"Okay. You're a vegetable. We can all see you're a vegetable. There's no question about what you are. A vegetable. But, what we'd all like to know is just how the heck you reproduce. Are we talking sex, here, two of you in the back seat of a '63 Thunderbird, or what? Well? Oh, come on, are you going to let us in on the big secret, or are you just going to sit there and rot under our studio lights?"
Phil Donahue was having a bad time of it; the most controversial guests his staff could come up with were kumquats. Oprah Winfrey cut her losses and got out of the talk show game early, returning to acting on a full time basis. Sally Jesse Raphael became an Avon lady.
The day Controversy died, everything changed.
The CBS Evening News soon degenerated into a series of vignettes about three-legged sheep, but even its staunchest allies had to admit that it had been heading in that direction anyway. Dan Rather retired from the news division to host his own game show. He was replaced by a puppet named Mister Wiggles.
Soon, the other networks followed suit. Peter Jennings was replaced by a Commodore computer with voice capabilities. Tom Brokaw stayed on, hoping that this was just a lull that he could ride out until the news returned. After three months, he started babbling, "What's going on? This used to be such an interesting world!" and "I coulda been somebody. I coulda been a contendah." and throwing spitballs at the studio crew. He was replaced by a trio of nubile aerobics instructors.
Sixty Minutes was, at first, cut to Thirty Minutes. When it became apparent that there wasn't enough investigative material to fill even this diminished time slot, it was cut to Fifteen Minutes. Rather than reduce it to Sixty Seconds (the stopwatch motif becoming a cruel joke), the show was finally canceled. Mike Wallace became an investment consultant for a major Wall Street brokerage house, Diane Sawyer cut an album of disco music and Morley Safer returned to Canada to raise a family.
The Journal could not continue, of course. Barbara Frum was crushed, and never fully recovered. In fact, the CBC's entire schedule was gutted, being so news and public affairs oriented, and the government was given no opposition when it cut the CBC's annual grant to 37 cents.
Curiously, Daniel Richler's entertainment segment, The Journal Diary, became its own daily half hour programme.
Ted Koppel was, perhaps, the hardest hit by the end of Controversy; he had a nervous breakdown when he discovered that nobody was standing by at ABC's Rome, Moscow, London, Washington or Kookaburra bureaus.
The New York Times, flush from its best advertising year ever, refused to give up, resorting to filling its pages with the minutes of New York University student union meetings and deep thought pieces on the true nature of concrete. "We're still the newspaper of record," one of the Rosenthal brood insisted. Russell Baker and James Reston had nothing to say.
Different newspapers coped with the lack of crisis in different ways. Some increased their advertising to fill 98 per cent of the their space (not a great sacrifice for most of them); others turned to fiction. Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post, choked to death when, in a fit of pique, he tried to eat a box of Cuban cigars.
Time Magazine eliminated text and became Picture Magazine. Newsweek changed corporate hands eight times in the space of three days, eventually mutating into Women's Own Sob Stories. The New Republic disappeared into a black hole and, mercifully, William F. Buckley was never heard from again.
Inexplicably, The Naional Enquirer, like other publications of its ilk, thrived.
To cope with the dearth of news, most news outlets reported on the dearth of news. It soon became epidemic. Within two weeks, 34 quickie paperbacks analyzing the phenomenon were published (by the time the scholarly dissertations had been written, everybody had lost interest). Journalists began interviewing each other (Sam Donaldson was lost at this point because he has lost the ability to communicate coherently with anybody when there wasn't a helicopter loudly buzzing in the background). The last Maclean's cover story contained seven blank pages.
Before Controversy dried up, a lot of people complained that journalists concentrated too much on bad news. "We don't want to hear about this," they said. "Where's the good news?" Well, the truth of the matter was that good news bombed in the ratings.
One theory suggests that Controversy dried up because people weren't interested any more, not because there weren't any more issues that needed to be resolved. Would we really choose ignorance over knowledge? I'm not sure - there's only one thing I know about Controversy.
I kind of miss it.
