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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