By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 31, 2006; C01

A beauty queen accused of murdering her husband. A woman accused of killing her pastor husband. A man convicted of killing his bride on their honeymoon. A newly married man who disappears from a cruise ship. A boot-camp director accused of murdering a teenager. A former model and her boyfriend who disappear on a boating trip. An 18-year-old whose partially clothed body was found in a car trunk.

These are among the blood-and-guts stories featured on NBC's "Dateline" in the last three months.

CBS's "48 Hours" has covered murders almost exclusively for the past two years. "I stopped thinking of ourselves as a general newsmagazine," says Executive Producer Susan Zirinsky. "I am Darwinian in my core, and to survive I've adapted."

Television news -- especially local television -- has always been drawn to crime. But in a country in which more than 16,000 murders were committed last year, are the killings of ordinary people, however tragic, really worth all this airtime?

"I think it lends itself to storytelling," says David Corvo, executive producer of "Dateline." "You've got a confrontation, right and wrong, guilt or innocence, and a resolution, and there's some suspense getting to that resolution."

The tabloidization of these programs comes as the networks have fallen out of love with newsmagazines, which were crippled by overexposure. As recently as 1999, magazine shows served up a dozen hours a week. Over the years, "Eye to Eye," "Public Eye," "Now," "West 57th," "60 Minutes II" and others came and went. "Dateline" and "48 Hours" have largely been relegated to weekends.

Among the other survivors, CBS's "60 Minutes" and ABC's "20/20" are still based on the original concept of a wide-ranging show that encompasses news, trend stories and lighter features. ABC's "Primetime Live" includes a number of murder stories but many other subjects as well.

"48 Hours" specializes in older cases that it can follow through the court system: an Ohio husband found not guilty of his wife's murder after three trials. A reopened investigation that led to a conviction in the 1969 murder of a Michigan woman. The hunt for a serial killer in Australia. The killing of a Bellevue, Wash., couple in 1994. The 1995 murder of a policeman's wife. A Texas woman convicted of killing her husband in 2002.

Zirinsky says she made the shift two years ago after ratings showed that "the crime genre really kind of resonated" with the audience. "I make no apologies. We love doing it."

At the suggestion of Les Moonves, CBS's chief executive, "48 Hours" dropped the idea of having an anchor and begins each program with the narrative, without so much as an introduction.

Thanks to the rise of cable news, Zirinsky says, "the audience no longer needs a potpourri magazine show. They're getting it in too many places." And with the growth of "Survivor"-type shows in recent years, "reality television has bitten us in the rear." Zirinsky calls her program "reality drama."

Television analyst Andrew Tyndall, who dubs the crime sagas "cliffhanger journalism," says newsmagazines proliferated because they were less expensive to produce than sitcoms or dramas -- but that was before the blossoming of reality shows. "Journalists are cheaper than actors," he says. "It turned out that real people are cheaper than journalists."

"Dateline" breaks away from murder now and then. It has aired a Tom Brokaw segment on global warming, a piece on Bill Clinton and Bill and Melinda Gates fighting AIDS, and a Matt Lauer interview with Britney Spears. The program has also devoted considerable time to stings against sexual predators on the Internet, working closely with law enforcement in a controversial collaboration.

Corvo says it may seem like the program does more crime because he has moved away from multiple subjects toward more single-topic hours. "People like you to go deep, not broad," he says.

But by and large, death dominates. Consider these opening lines from "Dateline" co-anchor Stone Phillips in recent weeks:

"A single gunshot and a man is dead, the killer disappearing into the night leaving behind a crying widow and a mystery."

"A savage murder in a wild landscape. The victim, a woman loved in her community, found dead deep in the woods of Alaska."

"It's a case with all the intrigue of 'The Da Vinci Code': A gruesome death at a famous landmark, links to a secret society, and a scandal surrounding the Vatican."

When "Dateline" runs out of current cases, it exhumes those from the past, such as a segment on four children looking into the circumstances surrounding their mother's death in 1973.

Both Corvo and Zirinsky say they have jumped on breaking news when necessary, as they did with Hurricane Katrina. Apparently, the war in the Middle East doesn't qualify.

But while the programs may seem increasingly one-dimensional, the bottom line is still getting people in the tent.

"We are a commercial network," Zirinsky says. "If nobody watches, I can be self-righteous right off the air."

Ted Koppel, who once bragged about his refusal to use e-mail, will soon be getting a webcam in his home.

To help publicize his new role creating documentaries and hosting town meetings for the Discovery Channel, Koppel will answer e-mail questions with video responses on the network's Web site.

"Ted is a self-described Luddite," says Tom Bettag, his longtime producer. "He would always say, 'Don't tell me about this new media stuff; it's not my world.' "

But Koppel agreed to take the plunge after potential advertisers, including a major automaker, told him they needed an online outlet if they were going to support his programming, Bettag says.

In a dry run with questions from Discovery staffers, the shirt-sleeve Koppel is more serious than chatty. He talks about whether America has ever been more divided (yes, in the McCarthy era), Kim Jong Il ("controls the single most totalitarian regime in the world") and the most under-covered parts of the globe (China and India).

"We thought the man who has done such a great job of interviewing would be a great person for other people to ask questions," says Don Baer, a Discovery senior executive vice president.

In an e-mail response -- itself a major sign of progress -- Koppel said he was unaware of plans for the home webcam and confessed that his initial answers were provided the old-fashioned way: "A camera person comes to my office and asks questions. Is that cheating?"

The online news audience is aging a bit.

Thirty-one percent of people aged 50 to 64 now say they get news from the Internet at least three days a week, compared with 19 percent in 2000, according to the Pew Research Center. By contrast, the percentage of 18-to-24-year-olds in that category has remained flat at 30 percent.

Newspapers, particularly national ones, are getting an online boost. While 40 percent of those surveyed said they read a paper yesterday, the number bumps up to 43 percent when newspaper Web sites are included (but remains below the 50 percent daily readership of a decade ago).

Still, only a minority of those who get news online are visiting newspaper sites. The majority, Pew says, prefer the likes of MSNBC, CNN and Yahoo, which specialize in quick updates of major headlines.

Interesting tidbit: While the percentage of those who say they regularly listen to National Public Radio has doubled since 1994, that audience now tilts more to the left, with nearly twice as many Democrats (23 percent) as Republicans (13 percent).

"Kenny Boy Gets His" -- cover headline in the July issue of Texas Monthly, published shortly before Ken Lay's death.