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Forget cute features about the latest newborn at the San Diego Zoo. Or insightful re-enactments of murders. Consumer stories exploring the social nuances of supermarket coupons didn't even come close.
No, by far, the most popular news story of the past year-the feature that was more common in television news than any other and best defined the year-was the Blatant Plug Feature. From the KNSD-TV (Channel 39) news team offering up interviews with "L.A. Law" stars to CBS affiliate KFMB-TV (Channel 8) treating the demise of "Dallas" with the same time and enthusiasm usually reserved for the marriage of British princes, the television news departments made it very clear that they were available to help the stations make a few extra bucks.
Does the network need a little sweeps period coverage of that "Return to Gilligan's Island" special? No problem. Local news seemed more than willing to devote a few minutes to a Bob Denver retrospective, maybe giving it a serious title like "Gilligan: Then and Now."
"News is not so sacrosanct anymore," KFMB-TV (Channel 8) Jim Holtzman said during an interview in June, several weeks after his department did a weeklong series on selling cars, which made car dealers and the station's sales department very happy.
The man who reshaped the Channel 8 news team with disastrous ratings results, Holtzman wasn't right about much this year, but he was right about that.
From linking news reports with advertisers to ignoring stories that weren't sexy, local television news in 1991 continued its descent into a tacky new world of television.
Instead of fighting to establish their domain with a sweeping card of local programming (what a radical idea), local stations turned their airwaves over to such syndicated mind-expanding programs as "Geraldo," "Studs," "Married . . . With Children" and "Hard Copy." Local news, which, in concept, always seemed to be above the fray, but in 1991, the Blatant Plug Feature proved that news is just another player in the game.
Local news operations managed to do much solid work, and on a day-to-day basis they were proven to be competent disseminators of information. But in a year when media bashing became a national sport, local television news gave more hints that...