Stay Tuned for the Hype

By Richard Zoglin

What's in the news this month? Well, let's take a spin around the local TV dial.

On Melrose Place, Billy and Alison finally consummated their relationship. The Fox station in Chicago covered the news with a behind-the-scenes report from a correspondent actually "there in Los Angeles during the filming of this historic episode."

Nothing quite so juicy was happening on L.A. Law; the show has just got so darn good that New York City's WNBC-TV felt compelled to do a story. "If you watched NBC's L.A. Law tonight, it wasn't your imagination," gushed co-anchor Sue Simmons. "The show's writers, stars and especially its fans agree that the old L.A. Law magic is back."

Anissa Ayala, the leukemia-stricken girl whose parents conceived another child in the hope of providing her with a blood-marrow donor, was a hot subject too. What was the news? Among other things, her family's reaction to the NBC movie For the Love of My Child: The Anissa Ayala Story. "I really enjoyed it," Anissa's mother told reporter Kelly Lange. "I cried through the whole movie."

Maybe the tears would be better shed for local TV news. These Action and Eyewitness news gangs have never exactly been mistaken for the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. But increasingly -- and especially during the ratings-sweeps months of November, February and May -- they are becoming little more than extensions of the network prime-time schedule. Stories that spin off network programming have been around for years, but now they are a depressing cottage industry. Networks alert stations to promotable programming and suggest possible tie- ins; stories done by one station are fed to a central network clearinghouse so that other affiliates can pick them up. The line between news and entertainment continues to fade.

Most common, of course, are those ubiquitous pieces touting the "real- life" story behind whatever fact-based TV movie is airing that evening. This month, for instance, local-news viewers have met the real-life policewomen who filed a sexual-harassment suit against the Long Beach, California, police department (CBS's With Hostile Intent); a real-life near victim of convicted murderer Blanche Taylor Moore (NBC's Black Widow Murders); and the real-life South Dakota woman who bore her daughter's baby (CBS's Labor of Love: The Arlette Schweitzer Story).

Stations hardly need a true-life drama, however, to concoct a bogus news tie-in. Last week's Academy of Country Music Awards on NBC gave Atlanta's WXIA-TV a chance to interview singers Travis Tritt and Doug Stone on the urgent subject of "why country music is so popular." New York's WABC-TV used a Kathie Lee Gifford special on motherhood as the pretext for a feature on her TV partner Regis Philbin's exercise regimen.

For sheer promotional chutzpah, Los Angeles' KABC-TV wins the Emmy: following Oprah Winfrey's high-rated interview with Michael Jackson in February, the station turned its entire 11 p.m. newscast (save for a few minutes of sports and weather) into a special report on Jackson. The end of local TV news as we know it? Depends on how you look at it; ratings for the show soared to nearly four times the newscast's usual figures.

Most local news directors concede that KABC's all-Jackson newscast crossed over the line. But generally they defend tie-ins as legitimate feature stories that help boost viewership, much as a newspaper's entertainment section or comics page does. "It's a question of balance," says Bruno Cohen, news director of New York's WNBC-TV. "Is there a place in a program for a good, interesting tie-in to what the prime-time programming was? Yes, if it's not overused, and the rest of the newscast does its job."

By flogging these stories relentlessly during prime time, stations hope to lure more viewers to stick around for the late news. "The tie-in happens well into the half-hour news broadcast," notes Ron Tindiglia, a Harrison, New York, broadcast consultant and former station executive. "Therefore people are exposed to the important news of the day well before they're able to see the tie-in."

But there remains the little matter of what important news is left out to make room for these pseudo stories. Ray Suarez, host of National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation and a former reporter for Chicago's WMAQ-TV, recalls doing a story on a controversial waste-incineration plant that was bumped for a piece hyping David Letterman's interview with Roseanne Arnold. "There used to be prime time, then prime time ended, and the news came on," says Suarez. "Now there isn't any boundary."

With reporting by Patrick E. Cole/Los Angeles, Julie R. Grace/Chicago and William Tynan/New York