Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 2, Summer 2002 | Page 64

60 Popular Culture Review In January 1991, NBC added a tougher series: “The aptly named Expose consisted almost entirely of hard-hitting revelations about real and potential scandals.. .Tom Brokaw was paired with one of NBC’s (and the industry’s) most successful investigative teams, Brian Ross and Ira Silverman, to dig up the dirt. Among the stories: Russian mobsters setting up shop in the United States, buying Uzi submachine guns on the streets of Florida; the Mafia muscling in on small town garbage collection; and death squads sent to kill beggar children who harass tourists on the streets of Brazil” (Brooks and Marsh 322). Real Life and Expose earned mixed reviews and low ratings (Gay). Real Life averaged an 11.0 rating during its 1990 summer launch (New York Times). In June 1991 the average for the two shows was a 7.8 rating and a 15 share (Kubasik). The two programs were canceled later that year and merged into Dateline NBC, which premiered in March 1992. After a rocky start and controversy involving a staged truck crash fire in 1993, Dateline NBC finally became the first long-term, prime time magazine success for the network, after more than a dozen attempts. The early nineties were a heady time for network newsmagazines. At one point in August 1993, five of the top-ten-rated programs were magazines (Hall 1993). They became weekly versions of Life in the Fat Lane and Scared Sexless, earning ratings comparable to other entertainment fare. This was the new development in broadcast news that changed the traditional relationship between newsmagazines and their more respectable cousins, the network documentaries. As former NBC News president Reuven Frank explained, all news must be entertaining, otherwise no one will watch and no information will be imparted. What Frank meant, however, was that television news reporting must employ entertainment values to remain successful as news programming. ABC capitalized on the celebrity of Diane Sawyer—who gained notoriety when she posed for a provocative cover for Vanity Fair in 1987—by teaming the former CBS correspondent with Sam Donaldson as hosts for Primetime Live in 1989, a magazine that survived early criticism for stiff, staged bante r and for its DonahueAikt interactions with a studio audience (Brooks and Marsh 838). By the early 1990s, the prime-time schedule was dotted with newsmagazines: 60 Minutes, Day One, Dateline NBC, 48 Hours, Now, Primetime Live, Eye to Eye with Connie Chung, and 20/20. The success of magazine programs in the early 1990s moved network news into the world of entertainment programming. What these shows replaced, however, were not documentaries, which were phased out for other reasons. The newsmagazines were substitutes for entertainment programs. It was a fundamental shift in America’s television culture. Setting the Stage If we peel back another layer of television history, we can see what led up to