Lane and Scared Sexless with Connie Chung.”
That was when infotainment was the pejorative used to disparage the trend of
news divisions to soften their reports and appeal to a larger audience. Implicit in
criticisms of infotainment—a term rarely heard now that the format has become a
fixture—and Letterman’s barbs at Chung was the expectation that documentaries
should not be frivolous and a complaint about the blending of news and
entertainment (Diamond and Mahony).
The broadcast television networks no longer produce what were called
documentaries. There are occasional hour-long specials on a single topic and reports
that in an earher time would have been classified as documentary programming.
But the word “documentary” has lost its cachet in network television news.
Today the news divisions have regular access to prime time through their
newsmagazine series, which have become brand names: 20/20, Primetime, Dateline
NBC, 48 Hours, and 60 Minutes. Putting newsmagazines in prime time has been
an effective programming strategy (Hall 1993,1996; Carter 1995; Saunders 1998;
Battagho 1998). It is common for one or more of these programs to appear in
weekly top-ten ratings lists, especially when competing with summer reruns.
Unhke network documentaries, newsmagazines are no longer accepted as loss
leaders. Instead, they have become reliable vehicles for advertising revenue—not
to mention terrific billboards for promoting the networks’ other programming and
star employees. This change in the expectations for a news program took place in
the 1980s. The turning point was 1987, when executives detected a formula for
profitable news and an opportunity to replace marginal entertainment fare with
celebrity reports. This article examines how network news crossed over and became
part of regularly scheduled entertainment programming in the form of weekly
celebrity newsmagazines in prime time. This piec e also explains developments
that preceded this transition.