Television News Magazines

Origins

By the late 1970s, commercial network documentaries were disappearing given their reliance on a single hard news topic per program, their production cost, relative lack of advertiser interest, and the controversy (and sometimes legal actions) that often resulted from their airing. Only public television's PBS offered regular documentary series. As cable networks developed in the 1980s, they took over much of the documentary role from the broadcast networks. One question facing the broadcast news divisions was how to fully utilize the reporters and stories that often could not fit into the half-hour evening newscasts. Compared to comedy and drama, news material was relatively inexpensive to produce—and while it appealed to smaller audiences than entertainment, those viewers were influential. What was needed was an additional way to feature those reporters and stories without building whole programs around each of them. Perhaps a program with multiple segments was an answer.

One early example of this “magazine” concept applied to television was Omnibus (1952–61), what might be dubbed a high-brow cultural variety program. It was broadcast on Sunday afternoons or evenings (in the days before more lucrative professional sports crowded out culture programming), funded by the Ford Foundation, and hosted by the urbane former BBC journalist Alistair Cooke. Omnibus featured diverse programming about science, the arts, and the humanities, and included original dramatic works, interviews with celebrated people, and performances by many famous actors, singers, and dancers. It aired originally on CBS, then ABC, before finally moving to NBC in 1957, where it was irregularly scheduled until its demise.

Another application of the magazine approach could be found in the ABC network's Wide World of Sports which, beginning in 1961, offered programs made up of multiple segments featuring different sports and locations. Viewers could often see sports that had little presence on television outside of the Olympics, or little previous exposure at all. Originally designed as a summer replacement, the 90-minute telecast became a permanent part of the network's offerings (and was still on the air in the first decade of the 2000s).

Finally, two foreign television news-related programs provided more controversial examples of what could be accomplished with the television news magazine. The BBC's That Was the Week That Was series lasted for two seasons (1962–63), and focused on a satirical look at news events. NBC ran an American version in 1964 to 1965. This Hour Has Seven Days aired by the Canadian CBC network (1964–66), melded satire with serious segments. Both the British and Canadian series, which provided multiple segments or stories in each broadcast, were popular but created huge controversies at the same time. The mix of satire and news was simply too controversial for many viewers, especially in stories that parodied national leaders or concerning social or political subjects that some viewers perceived as very serious matters, not to be treated with humor.

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