Word: newshour
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Dates: during 1983-1983
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...helped develop PBS's healthy roster of news programs, including the MacNeil/ Lehrer NewsHour, Inside Story, Frontline and the critically acclaimed 13-part documentary series Vietnam: A Television His tory. NBC News, by contrast, has been losing ground. Two weeks ago, the brilliant but un profitable Overnight left the air. Today, once the sunrise champ, now has to fight the CBS Morning News for second place, be hind ABC's Good Morning America...
True enough, but American viewers are accustomed to being transported to the scene of the news. The effect of studio interviews is sometimes akin to a televised radio show. Moreover, there are pitfalls in live TV, especially as practiced by the unintrusive interviewers on NewsHour: under the permissive guidance of Washington Correspondent Judy Woodruff (who was lured from NBC), a discussion of President Reagan's proposed legislation to correct sex discrimination turned into an unrestrained attack by two feminist critics...
...with the first editions of almost anything, the opening installments of NewsHour were ragged. Admitted Executive Producer Lester Crystal, a former president of NBC News, "There is a great deal of smoothing out to be done." Among the snags: "mini-documentaries" on organ transplants and on the decline of a Kansas City stockyard seemed more like unedited slices of life than stories with news pegs, and "video postcards" of nature scenes and Americana reinforced the show's occasional aura of untimeliness...
...What NewsHour lacks in slickness it hopes to make up in spontaneity. It is too soon to tell whether that will satisfy viewers. In overnight ratings from several cities last week, the show held its customary 4% share of the total audience. In New York, where the first half of NewsHour was outmatched by the network news casts, second-half ratings rose substantially. The show has funds to last a year, with $13 million of the $22 million budget coming from A T & T grants. Says Senior Producer Phil Garvin: "We do not know if the hour show will even...
...fundamental question that NewsHour must answer, for PBS stations that resisted the expansion and for audiences who liked it as it was, is why the producers gambled with a proven success. MacNeil admits to having felt personally "confined" by the old format. Says he: "The half hour had a clear role, but it was always intended as just a foot in the door." Now that the door is open the show must trace a clear path...