Word: nbc
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...complain? Under my new name ALF -- for Alien Life Form -- I'm now a bigger star than Alpha Centauri. My half hour on Monday nights on the NBC-TV network sometimes hits the Top Ten in the Nielsen ratings (just like ours, except recorded electronically instead of with marshmallows and thumbtacks) and is playing in about 50 countries. The show is the story of my life in a typical suburban household -- working dad, nonworking mom, teenage daughter just out of braces, chirpy son who dresses up as a vegetable for the school play, and yours truly, the alien...
...claims to have invented me. Sure, he talks like me, laughs like me, jokes like me, even sort of looks like me. But I'm 230 years old and he's 35, barely old enough to have a bar catzvah back home. Also important is Brandon Tartikoff, president of NBC Entertainment, who admits I am a personal favorite. We keep everyone off the set, supposedly to maintain the illusion that I'm real but actually to maintain the illusion that I'm an illusion. This reporter from TIME (here it's a magazine, not a dental drill) called Tartikoff...
...goes, the blanket network coverage of previous years is redundant. If major news occurs when a network camera is not rolling, the candidate watcher can send in tape from a local affiliate via satellite the same day. "Local stations have become so reliable," says Joseph Angotti, chief of NBC's election coverage, "that we don't feel we need to have a correspondent and crew with the candidate all the time." The network did not assign anyone permanently to any campaign until after last month's New Hampshire primary...
...tube a little differently from Black: through television, "the public got a look at us and didn't like what it saw." Television feeds egos; in some, said Patterson, it produces "attack journalism--let the public see how big we are and how we can shove people around." To NBC's John Chancellor, "the main culprit is the televised press conference: the public suddenly saw people asking nasty questions of the President of the U.S." Since the visual impression matters so much on television, Chancellor also brought up "the Ronald Reagan cupped-ear gambit. The press is deliberately and systematically...
...dispute that the glitzy publicity is a slick promotional tool. "It's an opportunity to market themselves," says NBC Producer Linda Ellman, who worked with Maria Shriver in Los Angeles. "The more publicity they get, the more people are likely to watch them." The strongest detractors contend that any benefits may be illusory. By playing at being sex objects, they warn, even the most successful women run the risk of eroding their hard-earned credibility...