ABSTRACT
The critical and commercial success of 60 Minutes was the source of much more than envy at ABC and NBC. News magazine programs were markedly less expensive to produce than entertainment shows. It was a generally accepted fact that it cost less than $500,000 to produce an hour-long news magazine, while an hour of comedy or drama might run more than $2 million. News magazines also earned nearly as much in revenue, an average of $85,000 per thirty-second commercial, in contrast to the prime-time entertainment average of $110,000.1 And if 60 Minutes could attract a huge audience, why couldn’t a comparable program on another network? Doing news magazine programs was not like producing the evening news, though. It meant adopting a new mind-set. All of CBS’s competitors realized that success in prime time meant adjusting the content of “reality-based programming” (the phrase itself was almost twenty years away) to a broader audience than that of the evening news. Former CBS vice president and director of news Ed Fouhy says that in seeking a different audience for prime time, the networks disappointed those viewers interested in serious, substantive news coverage.
[The networks] are pursuing a group of people who watch a lot of television and who may have only a slight connection with the civil society in which they live, people with only a marginal interest in the events of the day that engage the vast middle of the television audience, which is a mass audience. They’re trying to engage people who are not normally engaged by television news, and in trying to do that, I think they alienated the most regular and most faithful viewers of TV news.2
