Network documentaries on the blink.

• Author: Alter, Jonathan

NETWORK DOCUMENTARIES ON THE BLINK

When I began covering the media for Newsweek last year, P.R. people for the networks, knowing a new man on the beat when they saw one, played a little game with me. I would ask how many hours of documentaries were scheduled for the season. They would give me complexlooking charts with categories like "public affairs programming' or "news programming' that always showed the numbers up from the year before. They knew that I knew the charts were phony; "public affairs programming' usually includes such things as magazine shows and latenight and early-morning news shows. But at least their little game showed the networks still cared about how they were perceived on the issue of documentaries. Now, only a year later, they barely even try to jiggle the figures. Why bother? It's perfectly obvious that the hour-long documentary form is close to death at the commercial networks. CBS, long the premier documentary maker, is scheduling only six to eight hours for next year, less than a third of what appeared in 1984. Many of the finest documentary producers chose to take early retirement during the network's recent turmoil. NBC has cut back its "White Papers,' and ABC, which for a while tried to close the respectability gap with CBS, has cut its staff and even banned the word "documentary' from news specials (too boring).

Unlike at PBS, the decline for documentaries at the networks does not have much to do with the role of government, though a little interest on the part of the FCC, which once encouraged such programming, might have helped slow the process. The change obviously has a lot to do with commercial pressures, not from sponsors but from the business divisions of the networks. Until recently, the business side provided special dispensation to the news divisions, partly as a matter of prestige and partly because combatants in the rating wars observed a cease fire when it came to documentaries. The willingness to judge documentaries by a less rigorous rating standard has eroded as network television's glory days of boundless revenues have faded into the past. After years of printing money, CBS, for instance, suffered losses last quarter for the first time ever. The "prestige' issue, however, is more interesting and generally less well understood. The real change may have as much to do with the internal culture of the networks as with economic issues. Today's news executives still care about what people think at...