celebrity gossip, academic style

As a full-time academic, my work is split in three: I teach, I write for academics, and I write for the internet (where academics also hang out). Sometimes, however, I’m able to bring all three of those interests together — which is precisely what happened with my contribution to How to Watch Television, edited by Jason Mittell and Ethan Thompson. With the encouragement of the press and the editors, you’ll find my piece (on Entertainment Tonight and how it altered the landscape of television — no seriously) below, but to contextualize the project and its purpose, I’m excerpting Mittell’s introduction (including the table of contents), which he posted to his excellent blog Just TV earlier this week. Read on, get the book, be awesome.

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I am quite excited to announce the publication of my latest book, How to Watch Television. Of course, in this instance, “my” should really be “our,” as the book was edited by me and my friend Ethan Thompson, and features 40 essays by an all-star line-up of media scholars young and old, familiar faces and new names. I’ve been itching to share my own chapter, about Phineas & Ferb, so you’ll find that essay previewed below the fold. But first, here’s some background on what we were trying to accomplish with the book, and why you might want to read it.

The idea (and title) was Ethan’s, and he approached me as a potential contributor to a volume that would be designed for the undergraduate classroom, with short essays each focused on a specific television program to model a critical approach within television studies. Too often, students lack models for how to write smart, accessible, engaging works of academic television criticism—most journalistic examples lack historical context and scholarly argumentation, and most academic examples are too long, too dense, and more often focused on larger theoretical arguments than close analysis of television texts and contexts. I was so taken with the idea, and excited about how it might dovetail effectively with my introductory textbook Television and American Culture, that I signed on as co-editor. Ethan & I spent months in 2011 soliciting essays that span a wide range of genres, historical eras, authorial perspectives, and authors in different stages in their careers. We ended up with a remarkable table of contents featuring 40 (!) original essays by great writers on an array of topics, arranged by broad categories of television analysis. The line-up really needs to be seen to be believed:

I. TV Form: Aesthetics and Style

1. Homicide: Realism – Bambi L. Haggins

2. House: Narrative Complexity – Amanda D. Lotz

3. Life on Mars: Transnational Adaptation – Christine Becker

4. Mad Men: Visual Style – Jeremy G. Butler

5. Nip/Tuck: Popular Music – Ben Aslinger

6. Phineas & Ferb: Children’s Television – Jason Mittell

7. The Sopranos: Episodic Storytelling – Sean O’Sullivan

8. Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show, Great Job!: Metacomedy – Jeffrey Sconce

II. TV Representations: Social Identity and Cultural Politics

9. 24: Challenging Stereotypes – Evelyn Alsultany

10. The Amazing Race: Global Othering – Jonathan Gray

11. The Cosby Show: Representing Race – Christine Acham

12. The Dick Van Dyke Show: Queer Meanings – Quinn Miller

13. Eva Luna: Latino/a Audiences – Hector Amaya

14. Glee/House Hunters International: Gay Narratives – Ron Becker

15. Grey’s Anatomy: Feminism – Elana Levine

16. Jersey Shore: Ironic Viewing – Susan J. Douglas

III. TV Politics: Democracy, Nation, and the Public Interest

17. 30 Days: Social Engagement – Geoffrey Baym and Colby Gottert

18. America’s Next Top Model: Neoliberal Labor – Laurie Ouellette

19. Family Guy: Undermining Satire – Nick Marx

20. Fox & Friends: Political Talk – Jeffrey P. Jones

21. M*A*S*H: Socially Relevant Comedy – Noel Murray

22. Parks and Recreation: The Cultural Forum – Heather Hendershot

23. Star Trek: Serialized Ideology – Roberta Pearson

24. The Wonder Years: Televised Nostalgia – Daniel Marcus

IV. TV Industry: Industrial Practices and Structures

25. Entertainment Tonight: Tabloid News – Anne Helen Petersen

26. I Love Lucy: The Writer-Producer – Miranda J. Banks

27. Modern Family: Product Placement – Kevin Sandler

28. Monday Night Football: Brand Identity – Victoria E. Johnson

29. NYPD Blue: Content Regulation – Jennifer Holt

30. Onion News Network: Flow – Ethan Thompson

31. The Prisoner: Cult TV Remakes – Matt Hills

32. The Twilight Zone: Landmark Television – Derek Kompare

V. TV Practices: Medium, Technology, and Everyday Life

33. Auto-Tune the News: Remix Video – David Gurney

34. Battlestar Galactica: Fans and Ancillary Content – Suzanne Scott

35. Everyday Italian: Cultivating Taste – Michael Z. Newman

36. Gossip Girl: Transmedia Technologies – Louisa Stein

37. It’s Fun to Eat: Forgotten Television – Dana Polan

38. One Life to Live: Soap Opera Storytelling – Abigail De Kosnik

39. Samurai Champloo: Transnational Viewing – Jiwon Ahn

40. The Walking Dead: Adapting Comics – Henry Jenkins

It’s a remarkable line-up, and everyone managed to produce essays that run counter to many trends of academic writing: tightly focused, clearly written for general readers, jargon-free, not too long, and submitted on time! After a editorial and publication process, we’re thrilled to announce that New York University Press is now shipping the book at an incredibly reasonable price of $29 (for a well-designed 400 page book of original content!). You can order it at the NYU Press website, along with previewing the introduction or requesting a review copy for faculty thinking about adopting it in a class. You can also order it on Amazon, where the already low price is even more discounted or the Kindle version is even cheaper (note that Amazon says it will be released on Monday, but I think they might already be shipping it). Or please request it at an independent bookstore near you, if you’ve got one.

Even though it was designed for classroom use and I’m quite excited to teach it in the spring, we’re happy that the essays do not read as academic homework—our secondary goal was to create public-facing intellectual criticism, demonstrating what some of our smartest colleagues and friends have to teach anyone about television. If you’re a television scholar, this is the book you show your mother to explain what it is that you do! And if you’re not a television scholar, I hope this book gives you a sense of what the field has to share with a general readership.

For a taste of that type of criticism, a few of us contributors who are regular bloggers will be sharing our chapters online (I’ll link to them in the Table of Contents above once they go live). Mine is below, offering an account of one of my favorite children’s programs, Phineas & Ferb. If you like the essay, remember that the book has 39 more chapters of similar work. (And if you don’t like it, I guarantee you that many of the other 39 are better…) I hope you read the book and enjoy!

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ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT: TABLOID NEWS

Until the early 1980s, “first-run” syndicated programming—that is, programming created for initial airing in syndication, not reruns—was limited to a “ghetto of game shows, talk shows and cartoons.”¹ Entertainment Tonight (syndicated, 1981–present) gentrified that ghetto, changing the way that both television producers and stations conceived of first-run syndication and its potential profitability. Indeed, if you flipped through the channels between the evening news and the beginning of primetime during the 1980s, you would almost certainly happen upon a now-familiar sight: the wholesome face of Mary Hart, reporting on the latest happenings in Hollywood. As the host of Entertainment Tonight, Hart helped popularize a new mode of celebrity gossip in which stories on the private lives of stars and celebrities comingled with reportage of box office receipts and on-set exclusives.

Since its debut, ET has become one of the longest running, most consistently profitable programs on the air. In the 1980s, it readied the way for a profusion of entertainment news programs and venues that now form a major node in the media landscape, from E! to Entertainment Weekly. Yet Entertainment Tonight’s success must be situated amidst a constellation of technological and regulatory changes, from the spread of cable and satellite technology to the gradual repeal of the Financial and Syndication Rules and other anti-monopoly regulations. This essay positions ET within the greater industrial climate of the 1980s, underlining the ways in which the program’s unmitigated success fundamentally altered the landscape of first-run syndication.

Beginning in the days of early radio, the Federal Communications Committee (FCC) blocked Hollywood studios from entering into broadcasting, fearing the consolidation of entertainment media into the hands of few. This practice continued when broadcasting expanded from radio to television, as the FCC blocked film studio attempts at entering into television, station ownership, cultivating “Pay-TV” options, or starting their own networks. At the same time, the FCC was wary of the existing networks, their growing power, and their apparent negligence of the mandate to use the airwaves for the public good. By the end of the 1950s, ABC, CBS, and NBC relied on programming which they owned or had invested in—a practice that may have streamlined profits, but also resulted in a schedule replete with derivative game shows and Westerns.²

The resultant crop of programming, famously deemed a “vast wasteland” by FCC chairman Newton Minow in 1961, encouraged FCC passage of the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules, otherwise known as Fin-Syn, in 1971. Fin-Syn prohibited the networks from securing financial interest in independently produced programming and syndicating off-network programming. Coupled with the Prime Time Access Rule (PTAR), Fin-Syn also limited the amount of programming that each network could produce for itself (such as news) and freed a portion of primetime from network control. The resultant time slots, dubbed “prime access,” would allow affiliates to program independently, hopefully with shows serving the local interest.

In short, the FCC blocked the networks’ attempt to vertically integrate, barring them from producing the content they distributed. With the passage of Fin-Syn and PTAR, the FCC also hoped to free broadcast hours from network-induced repeats, opening the airwaves to local interests and concerns. In several crucial ways, these regulations served that purpose, but failed to encourage local programming. When tasked with filling the hours vacated by PTAR, local stations usually opted for syndicated offerings from studios or independent production companies, which not only cost less, but brought in higher ad revenue.³ Without Fin-Syn and PTAR, Entertainment Tonight—a show produced by a major studio (Paramount) and broadcast during prime access—would not have been possible.

Entertainment Tonight was conceived by Alfred M. Masini, a former advertising executive and the creative force behind the hit music program Solid Gold. Masini came up with the idea for ET by studying what was not on the air—no one was providing “entertainment news” in the form of information on box office receipts, upcoming projects, Nielsen ratings, gossip, and personality profiles.⁴ But the particular brand of “news” that ET was prepared to offer was a commodity that consumers had no idea they were supposed to desire. Indeed, before 1981, “almost no one, outside of pencil pushers in the business, had heard of television’s upfront ad-selling season” let alone attendance figures, production deals, and industry machinations.⁵

But if ET provided that news, Masini hypothesized, audiences would watch. As longtime ET host Mary Hart recalled, “Do people really want to learn all these details—the weekly TV show ratings, the top-grossing movies? If we present it concisely and regularly, the answer is yes, people do want to learn.”⁶ Hart’s rhetoric reproduced the implicit message of the program, which suggested that entertainment news, when offered concisely on a daily basis, accrues gravity and importance. In other words, ET supplied entertainment news and figures with such regularity that such information no longer appeared superfluous but necessary to make sense of the entertainment world.⁷

While Entertainment Tonight was introducing a new genre of programming, it was also proposing a novel model of distribution. ET, like Maisani’s other hits, was syndicated. For the previous thirty years, syndicated programs had been “bicycled” from station to station, airing in one market, then sent, via the mail, to another. As a result, the lag-time between production and airing could be weeks—unacceptable for a program promising up-to-date Hollywood news. Paramount offered a solution in the form of satellite technology. In exchange for control of the show, Paramount offered to install and lease dishes to any station willing to air the show.⁸ The offer resulted in a collection of 100 local stations equipped to receive the ET feed and a reach unthinkable without Paramount’s infusion of capital.⁹

Satellite distribution also allowed Entertainment Tonight “day and date” transmission, meaning the show could be aired the same day it was filmed. This promise of immediacy would prove quintessential to ET’s image. In the early 1980s, the weekend’s box office figures came in at noon on Monday. ET would tape its segment at 1:30 p.m., and the finished product would be seen across the nation within hours.¹⁰ As a result, ET even beat the long-established Hollywood trade papers Variety and Hollywood Reporter in announcing figures crucial to the industry. In truth, such immediacy mattered little to ET’s audience, the vast majority of whom had no fiscal investment in the media industry. But the distinction of ET as the “first in entertainment news” bestowed its viewers with the status of insiders and experts and, by extension, encouraged dedicated viewership.

ET’s cost and market penetration were unprecedented. Three months before it aired, ET had already been cleared in 100+ markets, reaching 77 percent of U.S. homes with all advertising spots sold for the year.¹¹ In its first week on the air, ET made good on its promises to affiliates, earning a 12.6 national rating—enough to make it the highest-rated national newscast.¹² But early reviews were not kind. The hosts were “dreadful”; the news was “so soft it squishes”; it was “People Magazine without that fine publication’s depth.”¹³ One critic deemed it a “press agent’s dream,” calling out a recent on-set visit to Paramount-produced Grease II as pure promotional propaganda.¹⁴ In decrying ET’s intimacy with the industry, critics were in fact criticizing the designed cooperation between the production cultures at ET and the studios. In other words, ET was intended to be a press agent’s dream and serve as a promotional vehicle for Paramount, not an independent journalistic outsider. These functions were not intended to be visible to the average viewer, only the savviest of whom would even realize that the show was produced by the same corporation as Grease II.

Over the next decade, critics would continue to criticize ET’s relationship with Hollywood. According to one Time reviewer, “ET is a part of the phenomenon it covers, another wheel in the publicity machine it seeks to explain.”¹⁵ ET has built a “cozy, symbiotic relationship” with celebrities, and “[t]he show has dropped almost all pretense of being anything but an arm of the Hollywood publicity machine,” filled with “fluff indistinguishable from advertising.”¹⁶ Such assessments were not inaccurate, but perhaps missed the point, as ET had never aspired to function as a source for hard news or investigative journalism. From the start, ET’s tone has mirrored that of a traditional fan magazine, offering fawning, flattering portraits of the stars and Hollywood delivered by Hart and her various co-anchors in a bright, cheery fashion. While ET would not shy away from reporting on an existing celebrity controversy or scandal, the tone was never derogatory or denigrating. Most importantly, ET did not break such stories itself, lest it risk alienating a celebrity or publicist. The addition of entertainment news and figures helped ET gain credibility and attract a broader demographic, but it did not change the character of the relationship between the program and its subjects.

That relationship, however, was one of ET’s biggest assets. As Variety observed, the program is “a big wet kiss in terms of promotion of projects.” A single appearance on ET could reach double, even triple the audience of a network morning show or late-night talk show.¹⁷ Such reach gave ET tremendous leverage, especially over publicists eager to place celebrity clients on the show. ET producers exploited this leverage to exact a host of demands, including exclusive footage, access to stars, and the right to air a film trailer before any other outlet.¹⁸ But ET needed celebrities and their publicists as much as they needed ET. “The reality is that we’re all in bed with each other,” said one top talent manager. “So nobody can tell anyone off. I need them. They need me.”¹⁹

ET attempted to make up for lack of hard content with snappy editing, musical accompaniment, and fast-paced storytelling. Producers livened up its otherwise soft approach with flashy graphics, sound effects, and quick cuts that add “portent” and attract audience members who are “video fluent,” thus manifesting a graphic mode that John T. Caldwell has termed “exhibitionism,” in which stylization and activity take precedence.²⁰ In 1983, a typical program began with seven to eight minutes of industry news, delivered in the style of a nightly news program, followed by a “Spotlight” on celebrity and an on-set exclusive (a “Never-Before-Seen glimpse behind Johnny Carson’s desk!”). The show generally closed with an “in-depth” report on style, an industry trend, or “a look backward at entertainment of the past.”²¹

From time to time, a longer, more investigative piece or multi-part series would replace the final section. Because ET was shot on video, producers could easily and cheaply manipulate graphics and other visual framing devices (bumpers heading to and from commercials, “Next On” previews, logos). The cluttered aesthetic compensated for the otherwise “low” production values and, more importantly, guided viewer response and discouraged viewers from changing channels. The carefully orchestrated mix of content, oscillating between headlines and statistics, eye-catching imagery, and slightly longer interviews and features likewise prevented viewer fatigue with a particular segment.

Over the course of the 1980s, ET continued to grow. By September 1983, it trailed only Solid Gold (1980–1988) and Family Feud (1977–1985; 1988­–1995; 1999–present) among syndicated programming with an 8.9 weekly rating, while its weekend show, Entertainment this Week, earned a 14.4.²² By the end of the decade, ET had established itself, in the words of one Hollywood observer, as “such an important component in the way the industry is covered by press and television that it would be difficult to imagine its absence.”²³ According to Ron Miller, a journalist for the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, ET’s concept had “revolutionized the TV syndication business and proved that expensive, original non-network programming can be profitable to everyone.”²⁴ ET prided itself on its success, collecting both of the above quotes for a full-page Variety advertisement that trumpeted the program’s success. With its placement in the leading Hollywood trade, ET was effectively advising other Hollywood entities that the program had taken on a crucial promotional role within the industry and could not be ignored.

With the potential and profitability of the genre firmly established, imitators followed. Between 1981 and 1990, more than a dozen shows and pilots attempted to emulate the ET formula, including Metromedia’s All About US (1984); Paramount’s America (1985); King World’s Photoplay (1986); Tribune Entertainment’s Public People, Private Lives (1988–1989); TPE’s Preview (1990); Twentieth’s Entertainment Daily Journal (1990–1992); and Viacom’s TV Star (1980), Entertainment Coast to Coast (1986), Exclusive (1988), and America’s Hit List (1990). Some shows, such as the pilot for All About US, were clear attempts to create cross-media promotion for print publications, while others, such as Twentieth’s Entertainment Daily Journal, attempted to provide promotion for parent companies, in this case Fox/News Corporation.

Imitators also struggled for a reason that had little to do with Entertainment Tonight. ET was innovative and addictive, but its initial clearances and subsequent growth took place during a period of high demand for syndicated programming. As the number of independent stations was growing (from 106 to 215 between 1980 to 1985), the number of shows being sold into “off-network” syndication (commonly known as reruns) was decreasing.²⁵ The networks had become increasingly quick to cancel high-budget shows with mediocre ratings, and without at least a season or two already produced, a program could not be profitably sold into syndication. The lack of rerun material thus bolstered the first-run syndication market, which included shows like ET, Solid Gold, and a raft of game shows such as Family Feud and Wheel of Fortune 1983–present).²⁶ ET and the game shows were joined in the late-1980s by televised tabloids— A Current Affair (1986–2005), Hard Copy (1989–1999), and Inside Edition (1988–present)—that distinguished themselves through interest in the weird, the tawdry, and other sensational subjects otherwise at home in tabloid journalism.²⁷

Each station’s schedule had a finite amount of “prime access” space between the evening news and primetime. Depending on the time zone and the length of the local news, a station had room for two, three, or maybe four half-hour “strips” at most. By the end of the 1980s, ET, Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy! (1984–present), A Current Affair and Inside Edition had claims on all of the quality access time periods.²⁸ A program might settle for a moderate number of access clearances, slowly building its audience. Yet any program attempting to emulate the ET formula needed to expend a similar amount of capital, which, by 1988, was $21 million per year, or $400,000 a week. In order to turn a profit, a new program required prime access clearance in a similar number of markets, generally upwards of 100. With so few access spots available, competitors faced nearly insurmountable odds. Entertainment Tonight’s success throughout the 1980s was thus a result of its novelty, innovations, and the ruling logic of the conglomerate media industry.

In 2011, Mary Hart stepped down from Entertainment Tonight after twenty-nine years as co-host. While the show goes on, Hart’s exit signaled, however unofficially, the end of an era. The mode and speed with which ET disseminated “entertainment news” for the majority of Hart’s tenure was a thing of the past, replaced by online video, breaking news sent to mobile phones, and celebrity Twitter updates. The transformation was gradual: over the course of the 1990s, a raft of similarly-themed programming (Extra, Access Hollywood, the entire E! channel), all with backing from major media conglomerates, cut into ET’s market share. In the mid-2000s, the rise of gossip blogs further compromised ET’s hold. These early blogs—Perez Hilton, Gawker, Just Jared, The Superficial, and dozens of others—offered immediacy, a markedly snarky attitude, and a distinctly new media style of breaking and proliferating content that attracted millions of visitors.²⁹ In contrast, despite a content-sharing partnership with Yahoo, ET’s web presence was negligible, attracting a mere 609,000 visitors in July 2007.³⁰ Of course, ET has historically catered to a different (older, less technologically savvy) demographic, and most viewers were content with a self-contained, twenty-two-minute television program.³¹

But in 2007, TMZ on TV expanded the parameters of the market. As the televised extension of TMZ.com, then garnering over 10 million unique visitors a month, TMZ on TV enjoyed a massive built-in audience, backing from Time Warner–owned Telepictures and AOL, and a clearance deal with FOX stations across the country.³² After one year on the air, it was available in 90 percent of American households, garnering an average Nielsen rating of 2.3. TMZ still trailed ET, but it brought in viewers who were both younger and male, and thus more valuable to advertisers.³³ Most importantly, TMZ modeled a form of convergence in which content transitioned seamlessly from the web to the airwaves, edited to fit the specifics of each medium and its audience.

ET had to change its attitude towards breaking news and digital content lest it be left in TMZ’s dust. Between 2007 and 2010, it began broadcasting in HD, expanded to partner with MSN.com, and significantly updated its website to include many of the features found on TMZ, including streaming video, breaking news, photo galleries, Twitter updates, and the ability for users to share stories through social media.

While ET no longer enjoys the uncontested dominance that characterized its rein in the 1980s, perhaps we can gauge its importance somewhat differently. In 2011, ET maintained an average of 5.9 million viewers (more than the CBS Nightly News) and ET-style reporting on celebrity couples, movie grosses, and industry deals now infuses everything from The Huffington Post to CNN.³⁴ With Hart’s departure and the continued surge of web-based content, including “intimate” access to celebrities via social media, ET may decline. Or it may endure, catering to those who like their celebrity coverage cheery and fawning, working to adapt to the increasingly convergent media culture. Regardless of its eventual fate, it is clear that Entertainment Tonight fundamentally altered the landscape of first-run syndication, paving the path not only for Extra, Access Hollywood, and TMZ, but the infusion of “entertainment news” in all its various manifestations across the contemporary mediascape.

 

 

Notes

1. Aljean Harmetz, “TV Producers Discover New Path to Prime Time,” New York Times, July 5, 1988, C16.

2. See Michele Hilmes, ed., NBC: America’s Network (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Janet Wasko, “Hollywood and Television in the 1950s: The Roots of Diversification,” in The Fifties: Transforming the Screen, 1950–1959, Peter Lev, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 135–46.

3. Marilyn J. Matelski, “Jerry Springer and the Wages of Fin-Syn: The Rise of Deregulation and the Decline of TV Talk,” Journal of Popular Culture 33 (2000), 64–65.

4. Peter Funt, “One Man’s Formula for Sure-Fire Hits,” New York Times, April 6, 1986, 14.

5. Kevin Downey, “ET: It Changed Show Biz and Changed the Syndie Biz as Well,” Broadcasting and Cable, November 17, 2003, 22.

6. Michael E. Hill, “Entertainment Tonight: On the Air Fan Magazine,” Washington Post, May 27, 1984, 5.

7. See Michael Joseph Gross, “Famous for Tracking the Famous,” New York Times, June 23, 2002, A1.

8. The show’s ownership was a “patchwork” of production companies and cable providers: Paramount owned 40 percent, Cox Broadcasting-owned Telerep held 40 percent and Taft Broadcasting had the remaining 20 percent. Paramount was viewed as “the principal production entity,” in part due to its role in funding the installation of the satellite network.

9. Funt, “One Man’s Formula,” 14.

10. Rick Kissell, “ET Innovations Now Taken For Granted,” Variety, September 8, 2000, A6.

11. Entertainment Tonight Ad, Variety, June 24 1981, 57; Morrie Gelman, “Par TV’s Entertainment Tonight Marks a Major Step in Networking,” Daily Variety, June 23, 1981, 10.

12. “Entertainment Tonight Wins Big-Par TV,” Daily Variety, October 6, 1981, 12.

13. James Brown, “All the Fluff That’s Fit to Air,” Los Angeles Times, September 24, 1981.

14. Howard Rosenberg, “Relentless Pursuit of Fluff,” Los Angeles Times, March 10, 1982, G1.

15. Richard Stengel, “Turning Show Biz into News,” Time, July 4, 1983, 72.

16. Gross, “Famous for Tracking the Famous,” A1; Richard Zoglin and Tara Weingarten, “That’s Entertainment?” Time, October 3, 1994, 85.

17. John Brodie, “ET’s New Competitor Sets Flack a-Flutter,” Variety, July 25, 1994, 1.

18. Ibid.

19. Susanne Ault, “ET: The Business Behind the Buzz,” Broadcasting & Cable, July 2, 2001, 14.

20. Gross, “Famous for Tracking the Famous,” A1; Peter W. Kaplan, “TV News Magazines Aim at Diverse Viewers,” New York Times, August 1, 1985, C18. John Thornton Caldwell, “Excessive Style: The Crisis of Network Television,” in Television: The Critical View, 6^th ed., Horace Newcomb, ed. (New York: Oxford, 2000), 652.

21. Stengel, “Turning Show Biz into News,” 72.

22. “First Run Syndication Leader,” Variety, September 21, 1983, 82.

23. Ibid.; David Gritten, quote attributed to Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. See Entertainment Tonight Advertisement, Variety, February 1, 1984, 67.

24. See Entertainment Tonight Advertisement, Variety, February 1, 1984, 67.

25. Michael Schrage, “TV Producers Woo the Networks,” Washington Post, January 15, 1985, E5.

26. Ibid.

27. See Kevin Glynn, Tabloid Culture: Trash Taste, Popular Power, and the Transformation of American Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).

28. “Entertainment Tonight turns 3,000,” Broadcasting & Cable, March 8, 1993, 30.

29. See Anne Helen Petersen, “Celebrity Juice, Not From Concentrate: Perez Hilton, Gossip Blogging, and the New Star Production,” Jump Cut, 2007, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc49.2007/PerezHilton/index.html.

30. Paige Albiniak, “New, Improved Access,” Broadcasting & Cable, September 10, 2007, 9.

31. While numbers for all television viewing had steadily declined with the expansion of cable and new media, ET still earned a 5.4 Nielsen rating in January 2006. Ben Grossman, “Entertainment Mags Rock,” Broadcasting & Cable, January 23, 2006, 17.

32. For more on TMZ, see Petersen, “Smut Goes Corporate.”

33. Paige Albiniak, “TMZ Stays in the News,” Broadcasting & Cable, November 26, 2007, 12.

34. Brooks Barnes, “After Hart, a Deluge of Meaner Celebrity TV?” New York Times, May 19, 2011, C1.

Further Reading

Caldwell, John Thornton. Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television. New

Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995.

Glynn, Kevin. Tabloid Culture: Trash Taste, Popular Power, and the Transformation of American Television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

Petersen, Anne Helen. “Smut Goes Corporate: TMZ and the Conglomerate, Convergent Face of

Celebrity Gossip.” Television & New Media 11, 1 (2009): 62–81.