Whatever Happened to the News?
When hard news goes soft, entertainment takes over.
By Daniel Hallin
News has always mixed the serious and the entertaining. The tension between journalism and commercialism goes back long before television, but it is felt with special intensity in television news today.
In the early 1960s the networks, hugely profitable but worried about their images and about regulatory pressures, expanded their news operations and largely freed them from the pressures of commercial television. The "church" of news was to be separated from the "state" of entertainment.
In the 1970s and '80s, however, the barrier between news and entertainment has been increasingly eroded. Not all the changes of these years have been for the worse. But taken together, they raise serious questions about the future of journalism in an entertainment-dominated medium. A recent edition of the news tabloid
A Current Affair, for example, ended with the tease "Coming up – sex, murder and videotape, that's next!" It may be that this is indeed the future of television news.
It was the local stations that first discovered, late in the 1960s, that news could make money– lots of money. By the end of the '70s, news was frequently producing 60 percent of a station's profits. With numbers like that, news was much "too important" to leave to journalists, and a heavily entertainment-oriented form of programming began to evolve. Often it was contrasted directly with the network news. 'Feel like you're getting a bad deal from poker-faced TV news reporters?" asked San Francisco's KGO in one ad, "Then let the Channel 7 Gang deal you in. They're not afraid to be friendly."