By 1992 news magazines were ranked among the most popular programs on prime time television. It was pointed out, "The appetite for news and information is increasing. I think the mood of the country is more serious, and people are in a mood to be more informed." Don Hewitt remarked, "...Maybe this is the year of the news magazine." Neal Shapiro observed, "I think this is the most competitive form of journalism. In some ways, the pressure is just enormous." Victor Neufeld added, "We are compelled to make our programs as interesting as possible in an environment where there are many more choices. We are searching harder and digging deeper to get stories." The majority of the Baby Boomers would have reached their 40s in the 1990s. "People in their 40s watch significantly more news and information programing than people in their 30s," it was explained. "This major blip in the population is entering that stage of life, and that makes the TV environment more conducive to news and information programing."
However in the year of the U.S. presidential election, there were concerns informed voters were only getting sound bites from TV coverage and that reporting of election campaigns were blurring the lines of discourse between news and editorial. Neil Postman made the point, "I think political discourse should be put in a certain frame that says to viewers, 'What's about to happen is not something solely for your amusement, so attend to this – what this person says can affect your life in some fundamental way." In 1992, Neil and Steve Powers published 'How To Watch TV News', "a consumer guide to what we call 'TV news', addressing what viewers should know in order to approach it intelligently."
It was articulated, "All these programs are full of information and that serves the public interest." But Don disagreed, "The network news divisions that once aspired to be to broadcasting what The New York Times is to print, are now content to be to broadcasting what picture magazines are to print." One said, "If you don't have substance, style is useless."
"Arguably," one network chief decried at the end of the decade, "there are too many of the same type of program. Arguably, that has diluted the identity of some programs." One media buyer bemoaned, "There's too many of them. When you split the pie so many ways, everybody suffers. There's too many of these programs chasing the same audience." For example, "If '48 Hours' is up against 2 dramas, you can expect it to be a hit. If you schedule another magazine against it, you end up dividing the share points." Another point was made, "After a while, the outrageousness of what they covered and the approach to what they covered backed them into a corner." On reflection, one network chief admitted, "When network television starts a trend, it's not afraid to travel it to death. The early ones, '60 Minutes', '20/20' or '48 Hours', commanded one part of the audience on particular days. There was an enthusiastic demand for that, and I think we misread that demand."
Neal believed, "In the long term, people will still want a mix of news, entertainment and drama, and the news audience is sizable." Don begged to differ, "What worries me...and should worry everybody, is not that today that line(*) is crossed and crisscrossed repeatedly, but that nobody gives a damn." (* referring to the lines between news and entertainment)
In conclusion, "while the new technology may hurt the Blockbuster Video store, we don’t think it will have a great effect on the viewership for good television and good programing."
