You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. Guess what Will?
What's that Mango?
So the term fake news has been around for a long time, but it really entered the public consciousness in nineteen ninety two, and that is thanks to a hard hitting article in one of America's most important and beloved magazines Do you know which one? All? Right?
Nineteen ninety two, which in my head is much more recent than it actually is. Like, it's hard to wrap my head around the fact that that was like thirty six, thirty five, thirty four years I've lost track of man thirty three years ago, right, yeah, a lot of years. So I'm going to go with that many years ago. I'm going to go with was it Time or Newsweek?
You know? And that's a good guess, But it was
actually TV Guide? Oh wow, yeah, it's not stunning. So in the February twenty second, nineteen ninety two edition, there's a journalist named David Lieberman, and he wrote a cover story under the headline fake News, and in it he criticized the widespread use of something called video news releases, or vnrs, and these were short videos made to look like regular news segments, but they were produced by PR firms, and they were sent out to all the TV news stations,
who sometimes aired them as though they were real stories. Now, Lieberman acknowledged that the information in these vnrs could be accurate, but he said news programs should label them so viewers know that what they're watching isn't an independent news report,
just a glorified press release. The article sparked a lot of conversation, and at first the PR industry tried to push back, but thanks in part to TV guys journalism, in June of nineteen ninety two, the Public Relations Service Council formed a committee to develop better standards for disclosure in VA and ours. And for the record, nobody paid me to tell you that story.
I'm glad to share that. I do appreciate your integrity, Mango. And speaking of news that definitely isn't fake, today we've got eight more facts about TV Guide, the little magazine that made a big impact on American culture. So let's dive in. Hey their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend mangesh Hot Ticketer and over there on the booth wearing a Safari vest stuffed with remote controls. This
is one of the best I've seen from him. That's our Palin producer, Dylan Fagan.
And don't forget he's got that Safari pit helmet with an ten on pomp as well.
That is that's really impressive. So I think we all know where he's going with this one, right, Like he's a literal TV Guide Incredible work is always Dylan.
So will I know. This episode was my idea and I just wanted to explain why I've been thinking about TV Guide a lot recently. So I was just on this super fun podcast as a guest, and it's called TV Guidance Counselor, and basically the host Ken has people come on and he sends you this old issue of TV Guide, like a random old issue, and you go through the week together and you pick the things you would have watched in primetime and just discuss it. And it is so fun, and you know, it's a great
concept for a show. But it made me realize that TV Guide is this almost this incredible record of pop culture and media and politics and so much more. And also it had recipes from stars in there. Do you remember those?
I definitely remember this. Of course we've talked about my grandmother many times on this show before. I have a strong association of TV Guide because there would always be TV guides on her coffee table and I would try to convince her every day to stop watching Wheel of Fortune and it was time to try out something else. But it never really worked. But I always loved thumbing through those old issues ed.
She had all the options right in front of her, but she refused so many options. Channel. But you know, I was looking at it and I was wondering, like, why do you really want to eat like David Hasselhoff's cop salad or like Suzanne Summer's vegetarian lasagna or whatever. But then I read that the magazine editorial was basically trying to encourage you to make these really easy and quick meals that you could eat in front of the TV. And it's kind of brilliant, right, Like everything relates back
to TV, which is so editorially smart. But you know, I'm glad we're doing this topic, and I'm curious where you want to.
Start, all right, So I feel like we should go back to the very beginning like we like to do, and that takes us to New York City and then nineteen thirty so I know, I proved I was really bad at math earlier, but this is almost one hundred
years ago now. A young man named Lee Wagner got a job at a magazine publisher where he managed subscriptions for several titles focused on movies and celebrities, and later he worked for the publisher of Look, which at the time was one of the most read magazines in the United States. So Wagner knew the ins and outs of publishing at the time, and he was convinced that television, then in its infancy, was about to be the next big thing. So he takes this leap of faith and
he launches his own magazine. It was called The Television Guide, which initially just covered programming in the New York City area, and the first issue appeared on June fourteenth, nineteen forty eight. The cover featured the silent film star Gloria Swanson.
That's kind of funny, right, Like he's embracing this new medium by putting a silent film star on the cover.
Yeah. I didn't actually think about that, but that is pretty funny, Well, Gloria had seen the writing on the wall. She was actually trying to break in the TV by hosting a variety show called the Gloria Swanson Hour, which was ansel just a year after that. But the magazine that featured her ended up being a bit more successful
than that. Of course, sales increased and he was able to expand the magazine, creating these regional editions for New England and Washington, DC, really specific to those markets.
And I'm going to pick up the thread here because i did a little research about what happens next. So in nineteen fifty three, Walter Annenberg, whose name you might recognize from his foundation and the University of Southern California's journalism school, he bought the Television Guide and folded into his company, Triangle Publications. And his story's kind of interesting. So in the twenties he was this rich kid playboy who dated movie stars and drove fast cars, and then
the stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine happens. He basically made a bad bet and loses a lot of his money. So his dad pulls him into his publishing business in Philly, where he gives them kind of this fake job, right, He's just like signing checks and doing as little work as possible. His dad goes to jail for tax evasion and Walter has to step up, and it turns out he's actually pretty savvy. He invests in
two things. One is in a racing journal called the Race and Form, which is for horse betting, and he basically realizes that people are betting on horses all over the country, and you can make this journal for them all across the country so that they could pay attention and bet on whatever races. And the other is Television Guide, which is kind of a similar idea where he decides
to combine all these other regional TV listing magazines. So there's one in Chicago, there's one New York, there's one DC And as part of this change, the name got shortened to TV Guide and the new version appears on April third, nineteen fifty three, with a cover photo of one of the years most talked about TV stars, and that is Desi Arnez Junior, who is just two and a half months old at the time.
Actually, I think I've heard about this, So they wrote luci Oball's real life pregnancy into the plot of is live.
Lucy right, Yeah, that's right, And at the time this was really rare. It was considered bad taste to show or even talk about pregnancy on TV, and in fact, CBS wouldn't let Lucy use the word pregnant on TV. She could only say she was expecting, which is so funny.
Huge difference.
But the storyline was a huge hit, and Lucille Ball time the episode so that the on screen birth corresponded with their own planned c section. This is in January of nineteen fifty three. Now, the episode where she gives birth became the most washed TV program up to that point in the country.
So when TV Guide relaunched, they actually wanted to lead with the real star of the show, which was of course the baby.
Right, and it was baby Dozy's first cover appearance, so it was huge news. In fact, Lucy and Dozi Senior had a deal to give exclusive photos to Life and Look magazine, the two biggest magazines of the country. But Desi Arnez Senior agreed to meet with an editor from TV Guide and apparently the conversation went really well. Desi actually had the baby photos on his desk and when he got up to use the restroom. He told the editor that if you know, some of those pictures were
missing when he came back, it would be okay. So TV Guide managed to get the scoop that way, and today the issue is a real collector's item. Mint condition copies have sold for as much as one thousand dollars. Of course, Annenberg, like most other magazine owners of the time,
had plenty of quirks. He ran his magazine like a fiefdom and like For instance, there was one time he was so irritated that the Phillies had scheduled a game at the same time as one of his charity benefits that he kept their listings out of the magazine for a while his punishment.
Oh wow.
And according to a book on TV Guide's history called Changing Channels, he also had this thing against a few celebrities. I'm not exactly sure why, but Imagene Coca, Sammy Davis Junior, Jajrea Gabor, and Dinnah Shore were banned from the early TV Guide pages. That is so weird.
I mean, can you imagine not liking Sammy Davis Junior Actually a few of those celebrities for the that matter.
Yeah, I know, it's really bizarre, but he definitely made a smart play with TV Guide. People thought Annenberg was an idiot for buying a magazine that gave out the same TV listings that you could find in your local paper. But he believed TV would be a centerpiece of American life. And this was back when there were only thirty percent of homes in the country at TVs. And he wrapped his listings in this smart editorial package and sold in
grocery store checkouts, and it really worked. Apparently, Annenberg and his editors would send a guy with the schoolyard bell through the office hallways to ring it loudly every time the circulation rose by an extra one hundred thousand people, and it happened so much that the bell broke in the early years.
So funny. All right, Well, let's talk about the magazine changing hands and how much it actually sold for, which is three billion dollars, Like, can you believe this? That's the price Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Paid to acquire TV Guides publisher Triangle Publications. This was in nineteen eighty eight. Three billion dollars. That is actually about eight billion dollars
in today's money. And the Triangle portfolio included other titles like seventeen Magazine, the Daily Racing Form, but TV Guide was the crown jewel of all of those. Back then, it had the largest circulation of any magazine in the United States. It was over seventeen million readers. But media critics and network executives had concerns about the sale, though. That's because Rupert Murdoch owned the Fox Network, and people wondered if TV Guide would start favoring Fox shows in
its coverage now. It didn't help that the week after the acquisition, a new issue of TV Guide appeared with a cover story about Fox's show twenty one Jump Street. But it turned out that that story had been in the works for months. It was all above board, Mango, They've been talking about this show for a while.
That's amazing. So TV Guide didn't just cover the best of TV. It also covered the worst, and the magazine launched the j. Fred Muggs Award to recognize each year's silliest gaffes and gimmicks.
And so who was j Fred Muggs? Like, was he a real person?
No, he was a real chimpanzee. Oh, of course this is true. He was a regular on the Today Show for several years in the nineteen fifties, and apparently it was a desperate attempt to boost low ratings. But the thing is it worked right like people tuned in ad sales went up. Producers estimated that the stunt brought in over one hundred million dollars, which is wow.
All right? So who were some of the unlucky recipients of the Jfred Muggs Award?
So there are a few doozies in there. In nineteen eighty seven, CBS News anchor Dan Rather won the Quote John McEnroe Cup for Petulance under Fire after he stormed off because a US Open match was delaying the start of his newscast.
Wow.
So when the tennis match ended and stations switched back to the news, there were six minutes of nothing. Isn't that incredible?
That is wild.
Heraldo Rivera also won a Suckers Award for his two hour live special The Mystery of al Capone's Faults, in which he and a team of construction workers dug up the basement of a Chicago hotel only to find a few empty bottles and I kind of love this one. In nineteen eighty six, TV Guide gave Ted Turner the Mickey Mouse Coloring Book Award because he'd colorized famous black and white movies like The Maltese Falcon.
We love the names of these awards. Sounds well deserved. All right, Well, Mage, I know you talked about a nineteen ninety two fake news story at the very top here, But it turns out TV Guide had its own fake news scandal just a few years earlier and involved Oprah Winfrey and a pile of money. And I'll tell you all about it right after this break.
Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where we're talking about TV Guide. That's right, it's a whole episode about a magazine of television listings. But as is so often the case, if you look a little bit more closely, there are some fascinating stories in there. And you know, well that's what we love to do here, right, We dig deep and find gems underneath the surface.
That is exactly right. And actually, if you love surprising facts and unusual stories as much as we do, I hope you'll subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave us a nice rating when review It actually really helps us out, and more importantly, it makes Dylan very happy. Lookay, Mango, he's actually smiling.
Back there, finally smiling. Okay, well, so you left us on a real cliffhanger before the break, fake news, Oprah Winfrey, pile of money.
Go all right, okay, this is a good cues. All right. Well, it was August of nineteen eighty nine and TV Guide put Oprah on the cover. Now, the headline read Oprah the richest woman on TV. That was question mark there how she amassed her two hundred and fifty million dollar fortune. So take a look at this cover, Mango, and tell me what you see.
On Oprah looking very glamour. She's wearing a sparkly gown and showing a little leg and she's sitting on a huge pile of buddy. It's eye catching. But you know, I have to say, there's something a little off about this image.
There is something actually very off about this image because it's not Oprah, well not entirely Oprah. It's Oprah's head, but the body belongs to nineteen sixties actress and dancer and Margaret. How weird is that, Mango?
So they photoshopped her head on someone else's body.
No, this is nineteen eighty nine. Photoshop didn't become widely available until nineteen ninety. Someone at TV Guide had to physically cut these images together. This is like third grade work on our part. So the pile of money is also fake. In the original an Margaret photo, she's sitting on some kind of barrel or a round table. Now, TV Guide might have gotten away with his trickery, except the guy who designed an Margaret's sparkly dress saw this cover.
He recognized his whole creation, and he alerted the media. Oprah was, of course furious. Her spokesperson released a statement that said quote, Oprah would not pose on a pile of money like that, nor would she pose in that revealing address, And Margaret's publicist said she was shocked. So it's a pretty wild When it was a bona fide scandal, people took it very seriously. The La Times wrote, here, let me find this quote. It says the incident is
by no means trivial. It should have responsible journalists and the entire reading public steaming mad and genuinely concerned about the media's commitment to truth.
Now.
The piece pointed out that images have a unique ability to convey accurate information, like how photojournalists helped show the reality of Vietnam. And you know, as The Times concluded, if the public has to wonder if an image is real, it loses its power.
That's so funny, right, there's something almost like quaint about that today.
Yeah, no kidding.
You know, not only are so many things like photoshop, but also with AI out there. You see all these images of people, your celebrities and them they've got like six fingers whatever. So here's another problem. One. Did you know TV Guide played a role in a landmark federal fraud case. I did not, So this is true. It had to do with these diet pills called Regimen that were heavily advertised in print and on TV from nineteen
fifty nine to nineteen sixty four. Now, the ads made all these outlandish claims that the pills would make you lose weight without changing your diet. The company that made them even hired women to go on programs like The Today Show in American Bandstand to talk about how Regimen changed their lives. But in fact, all of these women had been put on unhealthy, restrictive diets, which is what made them lose weight, not the pills. Now, the FDA
opened an investigation. Eventually, New York State brought criminal charges against the drug company, its president, and notably the AD agency that helped create the campaigns. The case ended up going to a federal jury trial, and in nineteen sixty five everyone involved was found guilty. And this was actually the first time an ad agency has ever been found guilty of fraud for promoting a client's product.
Wow, that is actually really insane. But how was TV Guide involved?
So attorneys for the defendants challenged the decision, and one of their main arguments was that TV Guide had prejudiced the jury. Shortly before the trial's conclusion, the magazine ran a big article about the case under the headline quote the diet pill Fraud All America Watched. It was actually an excerpt of a forthcoming book about the weight loss industry, and it was written by this journalist, Peter Widen, and one of Widen's sources was Martin Pollner, the assistant US
attorney who prosecuted the regiment case. But the courts denied the appeal, and that decision was careful to note that TV Guide was not responsible for the outcome of the trial. Apparently, jurors had followed instructions not to follow any media about the case while it was pending. And besides, Wyden's article relied on information that had already been made public at that time. But it just goes to show that TV guide has popped up in almost every corner of American life over all these years.
That's really true. And actually, here's another example. So in the nineteen eighties, teachers were encouraged to use TV Guide in the classroom. So I found this article in an instructor magazine that actually laid out the whole lesson plan. Teachers were supposed to ask the kids to bring in copies of TV Guide and use it to teach them the hour minute format of writing time, you know, and the difference between AM and PM. Of course, so after the kids mastered that, the next step was to learn how
to read and interpret TV listings. Sample lesson questions included and likes to watch Hollywood Squares on Thursday night. What time does it start? And here's another one, Jan likes to watch The Brady Bunch each weeknight at six thirty pm. What channel does she watch?
It's so tricky, but I got to make sense by the times, you know, Obviously, times have changed since then, and TV Guide has changed too, So for the first fifty two years of its life, the magazine was digestized about the size of the paperback book, but in two thousand and five it switched to a larger, more standard magazine format and reduced the amount of listings in order
to make room for more celebrity news. So previously the ratio had been about seventy five percent listings twenty five percent other stories, but with the format change, that ratio got inverted. But perhaps the biggest change was the elimination of the Guide's one hundred and forty regional editions. Instead, it shranked to just one national edition with schedules marked
in either Eastern or Pacific time. Parent company Gemstars so I did declining readership and ad sales, but at its peak in the nineteen seventies, TV Guides circulation was around twenty million, which is just unfathomable to me, especially you and me as as people who used to run a magazine. But by two thousand and four it dropped to nine million, And in the past couple decades there's been a whole maze of corporate sales, acquisitions, spin offs, and so on.
It would actually take a long time to go through all of them. But since I know you're wondering, here's where things stand today. TV Guides still exists. Its website, additional properties are owned by the fan engagement platform Fandom, and the print magazine is owned by a Michigan based publisher called NTVD Media. That is wild.
I'm just thinking back about that staff that you said that there were one hundred and forty regional editions at one point. That was pretty wild. But you know, even though we're up to our eyeballs and premium channels and streaming services and of course video on demand, you can still pick up a print copy of TV Guide. There's something nice about the.
Child and maybe all those things you sid died are the reason you should because, as the twenty twenty four TV Guide Media Kit puts it, quote, there's more TV than ever, so there's never been more of a need for guidance.
I mean, they're not wrong. If mammal are still around, I'm pretty sure there'd be one on our coffee table. But you know mego for that and the fact that this whole episode was your idea, I'm going to give you today's Trophy. Congrats.
Well, I'm so honored and thanks to TV Guidance Council for the inspiration and for having me on the show. We will be back next week with a brand new episode, but in the meantime, please be sure to follow us on Instagram at part Time Genius and from Dylan, Gabe, Mary, Will and myself, thank you so much for listening. Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted by Will Pearson and Me mongas Heartikuler
and research by our good pal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered and produced by the Wonderful of Dylan Fagan with support from Tyler Klang. The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norbel and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay, Trustee Dara Potts and Viney Shorey. For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast Us, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.