The TV Tabs' New Tone

Once the pro- vince of royal scandal and Elvis sightings, television's syndicated tab- loid news shows are sporting a new look. The gossip quotient is down at shows like Inside Edition,American Journal, and A Current Affair, and investigative journalism is up. While the tactics of tabloid television -- parking-lot ambushes and hidden cameras -- haven't changed, the targets have. The shows are digging up consumer fraud and rooting out political misdeeds with the same zeal they once applied to stories about topless donut shops and Joey Buttafuoco.

The shows, scattered across TV's syndicated landscape five evenings a week, playing to an estimated audience of more than twenty million in the early hours leading up to and including prime time, still include the Hollywood prattle proffered by Extra and Entertainment Tonight and the entertainment-and-sensation recipe of Viacom's Hard Copy. Hard Copy, in fact, with a heavy investment in the O.J. story, won the tabloid ratings race last year.

But the other tabloid news shows have begun opting for more sober, in-depth reporting. King World's Inside Edition has always had investigative pieces, but in recent years it has had more of them, and the pieces have had more impact. Meanwhile, Twentieth Television, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, has taken its Current Affair in a similar direction with a complete overhaul this year.

 One reason for this is that advertisers are increasingly looking beyond pure ratings numbers to just who is watching. A mix of higher-quality stories tends to mean better demographics. Instead of asking who has the most viewers, "The question now is, can this particular show deliver women aged eighteen to thirty-four, or will another show give us men twenty-five to fifty-four who make more than $75,000 a year," says David Bartlett, president of the Radio and Television News Directors Association. "What we're seeing here is a shake-out period for a lot of these programs. They've got to improve the program in the eyes of the target audience."

 Behind the scenes in this effort are two tabloid veterans, producers Bob Young and John Tomlin, who worked on A Current Affair when it began life in 1986 as the original TV tab. In 1988 Young and Tomlin jumped ship to launch the rival Inside Edition, envisioning an "upmarket" tab (the original anchor was David Frost). The show has steadily beefed up its investigative presence, especially in consumer reporting, looking, for example, into safety problems at U-Haul, food inspection, and insurance fraud. King World's other tab, American Journal, has reported on fast-food health violations and adulterated beef in the nation's supermarkets, among other stories.

 One of the biggest victims of this investigative streak has been Chrysler Corp. A series of Inside Edition stories illustrated why the National Highway Traf-fic Safety Administration (NHTSA) had been investigating a flaw in the rear-door latch that caused the liftgates of Town and Country, Dodge Caravan, and Plymouth Voyager minivans to open in collisions in which thirty-seven people have died in the last decade. Inside Edition's Steve Wilson first reported the story in January 1995. When Chrysler preempted a Safety Administration finding (and a possible recall) in March by instigating a replacement program, Wilson showed the new latch to be inadequate, too. The federal agency continued its investigation and has since raised its standards for minivan rear-door latches.

But the story didn't end there. Last summer, producers Young and Tomlin moved back to A Current Affair, and they brought the Chrysler story with them. This time, they focused on the public relations firm, Maritz, that was answering questions from concerned minivan owners. An undercover camera revealed operators telling hotline callers that there were no safety problems with the minivan's latch, contrary to established facts. When officials of the government agency learned of the segment, they issued a strong rebuke to Chrysler, saying "NHTSA at no time found the latches to be safe."

A Current Affair began remaking its image after finishing a distant third in the ratings race last year. The revamping started with a new anchor, Jon Scott (who was lured away from Dateline NBC), twenty new investigative staff members, a new Washington bureau, and a $4 million marketing campaign. A commercial, in which a dump truck rumbles through a suburban neighborhood and then winds up plunging off a cliff, explained the approach: "We took out the trash." A Current Affair even changed its "bug," or logo, in the corner of the screen, to prevent viewers from mistaking the new show for the old. "If the old Current Affair was synonymous with sleaze," says Young, "we'd rather they just saw the content." The show's first segment of the new season was about an all-expenses-paid charity golf vacation for members of Congress in Sun Valley, Idaho, where corporations paid thousands of dollars for the right to bend a legislator's ear on the links. In Inside Edition's "Senators' Ski Cup," reporter Wilson is called a "horse's ass" by a discomfited Missouri Senator Christopher "Kit" Bond, who is seen skiing the slopes of Park City, Utah, free of charge alongside corporate sponsors from American Express, USWest, and Delta. The style of the piece -- which opens to the strains of "Chariots of Fire" -- is an odd intersection of Michael Moore's "Roger and Me" and ABC World News Tonight's "Your Money" segments.

In fact, that intersection is emblematic of the middle ground emerging between the tabs and the network news magazines. Rosemary Armao, executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, is one who doesn't see "a great dividing wall" between the tabloids and the "so-called 'legitimate' journalism" of the networks. "If you cut out the alien landings and the checkbook journalism, is it so different?" Actually, Inside Edition's investigative unit doesn't pay for interviews; the new Current Affair will shy away from the practice and will say so when it does pay.

Jacquee Petchel, a senior producer for investigations at WCCO-TV, a CBS-owned and operated station in Minneapolis, says the distinction in the eyes of the viewer between tabloid and mainstream is largely illusory, anyway. "Viewers remember what they saw, not where they saw it," she says. "When people criticize a story that's shoddily done, it reflects on all of us. Whenever somebody attempts to do a better job, it's good for all of us."

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