Word: tinkers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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While diplomats tinker with timetables for troop withdrawal, Angola bleeds. Negotiators from Cuba, Angola and South Africa are inching toward a detailed accord to send Cuba's 50,000 soldiers home and institute long-promised independence for Namibia. But an agreement on the terms, expected next week in the Congolese capital of Brazzaville, will bring no peace to Angola, whose people have known nothing but war for 27 years. The departing foreigners will leave behind a land glutted with weapons and a Marxist government still at war with the 60,000 homegrown rebels known as UNITA...
Certainly the days of captive audiences and free-spending arrogance are over. "Network television is a mature medium," says Grant Tinker, the former NBC chairman who now runs his own production company. "There is no more audience growth. The universe is what it is." In a survey of top advertisers, Eugene Secunda, professor of marketing at Baruch College in New York City, found that 53% would consider making a significant shift in their ad dollars if the three networks' share dropped to 65%. "You're dealing with inevitable decline," says Secunda. "It's like those folks who kidded themselves that...
...along comes iconoclast Grant Tinker, who has managed to neatly avoid both rules. His new USA Today: The Television Show, which began its nightly broadcasts last week, is an unmitigated mess. Unsubtly billed by Gannett as a "new journalism of hope," the show is neither hopeful nor journalistic. Its splashy graphics--borrowed of course from the show's paper parent--obscure a lineup that is drab and uninviting. Consider the Wednesday "spotlight": a snappy 10-second piece on the states with the highest population of pigs...
This is not to say the show was misconceived. The program was intended as a cheery supplement to the natural disasters and somber economic forecasts of the nightly newscast which it follows. Tinker, a proven NBC veteran, judged rightly that human interest is too often relegated to the last slot on the evening news...
...unfortunately for Tinker and his backers at Gannett, jaunty stories that reek of the Time-Life Home Improvement series simply won't cut it. The uncritical tone of the program, reminiscent of banal public service spots, is going to make increasingly savvy viewers rush for their dials...