Celebrity Newsmagazines
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Hollywood, where the experience was recreated on a sound stage. The guests were
asked to reenact their life-threatening flight—^including facial expressions—in a
simulated airplane. The program got a 15.3 rating and 28 share (Mascaro 1994,
73-76). And in a marked departure from network news practices, which generally
required that documentaries and news reports be produced only by in-house
employees, this documentary was entrusted to freelancers, Paul and Holly Fine.
The Gift o f Life took CBS Reports, and network news, into new terrain. This
program celebrated organ donors. It aired 27 March 1985 and also was produced
by Paul and Holly Fine. The melodramatic look and tone of this program resemble
early reality TV (Mascaro 1994,78-79). Absent from this report was any discussion
or analysis about the social controversies related to organ donors, costs and benefits,
or who decides who will live or die. The familiar CBS theme music dating back to
Edward R. Murrow’s days in the sixties with CBS Reports, Aaron Copland’s
Appalachian Spring, was replaced by a percussive sound track more typical of 48
Hours or NYPD Blue.
Kurtis’s resonant voice and intimate tone provided sound-bite captions to the
visual grammar of the film in the style of Dragnet's Joe Friday: “The heart is
installed and it beats. It’s a terrifying and wonderful sight. Man bringing life...to
man.” The program featured quick visual cuts and jerky zooms. The credits were
stylized, depicted in script and color, more like an entertainment show than a
documentary, and the music shifted to a happy tone and beat as the program ended.
This was no pedantic treatment. The medical information was meted out in small
doses and layered between generous portions of entertaining or engaging video.
Instead of confronting the viewers with a moral dilemma, this report invites viewers
to be voyeurs.
Today’s audience would find nothing unusual about the style and techniques
of these 1980s documentary experiments. Compared with traditions formed by the
producers and reporters of broadcast news, though, these developments signaled a
break—their craft was on the wane. To network executives, a new television culture
was dawning.
Evolution of the Magazine Format
There have always been newsmagazines on television. See It Now, one of the
most famous documentary series, was originally a newsmagazine in format, if not
name. In December 1951, for instance, Murrow and producer Friendly aired
segments on a Washington hearing, Korean orphans, brain research. Senator
McCarthy’s campaign kickoff, and a commentary by Howard K. Smith (Einstein
471).
The term caught on in 1968 after Harry Reasoner appeared in the premiere of
60 Minutes and introduced the CBS experiment: “It’s a kind of magazine for