Ted Koppel: News Documentaries Are Dying, "Almost Nonexistent"...
Entertainment Weekly Missy Schwartz January 14, 2006 at 10:37 PM
There's also a limit to the number of outlets doing hard journalism.
Oh, absolutely. That's probably the predicate to everything, and that's one of the reasons [Nightline producer] Tom Bettag and I decided to leave ABC in the first place. It's been a great home for all us, especially for me. I spent 42 years there and still have a lot of good friends and colleagues there, and they still do fine work. But more and more, I think the economic model is that the advertiser dictates -- not specifically in terms of what an advertiser wants to have on the air but indirectly through demographics, by saying the only people that we are really interested in reaching are the young men and women between the ages 18 and whatever it is...it's like 18 and 35. By saying that, they are dictating the kinds of programming that the commercial, over-the-air networks are going to end up offering. If you look at magazine programs, for example, they have gotten so much softer over the past few years, and as far as actual one-hour documentaries on serious subjects, they're almost nonexistent. I think Peter Jennings' program on health insurance on ABC, which aired posthumously, may be one of the last you're going to see.
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There's also a limit to the number of outlets doing hard journalism.
Oh, absolutely. That's probably the predicate to everything, and that's one of the reasons [Nightline producer] Tom Bettag and I decided to leave ABC in the first place. It's been a great home for all us, especially for me. I spent 42 years there and still have a lot of good friends and colleagues there, and they still do fine work. But more and more, I think the economic model is that the advertiser dictates -- not specifically in terms of what an advertiser wants to have on the air but indirectly through demographics, by saying the only people that we are really interested in reaching are the young men and women between the ages 18 and whatever it is...it's like 18 and 35. By saying that, they are dictating the kinds of programming that the commercial, over-the-air networks are going to end up offering. If you look at magazine programs, for example, they have gotten so much softer over the past few years, and as far as actual one-hour documentaries on serious subjects, they're almost nonexistent. I think Peter Jennings' program on health insurance on ABC, which aired posthumously, may be one of the last you're going to see.
READ WHOLE STORY
posted by Kangaroo Brisbane Australia at 3:06 PM
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