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Tabloid nation
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Dec. 8, 1999 |
Burt Kearns was a producer on both of those shows. To hear him tell it, tabloid TV simply morphed into network news magazines, syndicated talk shows, ceaseless cable "news" coverage and those morning programs where the men all wear sweaters and the coffee is decaffeinated. "When I want to watch my tabloid stories now," says Kearns, "I'll watch the 'Today' show. There's no better tabloid team than Matt Lauer and Katie Couric." This may come as news to anyone who thinks tabloid TV was, in its purest form, all about Elvis sightings and ax murders. But for Kearns, who is in New York promoting his book "Tabloid Baby," an amusing if somewhat self-serving account of his years in the business, most people just don't get it. And that includes many of the programmers who imitated and co-opted the brass-tacks style of his early shows. "Nobody is covering those stories the way we covered them," he complains. "They're doing it the network way. They'll do a story on a UFO cult and cut to Keith Morrison at NBC and he's rolling his eyes. They still look down on people." Kearns doesn't look that different from any number of Los Angeles TV producers. An affable, good-looking man in his early 40s, he's talking to me between appearing on a panel on tabloid TV and doing a radio interview. Appropriately, he has chosen Langan's -- an Irish bar in midtown Manhattan frequented by New York Post writers -- for our interview; so much of "Tabloid Baby" (which covers the period from Kearns' 1989 arrival at Fox's "A Current Affair" to the cancellation of Paramount's "Hard Copy" earlier this year) floats by on a sea of vodka. And Steven Dunleavy, a Mephistophelean character in Kearns' book, writes a column for the Post now. In fact, during the interview he appears at the bar as if conjured and signals the barman for a refill while lighting a Parliament. "Joey Adams died today," says Dunleavy solemnly in his Aussie accent. He's wearing a corduroy jacket that nearly matches the color of his tan, and he sports a Porter Wagoner-style pompadour. Tabloid Baby By Burt Kearns
Celebrity Books
544 pages
"No shit?" says Kearns. Adams, husband of Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams and aggregator (if not author) of a million one-liners, had been ill for some time. "Cindy was supposed to be on this panel with me last night but said she had family business." There is a beat before he adds: "At least it was a real excuse." With its hard drinking and quick cynicism, the world that "Tabloid Baby" limns is a sort of throwback to yellow journalism's days of yore. "In the worldview of 'A Current Affair,'" Kearns writes, "people didn’t insult the Church, and sex was naughty -- the word unsaid, only spelled out, S-E-X -- values needed to be upheld, and all offensive images needed to be shown in as explicit detail as the lawyers would allow." This combination of titillation and hypocrisy was imported from Australia by Rupert Murdoch, who staked his claim to the States when he purchased 20th Century Fox and the Metromedia TV stations in the mid-'80s and formed the Fox Broadcasting Corp. And when he needed news magazines, he didn't look to "60 Minutes" as a role model. He called on some of the same Aussie journalists who had reinvented the print tabloids for him there -- men like Dunleavy and Peter Brennan. It is Brennan whom Kearns credits with splitting the atom of the tabloid-TV formula. "Now, you get back from a story, what happens?" Brennan would ask his charges. "You talk to people. You go to a bar and your friends say, 'What were they really like? What really happened?' If you give an answer that wasn't in the story, if the viewer or your mother can ask what the people in your story are really like, you've told the typical television version of the story. 'A Current Affair' tries to do the story between the lines and turn it into lines." For Kearns, who came to Fox from WNBC, this new way of reporting was liberating. "In the so-called legitimate news," Kearns tells me, "the idea was to make sure you have the same story everyone else does and make sure you cover it the same way, and make sure you have what everyone else has. With 'A Current Affair,' you'd walk in each morning and say, 'What's the most interesting story going on right now?'" And according to Kearns, they didn't take their lead from the supermarket tabloids, either. The "Current Affair" staff scanned hundreds of newspapers for offbeat stories. They broke a map of the United States into five sections, like the five boroughs of New York, and assigned reporters to cover each. And, OK, they pissed off a number of celebrities in the process. "It was never journalism," Kearns says of what they were doing. "It was what the Australians would call a piss-take on journalism." And it was much safer -- and more just -- to "take the piss" out of public figures like Steven Spielberg, whose divorce from Amy Irving got the "Current Affair" treatment, including clips from "Jaws" that equated interloper Kate Capshaw with Bruce the Shark. This resulted in a phone call from Spielberg to Fox studio head Barry Diller, which Kearns interprets as follows: "Hello, Steven!" "Barry, if I live to be 90, I will never do a movie for Fox." Kearns estimates that cost the company around $500 million.
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