Will success spoil network news?

The three network news divisions have never been busier. Their newsmagazines now fill a dozen prime-time hours a week on ABC, CBS, and NBC. No longer loss leaders, the network news operations find themselves in the unaccustomed role of making major money for their parent companies. And in the process, they are sounding their own death knell; the future victims of their own remarkable financial success.

60 Minutes executive producer Don Hewitt told what's really happening to network news in his blunt-spoken Frank E. Gannett Lecture last December. The economics of television, Hewitt said, have "in no small measure driven the networks out of the entertainment business, which they used to be very serious about and did very well, and into the news business, which they're not very serious about and don't do very well."

The news business Hewitt was complaining about is not the business of covering the major news of the world, at one time the core of network news and its very reason for being. No, Hewitt was talking about the news divisions' new core business of churning out entertaining real-life stories for their twelve weekly magazine hours. The networks' current strategy, he said, is either to "put on one of those ersatz newsmagazines or go dark" because, "they don't have anything else" to put on the air that works.

The man who invented the television newsmagazine excoriated the networks and their news divisions, including his own, for "Filling Time with Second-Rate Newsmagazines," the title of his talk. They're "scraping the bottom of the barrel" with these shows, he said, "just to keep themselves in business."

Although Hewitt's right about what's happening to network news, he's wrong about what the economics of television are doing to the networks. It's not the entertainment business the networks are being driven out of but the news business. Their news divisions are likely to go under while the newsmagazines keep the networks afloat.

True, the four hours a week of ABC News's 20/20, five hours of NBC News's Dateline, and three hours of CBS News's 60 Minutes, 60 Minutes II, and 48 Hours, tend to be a big improvement over the failed sitcoms and action dramas they replaced. And the networks' newsmagazines are paragons of quality and taste compared to the syndicated tabloid knockoffs like Hard Copy, Inside Edition, Real TV, and Entertainment Tonight that increasingly fill station time days, evenings, and late night.

But for almost half a century, covering the important news of the world was what ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News did for a living. They reigned as the kings of serious and responsible broadcast journalism, the pride of their networks. No longer. Now their bread-- and-butter business is producing features for prime-time magazines. Being entertaining and profitable rather than being informative has become the new measure of their success.

The weekly prime-time newsmagazine hours that represent the major output of ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News contain few stories that focus on substantive public issues. During the second week in March, when this column was written, 60 Minutes featured a piece on physically challenged performers, another on gangsters in the Irish Republican Army, and revisited the area in Alaska where a decade ago, the Exxon Valdez had leaked oil. 60 Minutes II carried features on the man who invented on-line stock trading, a women's basketball coach with a bad temper, and an old Mike Wallace interview with Oprah Winfrey, updated.

Dateline NBC offered three news recreations: the "City of New Orleans" train crash, the mystery of three missing women hikers, and the frantic rescue of a man who fell through the ice. It told stories about warm and tender crocodiles, a cheerleader accused of murdering her own infant, and the theft of a movie idea. Dateline episodes that week also focused on "Suze's secrets of financial success," a Chinese herbal alternative to Viagra, a World War II soldier's secret, a family's "journey from despair to hope" about their sick child, and a new way to treat dogs with emotional problems. Dateline's investigations exposed the exploitation of kids who sell candy for charities, and careless care in nursing homes.

The four 20/20 shows reported on an innocent man freed from death row, women doing time in prison, the rise and fall of a powerful church leader, teenagers on a binge, heroic high school rescuers, an amazing little dog, and a portrait of golfer Arnold Palmer in his senior years. 20/20 also focused on federal informants who commit crimes (particularly the case of a pedophile who raped a boy), children who abuse their parents, and the dangers of bacteria accumulating in refrigerated food. Its medical features described the benefits of a new and unorthodox treatment that induces "a good heart attack," and surgeons who've figured out how to extend short people's bones.

48 Hours covered an "unholy feud" between two ministers and a story of "getting even with deadbeat dads."